A Mamlūk Embassy to the Court of Charles V of France in Light of the Account of Christine de Pizan

Reviewed by: An Introduction to Christine de Pizan Beverly J. Evans Margolis, Nadia . An Introduction to Christine de Pizan. Foreword by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh, series editors. New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. PP [i]-xxiv ; 272. ISBN 978-0-8130-3650-2. $69.95 (Cloth). ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4198-8. $22.50 (Paper). Every so often, a study appears whose clear-cut organization, insightful commentary, and engaging style make it indispensable reading for specialists and non-specialists alike. Such is Nadia Margolis' An Introduction to Christine de Pizan. Although the title identifies it as introductory, this volume goes far beyond being a resource primarily for newcomers to Christine's literary world. Even experts who navigate the territory of late-medieval literature with ease are bound to increase their knowledge, thanks to Margolis' skill at tracing, [End Page 121] contextualizing, and interpreting the defining moments of Christine's life and art. One extremely useful feature of An Introduction is that roughly half of the book is devoted to supporting information that is crucial to understanding Christine's path toward becoming a formidable intellectual and author. The chapters that focus on Christine's works are bookended, on the one side, by a Chronology of Christine's Life and Influential Events and a Genealogy of the Valois Dynasty and, on the other side, by a Glossary, Bibliographical Guide, Notes, and Index. The Glossary cannot fail to be a tremendous boon both to students who are approaching the field for the first time and to instructors. Among other items, entries include historical figures, authors, and mythological personages; pertinent written forms (e.g., virelai, summa, epistle); specific works; and concepts that are central to medieval intellectual life. The Bibliographical Guide "a select bibliography of English- and French-languages sources while sections IIIa and IIIb list four bibliographies and two useful electronic sites (200). The rest of the guide inventories primary sources of Christine's writings. The value of Chapter 1, "Christine's Life and Times," presents facts about the author's life, notably her intellectual debt to her father, Thomassos, astrologer to Charles V, and her grief at losing a beloved husband at the age of 25, while showing how profoundly she was affected by the chaos of the Hundred Years' War. Turmoil at the court of Charles VI ended Tomassos' career. He fell ill and died in 1388 or 1389. Shortly thereafter, Christine's beloved husband, Etienne de Castel, died, too, leaving her responsible for herself, their three children, her mother, and her niece. Writing would provide their livelihood. Margolis' Chapter 2, "Early Works," deals with how Christine began by composing lyric poetry. Nonetheless, her skill at argumentation led to participation in the famous Debate on the Romance of the Rose. She also chronicled Charles V's reign in Le Livre des Fais et bonnes moeurs du sage roy Charles V. Through Margolis' adept treatment of the French political environment of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reader is able to appreciate exactly what was at stake for Christine during this period when the fortunes of princes rose and fell. With the passage of time, Christine de Pizan's authorial activities came to be determined more and more by political events in France, as well as the widespead climate of misogyny in medieval society. As concerns the latter, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, "the first known history of women by a woman," has obviously received the most critical attention. Margolis gives this masterpiece its due in Chapter 3, "Later Works," but also presents excellent commentary on other pieces that address woman's identity and power within a political context. For example, the Epistre a la reine, written to Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of Charles VI, asks the queen to serve as mediator-or moyennerresse, a term coined by Christine-between the ruling class and its subjects. Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc likewise evokes the power of woman to save nations and all humankind. [End Page 122] As mentioned above, one of the great strengths of An Introduction is its author's ability to contextualize so many and such...

