ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bad Habits and Dancing Queens: Ambiguous Sex and Changing Bodies in Baroque Spain

• In Event: The Science and Medicine of Habits I: Habits, the Body and Space

English Abstract

During his 1587 Inquisitorial trial, Eleno de Céspedes — Spain’s best known hermaphrodite — referred to the inception of his corporeal transformation as the moment in which he had “taken on the habit of a man”; a phrase that reveals how clothing, conduct, and self-presentation were understood to shape the material body.

While such view may appear strikingly contemporary, it was deeply rooted in the intellectual and cultural traditions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. During the Spanish Baroque, amid political, economic, and epidemiological crisis, moralists and educators emphasized bodily discipline as a means of preserving social order. Habits such as dress, posture, voice, gesture were thus deemed capable of modifying not only one’s identity, but also one’s physical body.

The long history of that connection can be traced back to Aristotle’s notion of habit (hexis) as a practice that becomes “second nature”. Medieval thinkers like Augustine perpetuated the idea that repetition rendered custom indistinguishable from essence, while early modern authors such as Jean Bodin and Juan Fragoso extended this framework across moral, medical, and political discourse. For them, sex, nature, and habit were conceptually inseparable: conduct and appearance were widely perceived as body-shaping, and thus sex-shaping, practices.

This paper aims to delve deeper into that connection, using medical, literary, religious, and moral primary sources from the period to illustrate Spain’s Baroque “crisis of masculinity”; one in which multiple authorities advocated for a custom reform that would prevent men from literally turning into women through their bad habits.

Author

• Mónica Morado Vázquez, European University Institute