ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an anonymous mid-seventeenth-century English poem, included among the commendatory verses prefacing Katherine Philips's posthumously published collection, Poems. It discusses a late seventeenth-century, semi-scandalous French novel by Abominable Madame de Murat, Les Memoires De Madame La Comtesse De M. It's well known that in the seventeenth century, writing for a public audience was charged with dangerous sexual significance—at least for women, who risked accusations of immodesty, unchastity, even prostitution. Women writers seem not to have invoked an explicitly tribadic muse, some managed subtly to suggest sex and love between women when alluding to Calliope & Company. Philo-Philippa asserts women and men's intellectual and even physical equality. Philo-Philippa makes Iphis the agent of transformation: she changed her form of life and thereby changed sex. In Philo-Philippa's version of the story, as in Ovid's, love-making and poetry-making blur.
