Christine De Pizan Research Articles

Cheek, Pamela L. Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

Cheek, Pamela L. <i>Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>

Le morphème d’insistance meismes en moyen français dans les oeuvres de Christine de Pizan – valeurs et emplois

Meismes, the morpheme of insistence in Middle French on the basis of Christine de Pizan’s works ‒ values and modes of use The aim of the present article is to analyze the functioning of the meismes morpheme in Middle French, on the basis of Christine de Pizan’s works, above all the attempt to define and arrange the contexts of occurence of its particular paradigms in the language that demonstrates the features of a hybrid system. The analysis of occurences containing the meismes morpheme shows a co-existence of defensive constructions known in Ancient French altogether with the new, more numerous ones. The use of the meismes morpheme is characterized by a strong regularity and a consequence of applying analogical structures, which constitutes a piece of evidence that the system stabilizes, and even codifies itself.

Old Bad Attitudes

The systematic study of male misogyny began with Christine de Pizan at the start of the fifteenth century. Although her work has generally been neglected within the history of philosophy, her ideas illuminate many questions of pressing current philosophical concern, including the nature of epistemic injustice, the prospects for an individualistic methodology in social theory, and the epistemology of disagreement.

Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song ed. by Rachel May Golden and Katerine Kong

Reviewed by: Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song ed. by Rachel May Golden and Katerine Kong Juliana Starr Golden, Rachel May, and Katerine Kong, eds. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song. UP of Florida, 2021. ISBN 978-0-8130-6903-6. Pp. 310. This collection, comprised of an introduction by the editors and ten essays, traces the gendered manifestations and meanings of voice in France and Occitania, from the twelfth century until the early sixteenth century. The volume views medieval France as a locus of new trends in travel, trade, and cross-cultural encounters and as a hotspot of artistic ingenuity, including experimentation with French and Occitan (newly valued vernaculars), the productions of learned, Latinate scholars and scribes, the blossoming of troubadour and trouvère lyric, liturgical innovations that responded to changing needs, and the formation of the polyphonic song. Through such utterances—in song, liturgy, romances, letters, treatises, and sermons—medieval people cultivated their performative and political selves, shaping contemporaneous belief systems about gender. Most chapters engage in the important work of recuperating female-voiced genres, restoring female voice and subjectivity to their rightful place in medieval French literature and lyric. In chapter 1, however, Katherine Kong examines the exercise of Lancelot’s masculine voice in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier de la charrette, not as constitutive of a universal gendered subjectivity but rather to consider how its privileged status overrides abject, liminal, and subjugated performances of voice. In chapter 2, Tamara Bentley Caudill examines how gendered voices operate within conventions of particular troubadour lyric genres like the tenso and canso, while reinforcing and challenging gendered expectations. In chapter 3, Anne Adele Levitsky explores how the troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan challenges gender binaries in his classification of song genres, by distinguishing grammatical gender from socially constructed notions of song types. In chapter 4, Meghan Quinlan examines two linked trouvère songs and traces their poetic-musical interrelationships. Chapter 5, by Rachel May Golden, focuses on two anonymous trouvère lament songs that develop the voice’s capacity to engage with and reinterpret losses stemming from crusading contexts. In chapter 6, Lydia M. Walker examines how bishop Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) strategically constructs a preaching voice, developing vivid imagery and vocabulary to persuasively perform sermons in support of the Fifth Crusade. In chapter 7, Lisa Colton demonstrates the distinctive polyphonic construction of the motet as a community of voices in dialogue, one that allowed composers to interact with and comment upon past conventions, create multiple registers of gendered expressivity, and newly negotiate the vocalization of striking and highly personal emotions against ecclesiastic regulations for controlling such utterances. Anna Kathryn Grau, in chapter 8, employs close musico-poetic readings of female voices within motets to uncover nuanced gendered readings. Emily J. Hutchinson, in chapter 9, locates in the textual voice [End Page 195] of Christine de Pizan acts of gendered and political resistance. Finally, chapter 10, by Daisy Delogu, examines the early sixteenth-century court of Queen Claude of France where Anne de Graville, in an act of “voiceover,” boldly adapts the work of Boccaccio, appropriating a male-authored Italian text into her own romance intended for a female patron and public. This expertly researched and crafted collection is highly recommended to all interested in the complex relationships between gender and voice in medieval French culture. [End Page 196] Juliana Starr University of New Orleans (LA) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Reconsidering Boccaccio: Medieval Contexts and Global Intertexts

