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Article published In: Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 14:2 (2025) ► pp.178–199

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The afterlives of Margaret Rany

Tracing the trial of an intersex person in early modern Scotland

ORCiD logo with link | University of Cambridge, UK
Published online: 7 July 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.24025.tur
Abstract
In 1653, Margaret Rany was indicted before a court in Edinburgh for having sexual intercourse with a horse. It was unusual for a woman to be charged with bestiality, but what made the case more unusual was that a forced examination of Rany’s body caused widespread debate over the nature of Rany’s ‘true’ sex: were they a woman, man, or ‘hermaphrodite’? Conflicting accounts of Rany arose as reports of the trial spread from legal records to newspapers, and even to early English dictionaries. In attempting to do justice to Rany’s life and the traces it left behind, this paper proposes sexed trajectories as one tool for analysing how a person’s body can be discursively remodelled through successive texts and text-types. But the paper also attends to how the echoes of a body’s sensations and affects might exceed, disturb, or slip away from the discursive structures that try to order it.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Sexual variance in early modern Britain
    • 1.2Theorizing the sexed trajectory
    • 1.3The textual corpus
  • 2.Plotting Rany’s trajectory
    • 2.1Legal records
    • 2.2Medical diagnosis
    • 2.3News reports
    • 2.4Dictionaries
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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