Lyric Sequences in the<i>Cantigas d'amigo</i>

1OOARTHURIANA nonchristianists in the collection, discusses the connection between Wolfram's Parzival and the Crusades in the general context offeudal politics and economics. Deborah Rose-Lefmann's closing essay demonstrates ways in which late medieval mystical writers drew upon Arthurian and courtly imagery for their depictions of the love between Christ and the soul. The diversity ofperspectives contained in this volume should make it useful and interesting not only to Arthurians, but also to students ofmedieval literature, history, and theology. It presents a broad range of interpretations covering texts from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, and could be especially useful as a textbook for upper-division undergraduate courses in medieval disciplines. WANDA ZEMLER-CIZEWSKI Marquette University barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Beliefin the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 446. isbn: o— 8122-3691-2. $42.50. Barbara Newman is best known for her two books on Hildegard of Bingen—Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegards Theology ofthe Feminine (1987) and her edition and translation of Symphonia: A Critical Edition ofthe 'Symphonia Armonie celestium revelationum (1988). Recently, in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Religion and Literature (1995), she surveyed thirteenth- and fourteenth-century women mystics and theologians in relation to her concept of the 'virile woman.' Her new book, God and the Goddess: Vision, Poetry, and Beliefin the Middle Ages (2003), argues that a feminized God—and not just a figurative depiction of his personified attributes as imagined in poetry and visions—actually informed medieval theology. To get to this point, she uses female personifications ofdivinity primarily found in the theology ofwomen mystics from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a gloss on those of the twelfth-century French Platonist philosophers. She then argues that, 'in the most imaginative and provocative texts, both Latin and vernacular, they [these personifications] add an irreducible fourth dimension to the spiritual universe. As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and not least, ravishing objects of identification and desire, the goddesses substantially transformed and deepened Christendom's concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life' (2-3). In this project, Newman renders women mystics and thinkers—less than mainstream in the Middle Ages—as part of what would have had to have been a monolithic philosophic tradition, one more conventionally associated with the scholastic philosophy (not theology) ofthe universities in the twelfth century than is now believed to have existed. In introductory and concluding chapters, on God and the goddesses and then on the goddesses and the One God, Newman discusses St. Francis's Lady Poverty, Mechthild of Magdeburg's Lady Love, Henry of Suso's Wisdom, William Langland's Lady Holy Church, and Christine de Pizan's Lady REVIEWS??? Reason, Lady Right, and Lady Justice. In the intervening chapters between the introduction and conclusion, roughly chronological in order and leading up to the Reformation, she shows the relationships between the twelfth-century figure of Natura as handmaiden of God, Hildegard of Bingen's Natura, and Nature in Christine de Pizan (chapters 2 and 3); Love (Caritas) and Hadewich of Brabant (chapter 4); Sapientia and Julian ofNorwich (chapter 5); and Mary and the Trinity (the Holy Family) (chapter 6). Her grand mistake here is to construe these goddesses as 'introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit ofscholastic theology' (3) for all late medieval poets and philosophers, male and female, and to disengage the literary and religious history of the mid-thirteenth to the fifteenth century from those poets' and philosophers' antecedents in the twelfth. From what scholars have understood about the use of such personifications, there was no verifiable 'emotional force' or 'religious import' beyond the pleasure ofthefigura and its instantiation within a poetic or prosimetric text (like the Depianeta Naturae [The Complaint ofNature] ofAlan ofLille or the Roman de la Rose [The Romance ofthe Rose] ofJean de Meun). In a book arguing for the historical influence oftwelfth-century Neoplatonic practice, I would expect an introductory chapter to explain the use of such personification allegory in the twelfth century (many books have been written on these periods and the...

Carter (Yale UP) for an American audience is another interesting future project. Stéphane Heuet’s article“La Recherche en BD,”is a special pleasure to read. The author of the French comic-strip version of Proust’s novel, Heuet is one of a very select group who has managed to bridge the gap between “Proust scholarship” and “popular culture.” Heuet describes the history of his creative interpretation and the care he has taken in creating the comics—from the choice of colors (impressionist) to not only the choice of texts to include, but also where to put the bubbles that contain them. This book is like the exhibit prepared for the Rijksmuseum during its remodeling. While neither could reflect the entirety of the museum or Proust’s novel, the choice of works and their arrangement reflects the complexity and richness of the full experience as well as it could in a limited space. Mississippi State University Jack Jordan Le Ninan, Claire. Le sage roi et la clergesse: l’écriture du politique dans l’œuvre de Christine de Pizan. Paris: Champion, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7453-2431-3. Pp. 434. 100 a. That Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) was one of the most important political writers of her time is by now well known. Many studies have investigated certain aspects of her political thought and writings but Le Ninan’s book is the first to take a vue d’ensemble of the four texts that form the heart of Pizan’s political output: her 1404 biography of Charles V, now available in a new translation by Joël Blanchard (Pocket Agora, 2013); Le livre de l’advision Christine (1405); Le livre de paix (1412– 13); and the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (1430). There are also frequent references to other works by Pizan as well as to those by her contemporaries. The book is divided into two parts: the first explores the different personas Pizan created for herself in order to gain authority and justify her role as unofficial counselor to kings and princes. The second part is devoted to the interdependence of political message and rhetorical methods, notably to Pizan’s use of compilation, allegory, and exemplum. Pizan created herself as widow, historian, counselor/philosopher, and prophetess by interlacing her life story with that of the kingdom of France. She could thus speak for the “peuple malmené” (39) by power-hungry, feckless rulers, demonstrating that revolts and disorder were often provoked by the rulers’ own moral failings and their lack of ordered leadership. Le Ninan returns again and again to the problem of the broken oath, which Pizan considered key for a number of the crises besetting France at the time. For the war with England, the Great Schism of the Western Church, and incipient civil war, Pizan tried to offer “la solution la plus sage, la plus pacifique et la plus efficace à ses yeux” (75). Her didacticism drew on a large number of sources from antiquity, the Bible, and contemporary anecdotes. Le Ninan shows how Pizan manipulated these sources, creating such new figures as Libera, a veiled personification of France in the Advision, 224 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 225 or Opinion in the same work, or drew exempla from antique and contemporary authors that she reworked and rearranged in order to get her message across. Le Ninan offers a long series of close readings that are always illuminating, showing for example that Pizan transforms negative examples into positive ones or adapts her lessons to the age of the dauphin Louis de Guyenne who is the target of several texts. With a keen sense for Pizan’s use of metaphors and her skilled technique of auto-citation, Le Ninan guides her readers through Pizan’s often intricate writings, whose goals were always the same: to save the kingdom of France. The book is clearly and elegantly written, marred only by a bibliography unnecessarily divided into sections that make it difficult to retrieve a particular reference, and by a number of typos unworthy of such an excellent book. University of Pittsburgh Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski Lestringant, Frank. André Gide, l’inquiéteur: tome 1, le ciel sur la...

