Transvestism, transgression, and translatio: Christine de Pizan and the politics and poetics of gender in the French and Italian Middle Ages

Despite the edict in Deuteronomy 22:5, well known in the Middle Ages: "The woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garments," medieval cross dressers appear with intriguing frequency in both textual representations and popular cultural practices. This study is an investigation of how and why such representations and practices functioned in perhaps unexpected ways in the creation or reinforcement of the medieval sex gender system.;Focusing on the French and Italian Middle Ages from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, the study includes an examination of the mythological and medical discourses of the hermaphrodite, spiritual and popular culture costuming, and the legalities of clothing and class. Gynecological treatises or iconographic representations, as well as literary genres from hagiography to the sometimes obscene fabliaux, along with the great edifices of the Middle Ages, La Commedia and Le Roman de to rose, provide the materials indicating medieval interest in sexual inversion. And to no small degreee this was a masculine interest as well as a masculine composition of inversion narratives.;These various poetic representations or cultural practices of transvestism, however, paradoxically reproduced the conventional parameters of medieval gender hierarchy within the socio-political system of the Middle Ages. They functioned to express and contain, for example, Church struggles with control of the laity, or secular concerns about class dislocation, even as these cross dressed representations reveal anxiety about the dynamic presented between the sexed bodies within them.;Medieval women, though not generally the producers of such texts, nor the actors in festive cross dressing events, nonetheless did identify and interrogate a male transvestite inversion reversal model of authority in their reception of such accounts of cross dressed figures. Moreover, a number of women poets interestingly chose to work with the "hermaphrodite" composition model of masculine/feminine oscillation rejected by their transvestite brothers. As the always astute Christine de Pizan suggests after her supposed female to male transformation in Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune , this change was after all, "par metaphore;" the transgressive poetics and politics of transvestism were all in the translatio.