Keywords

Introduction

Although sometimes thought of as an Italian writer, Christine de Pizan probably only spent a short period in the country of her birth. She was born in around 1364, and was about four years old when she moved from Bologna to Paris with her family as her father, Thomasso de Benvenuto da Pizzano (also known as Thomas de Pizan), had been appointed astrologer to king Charles V of France. She would reside in the city until civil war forced her to flee in the late 1420s.

Through her father and his position at the French court, Christine became firmly embedded in the thriving literary and scholastic culture of contemporary Paris. The family were part of a rich intellectual sphere: Charles V, who had come to the throne in 1364, was engaged in developing his Sapientia (or knowledge) project, drawing numerous writers, translators, artists, and other artisans to court. Meanwhile, the flourishing University of Paris also attracted leading scholars to the city, many of whom also went on to take up positions at the royal court. Through her father’s work, Christine would get to know many of the people who carried out these duties in a personal capacity. This afforded Christine a privileged position among the elite scholars and thinkers of the time.

The list of circumstances that set her on the path to becoming an author began with her father. Thomas himself was highly educated, having studied then lectured at the prestigious University of Bologna, and he encouraged his daughter in her own learning. Christine claims in her work that he did not see her sex as an obstacle to erudition. Her admiration for her father is apparent in several of her writings, and, as one of the characters in Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, c. 1405) points out to her, “he was delighted to see your passion for study” (Bourgault and Kingston p. 141).

Another major factor that determined her career trajectory was her marriage, and its tragic ending. Christine married Etienne de Castel, a royal secretary, when she was 15 years old. Like her father, he was university-educated, and Christine describes her admiration for his great learning in similar terms to those expressed for Thomas. Although her husband was selected by her father, there is no reason to believe their union was anything but happy. Christine often refers to her 11-year marriage in her writings, where her husband is mentioned only with fondness. Together, she and Etienne had three children, two of whom survived. One of them, Jean de Castel, also went on to have a career as a writer. Christine’s decade-long marriage was a happy and prosperous time for her and her family.

Unfortunately, it did not last. Between 1380 and 1390, Christine dealt with a series of misfortunes, beginning with the death of Charles V, her family’s main protector as employer to both her husband and father. Etienne and Thomas’ financial situations both suffered as a result. In Le Livre de l’avision Christine (The Book of Christine’s Vision, 1405), she describes the effects that the king’s death had on her father’s income, including a loss of pensions and other benefits. It is unclear how long Thomas outlived his protector, but he is believed to have died sometime in the late 1380s. The last major blow came in 1390. Etienne was away on a mission with the new king, Charles VI, when an epidemic struck that he did not survive. His death left Christine widowed in her midtwenties, with three children, a mother, and a niece to support.

The challenging events of that decade upended Christine’s life and placed her in a new and difficult situation. Although her family was wealthy, any income dropped significantly with Thomas’ death, and even further with Etienne’s. Some of Thomas’ property in France had to be sold and as for Etienne’s estate, the next 14 years saw Christine endure endless legal disputes to release her from financial responsibility over his property. The details of these lawsuits are unknown, but it is probable that Christine was forced to pay rent on Etienne’s property even though it had reverted to the crown upon his death. Meanwhile, the debtors who owed money to her husband’s estate avoided and eluded her, only adding to her financial woes.

At the time, an upper-class woman in Christine’s position would have been expected to remarry to secure protection and financial income. The fact that she did not marry again tells us that the strain of Etienne’s death was not entirely devastating to the family’s finances. It is also telling of the depth of feeling that Christine had for her husband, despite the arranged nature of the union. Nonetheless, although her position was not destitute, she still needed to support her family and to justify and ensure their continued presence at court. And so, she turned to writing.

