Androgyny and the Fear of Demonic Intervention in the Early Modern Iberian Peninsula: Ecclesiastical and Popular Responses

Abstract

On the afternoon of 3 April 1698, a prisoner was taken from the cells in the building of the inquisitorial tribunal in Coimbra, Portugal, and led into a room described as the “old chapel” (oratório velho). There, the prisoner was met by four men: a doctor, a surgeon, and two notaries, all of whom were lay agents (familiares) of the Inquisition. The four men had been instructed by one of the inquisitors to conduct a thorough examination of the sexual organs of the prisoner, “to ascertain whether he was a woman or a hermaphrodite.” All four men were later questioned separately by inquisitor João Duarte Ribeiro and reported that, apart from a hernia affecting one of his testicles, the penis, scrotum and anus of the prisoner “were in their proper places and of the normal proportions,” and that they had not found anything “that was not like that of any man.”