Reviewed by: Christine de Pizan: A Casebook Stephanie Downes Altmann, Barbara and Deborah McGrady , eds, Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, New York, Routledge, 2003; hardback; pp. xiii, 296; RRP £65; ISBN 0415939097. This collection of essays edited by Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L. McGrady embraces Christine de Pizan in all her guises: poet, polemicist, feminist, politician, historian. In their introduction, the editors suggest that the 'challenge' for twenty-first century scholars of Christine 'is to nuance our understanding of her uniqueness' (pp. 1-2). This carefully worded exhortation avoids casting Christine in any one critical mould, and alludes instead to the fluidity with which sheherself navigates theoretical boundaries. The Christine that emerges from this volume is distinguished chiefly by her 'unique'ability to elude categorisation. The Casebook also professes its own 'uniqueness', as a collation of previously unpublished articles at the forefront of post-millenium Christine scholarship. The collection begins with a brief review of the critical reception of Christine in the twentieth century: Charity Cannon Willard's anecdotal and entertaining foreword maps out her scholarly interest in Christine in the twentieth century with a light, personal touch. Altmann and McGrady acknowledge this legacy of academic study in their introduction, but stress that the volume's intention is to reflect, and even to generate, a 'new shift in Christine studies' (p. 2). Part I, 'Christine in Context', proposes readings of Christine's oeuvre within the historical, social and political context of fifteenth-century France. It includes instructive essays by major scholars Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsksi, Lori J. Walters and Earl Jeffrey Richards. Margarete Zimmerman's intriguing 'Christine de Pizan: Memory's Architect' concludes the first section by exploring Christine's attention to memoria, and her promotion of her work, both textually and visually, to secure its future survival. Part II reviews the feminist approach to Christine, with a particular emphasis on feminine space: Rosalind Brown-Grant reminds us that the defense genre provides the foundation of the Cité des dames, while Roberta L. Krueger accentuates the [End Page 187] female domestic sphere in her examination of the link between the spiritual and economic well-being of women in the Livre des trois vertus (also known as the Tresor de la cité des dames). The exploration of feminine space culminates with Judith L. Kellogg's article, 'Le livre de la cité des dames: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Reimagining Gendered Space', which focuses on Christine's representation of a feminine body politic, where the physical space in which the City of Ladies is constructed is ultimately grafted onto the female body. The miscellany of textual analysis of Christine's works in Part III, 'Christine's Writings', lacks the engaging internal unity of Parts I and II. But the collective eclecticism of the contributions, might be interpreted as indicative of Christine's versatility in her own century, as well as in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship. Tracy Adams's article, which focuses on the Cents balades,sees Christine channelling her own experience in life and love stylistically into her ballade cycles. Marilynn Desmond re-examines the three letters Christine contributed to the early fifteenth-century epistolary debate, the Querelle de la rose, arguing for their significance in relation to Christine's corpus and to the Early Modern Querelle des femmes, while Andrea Tarnowski elucidates Christine's deliberate representation of herself as both a 'fictional character' and a 'producer of texts' (p. 182) in the oft-appraised Chemin de long estude. Liliane Dulac and Christine Reno's article on the Livre de l'advision Cristine expicitly articulates the generic elusiveness of Christine which underpins the volume: 'The autobiographical and political dimensions of the Advision are thus inextricably linked to such a degree that it is impossible to classify the work neatly according to a single genre that would exclude or downplay the importance of one or the other' (p. 209). It seems to me that the same could be said of the collection as a whole. Willard's intimate prefatory remarks spill over into the collection itself, and the result is an attempt to cancel out anachronism by recovering Christine on a personal level. The foreword resonates throughout the entire volume, but perhaps...