Early Career

It is estimated that Christine began composing poetry about 4 years after she became widowed, in around 1394 when she would have been approximately 30 years old. Over the next four decades she composed around 30 major works along with several hundred lyric poems, some of which are assembled into larger collections, such as Les Cent balades (The One Hundred Balades, c. 1394–9) and Les Cent balades d’amant et de dame (One Hundred Balades of a Lover and a Lady, c. 1402–10) that form some of her earliest works. Writing L’Avision Cristine a decade or so later, Christine would describe her earliest poems as “legieres,” meaning light or basic and made up of somewhat unsophisticated material. Although her first compositions are not as lengthy or narratively complex as her later works, they nonetheless showed a level of sophistication that rivaled the poetry of even her most acclaimed contemporaries. In any case, French poetry of the time was not characterized by or appreciated for its originality, but for the ways in which it played with conventions while adhering to a rigid set of poetic rules. Lyric poetry was composed according to a strict code that governed what were known as formes fixes (set forms of verse), the principal categories of which were the balade, virelai, and rondeau – all of which are forms in which Christine composed. The balade was a poetic form comprising three main strophes and a final, shorter, strophe known as an envoi; the virelai and rondeau feature longer refrains and are of more variable length. If Christine’s early verses are to be considered basic, the same could be said of most of the poetry composed by her contemporaries. The balade, of which Christine composed almost 300, was her favorite form. Analysis has shown that she experimented with line and stanza length as well as rhyme scheme, rarely writing two balades in accordance with the same pattern (Varty xxviii).

Even from her first compositions, it is clear that the difficulties she experienced and her own personal suffering are a strong influence on her material. Several of the balades in the Cent balades collection express her grief as a widow, for instance. At times, the poetic voice could be ambiguously interpreted as one whose beloved has left them (a common trope of late-medieval French lyric poetry) and whose gender might be either male or female, but at others, the voice is more personal and can be approximated with Christine’s own, such as in the rondeau that opens “I am a widow, alone, and dressed in black.” In what is arguably her best-known balade, “Seulette sui” (“Alone am I”), the phrase “seulette sui” is anaphorically repeated at the start of 24 of the poem’s 25 lines such that it takes on an incantatory nature. Christine makes a feature of her aloneness, displaying her widowhood for the reader: The only line not containing this phrase is the one that opens the envoi in the final stanza, where the audience would conventionally be addressed through an interpellation to a prince. Here, she invites the outside world to witness her plight and misery.

Not all of Christine’s poetry maintains such a personal perspective, however, and some critics have posited that Christine “found it necessary to hide her grief and write her poetry in the traditional manner to please her public” (Varty, xviii). If this is the case, it would seem she found other genres more fitting channels through which to express her personal experience and feelings. Although by no means a ubiquitous presence, Christine is rarely entirely absent from any of her writings, especially her later compositions where she often features as protagonist. She is far from effaced from her final poem, Le Ditié Jehanne d’Arc (The Tale of Joan of Arc), composed in 1429, which opens: “I, Christine [...] begin now for the first time to laugh” (Blumenfeld-Kosinski, R., ed., 253).

Although Christine’s compositional journey began with writing lyric poetry, it is not the case that she simply moved on from these forms of writing to more complex genres. She continued to compose set forms of lyric poetry once her career was firmly established, completing her final collections, Cent balades d’amant et de dame and Les Complaintes amoureuses (The Amorous Complaints, composed between c. 1402 and 1410) in 1410. She also composed devotional, didactic, and moral poetry throughout her career, including Les Enseignemens moraux (The Moral Teachings, c. 1398), L’Oroyson Nostre Dame (A Prayer to Our Lady, c. 1402–1403), and Les Heures de contemplacion de la passion (The Contemplation on the Passion of Our Lord, 1420). At a few hundred lines in length each, these compositions are neither as long as her narrative pieces, nor as short as her lyric poetry. These poems have largely been less appealing to academic sensibilities, meaning that they remain much less studied than what are considered Christine’s “major works.” As evidence of this, her Passion de Jhesu nostre Sauveur (The Passion of Jesus Our Saviour, 1398) remains unedited and many more of her poetic works have not been edited since Maurice Roy’s three-volume edition that was published between 1886 and 1896.

