Fortune’s Touch: Reading transformation in Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune

Abstract

A study of the changes wrought by the retelling of the Iphis story in Christine de Pizan’s La Mutacion de Fortune, alongside the tales of Circe and Tiresias, and their articulations in Christine’s source text, the Ovide moralisé, reveals a practice of reading and retelling informed by the memory of learning and sensuality. Transformed into a man by the touch of the goddess Fortune, the Mutacion’s narrator’s situation echoes those of Ovidian characters he evokes, enabling him to express the reconfiguration of his body which resulted from his widowhood. In this text, gender transformation is written onto skin.