In the first part of her Livre de l’Advision Cristine, Christine de Pizan uses the insertion of exempla so as to work out a prophetic discourse whose power of persuasion derives from a system of explicit and implicit analogies. Following the narratives, the exegesis tempts one to recognize in the events borrowed from the biblical texts the reflected image of the events lived by the Kingdom of France and the foreboding of its tragic fate. It links in a more complex pattern the Hebrew Kings to the French Princes, Libera’s allegoric figure to the biblical prophets, and especially Christine herself to the allegory which bestows the writer the role of a prophetess. But the strength of the political discourse owns as much to this mirror effect as to the author’s literary accomplishments which confer to the first book of the Advision the structure of the last evoked exemplum1.

Reviewed by: The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes by Christine de Pizan Karen Green Christine de Pizan, The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, ed. Hope Johnston, trans. Brian Anslay (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 457), Tempe, ACMRS, 2014; hardback; pp. lxvii, 622; 13 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $90.00, £69.00; ISBN 9780866985086. With this new edition of the Middle English translation of Christine de Pizan's Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, the purchaser gets two editions for the price of one, for the book incorporates both the text of Brian Anslay's English translation, published in 1521, and an edition, in Middle French, of an early exemplar of Christine's famous defence of women, London, British Library, MS Royal 19.A.xix (L), a manuscript that may have been consulted by the English translator (p. xxv). As the editor, Hope Johnson, notes, by printing both the French and English on facing pages, comparison of the two texts and the identification of places where they deviate is greatly facilitated. Since the only other easily available edition of the French text, that prepared by Earl Jeffrey Richards and Patrizia Caraffi (Luni Editrice, 1997), comes with an Italian translation, the inclusion of the French along with the Middle English significantly enhances the publication's usefulness for English speakers. The introduction offers a brief account of the contents of Christine's defence of women, a short account of her life, with brief details of her other works, a biography of the translator, Brian Anslay, a discussion of the minor ways in which the translation deviates from the original, an account of the editorial history of the [End Page 155] Cité des Dames, some details concerning the printer, Henry Pepwell, and details of the signature irregularities, provenance, and marginalia of the five surviving copies of the English publication. There are extensive notes, which detail the ways in which the text of L diverges from British Library, MS Harley 4431 (R), the authoritative version prepared for the French queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, in 1414. A bibliography and selective glossary of Middle English words that are likely to cause trouble make up the volume. An enormous amount of detailed work has gone into the preparation of this pair of texts, and I find the conjunction of the Middle French with the Middle English is an aid in reading both. When the French is obscure, the English helps, and vice versa. As others have noted, Ansley's translation follows the French almost word for word, so that someone with French, and whose Middle English is weak, could use the French to familiarize themselves with Middle English, or the other way around. I suspect that this will make the edition of use to students of both languages. The ease of comparison also promises 'multiple interpretative possibilities for future scholars to consider' (p. li). This is a very careful, scholarly edition. If it has any fault, it is that it is so careful not to go beyond the available evidence that it offers no interesting new speculations concerning the circumstances of the translation or the influence of it and its French original on later English political debates concerning women's capacity to rule. We learn that the translator was a yeoman who attended Henry VII's funeral and the coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Both events took place in 1509, and at the latter event he was assigned to the 'Queen's Chamber' (p. xl). He was a yeoman of the cellar, married to Anne Polsted, and lived in Kent not far from William Thynne, the 1532 editor of Chaucer's Works. Thynne's nephew, Sir John Thynne, acquired one of the surviving copies of the translation, that at Longleat, which bears the name of William Brereton, who was charged and executed on the grounds of adultery with Anne Boleyn' (pp. xliii, lxi). Given the timing of its production—when after eleven years of marriage, Catherine of Aragon had provided Henry VIII with only a female heir—, and in the light of Susan Groag Bell's discoveries relating to the contemporary 'city of ladies' tapestries', which are mentioned...