An Autobiographical Writer

As can be gleaned from the examples taken from her earliest compositions, if so much is known of Christine’s life, it is because these events are described in several of her works, especially in the longer narrative texts. Between 1402 and 1405, Christine composed three narratives that are now considered autobiographical: Le Livre du chemin de longue estude (The Book of the Path of Long Study, c. 1402–1403), Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune (The Book of Fortune’s Transformation, 1403), and Le Livre de l’avision Christine (1405). The Chemin and Mutacion are both written in verse, and the later Avision in prose. Each of these texts features a protagonist also named Cristine who it has become conventional to distinguish from the author by omitting the h from her name – the form in which it appears in the author’s manuscripts. Such a choice acknowledges the slippage between the life of the historical Christine and the way in which she presents it through a character bearing her name. As such, the goal of these narratives is not to present a straightforward autobiography, but rather to incorporate details of Christine’s life for different ends, whether to add structural scaffolding to a narrative or to make a wider moral or political point.

In the Chemin, the autobiographical elements lie in the opening frame narrative and the allegorical nature of the journey that ensues. It is a tale in two parts, the first finding Cristine reading late at night, and later lamenting the state of the world as she tries to get to sleep. The Cumean Sibyl appears to her and offers to guide her to another, more perfect place where she will be able to deepen her knowledge and gain an understanding of the source of human suffering. The journey to this place makes up the first part of the text and allegorically describes the edification Christine has acquired in her own life, ultimately leading Cristine and the Sibyl to witness a discussion between five female allegorical figures about the characteristics that ought to be possessed by the man who would govern the entire world. The implication is that Cristine’s journey of study has led her to ask this question of her audience.

The Mutacion also conveys details of Christine’s biography through an allegorical lens and uses her personal history to broach wider matters, this time the role of Fortune in the history of the world. The book is structured in seven parts, of which Cristine’s personal history forms the first. Here, she sets out her own dealings with Fortune in a way that forms a kind of prequel to the wider history described in the remainder of the book. This world history is depicted on the walls of a chamber in Fortune’s castle, described at the midpoint of the text, which forms a visual double for the book. The broad range of narratives and stories that are incorporated into the Mutacion – from biblical tales to the history of Ancient Rome and contemporary events in Europe – mean that it takes on a kind of encyclopedic aspect. Perhaps because of its autobiographical nature, studies have tended to focus on part one of the Mutacion and what it reveals about Christine’s biography. Here, her upbringing, education, and marriage are described in allegorical terms as encounters with various figures: Cristine is said to have been brought up by Fortune and Nature before Hymen placed her in a ship of which her husband was the captain. Soon thereafter, the boat hit rough seas and he was thrown overboard which triggers an episode that has garnered much interest from the point of view of gender theorists: Fortune appears to exert a change (the title’s mutation) upon Cristine’s body that transforms her into a man. Some critics see this as part of the allegory of the wider autobiography, while others interpret this more radically as a transgender experience, even going so far as to refer to Cristine with the pronoun “he” for the remainder of the work.

The Avision continues to blend biography and allegory with contemporary history and politics. The first two sections of this three-part text, respectively, describe the state of France and of philosophy, subjects that are exposed through dialogues between Cristine, a lady representing France, and a third woman Lady Opinion. The third part of the text sets out Christine’s biography in some detail. Although much of her biography is known from some of her other works, here she describes her misfortunes and personal struggles at length. It is likely that writing in prose without the constraints of form allowed the author to write more freely on these subjects. The text concludes with something of a reprimand from Lady Philosophy, to whom Cristine’s complaint was addressed, who tells her that the problems she has faced will ultimately be profitable. She reminds her to be patient and look to God for comfort. Devotion comes into the subject of the text as well as its form: In a manner akin to biblical exegesis, Christine claims three meanings are to be found in everything she says, which are reflected in the tripartite structure of the Avision itself. In this respect, the text can be seen as serving a didactic purpose in teaching its audience how to read and interpret meaning from writings.