This volume collects essays that resulted from the centennial conference Boccaccio at 700, held at Binghamton University in 2013. As such, it joins a flurry of publications that recorded the conversations of that anniversary year, as scholars here and abroad focused their collective eyes on this most alluring of Italian writers. Like other volumes, this one offers up an eclectic group of essays, ranging from the minutiae of textual practice to social and cultural themes in Boccaccio to intertextuality. As Boccaccio gives us much to think about, so do these studies.The editors have divided the fifteen essays into five unequal groups, following a defensible rubricating logic. Sometimes a single essay will intersect fruitfully with another within its group and, at other times, with an essay outside its group. Three texts remain foundational here: the De mulieribus claris; the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, and the Decameron. The essays on the De mulieribus join with others that address, directly or indirectly, Boccaccio's Neapolitan experience and, in particular, his relationships with Niccolò Acciaiuoli and Mainardo Cavalcanti, as well as his evolving representation of Queen Johanna and her legacy.The studies by Jason Houston and Todd Boli are biographical in nature and examine the relationship with Acciaiuoli and Cavalcanti. The former is famous, by Boccaccio's account, for having treated him poorly after inviting him to Naples; the latter was a young acolyte to whom Boccaccio would eventually dedicate the De casibus. Together they raise questions about Boccaccio for which, sadly, we will never have full answers: whether he was in fact the “uomo di vetro” that Acciaiuoli acidly claimed he was, and whether he preferred the company of slavish younger devotees to less devout contemporaries. Those who want to see the best in Boccaccio will find these essays unsettling in a salutary way. The De mulieribus claris finds its way into several essays, including those that focus on Christine de Pizan. In the latter category there is Mary Anne Case's essay, which examines Christine's treatment of women as human beings before turning to a different case, that of Madonna Filippa in Decameron 6.7; Kevin Brownlee's essay on Christine's citations of the De mulieribus; and Lori Walters's study of how Christine models her Queen Ysabel on Boccaccio's Johanna I. Finally, there is an incisive essay by Elizabeth Casteen that details Boccaccio's uneven treatment of Johanna in the De mulieribus and other texts; the essays on the Fiammetta including Alessia Ronchetti's, which explores how Boccaccio puts the experience of compassion into play in this text, and Filippo Andrei's dissection of the relationship between the Fiammetta and the Celestina.The volume opens with an essay on the Decameron by K. P. Clarke, which details Boccaccio's use of catchwords in the Hamilton 90 autograph. Sadly, there are no plates, which would have been helpful. Other essays on the Decameron address Boccaccio's use of sources. Among these are Grace Delmolino's brilliant study of how Gratian's Decretum informs Decameron 2.10, and Franklin Lewis's essay detailing the Persian and Arabic analogues to Decameron 7.9, which exposes many of the complexities of Boccaccio's compositional approach when dealing with received tales. Katherine Brown takes a similar approach in her essay on Decameron 8.5 and 8.6, both of which have roots in the same French fabliau.Finally, there are some outliers that do not conform to the model I have developed here, which I should add is not the one adopted by the editors. These include Rhiannon Daniels's essay “Reading Boccaccio's Paratexts,” a somehow misleading title since not all the paratexts studied are those written by Boccaccio: Daniels compares his own dedicatory letters to those written by sixteenth-century editors. Finally, Sara Díaz offers a fresh reading of the Trattatello in laude di Dante, arguing for a distinction between misogyny and misogamy which, in the context of the little treatise, she relates to Boccaccio's attitude toward the vernacular.These essays thus apply a variety of perspectives to the questions and problems they address. As well, they fill out details of Boccaccio's life as an itinerant writer, a keen social observer, an ingenious manipulator of textual material, and a thinker who often seems more taken with problem than bent upon a solution. The year 2013 was busy with conversations about Boccaccio, but they are far from over.

