Politics, Gender, And Genre

The Political Thought Of Christine De Pizan

Margaret Brabant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367283735
• eBook ISBN: 9781000307542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-1429) wrote more than twenty books, including poetry, defenses of women, critiques of war, Utopian visions, and general political and social commentary. This body of writing not only supported her during her lifetime but also brought her fame, patronage, and influence in high places. The revival of interest in her work is one of the major successes in the movement to recognize "lost" or overlooked women in the history of intellectual thought. Her courageous defense of women makes her, in the eyes of most, a protofeminist figure, and the depth of her feminism is one of the key issues debated in these essays by the world's leading Christine scholars. Other important topics are Christine's contribution to early humanist thought and the various ways in which her unique position sheds light on medieval politics and society. This book is a valuable contribution to medieval studies and political theory as well as to the history of feminist thought. It will be essential reading for philosophers and political scientists and for medievalists in any discipline.

1
Introduction

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Why Christine? Why now? This volume offers not so much the answer as many possible answers. Certainly one cannot underestimate the impact of feminist theorizing and the growth and legitimation of women's studies in exploring the burnishing of Christine de Pizan as an (admittedly complex and enigmatic) exemplar—a woman who not only wrote but wrote to help support herself and her family; a woman who dared to offer advice to the powerful and to take them into her confidence; a woman who chastised warfare and its dubious glories in an era when the Just Warrior was a powerful symbol of honor; a woman who created a perfect City of Ladies; in other words, a woman for whom Utopian possibilities shimmered even as earthly realities chastened. The contributors to this volume, which is destined to make an important impact on our understanding of the late medieval period as well as the life and work of Christine, offer us a plethora of Christines and a whole bushel of controversies. The reader will find many pleasures, no doubt a few perplexities, and perhaps the occasional moment for pique and disagreement in these pages.

Permit me just a few pages of my own by way of introduction. I am a political theorist. Sometimes those who do what I do are also tagged "political philosophers," though I have always found the philosophic designation a bit grand. For political theorists must do battle (the martial metaphor is apt) with perennial problems: order, liberty, authority, legitimacy, power, force, and violence. If political theory is up to its task, it makes the world more, not less, complex. Several of the contributors note the ways in which Christine's work is not of a piece and point to tensions, even paradoxes, in her many productions. Others criticize her for presenting perhaps too smooth a pathway to peace, justice, and virtue, and they find her altogether too pious. This suggests to me that she was doing her job well. It is not a job for everyone. But I, for one, am grateful she undertook her work.

Here's why: Although her life was unusual in many respects, Christine both reflects and challenges the dominant wisdom—the metaphors, tropes, exemplars, nostrums, pieties—of her time. She was no revolutionary. She did not want to burn everything down and start all over again. 1 am tempted to say she had far too much good sense for that. Better put, she was far too humane to advocate strategies steeped in blood—the blood of the innocents above all, for in all wars the victims are often the bystanders. Her opposition to disorder is lodged in the good reason that life for her, and for everyone in her time, was far more fragile, less predictable, more vulnerable, less orderly, than it is for us citizens of stable Western democracies.¹ It is good for us to take a deep breath from time to time and to try to imagine what it was like to live in what for us would be circumstances of the most severe discomfort (even if one were among the most comfortable), the most painful unpredictability, the most uncertain future for oneself and one's children. Perhaps, then, we can appreciate the preoccupation of our medieval forebears with "law and order." Fortune is a powerful trope in Christine's work, later made famous or infamous as Machiavelli's Fortuna. Fortune wears a rather more benign face for Christine than it did for her Florentine counterpart, whose life and work, a century later than Christine's chronologically, is light-years away politically. For Christine, unlike Niccolò, politics is an ethically suffused enterprise. His severance of the one from the other would have been for her, a mockery of authentic virtue. Perhaps she is altogether too virtuous in her hopes and words for our cynical age. But, then, perhaps we need of bit of edification from time to time.

Christine refuses to endorse just any law and order. She insists that a city requires foundations and structures firmly grounded in a vision of what it means to live and to govern well but that are open, at the same time, to the varieties and contingencies of life. Tears, pity, and outrage—reactions to real and terrible circumstances—can and should incite political and ethical action. In an era dominated by Christian universalism and nascent nationalism, she straddles both, tending (alas) to identify the particular fate of her own cause and spatial political identity—France—with universal and salvation history, le grand tout. By contrast to many later celebrants of total commitment to a particular national identity, Christine's evocations of French glory and nobility seem relatively benign. Certainly her allegorization of the City of Ladies is a rich embodiment of a universal genre in the medieval West, the Mirror of Princes tradition. She plays against the grain of that tradition by creating a Utopian city, not cast in a nationalist mode, where the virtues embodied in the feminine form have come to reign.