MLR, .,   and understanding of the theorists with whom Germana puts him in conversation. (e extended discussion of how Ellison was so influenced by Northrop Frye’s book e Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy in itself makes the book worth reading.) e major chapters focus on, in order: Invisible Man and the historical/temporal concepts of Nietzsche and Bergson; Invisible Man and the historical figure of Henry Box Brown (as far as I am aware, this correspondence has never been remarked in Ellison scholarship); Ellison’s extensive collection of Polaroid pictures and his unfinished second novel; Ellison’s ‘polyrhythmic and metric techniques’ (p. ) both in his short fiction and in ree Days before the Shooting . . .; and finally Ellison’s substantial body of music criticism and musicology and how that work interweaves with his fiction writing throughout his career. e close readings and textual discussions are suggestive and learned. Although certain terms and concepts are at times confusing or perhaps overdone, the dense philosophical web of allusions and concepts does yield new readings of Ellison’s primary writings. e results are indeed profound, as Germana concludes that Ellison’s ‘commitment to reclaiming the protean within the persistent, the chaos within certainty’ is precisely what ‘makes his work not merely relevant, but truly indispensable in the twenty-first century’ (p. ). W  L U M C. C ‘e Book of the City of Ladies’ and Other Writings. By C  P. Ed. by S B and R K. Trans. by I H. Indianapolis: Hackett. . $; £. (pbk $; £.). ISBN –– –– (pbk ––––). is new English translation of Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames is accompanied by selections from her Advision Cristine (Christine’s Vision), Corps de Policie (Book of the Body Politic) and Lamentation sur les maux de la France (Lamentation on France’s Ills), all of which are a pleasure to read in Ineke Hardy’s renderings. In a stimulating introductory essay, editors Sophie Bourgault and Rebecca Kingston argue that the Cité, a work generally read for its defence of women, also makes ‘a worthy contribution’ to ‘traditions of political reflection’ and to ‘philosophical debates about the nature of the virtues and their place in the well lived life’ (p. xviii). at welcome orientation takes us further into understanding the work of this brilliant fieenth-century writer. Substantive modern interest in Christine and her work, which initially coincided with the attention brought to women’s issues in the s and s, at first focused on her writing about women, and especially on the Cité. While the Cité remains a centrepiece of Christine Studies, scholars have now broadened their enquiry to examine other texts from Christine’s large body of writing, especially those that illuminate her political views and her strong interest in virtue ethics. One rewarding result has been concentrated research into Christine’s thoughts about government  Reviews (especially France’s government), and into her recommendations for a well-run society . e Cité itself is an engaged and erudite rebuke both to the historical method Christine knew and to the specific historical narratives of her time, which both justified and structured the assumptions, institutions, and political practices of the generations for whom they were written. Some recent studies by French researchers could have lent additional support to Bourgault and Kingston’s thesis. ese include Françoise Autrand, Christine de Pizan : une femme en politique (Paris: Fayard, ); Claire Le Ninan, Le Sage Roi et la clergesse: l’écriture du politique dans l’œuvre de Christine de Pizan (Paris: Champion, ); and Anne Paupert, ‘“Te donrai preuve par exemples”: statut et fonction des exemples dans Le Livre de la Cité des Dames de Christine de Pizan’, Elseneur,  (), –. Works by Christine translated or mentioned in this volume are unfortunately given by their English titles only; the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc is a curious exception but one misses any reference to the authoritative edition and translation of the poem by Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Medium Ævum Monographs,   (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, )). is City is the third expert English translation of the work published in the last four decades. Hardy comments very briefly on how her translation...

Reviewed by: Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish David Luscombe Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish. Edited by Cary J. Nederman, Nancy Van Deusen, and E. Ann Matter. [Disputatio, Vol. 21.] (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers. 2009. Pp. ix, 308. €60,00. ISBN 978-2-503-52756-7.) Marcia Colish has published widely and influentially on the history of medieval thought. This Festschrift celebrates her valuable achievements with thirteen essays written in her honor, some boasting witty titles, eight of them on twelfth-century topics, five on later ones up to Machiavelli. Great figures are present: St. Anselm of Canterbury, Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, Gratian of Bologna, and Nicholas of Cusa, among others. Important themes, too, are here: theories of language, the devil, Christology, the sources of law, wonders, programs of study, music, princely virtues, and saints’ cults. And the contributors are well-established scholars. An excellent evaluation of notions of schools of thought—Porretans, nominalists, and so forth—in the study of twelfth-century history is made by William Courtenay (“Schools and Schools of Thought”). Gary Macy (“Fake Fathers”) finds that canon law discussions of the role of women in the Church were most often based on spurious authorities. Arjo Vanderjagt (“Constant Exercise”) brings to life links between modern devotion and humanism in northwestern Europe in the late-fifteenth [End Page 531] century with a study of a letter of Rudolfus Agricola offering pedagogical advice. Grover Zinn (“Minding Matter”) unpicks the discussion by Hugh of St. Victor of a (now lost) symbolical drawing of Noah’s ark that denotes the Church as the body of Christ. One of Colish’s books was on The Mirror of Language (New Haven, 1968), and, appropriately, her interests in language are reflected in an amusing essay by Mary Sirridge on the content and functions of vocative and substantive phrases such as “I am called” and “I am.” Priscian’s “rambling” and “notoriously cryptic and episodic” discussion of these, she writes (p. 97), “in no way discouraged medieval commentators from trying to extract a consistent theory from his remarks.” Willemien Otten (“Broken Mirrors”) also writes on theory of language and Abelard’s teaching on the Incarnation, but he loses the reader when he writes that Abelard sees “incarnational teaching resulting in an intersubjective human process of universal learning by which Redemption can ultimately be the result of one teacher’s unusual talent” (p. 86). M. B. Pranger shows how St. Augustine’s exclusion of evil from being shaped the thought of Pope Gregory the Great, Anselm of Canterbury, and Heinrich von Kleist about the devil. In an interesting way Jason Taliadoros challenges Colish’s assessment of the controversy in Anglo-Norman circles over Lombard’s Christology, but his attempt to bring John of Salisbury into these debates (pp. 139–40) is not successful. Edward M. Peters’s essay on Gervase of Tilbury (“The Lady Vanishes”) usefully adds to knowledge and understanding of twelfth-century stories about edifying and memorable wonders. Nancy Van Deusen provides a most helpful study of the Timaeus in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa. E. Ann Matter shows how Alberto Alfieri in the early-fifteenth century happily turned Macrobius’s swirling realm of the heavenly spheres into a Christian vision of the afterlife. Cary Nederman suggests that Poggio Bracciolini and Machiavelli were not so startling in their views on greed since Nicolas Oresme and Christine de Pizan in the fourteenth century were already heading in a similar direction. Joel Seltzer vividly shows how Hussite radicals in fifteenth-century Bohemia dismantled the practices that accompanied the cult of saints, yet by the early-sixteenth century the Utraquists in Prague “celebrated St Jan Hus Day with all the hoopla of a national holiday” (p. 297). Occasional misprints notwithstanding, these “Mind Matters” are well worth reading. They are opened and brought together with an appreciation by the volume’s editors of Colish’s published work. David Luscombe University of Sheffield Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

