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Chapter 21 - Christine de Pizan

Women’s Literary Culture and Anglo-French Politics

from V - Women as Authors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2023

Corinne Saunders
Affiliation:
Durham University
Diane Watt
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Summary

This essay considers the influence and reception of the writings of Christine de Pizan, whose career was caught up in the Anglo-French conflict of the Hundred Yearsߣ War, as illustrated by her LߣEpistre dߣOthéa, a didactic treatise on chivalry and virtue, and her autobiographical LߣAdvision Christine. Warren explores the shifting significance of the Othéa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, showing that Stephen Scropeߣs English translation reduced female agency and power, changes that reflected wider cultural anxieties concerning female lineage and virtue in the context of Lancastrian claims to the throne. The essay also explores Christineߣs connections to two other powerful women: Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou. By reworking Christineߣs treatments of women to reduce their political power and independent wisdom, translators of Christineߣs works also contained the political threats represented by powerful women. Strikingly, depictions of Christine as author shift her context from the court to the cloister, reaffirming traditionally gendered views of women even while her works continued to be circulated in England.

Type
Chapter
Information
Women and Medieval Literary Culture
From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century
, pp. 438 - 456
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Campbell, P. G .C. (1925). Christine de Pisan en Angleterre. Revue de littérature comparée 5, 659–70.Google Scholar
Hindman, Sarah L. (1986). Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othéa: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Johnston, Hope (2008). How Le Livre de la cité des dames first came to be printed in England. In Desireuse de plus avant enquerre … .: Actes du VI colloque international sur Christine de Pizan, ed. Dulac, Liliane, Paupert, Anne, Reno, Christine, and Ribémont, Bernard. Paris: Champion, 385–86.Google Scholar
McCleod, Glenda K., ed. (1991). The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries: Visitors to the City, Medieval and Renaissance Series 9, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen.Google Scholar
Schieberle, Misty (2019). A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: The Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library, MS Harley 219. Review of English Studies, N.S. 70, 799822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strakhov, Elizaveta, and Watson, Sarah Wilma (2021). Behind Every Man(uscript) is a Woman: Social Networks, Christine de Pizan, and Westminster Abbey Library, MS 21. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43, 151–80.Google Scholar
Summit, Jennifer (2000). Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar

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