"Feminine form" is important. Christine lived in an era dominated by metaphors of the body politic and the familial polity. Stations were established by divine providence. It was a world of duty, not rights; of reciprocal obligations, not "freedom" in the modern liberal sense. Such ruminations have by no means been left behind in the dusty archives of our medieval past. Every political community expresses its beliefs symbolically. These beliefs embody images of hope and possibility, on the one hand; fear and dissolution, on the other. The body that represented the body politic for John of Salisbury (whose Policraticus was a text familiar to Christine) was undeniably male, in large part because the "head" was a fatherly lord, a lordly father. (Dominant figures such as Queen Elizabeth I had the devil's own time playing with "the body of a woman" but a Queen of England, too, a ruler, a war leader, and all the rest. Elizabeth was devilishly good at it.)

We draw upon articulations of a body politic—more and more, a planetary body, construed as poisoned, unwell, depleted, in peril—to score our strongest political points. Each era offers up a repertoire of bodily and familial metaphors, for good or ill, and the cleverest souls play with and against that repertoire to bring new configurations into being. Christine was clever in just this way. Her work both challenged and, at times, reinforced received notions of women, their faculties, and their moral status. Dame Philosophy is, for her, a dominant figure, for she teaches how to live well. Politics is about preserving harmony coupled with rectitude or justice. It is about chastening, even eliminating, warfare. Although Christine repeats stories of the Amazons, she does not endorse the Amazonian way; indeed, she specifically rejects conflating the vocations and virtues of men and women. To call her a "difference feminist" in our contemporary sense would, of course, be anachronistic. But to ignore the force of her argument that a body politic is about justice and care and, simply, to pooh-pooh her insistence on women's more pacific natures as desperately naive and tendentious is, perhaps, too easy.

Why? Because she points to a veritable hornet's nest of contemporary debates. I will, in winding down, gesture to just three debates: about difference, about care, and about authority. First, difference. Christine rejects one dominant sex identity theory of her time—sex polarity—by insisting that women were fit for all tasks. Women, too, could be fierce, vigorous, virtuous. On the whole, they tended toward greater pacifism than men, but this was by no means an absolutist or, as we now say, perhaps more than we ought, an essentialist position. The sex-polarity position holds that the sexes are radically unlike, embodying higher and lower orders of human beings. This is a dominant strand in pre-Christian antiquity and is exemplified philosophically in Aristotle's biology and in his arguments in Book 1 of The Politics.² A second position, one also rejected by Christine, is that of sex unity, represented historically by Platonists and Neoplatonists, who held that particular women and men might well be more like than unlike. But to make that argument they had to abstract from embodiment, and the results were often nasty—witness Plato's radical social surgery in Book 5 of The Republic.

Christine's position, which is not without its own special entourage of nagging troubles, is best seen as sex complementarity. Complementarity is not harmony: The engagement of difference may have an agonistic edge—as Christine's own prose does from time to time, most memorably, perhaps, when she is excoriating male woman haters and suggesting, not so subtly, that they are taking revenge on women for their own declining powers. The medieval sex complementarity argument holds that men and women are equal in the most fundamental sense—they are children of God, having immortal souls and free wills—but they are also different. The lives of men and women constitute alternative experiential modes, affording the two sexes, respectively, access to distinct ways of being and knowing. These lines are not necessarily rigid—medieval men sometimes described themselves in maternal and nutrimental terms—but are evident and presumed to be at once "natural" and socially constructed. Christine, then, compels debate on this very ancient question.

Second, the matter of care. Current feminist moral theorizing revolves around the justice versus care debate. The justice perspective posits an autonomous moral agent who discovers and applies fundamental rules through the use of universal and abstract reason. The care perspective emphasizes personal responsibility and connectedness to others. Within justice, rights are reaffirmed. The care outlook, however, is more aptly seen as a form of virtue theory, Aristotelian as opposed to Kantian. Justice stresses the abstract individual; care, the encumbered familial, social, and political being. I am troubled by construing justice in opposition to care, and Christine is insistent and consistent, it must be said, with much of the political theorizing of her time, in putting justice and care within a single frame. To be sure, this justice often seems harsh and retributive to us and the care distinctly paternalistic—or materialistic—but the refusal to sever the two is instructive and important. What might be our version of a political ethics of justice and care? Christine offers us no blueprint, but she is at times a decent guide, particularly in her insistence that tears and pity are not to be despised and that they can and should lead to political and ethical action.

