Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender

Church History, March, 2002 by Amy Hollywood

By Rosalind Brown-Grant. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv 224 pp. $64.95 cloth.

According to Rosalind Brown-Grant, there has been a tendency among feminist critics of Christine de Pizan (1364-14307) either to laud her as a feminist foremother--seeing in her work a challenge to the dominant misogyny of the Christian Middle Ages and even foreshadowings of central psychoanalytic and poststructuralist feminist ideas--or to castigate her as insufficiently feminist, unable adequately to address and therefore to challenge patriarchal social structures and hierarchical practices. For many feminist critics, the rift lies within Christine's work itself. Whereas The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) offers a spirited and complex defense of women against misogynist detractors, works like The Book of the Three Virtues (1405) accept the hierarchical ordering of late medieval society, including the subordinate place of women within it. Against proponents and detractors alike, Brown-Grant argues that we can only fully understand Christine de Pizan's multi-faceted defense of women within its own cultural context and in terms of the aims Christine sets for herself within her many texts.

Although literary criticism grounded in an assessment of the author's intentions may be currently out of favor in the Western academy, it was crucial to late medieval practice and to Christine's self-conception as an author. The famous querelle de la "Rose,'" in which Christine was a key contributor, hinges on the author of the Romance of the Rose's aims in writing his story: did Jean de Meung hope to demonstrate the folly of love or to celebrate its immoral pleasures? Jean's defenders and Christine agree that the Rose's literary and ethical value depends on its author's intentions, even as they disagree about what those intentions were. Brown-Grant rightly insists, then, that an historically nuanced reading of Christine's defense of women requires understanding how "Christine saw her role as author." As Brown-Grant shows, for Christine an author was "principally ... a teacher or advisor whose task was to provide her readers with much-needed lessons in ethics and morality" (3). These ethical aims unify all Christine's writings, but particularly those in defense of women. According to Brown-Grant, Christine's "feminism should thus be seen as based on a broader moral vision, one which refused to see virtue as an exclusively male preserve and which sought to prove that both sexes were capable of pursuing the universal goal of moral self-edification" (3).

Brown-Grant convincingly shows, moreover, that Christine uses particular literary forms and techniques to speak to particular audiences, even as the various texts that make up her defense of women need to be read together if they are to be fully understood. Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women focuses on five prose works produced between 1399 and 1405: the querelle de la "Rose" (1401-2), the Othea (1399-1400), the Avision-Christine (end of 1405), The Book of the City of Ladies, and The Book of the Three Virtues. Brown-Grant justifies her exclusion of two poems, Epistre au Dieu d'Amours (1399) and Dit de la Rose (1402), on the grounds that, for Christine, prose was "reserved for works of a more serious nature" than poetry and that the poems "offer a far less sustained critique of misogyny than that contained in Christine's works in prose" (5). Brown-Grant's book thus offers a sustained account of Christine's major prose writings from 1399 to 1405, reading them both in their particularity and as part of a unified ethical project.

Brown-Grant's readings are consistently interesting and almost always convincing. To give one example among many, Brown-Grant offers an excellent interpretation of the Avision, Christine's "mirror for princes." Careful attention to the text's genre clarifies the relationship between its three seemingly disparate sections. The author engages in three dialogues; in book 1, she speaks to Dame Libera, who offers an allegorized history of France; in book 2, Dame Opinion appears and provides a commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics; Dame Philosophie takes over in book 3. Here the author tells her own story, offering "her own intellectual itinerary as a model for [the prince's] self-examination" (92). For Christine, the ethical failings of France's leaders generate political chaos. As Dame Philosophie shows, only a return to well-ordered values and correct actions on the part of these leaders can restore political order. Brown-Grant shows how Christine uses a metaphysics of macrocosm and microcosm (book 2) to bring together the political (book 1) and the personal (book 3). Brown-Grant's interpretation makes startlingly apparent Christine's insistence that her life and activities can be a model for princes, a highly personalized rendering of her claim that on the ethical level, men and women are truly equal.

Brown-Grant treats each of the five texts under discussion in similarly original and insightful ways. Her study provides both an excellent introduction to Christine's defense of women (although it is unfortunate that Christine's French is not translated) and sophisticated engagements with on-going scholarly discussions. Brown-Grant may, at times, imply greater originality for Christine's arguments and procedures than they warrant. As Alcuin Blamires recently shows, there is a defense-of-women tradition clearly in place by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Read against this literature, one can better measure both the conservatism and innovation of Christine's writings.