The Vision of Christine de Pizan

Medium Aevum, Spring-Summer, 2007 by Rosalind Brown-Grant

The Vision of Christine de Pizan, trans. Glenda McLeod and Charity Cannon Willard, with notes and interpretative essay by Glenda McLeod, Library of Medieval Women (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 188 pp. ISBN 1-84384-058-8. 45.00 [pounds sterling]/$90.00. Given that Glenda McLeod's original translation of Christine de Pizan's Avision (Christine's Vision, Garland Library of Medieval Literature 68, series B, New York, 1993) has been out of print for some years, the appearance of a new modern English version of this important work is most timely.

McLeod and Charity Cannon Willard's new translation of Christine's text, which was at once autobiography, political allegory, and philosophical treatise, follows the now definitive edition of the Middle French original (Le Livre de l'advision Cristine, ed. Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac, Paris, 2001), based on the autograph manuscript ex-Phillipps 128. Expanding significantly on the single critical essay found in the original translation, this new version contains both a biographical introduction by Willard and a full discussion by McLeod of how Christine used her sources in order to construct an authoritative position for herself as a political and philosophical commentator. Whilst drawing extensively on the mass of scholarship devoted to this text that has appeared since 1993, McLeod also includes a highly original and interesting account of how the biblical figure of Jacob served Christine as an exemplum of experience in overcoming adversity (pp. 153-6). The new translation is, however, somewhat less user-friendly than the original in lacking its invaluable textual notes and useful translator's preface. The 2005 version also reads at times as both more archaic than that of 1993 (using awkward terms such as 'thusly', p. 85), and more literal, following the original syntax to the point of misunderstanding the grammatical sense in places. For example, on the loss of Christine's husband the text reads: 'Because of said Fortune, Death when he was in his flower, fit and ready and on the point of rising to a high rank, as much through scholarship as wise and prudent government and acquisition of properties, she deprived me of him in the flower of his youth' (p. 95). These shortcomings aside, this new rendering into modern English, with its excellent essays and scholarly bibliography, will certainly be read with great profit, particularly if consulted in tandem with the text of the earlier translation.