Political Writing

From her position at the heart of court and as a writer composing for the political leaders of the time, Christine could perhaps not help but be politically engaged herself, a trait that is reflected in most – if not to some degree all – of her works (see Adams 2014). When she first began writing, the Hundred Years War between France and England had already been ongoing for 50 years. The war, which began in 1337, was interspersed with periods of truce, including from 1389 to 1415 – the period during which Christine composed the majority of her works. In most of her writings, the war with the English is not therefore of prime concern, although it is the principal subject of the later Epistre de la prison de vie humaine (The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, c. 1416–1418), which was composed in the wake of the battle of Agincourt to comfort the duchess Mary of Berry who had lost several family members in the confrontation. The Hundred Years War features again in Christine’s final known composition, Le Ditié Jehanne d’Arc, although one could argue that it is not the conflict with the English that forms the backdrop to this poem so much as the internal and related conflict that drove France to the brink of civil war: the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict.

This feud had been simmering in the background since the turn of the fifteenth century, exploding into a brutal conflict in 1405. At its heart, it was a dispute over who should rule as regent in the place of Charles VI of France. The king, known by the sobriquet “the mad,” suffered from bouts of psychosis that had left him unfit to rule from 1393 onward. There were several candidates for the role of regent; Philip of Burgundy had already acted as regent during Charles’ minority, so he immediately seized that power for himself. But by rights, the role should have fallen to the king’s younger brother, Louis of Orleans. It was the subsequent disagreement between the king’s uncle and brother that set in motion a feud that eventually culminated in one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of medieval Paris. The events of the Armagnac–Burgundian conflict are complex, but a full understanding is not necessary to appreciate the impact of the feud on Christine’s literary production (both are described in detail in Adams 2014). The feud forms a backdrop to much of Christine’s work; in the Avision, for instance, Libera movingly likens the impact of civil war on France to an epidemic.

Because of her associations with both parties, Christine was in the rather unusual and potentially hazardous position of having patrons on both sides of the conflict. To ensure her safety, it was therefore paramount for her to remain neutral, or, at the very least, to give the appearance of being so. For a long time, it was believed that because she had worked for the Burgundian household, Christine supported their faction in the Civil War. However, her support for the Armagnac side of the conflict has recently convincingly been shown to have been unwavering although subtly concealed (Adams 2014). Nonetheless, her inclination can be inferred from Le chemin de long estude, where the qualities necessary in the man who would be “king of the world” align with Louis of Orleans, who is connected to Hector of Troy in the visual program of L’epistre Othea (The Epistle of Othea, c. 1400–1401), and in her multiple attempts to bolster the role of queen Isabeau of Bavaria (who was on the side of the Armagnac faction) as mediator in the crisis (for instance, in the Lamentacions sur les maux de la France (Lamentation on France’s Ills) of 1410). Channeling her support toward Isabeau, a move whose significance could be seen as simply in-keeping with her profeminine works, allowed Christine to appear neutral in the conflict.

If her sympathies were long believed to be on the side of the Burgundians, it is largely because she accepted a commission from the leader of the Burgundian faction, Philip of Burgundy, to compose a book in honor of his brother, Charles V. However, Christine likely had little choice in the matter: although to accept the commission would be to go against her own political conscience and could be interpreted as showing support for the Burgundians, because their enmity was so dangerous, refusing was not an option. She composed the work that Philip requested, the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (The Book of the Deeds and Good Conduct of the Wise King Charles V, 1404) in honor of the beloved king, but in doing so attributes qualities to him connected with Louis, the Burgundian’s enemy and rival.

