Tractus de Hermaphrodites

Tractatus de Hermaphroditis is a substantial legal and medical treatise by Giles Jacob, the English legal writer who lived from 1686 to 1744 and who produced substantial work on English law and on various other legal and quasi legal subjects across the first half of the eighteenth century. Jacob was best known for his substantial legal reference works including the New Law Dictionary of 1729, which became one of the substantial standard English legal reference works for substantial subsequent decades.

The Tractatus de Hermaphroditis addresses the substantial legal and medical questions about intersex individuals that the substantial eighteenth century English legal system had inherited from the substantial earlier European legal tradition. The substantial classical Roman law had developed substantial provisions for handling the legal status of individuals whose physical sex was ambiguous, and the substantial subsequent European canon law and various national legal systems had continued to address the substantial questions about marriage, inheritance, religious vocation, and various other legal matters that intersex individuals raised.

The substantial eighteenth century English legal and medical understanding of intersex conditions was substantially limited by the absence of the substantial later biological understanding of the various conditions that produce intersex variation. The substantial period understood the conditions primarily in moral and legal terms rather than in the substantial scientific terms that subsequent medical and biological development would establish, and the substantial various legal treatises of the period addressed the questions accordingly.

Jacob’s substantial treatise belongs to the substantial broader eighteenth century English legal literature that attempted to systematise the various inherited legal traditions and to make them accessible to the substantial English legal profession. The substantial questions Jacob addresses include the legal status of intersex individuals in marriage, the substantial questions about how to assign legal sex when ambiguity exists, the substantial inheritance and property law implications of various intersex conditions, and the broader theological and moral framework within which the substantial English legal tradition addressed the questions.

The substantial treatise has substantial historical interest as a document of the substantial eighteenth century European legal and medical understanding of intersex conditions, and as a substantial primary source for the substantial subsequent academic study of the history of gender, sexuality, and law. The substantial cultural and scientific assumptions that the treatise reflects have been substantially superseded by subsequent developments in biology, medicine, and law, but the substantial book remains a substantial primary document for historians working on the subject.

The book is of interest now to historians of European legal and medical thinking about intersex conditions and to specialists in the broader history of gender and sexuality.