The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.

Leah DeVun is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. DeVun is the author of Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (Columbia, 2009) and was coeditor of Trans*historicities (2018), an issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Ruth Evans, Dorothy McBride Orthwein Professor of English, Saint Louis University:
The Shape of Sex is beautifully written, elegantly argued, and accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. Leah DeVun's use of case studies draws the reader in, and the book's sophisticated elaborations of the import of the material shows familiarity with gender theory today as well as in the past. I especially value DeVun's attention to the intersection of race and gender. This will be the major study of the topic for many years to come.

Carolyn Dinshaw, author of How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time:
In this meticulous yet accessible study, DeVun details the long historical roots of Western European sexual categories and those bodies that exceed them. In a thrilling final chapter, DeVun turns from theological, legal, natural-philosophical, and medical ideas of binary containment to the fevered world of alchemical thought, where nonbinary beings were viewed as ‘miraculous and productive.’ This book reveals the world-creating power of nonbinary beings in imagery and writings from the distant past, urging us ‘to let the past intrude, to be attentive to its iterations, and to keep the future open.’

Kathleen P. Long, author of Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe:
Eloquent, erudite, and deftly argued, this book explores the rich history of theories and representations of nonbinary sex in medieval culture, revealing their resonances with and divergences from modern and postmodern theories of intersex and transgender. DeVun’s book is an absolutely vital source for anyone seeking to understand the long trajectory of the concepts of sex and gender. This is a work that challenges and transforms normative ideas about embodiment in order to offer more capacious possibilities for human experience.

Katharine Park, author of Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection:
In this important and timely study, DeVun traces the ways in which medieval European legal, religious, and scientific authorities gradually constructed the idea that there are two and only two ‘opposite’ sexes. Putting to rest the myth of the premodern ‘one-sex’ body, DeVun highlights changing understandings of what counted as a ‘natural’ body and why. Essential reading for students of sex and gender in the medieval and modern West.

Susan Stryker, executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly:
Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex brilliantly realizes the promise of transgender studies and nonbinary frames of reference to provide compelling reinterpretations of gender and bodies not just in the present but also in the distant past. Through deep archival research, erudite textual scholarship, and dazzling methodological turns, DeVun shows how the figure of the nonbinary body has been central to Western theological, philosophical, legal, and scientific thought regarding proper social and cosmological order for more than two millennia.