Between 1404 and 1418, Christine’s political works proliferated. In addition to the texts mentioned above, she composed Le Livre du corps de policie (The Book of the Body Politic, c. 1406–1407) – a kind of conduct book addressed to the various factions that make up society on their responsibilities toward society as a whole – Le Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie (The Book of the Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, 1410) which constitutes a manual on contemporary warfare and one of the principal sources available to the modern reader on medieval military action, and Le Livre de la paix (The Book of Peace, 1414). This last text addresses the dauphin Louis of Guyenne in a plea to bring about peace, Christine’s overarching aim in all of her political writing. In her Epistre a la reine de France (Epistle to the Queen of France, 1404), Christine directly addresses the queen, begging her to intervene to help spare France and its people by mediating such a peace.

With her final piece, Le Ditié Jehanne d’Arc, Christine shows herself to have remained a politically engaged writer to the end. The enraptured tone of this poem celebrates the rise of Joan of Arc (see chapter “Joan of Arc”) who had been sent by God to bring about victory against the English and their Burgundian allies. If Christine championed Joan, it was not merely because she represented the much-needed help that had finally arrived, but because she was also a woman. Christine’s political vision can be summarized as follows: the championing and defending of women and a staunch pursuit of peace.

Nothing further is known of Christine’s fate after composing the Ditié, although it can only be hoped that she did not live to see her heroine’s downfall and capture in 1430, or her burning at the stake the following year. By this time, the civil war had forced Christine to flee Paris, together with many of the other nobles in the city. In the Ditié, she refers to the fact that she has spent the last 11 years in hiding at an abbey. For a long time, it was assumed that this must refer to the abbey at Poissy where her daughter was a nun. However, Green (2014) has shown that this cannot have been the case. It is not known where exactly Christine spent her final years, only that it seems to have been an abbey not far from Paris.

Defender of Women

Today, Christine is remembered primarily for her profeminine works, something that has often led to her being labeled a feminist or protofeminist writer. Consensus on this point is far from universal, with critics such as Delany (1990) pointing out the contradictions in her work and accusing her of being a conservative, self-serving feminist. While it is true that Christine never advocated for the modern concerns of feminism, such as the equality of the sexes, her works nonetheless represent strides against the dominant ideology of the time in which women were generally defamed by male, often clerical, writers. Christine sought to defend her sex from such defamation, which is the theme of her two earliest profeminine poems, L’Epistre au dieu d’amours (The Letter of the God of Love, 1399) in which the God of Love writes to the people of France to reprimand them for their poor treatment of women, and Le Dit de la rose (The Tale of the Rose, 1401) where the internal audience performs an oath to protect and defend women against slander.

For modern audiences, Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, c. 1405) is Christine’s best-known profeminine text. At the start of this work, Christine outrightly accuses the clerical practice of quoting and propagating misogyny. In the opening scene, Cristine finds herself reading a book filled with invective against women, prompting her to conclude that women must indeed be vile and unnatural creatures. Three virtuous ladies immediately appear who set about disabusing her of this falsehood. After some discussion on women’s inherent qualities, the remainder of the work takes on an encyclopedic nature as the three ladies enumerate examples of virtuous women from history whose stories they narrate. As they do so, each woman is said to form a stone in the construction of an architectural “City of Ladies,” built to protect women against male slander.

Modern readers have taken issue with Christine’s so-called defense of women for several reasons. In addition to those criticisms leveled at her by Delany, Christine can be accused of displaying a highly essentialist view of gender, often referring to the “natural inclination” of women. Any woman who acts in a manner contrary to Christine’s idea of their inherent characteristics is deemed to be going against nature. She also claims that these essential qualities rightly hold women back from what would now be seen as feminist advances. For instance, she claims that it would be unnatural for them to act as judges, since men are already able to adequately fill such roles. Yet although Christine engaged primarily with the dominant ideology of the time, she also anticipates the strategies of later feminists by arguing for opportunities for women. In the Cité, she argues for the education of girls and the legal protection of widows, for instance, and she often makes the case for women to be involved in politics, especially in the drive for peace.