COVID Reflections

COVID Reflections

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

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

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

Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer by Sebastian J. Langdell

Reviewed by: Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer by Sebastian J. Langdell Robyn A. Bartlett (bio) Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer Sebastian J. Langdell Liverpool University Press, 2018. x + 224 pp. $130 cloth, $45 paperback. Sebastian J. Langdell's Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer is a wide-ranging and ambitious book, as the title alone indicates. In it, he presents Hoccleve as we may not habitually consider him: a religious writer concerned with navigating the choppy waters of orthodoxy, foregrounding prudence, discretion, and virtue as he did so; a mediator of these religious concerns, as well as transnational poetic ones; and, as we have long discussed him, the author of Chaucer's literary genesis. [End Page 213] Chapters one and two take up this mediatory role, and in chapter one, entitled "Reading and Moralization in The Series," Langdell foregrounds Hoccleve's alertness to ecclesiastical controversy, which he sees as exemplified in the Friend's moralizations. Hoccleve, for Langdell, walks the line between poetic creativity and orthodoxy; "tack[ing] on" these moralizations is one way that Hoccleve nods to both the need for and dangers of nuance in a time of religious turmoil (13, 17, 32). Chapter two, "Vice, Virtue, and Poetic Mediation in the Epistle of Cupid," focuses as much on Christine de Pizan, Deschamps, and Jean Gerson as on Hoccleve, and it is not always clear how this comparative approach advances the chapter's arguments, which include how Hoccleve's Series and Epistle "explore matters of political and ecclesiastical division, transnational exchange, literary taste, and specific instances of royal willfulness and betrayal" (35). For Langdell, Hoccleve leans into poetry's mediating powers, using "allusive language" to explore what is contentious or dangerous. Chapters three, four, and five all take up, variously, the centrality of Chaucer to Hoccleve's work, and Hoccleve's role in crafting a moral Chaucer who would not only be acceptable to orthodox audiences (chapter three, "Hoccleve, Chaucer, and the Architectonics of Fame"), but also whose religiosity would go on to influence the self-portraits of poets such as Lydgate (chapter five, "Hoccleve's Eucharist"). In this reading, Hoccleve is central to creating an English literary inheritance, even though he is often absent from it (182). Though chapter four does consider, in comparative terms, Piers Plowman and some well-known parallels between Langland and Hoccleve (104–07), it does, in the end, highlight Chaucer as well (112–37). It is in this last respect that Langdell's book offers one of its more convincing and useful throughlines: that, "in the face of an increasingly militant and repressive English Church" (5), Hoccleve gave us a religious and moral Chaucer, one clad in black and holding a rosary. Langdell goes on to suggest that this image in fact subtends Lydgate's own self-portrait (183–87). This claim reveals both the benefits and drawbacks of this study: its ambition means both that the sheer volume of material is daunting and that crafting a single, unifying argument is tricky. Langdell often loses sight of the idea that Hoccleve is an intermediary, and the book sometimes descends into summary (of, for instance, the circumstances surrounding Christine de Pizan, or Jean Gerson) and comparison, rather than analysis and argumentation. Particularly in the first two chapters, one wishes for more pointed attention to Hoccleve and his writing. As a result of this diffuse focus, Langdell's arguments are, sometimes, more conjectural than one might wish—or, rather, are presented as definitive when they are in fact conjectural. For example, Langdell perhaps makes too much of the correspondence between the [End Page 214] date of Hoccleve's return to health—1 November, 1414—and the opening date for the Council of Constance, which is suggestive, perhaps, but hardly conclusive (18). This kind of approach is unfortunately characteristic, appearing again with respect to Christine de Pizan, her son, and Anglo-French relations in general (50, 57); and dominating the discussion of prudence in chapter four, where Langdell's own use of the word sometimes substitutes for engagement with textual evidence (128–29). Langdell also frequently resorts to...

