Defiant Bodies: Discourses on Intersex, 1573-2003

Written in Italian, this mid-17th-century manuscript account by the doctor Renieri Cantarini describes an individual named Bettino di Domenico who was raised and baptized as a man but discovered to be intersex at the age of 108 or 109. According to Cantarini’s description, which seems more an empirical rather than moral or ethical account, Bettino was not persecuted within society for his sexual differences but lived a long, apparently normal life, his sexual differences undetected. This manuscript illustrates an alternate perspective on intersex bodies from contemporaneous sources that equate intersex with monstrous birth, demonstrating a transition within the medical profession toward standardized clinical practice and empirical science.