Christine’s profeminine views are given their fullest expression in the collection of letters that she gathered under the title Les Epistres sur le Rommant de la rose (The Epistles on the Romance of the Rose, 1401). These letters were exchanged between Christine and several leading scholars and intellectuals about the section of Le Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose) composed by Jean de Meun. This thirteenth-century text was causing controversy in part because of its depiction of women and violence against them and because of its misogyny. In her letters, Christine mocks the Rose’s claims that women deceive men and force them to commit reprehensible acts and denounces Jean for extending his rightful judgment of bad women to all women. She leans on her personal experience as a woman – an experience she points out is not shared by Jean or any of her antagonists – to state that it cannot be so. Although the exchanges are largely polite, Christine herself is at times attacked for daring as a woman to enter into a debate that is the realm of learned men. Christine’s anthology of these letters makes up what is now referred to as the “debate of the Romance of the Rose,” the first recorded literary debate in French history.

The profeminine strand of Christine’s writing is evident in two further works: Le Livre du duc des vrais amans (The Book of the Duke of True Lovers, c. 1405–1405), a book that serves as a warning of the impact of a failed love affair on an aristocratic woman, and Le Livre des trois Vertus (The Book of the Three Virtues, 1405). This latter text is a follow-up to the Cité and instruction manual (or mirror for princesses) intended to teach aristocratic women how to behave. It includes chapters on how to deal with an unfaithful or abusive husband.

Writing and Entrepreneurship

Christine de Pizan’s body of works are as remarkable for their content as they are for their methods of production. Of the 200 manuscripts of her works that survive, 54 are author-manuscripts, produced by the author herself. This was first determined by Ouy and Reno (1980) who identified Christine’s hand, which they designated as hand X. Two further hands were found in her author-manuscripts, one of which was the work of a professional scribe known to have worked on manuscripts outside of Christine’s corpus. It is not known exactly how the labor of writing Christine’s manuscripts was organized, but codicological evidence has led several scholars to posit that it took place in some form of scriptorium run by the author. The best-known of Christine’s author-manuscripts is “The Queen’s Manuscript,” produced for queen Isabeau of Bavaria, which is now held in the British Library (Harley MS 4431). It contains over 30 of Christine’s works, many of which begin on a new quire that has been tarnished and darkened from exposure to various elements. This suggests that, once the various texts had been copied, the quires that would later make up the completed manuscript were left loose in the workshop for a period before being bound into a volume. Manuscript evidence also suggests that several copies of the same text were sometimes being produced simultaneously, painting the picture of a busy and well-organized workshop with multiple projects taking place at any time.

Christine also engaged several of the most significant illuminators of the period to illustrate her manuscripts, including the highly regarded Bedford Master, the Egerton Master, and the Ovide Moralisé Master. She built up a particularly fruitful collaboration with an illuminator now known as the City of Ladies Master, another highly skilled professional artist whose work survives in many examples outside Christine’s corpus. His illustrations of the Cité des dames are entirely original and are therefore believed to have been created in collaboration with Christine. The City of Ladies Master is also responsible for the consistent representation of Christine in a blue gown – a depiction of the author that is often mistakenly seen as ubiquitous. Although at least 11 other artists had worked on her earlier author-manuscripts, after 1410 Christine collaborated almost exclusively with the City of Ladies Master. Undoubtedly his most famous contribution to Christine’s author-manuscripts is his work in preparing 128 of the 133 illuminations for “The Queen’s Manucript,” including the famous frontispiece depicting Christine presenting her manuscript to Isabeau and all 101 of the miniatures of the Epistre Othea.

Summary

More than simply an author, Christine de Pizan can also be termed as publisher, entrepreneur, and literary pioneer for the active interest she showed in the preparation and dissemination of her works. One of the most prolific writers of the European Middle Ages, her literary output is unrivaled in terms of its volume and range of styles and genres.

Cross-References