1. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979) discuss the implications for women writers of the patriarchal notion that the writer "fathers" his text, just as God fathered the world, in their seminal first chapter, 3-44.

2. See Susan Stanford Friedman, "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse," in Speaking of Gender , ed. Elaine Showalter (New York, 1989), 73-100.

4. Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage de Michel de Montaigne , ed. François Rigolot (Paris, 1992), 6-7.

5. Thomas Laqueur examines the concept of the "one-sex model" and explores the complex relationships between sex and gender in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). See also his "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology" in The Mak- ing of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century , eds. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, 1987), 1-41.

6. There is, of course, another way to read the story of Iphis, one I explore in "Montaigne's Memorable Stories of Gender and Sexuality," Montaigne Studies 6, nos. 1-2 (1994): 187-201. Instead of coding desire exclusively in heterosexual terms, as I have done here, one could speak of Iphis's love for Ianthe as the expression of lesbian desire. "Cows do not burn with love for cows, nor mares for mares," Iphis says, but her experience could be taken to prove that while they may not, women can love women and, in fact, they do, without having to be "men." The attribution of the penis and Iphis's transformation at the end would then merely be a way for her to consummate her love and to allow it to exist openly within a social and cultural context. This is a powerful alternative reading. I have chosen to read in heterosexual terms because both male and female appear to be inscribed in the character of Iphis from the beginning, as I tried to argue, and because I have read Iphis both from the vantage point of the single-sex theory and from that of Montaigne's essay, which is less hospitable to the lesbian interpretation. Both Ovid and Montaigne could be said from this perspective to reflect traditional gender ideology, which makes no place for two female sexual bodies outside of a heterosexual, male-oriented narrative. For insight on this issue see Valerie Traub, "Lesbian Desire in Early Modern England," in Erotics Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage , ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York, 1992), 150-67.

7. Pierre Villey, Les sources des Essais: Annotations et éclaircissements , vol. 4 of Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne , eds. Fortunat Strowski, François Gebelin, and Pierre Villey (Bordeaux, 1930), 48-49.

8. I am indebted in this discussion to Lawrence Kritzman, who speaks of the man within the woman's body as a psychic reality in "Montaigne's Fantastic Monsters and the Construction of Gender," 183-96.

9. Montaigne, Journal de voyage , 6. My translation.

10. See Traub, "Lesbian Desire in Early Modern England."

11. See Leonard Barkan's comments on Iphis in The Gods Made Flesh , 69-71. Thomas Laqueur makes the connection between Iphis and Mary in Making Sex , 139.

12. Laqueur makes the point in Making Sex that neither biological nor social sex "could be viewed as foundational or primary although gender divisions—the categories of social sex—were certainly construed as natural" (134). See esp. 124-34 for the discussion of what he refers to as "the one elastic sex" and the "open body."

13. Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975), 124-51.

14. Ibid., 150.

15. The theme of male pregnancy in popular tales is the subject of Roberto Zapperi's L'homme enceint: L'homme, la femme, et le pouvoir (Paris, 1984). For the pregnant male as an aspect of carnival see Claude Gaignebet, Le carnaval (Paris, 1974), 48-49. The function and significance of male maternity in Rabelais's Quart livre is explored by Alice Berry in "Dark Births: Male Maternity in Rabelais's Quart livre," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 101-17. See also Samuel Kinser, Rabelais's Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley, 1990), 83-85.

16. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic , 6. See their argument about the implications of this metaphor for women writers in their opening chapter, "The Queen's Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity."

17. This appears to be the view of the neo-Aristotelians. The Galenists did believe that the woman possessed semen that contributed to the form and matter of the embryo. For reasons that reveal more about his thematic and rhetorical preoccupations than his medical opinions, Montaigne takes a position closer to the neo-Aristotelians. For the subject of woman as seen by physiologists, anatomists, and physicians in the Renaissance, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980), chap. 3.

18. In terms of the traditional psychoanalytic opposition between a maternal order of nurturing and a paternal order of abstract signification where taking the position of the speaking subject requires a repudiation of continuity with the mother's body, we might see Montaigne collapsing or confounding the opposition by making the mother's body the origin of the speaking subject itself, or himself, in this case.

19. Elizabeth Harvey's Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London, 1992) drew my attention to the figure of Socrates the midwife and to its implications both for the figure of the male writer giving birth to his own voice and for the complex question of the construction of gender. See esp. 76-115.

20. Patricia Parker, "Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text," in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), 8-35.

21. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo , trans. Betty I. Knott, Book I, 1, in Collected Works of Erasmus , vol. 24 (Toronto, 1978), 295. In The Cornucopian Text Terence Cave has explored in detail the paradoxical tendencies of copia to both plenitude and emptiness.

22. Erasmus, Ciceronianus , trans. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus , vol. 28 (Toronto, 1986), 404.

23. Cave, The Cornucopian Text , 3-34.

24. On gendered language, and on gender as a central rhetorical and thematic issue of the Essais , I am indebted to Robert Cottrell's "Gender Imprinting in Montaigne's Essais ."

25. Robert Cottrell has demonstrated the richly suggestive semantic connections between bas, molle , and the feminine in the Essais . See his "Gender Imprinting in Montaigne's Essais ," and "Croisement chiasmique dans le premier essai de Montaigne," Bulletin de la société des amis de Montaigne , 6e série, nos. 11-12 (July-Dec. 1982): 65-71.

26. Starobinski, Montaigne en mouvement , 227.

27. On the relation between sexual impotence and textual strength, see Robert Cottrell, Sexuality / Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne's Essais , 146-66. Mathieu-Castellani demonstrates the presence and operation of the dynamic of seduction in the Essais and of Montaigne's rhetoric of seduction in her Montaigne: L'écriture de l'essai , 255-67.

28. I find it telling that two perceptive readers of the Essais attribute gender to the seducer and its object in opposite ways. Robert Cottrell pictures a feminine text seducing a masculine reader ("Gender Imprinting in Montaigne's Essais ") and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani portrays a masculine writer in the text seducing a feminine reader ( Montaigne: L'écriture de l'essai ). Rather than taking this as an either / or proposition that requires adjudication, I see the discrepancy as a sign of the diverse and divergent tendencies of Montaigne's text.

29. R. Howard Bloch describes the web of lexical and semantic elements that link the feminine and its dangerous deception to rhetoric, to literature, and even to the writer in medieval literature in "Medieval Misogyny," in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy , eds. R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson (Berkeley, 1989), 1-24.

30. In "Gender Imprinting in Montaigne's Essais " Cottrell brings out the female side of the writing, although he does not speak to its doubleness: "the text itself is invested with intentions quite properly called female, for in the tradition in which the Montaignian text is located woman is associated with seduction, that is to say, with sophistry and the art of persuasion, with rhetoric" (88).