How Isabella Whitney read “Her” Christine de Pizan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay provides the first evidence that Isabella Whitney read and imitated Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au Dieu d’Amours through Thomas Hoccleve’s 1402 translation in his Letter of Cupid, first published in Chaucer’s Works in 1532. The Copy of a Letter is the first example in print of an Englishwoman writer engaging with the work of this foundational early feminist author. Although Whitney may not have known she was reading Christine, she is especially attuned to the radical implications of this work. Whitney takes from The Letter of Cupid an ethos of female authorship, in which learned women act as cultural arbiters, and a template for how a woman author could engage in a humanist debate about the purpose of vernacular literature. One of the key differences from Christine’s work is that Whitney is addressing new constituencies for secular vernacular literature and a new class of readers, made up of both women and men, who were outside the court and traditional humanist centres of learning. Whitney’s imitation of Christine de Pizan in The Copy of a Letter adds to our understanding of the scope of her reading and her centrality to humanist culture, in all its diversity, in the mid-Tudor period.