This article analyses the literary sources and accounts of Novella d’Andrea, the daughter of Giovanni d’Andrea, an eminent professor at the Bolognese Studium. The study examines the unprecedented case of a woman teaching law at the university in the first half of the fourteenth century, casting light on the cultural and family environment in which she grew up. The sources that conserve her memory are analysed, in particular the account provided by Christine de Pizan, with a new interpretation of her passage, but also those sources that have disseminated misleading information, generating confusion about the historical figure of Novella d’Andrea. The visual works of art that, like the literary accounts, have fuelled her myth include a work that has hitherto been ignored by historiography on Novella d’Andrea, the fourteenth-century woman who broke the glass ceiling.

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

“Pseudo-autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune Laurence de Looze I N HIS SEMINAL CONSIDERATION of genre and (medieval) lit­ erary history, Hans Robert Jauss took the important step of situating the conventions of genres in the reader’s reception as much as, or more than, in the pages the reader reads.1One does not simply read, Jauss maintained, because one is always reading as: what a work is is not separable from what it is received as being. This results in a reader sens­ ing genre—i.e., reading according to certain generic conventions—most keenly precisely when he also senses that the bounds of a genre are being transgressed by a particular work: when, that is, the reader is unable to read comfortably according to his usual generic expectations. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the most exemplary texts of a par­ ticular genre are inevitably those which are perceived as going beyond the established conventions of the genre and provoking the reader’s horizon of expectation. Jauss contrasts these “ chefs-d’oeuvre” to “ stereotyped” works which are entirely conventional, which do not transgress, pro­ voke, resist, in which he finds the proof of generic atrophy. It follows that great examples of a genre will almost always be generically mixed (for the features which transgress the conventions of a genre will them­ selves have to be read “ as something” —namely, as something else) and that “ pure” examples of a single genre are fossilized, stereotyped con­ structions. The greatest examples of a genre will inevitably be, in certain respects, “ other to themselves.” Now, generic identity is never stable, even if one must occasionally freeze its motion in order to carry out analysis. Genre is as shifting as human perception itself, and as varied as the perceptions of different readers and different historical periods. One could chart the mix, even the evolution of perceived genre, in a particular work in terms of its mediation of a dominant genre by an “interprétant” genre, as Kathryn Gravdal proposes in this issue.2One would need to post a caveat, how­ ever, to the effect that the roles of dominant and subjugant may meta­ morphose from reader to reader, place to place, or period to period. In other cases, no one set of generic expectations arises, leading to a tussle between generic expectations. VOL. XXXIII, NO. 4 73 L ’E sprit C réateur As an example of the insoluble contestation of two genres, I will take up that of what has been designated, albeit somewhat loosely, as the medieval “ pseudo-autobiography.” Critics generally agree that it reaches its apogee in the fourteenth century, and that its practitioners include, among others, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan in France, Juan Ruiz in Spain, and Geoffrey Chaucer in England. This consensus is extraordinary given that critics have not been able to define what the pseudo-autobiography actually is. Here I will set forth briefly a theory of the pseudo-autobiography,3 and then examine a particular example, Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Remede de Fortune.4 One of the few attempts to formulate a definition of the medieval pseudo-autobiography has been that of Gabriel Gybbon-Monypenny: This genre [which] I would call the “ erotic pseudo-autobiography” . . . is an account by a poet, usually in verse, of an episode or episodes of his supposed love life, into which are interpolated a number of his own lyric compositions. The songs are said to have been com­ posed in connection with the love affair described, and the narrative serves, among other things, to explain their genesis.5 Though the various works subsequently cited are in general excellent examples of the pseudo-autobiography, the definition is problematic, for the taxonomy “ erotic pseudo-autobiography” presupposes an undefined notion of “ pseudo-autobiography.” If the erotic pseudo-autobiography is defined somewhat redundantly as nothing more than a pseudo-auto­ biography in which the protagonist’s erotic life figures prominently, the question remains: what is a pseudo-autobiography? Now, since the pseudo-autobiography is dependent on a notion of autobiography, which is itself dependent on an implicit recognition of biography, the pseudo-autobiography...