Six by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss

Reviewed by: Sixby Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss Horacio Sierra SIX. By Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage. Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York City. October 9, 2021. In a theatrical landscape regularly awash with jukebox musicals that cull the catalogs of big-name pop artists such as ABBA, Alanis Morrissette, Gloria Estefan, the Go-Gos, and more, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's Sixarrived on Broadway with an original score of radio-friendly hooks, TikTok-ready dance moves, and a racially diverse cast of tabloid-worthy divas that gave legitimate pop stars a run for their money. The musical's selling point is that its supersonic score takes inspiration from King Henry VIII's six wives as much as it does the pop sirens of the last twenty years. This dynamic combination gave the audience the chance to veer from silently thanking their high school history teachers for giving them the ability to laugh at puns about the Protestant Reformation to priding themselves for recognizing choreography indebted to Beyoncé's "Formation." By amalgamating the academic humor of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)with the rhetoric of superficial third-wave feminist pop stars, Sixcreated a frothy but provocative musical that offered bespoke narratives for sixteenth-century women whose travails are all the more relevant in the #MeToo era. Whether on London's West End or the various cruise ships where Sixwas staged before it debuted on Broadway, its creators proved that they found a formula that caters to an audience of pop music–loving millennials and Generation Zers who, in a post-Madonna cultural landscape, are liable to see Catherine of Aragon, Gloria Steinem, and Selena Gomez as equals in the feminist canon. Like a Black Pink music video, Six's plot was threadbare but straightforward enough: the women form a girl group and each one is competing to become the sextet's lead singer. The sole criterion for becoming the leader is winning the audience's applause by proving they suffered the most during their marriage to King Henry VIII. The competition format is more akin to the messy politics of twenty-first-century reality TV shows that pit women against one another rather than the sororal communities portrayed in actual early modern literary works such as Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies(1405), María de Zayas's Desenagños amorosos(1647), and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure(1688). The show's earnest though superficial take on feminist discourse attempts to mirror Zayas's work wherein a safe space is created for women to be candid about the ways in which men belittle, deceive, and murder them without repercussions in a patriarchal society. Six's opening number, "Ex-Wives," encapsulates how the show borrows from the historical lore of England, Broadway, and pop music. Each character is given a verse to flesh out the details of the dreary-but-catchy refrain of "divorced, beheaded, died / divorced, beheaded, survived" à la the imprisoned women of Chicagoin "Cell Block Tango." But unlike the "merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail," these women were unable to exact revenge on their husband. Catherine of Aragon's (Adrianna Hicks) stature as a regal Queen Bee was solidified with its keen homage to Beyoncé at her peak with the fist-pumping "No Way." But more could have been made of how Earth-shattering her divorce was. As the daughter of Europe's most powerful royals, Spain's Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel, Catherine was a queen among queens. Her fierce devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and twenty-four-year marriage to the king proved her as a loyal steward of traditional monarchies. Henry's divorce from Catherine ensured that England, Europe, and the world would never be the same as the Reformation ushered in religious wars, geopolitical standoffs, and a refreshing stream of liberal intellectual discourse. Anne Boleyn, played by the addictively charming Andrea Macasaet, garnered hearty laughter every [End Page 77]time she reminded the other wives and audience about the horrors of being beheaded. Lily Allenesque lines such as "The rules were so outdated / Us two wanted...

Glorifying God: The Theological Notion of Women in Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames

In the lives of holy women that constitute Part III of the Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405), Christine de Pizan (1365-c.1431) interpreted 1 Corinthians 11.1-15 and composed a theological anthropological notion of the human person that affirms that women and men alike are made in the image of God and the glory of God. In this passage of his letter to the Christian community in Corinth, the Apostle Paul taught on theological anthropology and ethics. Christine placed herself within the Augustinian tradition of scriptural interpretation and read the Pauline verses allegorically. Christine reordered and rewrote the lives of women saints in order to make the case for women as glorifying God, meaning both being the glory of God (i.e., representing God) and praising God. In the context of medieval intertextuality, Christine's descriptions of hair, head-coverings, and fathers each add to the author's biblical interpretation and theological argumentation. Christine's argument for women as created in the image of God and the glory of God is both about the basic relationships in the order of creation (Creator and created human being and human being and human being) and the capacities of human beings for intellect, virtue, and apostolic work in the world including teaching. Her exegetical and theological argument is inseparably anthropological, ecclesiological, and political.

Feminist Hermeneutic Tools: Visual Metaphors of Christine de Pizan's Literary Labor

This essay treats two images that represent Christine de Pizan's literary work as male-associated physical labor. The images, made by the Maître de la Cité des Dames, are found in two manuscripts supervised by the author: BL MS Harley 4431, in Le Livre de la cité des dames, and BnF MS fr. 603, in Le Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie. These images show Christine using workers' tools: in the former, a trowel and mortar pan; in the latter, a tree pruner. Many scholars have studied the author's various self-representations in text and image: the most typical images of her writing at a desk are literal and metatextual representations of her authorship. This essay contributes to discussions of her authorial self-representation by considering a different kind of image, in which literary labor is still metatextual—we still see the author represented inside her own text in the act of creation—but is metaphorical instead of literal: the images show Christine's authorial persona doing hard, physical work. By putting laborers' tools in the Christine-figure's hands, these images emphasize the fact that Christine accomplished authorial work traditionally restricted to men. The images recall the Christine-persona's first actions—picking up hammer, nails, and mortar—in the famous Mutacion de fortune passage about her transformation into a "true man." These two images, furthermore, accurately metaphorize particular aspects of her writing alongside the texts they illustrate. Offering another, more imaginative, even playful representational mode, these images enlarge our understanding of Christine's authorial self-fashioning.

Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan's Ditié by Karen Green

Reviewed by: Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan's Ditié by Karen Green Mary-Rose McLaren Green, Karen, Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan's Ditié, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2021; hardback; pp. 241; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$100.00; ISBN 9781793613165. In this book Karen Green constructs an argument that connects Christine de Pisan's beliefs and Joan of Arc's actions. She begins with the premise that the accepted history of Joan of Arc is incoherent: first, it is unbelievable; second, it disregards the numerous demonstrable and plausible connections between Christin and Joan. She suggests that there is 'tangible, albeit circumstantial' (p. 4) evidence that Joan's appearance was the result of purposeful political manoeuvring, and that [End Page 163] Christine de Pisan was central to this as a writer, an interpreter of prophecies, and a teacher. Green's key idea is that Joan was trained for her role. Green provides a brief outline of the life and writings of Christine and looks closely at Christine's Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc (1429), Martin le Franc's The Ladies' Champion (Le Champion des dames, 1441–42), and Alain Chartier's The Book of Hope (Le Traité de l'espérance, c. 1428–30). She explores the representation of Joan by her contemporaries, and the anticipation of this image by Christine some thirty years earlier, and examines the trial and rehabilitation records, noting references to 'voices' and 'secrets' in these documents—but not in prior accounts of Joan. Drawing on le Franc's poem, Green discusses evidence of a group of royal women as influential in Joan's appearance, using tropes of Amazons, sybils and the Virgin Mary. She ties together her thinking by analysing the prophetic imagery that anticipates the arrival of Joan, asking whether Joan's appearance was God's fulfilment of such imagery, or whether motivated women seeking peace set about training Joan to fulfil prophecies. Finally, she examines the question of where Christine was between 1418 and 1429. Green carefully deconstructs the common belief that she was at Poissy and posits an alternative argument for Christine being at the Abbey of Mureau, close to Domrémy. Green asks the reader to constantly reassess the Joan story, and to bring a critical reading to both texts and events. She undertakes a detailed and thorough analysis of the interconnections between noble families and between Christine and the women of these families. She meticulously untangles relationships of manuscript ownership and family and political connections and identifies when these family members are near Joan. In so doing, she constructs a significant argument that Joan was trained by Christine and supported by her affiliates to fulfill the prophecies. I am open to the hypothesis that Joan may have been instructed to fulfil the Charlemagne prophecy and was guided and supported by Christine's associates. I can also accept that Christine was not at Poissy, and that she continued to write while in another convent, perhaps Mureau. Green's argument is detailed and thorough, and she is quick to identify those times when her account, by necessity, must move into speculation. However, such a hypothesis opens further questions. The first of these concerns the familial relationships upon which Green places such emphasis. She has done an excellent job at identifying these interconnections. However, recognizing that people knew each other, shared texts, and worked together does not necessarily mean they were conspiring together. Secondly, Joan's religious observance means that we cannot disregard the possibility that she genuinely believed she had heard 'voices' of saints that instructed her. Green rejects Joan's instruction by 'voices'; instead, she suggests Joan had human instructors. There is a lack of clarity about how this instruction took place—did Joan 'hear' the instruction and therefore interpret it as voices of saints? Or did Joan receive instruction face to face from her instructors—in which case, why identify them as her voices? Further, Green suggests that Joan must have been [End Page 164] instructed regarding prophecies, biblical women, and the political flux around her. I question this. Although Domrémy was a small village, it was not a backwater. There is...

