The Book of the City of Ladies (review)

Abstract

266 biography Vol. 7, No. 3 be. The authors have no hard or fast rules for eliminating the subjective from the interpretation, but end with a warning to the field worker: "Self-consciousness is as vital as consciousness of the other." Clearly one of the most valuable assets of the book is the decision by Langness and Frank to present rather than argue. This feeling of authorial objectivity allows the reader to develop a high degree of confidence in the text—so confident in fact, does one become that after one realizes the physical, social, cultural, and behavioral contexts with which the anthropologist deals, even a literature person can begin to respect the authors' claim that As anthropology is both a humanistic and a scientific enterprise, and as anthropology's range of interest is probably unsurpassed by any other discipline's, it is perhaps the most logical place to attempt a general discussion of the use of biographical methods and techniques. Overall one also realizes that the problems of the anthropologist with life-history are, in fact, the problems of all who work in biography . The difference between the life itself and the life as transformed by the subject or by others is essentially the only problem in biography . For the transformation of life into meaning is in the end an intellectual creation—biography's art. It is interesting that Langness and Frank save the last brief section of their book to discuss the value of biography. If biography is considered as method, not as art, then the value lies in the techniques of the biographer. They discuss the opinion of Barbara Myerhof who sees life-history as a research tool teaching "a focusing on small things, in which the small becomes laden with significance and points beyond itself." From this Myerhof sees the potential of biography as a developmental power. The last words in Lives are hers: You can never dismiss people again, and although you may not have time to live that way, or the energy, or the spirit, or the appetite for it, once you do it, even if once, it is a transformative experience. Michael Fassiotto Chaminade University of Honolulu Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. Foreword by Marina Warner. New York: Persea Books, 1982. Ii + 281 pp.; 4 plates. $17.95. reviews 267 In his preface to De Claris Mulieribus, or Concerning Famous Women, Boccaccio remarks that "a long time ago" ancient authors used to write brief accounts of the lives of famous men, and in his own time in the middle of the fourteenth century, his master Petrarch was preparing a larger collection of lives in a loftier style, which was eventually called De Viris Illustribus. While Boccaccio is convinced that famous lives ought to be written so they can be remembered by posterity , he reports his surprise that "women have had so little attention from writers of this sort that they have gained no recognition in any work devoted especially to them." He presents his collection of brief lives of 104 women in classical literature and mythology as a remedy for such neglect. The accounts he gives are drawn primarily from Latin authors, particularly Valerius Maximus, Livy, Hyginus, and Tacitus , but he is "even more interested in presenting an example of vice or virtue" than in telling a story, as Guido Guarino observes in the introduction to his modern translation of Boccaccio's work (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964, p. xxix). Concerning Famous Women is therefore what Harold Nicolson has termed "impure" biography, because in it the author reveals a "desire to compose the life of an individual as an illustration of some extraneous theory or conception" (The Development of English Biography [London: Hogarth, 1959], pp. 9-10). The work shows the influence of the medieval conventions of hagiography and exempta: it uses biographical information to illustrate the wiles and worth, the weaknesses and strengths, of women. Though Boccaccio presents these extremes in about equal proportion, he inclines more to a negative interpretation of the material. But the greater attention he paid to women was not enough for Christine de Pizan; so in 1404...