Finally, the question of authority and the author. There were many medieval women writers, not just a few rare women here and there, but a respectable company whose word has come down to us. In the words of Katharine M. Wilson, editor of a collection of the writings of medieval women: "In contrast with women writers of the more recent past, medieval women writers did not use male pseudonyms but identified themselves by name and sex. In addition, unlike the works of women writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries, those of medieval women provide little evidence that they were ridiculed for or prevented from accomplishing their literary endeavors."³

Why didn't the medieval woman writers, including Christine, resort to the strategic ruse of the nom de plume? What happened between the late fifteenth and seventeenth centuries that altered social terms under which women authored, had authority with words? I have hazarded a few guesses of my own concerning the apparent eclipse of female written authority. One of my hunches is that women were more and more privatized in Protestant Christianity and with the nascent, then growing, bourgeois social order. That is, no longer situated in a social order (the medieval) with blurred boundaries between state and society, between piety and politics, the postmedieval woman could go public only if she were not "named," for the private realm was increasingly dictated as her sphere. This no doubt says both too much and too little, but these remarks are intended, in conclusion, to remind us not just of Christine's remarkable achievements as a public woman and writerly authority but also of the very different world of her time. That time, the past in general, instructs us or can instruct us only if we are humble enough to permit strange and alien thoughts, times, places, and personae to enter into our own worlds. This book is premised on that very possibility.

Notes

1. That there are in our midst fellow citizens whose lives are marred by random violence not only is a disgrace but also serves to highlight the remarkable overall stability of our order.

2. Other Aristotelian arguments, notably in the Nichomachean Ethics, put pressure on this other Aristotelian argument. But that is not my concern here.

3. Katharine M. Wilson, ed., Medieval Women Writers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), xix. See also Peter Dronke, ed., Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

2
The Political Significance of Christine de Pizan

Eric Hicks

Although these remarks will probably fall short of their title, I do hope to raise some questions and define some terms—the important ones, if possible. The term "significance" implies a continuum of thinkers weighed against each other; in a pluralistic society such as ours attempts to be, no one is expected to have a monopoly on truth, and the most equitable procedure for academic judgments is usually felt to be a comparative one: A set of thinkers is established for a given body of thought, and the importance of its members assessed with relationship to the whole. Christine's word does not lend itself, or lends itself only imperfectly, to such an approach. On my way to this colloquium, I happened upon a volume in the personal library of some friends, a book entitled Nouvelle histoire des idées politiques, published under the direction of Pascal Ory, with a preface by René Rémond.¹ "Aha!" I might have said, "This is just what I needed to brush up on Christine de Pizan's 'political ideas,'" But I must confess I knew better, and like Taine visiting England to verify his prejudices, I opened the volume mainly to confirm that Christine would be treated by omission. There, in a short introductory chapter on the Middle Ages was Pope Gregory VII, followed by Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and Marsilia of Padua; here were others closer to home: John of Salisbury, Gilles de Rome, Jean Gerson; Yet in the book's 643 pages, no mention could be found of Christine,

To be sure, there are other books, including those that are still to be written, but there is also some justification for this less than summary treatment of Christine; It is not always an easy matter, even for those trained in the language of France, to read the French of the fifteenth century; translations of major texts, and even editions, are often lacking. But more than anything else, it is an academic tradition that is lacking here. The habit has never really been formed of entering Christine's name in the canon of political authors, and this resides, partially with the fact that she was "also" a poet, and partially with the status of Latin as the preferred language of medieval scholars. Most have been content to believe Jules Michelet on "l'historienne femelle de Charles V,"² without going to see first hand just how much copying can lie behind a disparaging remark. For although it is perhaps not my place to say so, Christine's being a woman, for generations of French scholars, was not a circumstance likely to set things right. The eclipse of the female pronoun in the later manuscripts of Le Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie³ illustrates rather nicely what has been, over the last four or five centuries, a fairly characteristic attitude: Women are not felt to be competent in such matters.

In this sense then, the significance of Christine de Pizan as a political writer lies outside the history of ideas: She may be considered in and from her time or through the early Renaissance, from a viewpoint of history as reification, for her contribution to the ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Political Significance of Christine de Pizan
• 3 Christine de Pizan: From Poet to Political Commentator
• 4 Polycracy, Obligation, and Revolt: The Body Politic in John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan
• 5 Christine de Pizan and the Jews: Political and Poetic Implications
• 6 French Cultural Nationalism and Christian Universalism in the Works of Christine de Pizan
• 7 L'Avision Christine: Autobiographical Narrative or Mirror for the Prince?
• 8 Vox Femina, Vox Politica: The Lamentation sur les maux de la France
• 9 Authority in the Prose Treatises of Christine de Pizan: The Writer's Discourse and the Prince's Word
• 10 The Political Rhetoric of Christine de Pizan: Lamentation sur les maux de la guerre civile
• 11 The Subversive "Seulette"
• 12 Christine de Pizan: "At Best a Contradictory Figure"?
• 13 History, Politics, and Christine Studies: A Polemical Reply
• 14 Identity and Difference in Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Editor
• About the Contributors
• Index