Christine de Pizan on Worldly Prudence and Loving God in The Treasure of the City of Ladies

In The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan gives various categories of laywomen advice on how to love God (the teachings about loving God) and to lead their lives (the teachings of worldly prudence). This article explores the connection between the two kinds of teachings focusing on the relevance of manners for spirituality and morality. Worldly prudence is about manners, reputation, and self-discipline—that is, about how people should behave toward one another and present themselves to each other. I argue that for de Pizan, manners are spiritually and morally relevant in two ways. On the one hand, they convey how individuals should practice the teachings about loving God in a way that agrees with these individuals’ status in their communities. On the other hand, by practicing the virtues with good manners, people can make surprising moral and spiritual gains and so deepen the teachings about loving God.

The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle

Reviewed by: The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle Sarah Wilma Watson Kara A. Doyle. The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 306. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Kara A. Doyle's new book uncovers an exciting early chapter in the reception of Chaucer's poetry. Exploring six manuscript compilations dating to [End Page 397] between 1410 and 1450, Doyle demonstrates how early compilers placed Chaucer in a French literary context that encouraged readers to focus on Chaucer's female-voiced critique of fin'amors. Creators of fifteenth-century compilations developed Chaucer's reputation as "womanis frend" by positioning his poetry alongside French and English texts that highlight female perspective, agency, and voice. Through codicological interpretation and comparative literary analysis, Doyle reconstructs the intertextual reading experience of medieval audiences, showing how compilers and readers encountered Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate through the lens of French lyric sequences and dits and debats amoureux. This French literary context foregrounded for medieval readers a concept that Doyle terms "the female hermeneutic dilemma"—"when confronted with fin'amor gallantry, should women believe men's protestations of love and fidelity or treat them with skepticism?" (3). Tracing the development of this idea in Chaucer's poetry and in the works of his French and English contemporaries and successors, Doyle explores how medieval authors, compilers, and readers responded to bids for female agency and challenges to courtly and chivalric masculinity. Before turning to the six manuscript compilations that structure her book, Doyle devotes Chapter 1 to exploring the "female hermeneutic dilemma" featured in all six collections. Influenced by Ovid's Heroides; the Ovide moralisé; the dits amoureux of Guillaume de Machaut; and the French lyric sequences of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and John Gower, Chaucer developed a female-voiced critique of fin'amors that is portrayed especially prominently in Anelida and Arcite. Analyzing this poem, Doyle identifies five tropes that constitute the female hermeneutic dilemma: "female ventriloquism, exposing male fickleness, skepticism about male fin'amor rhetoric, demonstrating female fidelity, and warning the female audience" (21). Doyle argues that this critique of fin'amors runs through much of Chaucer's work prior to the Canterbury Tales and receives especially extended and sincere treatment in Anelida and Arcite, a text popular among Chaucer's early readers. With the female hermeneutic dilemma in mind, in Chapter 2, Doyle turns to Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 (c. 1410–25), the earliest known attempt to compile a complete works of Chaucer. Doyle observes that the compiler opens the collection with "French-inflected materials" to create a "French lyric backdrop" (13) for Chaucer's works, and closes the collection with John Lydgate's Temple of Glass, a text that offers "an unusually thoughtful retrospective on the female-voiced tropes [End Page 398] in Chaucer's work" (14). The compiler of Gg.4.27 thus "encourages readers to see Chaucer through the lens of late fourteenth-century French literature and sets audiences up to think of Chaucer as 'womanis frend'" (52). Next, in Chapter 3, Doyle analyzes Durham Cathedral Library, MS Cosin V.ii.13, an anthology dating to between 1425 and 1450 that includes Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Thomas Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid (an adaptation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours). Doyle argues that by pairing these texts, "the compiler gives Chaucer's masterpiece a French framework and helps construct a Chaucer who teaches women to be wary readers of [fin'amors] rhetoric" (76). In Chapter 4, Doyle returns to Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite, considering how this text is positioned within two anthologies created by John Shirley: British Library, Additional MS 16165 and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20. In both manuscripts, Shirley situates Anelida and Arcite in a context that reinforces female skepticism of fin'amors rhetoric, placing Chaucer's poem alongside lyric poems that question the morality of courtly life and show the wide range of male intentions that women must interpret. Through prologues, headers, and marginal...

