Transforming Fortune: Reading and Chance in Christine de Pizan's "Mutacion de Fortune" and "Chemin de long estude"

Both Derrida, in 'Mes chances', and Christine de Pizan, in "Le Chemin de long estude" and "La Mutacion de Fortune", reflect on the intimate relations between reading and Fortune. Christine both reads about Fortune (in Aristotle and Boethius) and she reads by chance, describing the coincidences which condition her reading and learning. In the Mutacion Fortune effects a sex change on Christine. The present article reads this allegorical transformation and the repeated claims to veracity with which it is introduced in terms of the reading encounters which frame it. It is argued that the transmuted body of Christine's poetic persona can be read as a figure for allegory in her work.