Cross-dressing from Renaissance to Revolution

Description

STEINBERG (Sylvie) La confusion des sexes. Le travestissement de la Renaissance à la Révolution. Fayard, 2001. Large octavo, XII-409 pages, notes, sources and bibliography, index, paperback. A scholarly study examining the phenomenon of cross-dressing in France from the Renaissance through the Revolutionary period. The work documents numerous cases of women who disguised themselves as men to escape poverty by enlisting in the king's armies, defend their estates, or claim citizen's rights, while noting that male cross-dressing was far rarer and socially scandalous. Through diverse testimonies, the author reveals the behavioral codes, rules, and values of a society founded on hierarchy of blood and gender. Despite royal justice treating cross-dressing as a crime of fraud, judges often showed leniency toward arrested women in men's clothing, except in cases of prostitution. The study demonstrates how physicians and moralists defended the "proper difference of the sexes" based on ancient humoral theory, a justification later adopted by Enlightenment philosophers appealing to "nature" to defend gender inequality.