Reviewed by: Stories of Women in the Middle Ages by Maria Teresa Brolis Jessica L. Minieri Maria Teresa Brolis, Stories of Women in the Middle Ages ( Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2018) xviii + 187 pp. Maria Teresa Brolis argues in her monograph Stories of Women in the Middle Ages that late medieval ideas on gender, sexuality, and religion shaped the ways in which women could participate in both elite and non-elite spaces from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries in Europe. To illustrate this point, Brolis divides her monograph into two sections, "Famous Women" and "Ordinary Women," each highlighting the lives and afterlives of sixteen individuals. The first eight will be familiar to scholars of the European Middle Ages, as they include Hildegard of Bingen, Raingarde of Montboissier, Heloise of Argenteuil, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Clare of Assisi, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan, and Joan of Arc. By beginning with these figures, Brolis brings her readers' attention to the lives of women in different social positions and geographic locations than those in the second section on "Ordinary Women." This second section, with chapters on Flora, Agnesina, Ottebona, Grazia, Gigliola, Bettina, Margherita, and Belfiore, focuses on economic activity, marital practices, religious life, fashion, medicine, and travel in the Lombard town of Bergamo during the fourteenth century. With this division, Brolis provides her readers with a necessary and fascinating look at life for medieval women across regions, centuries, and social strata in order to "investigate the female condition at the centre and on the periphery of the medieval word" (3). [End Page 247] Brolis thus juxtaposes the eight queens, saints, and writers featured in the first half with the seamstresses, businesswomen, and abbesses in the second section as their lives overlapped in terms of geographic location, participation in social and economic life, and relationship to the Church. The success of this monograph therefore lies not in its individual narratives but in the ways in which these stories raise new questions about the role of gender in European life in the late medieval period. Specifically, these stories ask how geographic location and social position affected the place of women within their communities across the continent. One of the main points of connection between these "famous" and "ordinary" women derives from their shared experiences in the Italian Peninsula. This geographic focus complicates the role of women in classical Renaissance republics and kingdoms throughout the peninsula, as many of these case studies, particularly those north of Rome, lived differently than their counterparts in Angevin Naples and Aragonese Sicily. These comparisons are most apparent in the chapters on Clare of Assisi, Birgitta of Sweden, Grazia d'Arzago, and Agnesina of Bergamo, as their different experiences demonstrate that for women across Italy, the variants in governmental structure (i.e., republicanism vs. monarchy) and corresponding beliefs about gender affected the ways in which women could be active participants in their communities. The complicated relationship between Birgitta and Johanna I of Naples illustrates that women, particularly in elite and royal circles, participated in political spaces within Angevin Naples in ways that their counterparts in Bergamo, Milan, and other northern Italian cities did not. Birgitta's connection to Johanna allowed her to speak publicly about several social ills that she observed while in the city, most significantly the enslavement of Muslim women, which she described as a "scandal to witness the slave trade in a Christian country" (61). While her words did not lead to a cessation of the practice, her arguments, particularly those recorded in her Revelations, brought wider attention to the enslavement of and sexual violence perpetrated against Muslim women in the region. While Naples was not the only city she visited on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it was among the most significant cities she traveled through due to her involvement in local politics, the abolition of slavery, and her connection to the House of Anjou. In conjunction with the chapters on Clare of Assisi and Grazia d'Arzago, the histories of these figures as advocates for women inside of religious spaces (e.g., in the Bridgettine Order, Poor Clares, and the Santa Grata abbey in Bergamo) raise significant questions about ecclesiastical structures, both inside and outside...

