Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea

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

Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea' (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xi 344 pp.; 6 colour plates. ISBN 0-472-11323-2. $65.00. With its lavish cycle of one hundred miniatures, Christine de Pizan's mythographical Epistre Othea has begun to attract the attention of scholars of medieval iconography in recent years. In their new study of this important text, Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn show how Christine's illuminations engaged critically with medieval visual tradition as conveyed in authoritative manuscripts of the period.

Adopting in chapter 1 the notion of Eisensteinian cinematic montage as a form of non-linear visual representation which disrupts the voyeuristic male gaze in its appropriation of the female as object of violence and desire, Desmond and Sheingorn argue that Christine's montage of images in the Epistre Othea provides her implied male reader with models of masculine chivalric identity that are at variance with those bequeathed by the misogynistic and violent Ovidian and epic traditions. Thus, in chapter 2, they discuss how Christine reinterprets the Roman de la Rose with its images of castration anxiety and violent fetishism that accompany the tales of Saturn, Narcissus, and Pygmalion, in favour of a more temperate view of masculinity based on moderation of speech and service to women. Similarly, in chapter 3, they examine how Christine 're-envisions' sexual desire as presented in the Ovide moralise by rejecting its images of homoeroticism and bestiality and by proposing instead the figure of Hermaphrodite as a model of the harmonious union of the sexes through difference. Chapter 4 reveals how Christine refuses to naturalize the violence against women in the domestic or political sphere as found in miniatures of the Histoire ancienne, preferring to use images of warfare to impart lessons to the male reader in military strategy. Finally, in chapter 5, the authors argue that Christine counters the many images of frenzied and irrational women contained in manuscripts of the Des cleres el nobles femmes by emphasizing instead the gestural and rhetorical authority of wise women such as the Cumaean sibyl. Although the model of Eisensteinian montage itself is soon lost from view in their actual analyses of the miniatures, Desmond and Sheingorn's study nonetheless offers a series of thought-provoking readings of Christine's revisionary visual practice in the Epistre Othea.