In this book, the author explores medieval society's fascination with the cross-dressed woman, examining a wide variety of religious, literary, and historical sources that recordedinterpretations of sartorial attempts to overcome gender hierarchy and also illustrate, mainly through the device of inversion, a remarkabley sustained desire to examine an reexamine the nature of social gender identities. Included in the study are investigations of the symbolism underlying the lives of popular transvestite saints; the confluence of hagiography and biography in the historical case of Hildegund von Schonau; the juridical and theological arguments for and against the transvestism of Jeanne d'Arc; the legend of the female pope; the phenomenon of the abandoned wife in male disguise; and the characterization of female protagonists in courtly romance who experience a crisis of sexual identity.</P>