Rachel Lewis, "Love and Persuassion in Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione Di Poppea," Music and Letters 86.1 2005
According to the Galenic tradition with which Monteverdi would have been familiar, there was no stable biological divide between male and female; the Renaissance lackeda scientific discourse that could even claim to establish a definitive method by which one distinguished male from female.¹⁴ Sexual identity was relational, not a fixed bodily condition, but a response to contexts that were always changing.15

14 See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, 'Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe', in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds.), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York and London, 1991), 80–110 at 81.

15 Ibid. 104.