Book of the Body Politic by Christine de Pizan

Book of the Body Politic by Christine de Pizan

The Spiritual Is Political: Why Feminism Needs a Superreal and Multitemporal Utopia

The article deals with the complex relationship between the spiritual and political in feminism and indicates the political nature of this relationship. The suffragettes had written The Woman’s Bible as an appeal to pious women in order to persuade them of the advantages of emancipation. Second-wave feminists deployed the imagery of witches and pagan goddesses as a metaphorical representation of the power of their resistance and as a way to recover continuity for women. The article analyzes the disagreements about spirituality between cultural and political feminists and concludes that they are due to an artificially constructed patriarchal dichotomy between the spiritual and the political. Some female theologians (Carol J. Adams, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel) do not subscribe to this dichotomy. On the contrary, they find spiritual potential in the women’s movement and an emancipatory one in the Bible. Feminist theologians have used the metaphor of feminists as prophets as the most vivid formulation of this idea. In much the same way as the biblical prophets put an end to ungodly practices, modern feminists expose the imperfections in patriarchy and strive for a better world. The author proposes that the goals of feminists as prophets can be best achieved by offering a feminist utopia inspired by past political achievements together with spiritual practices and imagery. She cites The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan and social networks from Belarus like #еволюция or #witchtok as examples of this approach.

Pizan, Christine de. "The God of Love's Letter" and "The Tale of the Rose": A Bilingual edition eds. and trans. by Thelma S. Fenster and Christine Reno

Reviewed by: Pizan, Christine de. "The God of Love's Letter" and "The Tale of the Rose": A Bilingual editioneds. and trans. by Thelma S. Fenster and Christine Reno Ashley Holt Pizan, Christine de. "The God of Love's Letter" and "The Tale of the Rose": A Bilingual edition. Eds. and trans. Thelma S. Fenster and Christine Reno. With Jean Gerson's "A Poem on Man and Woman."Thomas O'Donnell. Trans. Foreword by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. The Toronto Series, 79. Iter Press, 2021. Pp [xiii]- 209. ISBN 978-1-64959-006-0. $41.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-64959-007-7. $41.95 (eBook). In this volume, respected Christine de Pizan scholars Thelma S. Fenster and Christine Reno provide meticulously translated editions of Christine de Pizan's poems " The God of Love's Letter" [ Epistre au Dieu d'amours] and " The Tale of the Rose" [ La Dit de la Rose]. The text's generous introduction covers Christine's work as a defender of women and public figure—in particular, her participation in the Querelle de la Rose. Brief descriptions of the manuscripts consulted are given and editorial policies are explained. Thomas O'Donnell similarly introduces his translation of Jean Gerson's poem "A Poem on Man and Woman"—included at the end of this volume as an example of the misogyny of "official" Church doctrine. This includes general background to Christine's adoption and use of the language of "natural law" as a methodical push back against systemic misogynism. Fenster and Reno's creation of "genetic presentations" of "The God of Love's Letter" and "The Tale of the Rose" is noteworthy. Based on the earliest extant manuscripts of each poem, their editions attempt to trace Christine's editorial changes to the texts over time. This is accomplished through translation notes, historical background, notes on Christine's literary influences, and rejected readings and spelling variants of the various extant manuscripts. Fenster follows in Christine's footsteps: reworking earlier versions of translations she wrote with Mary Carpenter Erler in their 1990 work, Poems of Cupid, God of Love. The modern English translations of Christine's poems are a pleasure to read. While it slightly diverts attention from the original verse, the English facing translations are helpful for those who do not read Middle French. The choice to translate Christine's verse into prose, rather than preserving its rhyme scheme, faithfully preserves the meaning of the original Middle French. Textual notes following each poem illuminate the translators' word choices as well the historical and literary influences that play a role in Christine's work. O'Donnell's translation of Gerson's "A Poem on Man and Woman" is an interesting addition to the end of this volume as an example of the entrenched misogyny and complex system of social and political inequality that inspired Christine's work. However, this poem's placement at the end of the text feels like something of an afterthought, rather than a conversation with Christine's poems. Fenster and Reno bring together their considerable expertise to contextualize two of Christine's earliest works championing women framed against her engagement in the infamous Querelle. There is little new material in the introduction for Christine specialists. However, Fenster and Reno's carefully [End Page 198]curated content would be ideal for students and independent scholars, either of French literature or women's and gender studies, looking to increase their depth of understanding of Christine as a writer, intellectual, editor, participant in scholastic debate, and public defender of women. The bilingual format, guide to reading Christine's poetry, and translator's notes make this text invaluable for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses. Ashley Holt Louisiana State University Copyright © 2022 Women in French Studies

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil

Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...