‘The Herm-Aphrodite Rebell’, Gendered Liminal Polemic and Sexualized Slander in the British Civil Wars, 1643–6

The British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth-century endangered a great deal of contemporary concern about the dissolution of social norms in the trauma of war. This included not only the social hierarchy but also binary gender roles: which contemporary observers feared where being blurred by the conflict. However, this period also saw the maturation of print as a propaganda medium, and concern about gender was a valuable polemical tool in the newsbooks’ struggle for popular opinion. The Parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus was particularly prone to this, repeatedly using the term “hermaphrodite” to describe enemies ranging from the royalist press to Parliamentarian turncoats. In the hands of Britanicus, as well as in rival Royalist publications, the hermaphroditic trope was used to collapse opponents’ gentle masculine or feminine honour, imply their politics’ monstrous nature, and as a tool of mockery against other “intelligencers”.