Giles Jacob

Giles Jacob was an English legal writer and compiler whose books made specialized knowledge available to a broad eighteenth-century readership. Born in 1686, he trained in law and produced dictionaries, case summaries, guides to statute law, literary reference works, and verse. Tractus de Hermaphrodites appeared in 1718 with the fuller subtitle Or, A Treatise of Hermaphrodites. It approaches questions of bodily ambiguity through legal precedent, social custom, classical learning, and the medical language available in Jacob’s period. That mixture reflects his habit of organizing difficult material for readers who needed a practical route through it. His other works include A New Law-Dictionary, The Poetical Register, and collections concerning legal cases and parliamentary statutes. Tractus de Hermaphrodites is unusual within that larger bibliography, yet its method remains recognizably Jacob’s: definitions are linked to examples, and inherited authorities are arranged around problems of status and judgment. The result is best understood as an early modern legal and cultural inquiry rather than a modern scientific account.