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER would not have previously recognized. But still, I am left with some difficult questions: How do we use texts and traditions in ways that illuminate but not exasperate? How do we consider past cultural productions so as to speak fairly to the conditions of writing and reading in the fourteenth century as well as to the conditions in the twenty-first? How do we, as modern readers who resist the naturalization of supersessionist rewritings, nonetheless respect the power of such interpretations in our own attempts to understand poems that are, in many ways, as foreign to us as the Hebrew texts were to medieval poets? I don’t have the answers, except that I know we must take such texts, such modes of interpretation, and such questions seriously, and we must be very careful in doing so. Sylvia Tomasch Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York Marilyn Desmond. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 206. $52.50 cloth. $20.95 paper. One might not think that ‘‘free speech and academic freedom’’ as ‘‘principles that have come under enormous political pressure in the few short years since September 2001’’ have much to do with Ovid and the Wife of Bath. However, in an opening excurses on a Woman’s Studies conference that included a session on S/M, Marilyn Desmond relates contemporary cultural politics to sex and violence in medieval authors. Desmond generalizes from this incident that S/M is today ‘‘intensively policed’’ (p. 4), while maintaining that today in Britain and the United States ‘‘domestic violence has generally been tolerated . . . as part of the status quo’’ (ibid.). The transition from S/M to Chaucer is achieved through a citation from ‘‘one S/M practitioner’’ who ‘‘longingly writes’’ that ‘‘(f)or years I was actually unhappy about the civilized times I lived in, full of envy for people who had lived in the Middle Ages, in the days of witch-hunts and the Inquisition’’ (p. 5). The medieval, in other words, has always been a fantasy space psychologically. Desmond hopes, therefore , that ‘‘perhaps the constructs of the medieval past might elucidate specific performances of contemporary heterosexualities in terms of PAGE 482 482 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:19 PS REVIEWS erotic violence.’’ Cant overwhelms this section (‘‘category maintenance work,’’ ‘‘heteroerotic performance,’’ ‘‘cultural scripts,’’ etc.). Desmond then turns to an overview of the chapters: Ovid’s Ars ‘‘ironically explicates the potential of violence in the heterosexual contract as facilitated by Roman colonial power,’’ while the medieval citations and adaptations of Ovid ‘‘elaborate on violence as a formative component of eros.’’ Put more hauntingly: ‘‘The structures of medieval desire thus carry the traces of ancient Mediterranean sexual regimes’’ (p. 7). Desmond then traces a series of medieval commentaries on Ovid’s erotic poetics by Heloise, Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, moving toward the argument that the two female authors ‘‘expose the gendered nature of the French and Ovidian traditions that produced the Wife of Bath’s Prologue’’ (p. 9). Desmond first addresses the icon of ‘‘woman on top’’ enacted by the Wife of Bath as one that nonetheless ‘‘[a]s in contemporary cultures, obscures everyday violences, particularly marital violence, a quotidian feature of medieval cultures’’ (p. 13). The cumulative picture she paints, as she ‘‘articulate[s] the cultural intelligibilities of erotic violence’’ (ibid.), is that marriage is inherently , then and now (cf. ‘‘[a]s in contemporary cultures’’), tied to violence, with the modulation of that violence benefiting male pleasure and control. Despite this control, men fantasize their own humiliation as Desmond notices in images of ‘‘leather thongs furnished with metal studs’’ that she relates to ‘‘contemporary dominatrix pornography’’ and ‘‘pony training’’ (p. 27). Chapter 2 addresses Ovid’s Ars, a ‘‘handbook for heterosexual desire within a hierarchical dynamic,’’ which formulates ‘‘categories of erotic violence,’’ offers violence as an ‘‘effective option for heterosexual performance ,’’ and ‘‘crudely proposes the sexual pursuit of women with the goal of achieving dominance over them.’’ Accordingly Desmond associates the ‘‘male conquest of women’’ with colonialism, war spectacle, and even the ‘‘homoerotic...

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Christine de Pizan has resurfaced in the academic and literary spheres as a paragon of proto-feminist thought. This modern fascination with the fifteenth-century writer is largely grounded in her surprisingly progressive views on a woman's right to receive an education, to govern and achieve financial freedom. More recently, scholars have lauded Christine's later works for their reinterpretation of what it meant to be a woman in fifteenth-century Europe. The present study examines this latter goal of Christine de Pizan's writing specifically in the context of the heroic feminine identity she constructs throughout Le Livre de la cité des dames and reiterates in her final work Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc. While Christine de Pizan's heroines have previously been the focus of many historians' and literary scholars' analyses, this investigation proposes a new interpretation of these women that examines the author's pointed use of language, religious symbolism and descriptions of the female body to construct a unique heroic identity -- a synthesis of passivity, activity, the masculine and the feminine. Such an understanding of Christine's heroines also reveals the author's personal connection to the dynamic image of womanhood presented in her work, which in turn has implications for the historical practicality of Christine's passive heroines.