Ovidian Transversions

Valerie Traub is the Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor and Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Working across the disciplines of literature and history, she is a specialist in the study of gender and sexuality in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. She is the author of three monographs: Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002), and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992, 2014). Her most recent collection is The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016). Patricia Badir is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) and her most recent set of articles studies the archival remains of early twentieth-century productions of medieval and renaissance drama. She is currently working on a series of articles that explores what it means to study the early modern past “from here” as well as book on early twentieth-century director, Roy Mitchell and the matter of the theatrical archive. Peggy McCracken is the Mary Fair Croushore Collegiate Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author or co-author of six books, including most recently In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (2017), and translator of Gui de Cambrai’s Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha (2014).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsContributorsIntroduction: Transversions of ‘Iphis and Ianthe’, Valerie Traub1. Metamorphosis as Supplement: Sexuality and History in the Ovide moralisé, Peggy McCracken2. The Trans* Temporality of Lament: ‘Foolish’ Hope and Trans* Survival in the Ovide moralisé’s ‘Iphis and Ianthe’, Laurel Billings3. Gower’s Riddles in ‘Iphis and Iante’, Karma Lochrie4. Fortune’s Touch: Reading Transformation in Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune, Miranda Griffin5. Becoming Scattered: The Case of Iphis’s Trans*version and the Archipelogic of John Florio’s Worlde of Wordes, Marjorie Rubright6. Alchemy, Humanism, and the Uses of Disknowledge in John Lyly’s Galathea, Katherine Eggert7. The Problem with Love: Untoward Engagement and Humanist Pedagogy in Galatea, Elizabeth Mathie8. Coastal Squeeze: Environmental Metamorphosis and Lyly’s Lincolnshire, Patricia Badir9. Illegible Bodies: Reading Intersex and Transgender in Early Modern France (The Case of Isaac de Benserade’s Iphis et Ianthe), Kathleen Perry Long10. Lesbianism in Benserade’s Iphis et Ianthe (1634): Gallantry and the Making of Heterosexuality in Seventeenth-Century France, Matthieu Dupas11. Changing the Ways of the World: Sex, Youth, and Modernity in Benserade’s Iphis et Ianthe, Susan S. LanserIndex.

it is a reflection of the value of this project, and the inherent interest of Ovid’s comparatively neglected story, that the reader is left asking further questions about the texts, and identifying additional avenues that remain to be explored. And the very helpful appendixes, which include several of the shorter texts analyzed by the contributors as well as an intriguing selection of illustrations of the myth, further highlight the richness of this material and actively invite the reader to make his or her own new discoveries.