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

Medium Aevum, Fall, 2001 by Angus J. Kennedy

Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading beyond Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xiv 224 pp. ISBN 0-521-64194-2. 40.00 [pounds sterling]/$64.95.

This is a lucidly argued, well-structured, original, and perceptive monograph on four of Christine's prose texts and one prosimetrum (the Epistre Othea), all composed over the period 1399-1405: the debate on the Roman de la Rose (1401-2), the Epistre Othea (1399-1400), the Avision-Christine, the Cite des dames, and the Livre des trois vertus (all 1405). The decision to discuss the first two texts in non-chronological order is well justified, since it allows us to absorb the theoretical underpinning of the attack on misogyny which informs Christine's defence of women generally (Christine's concern throughout is not only to refute the thematic content of misogynist texts but also to condemn the deceptive rhetorical strategies operating within them). Chapter II makes the best case to date for reading Othea as an ethical and literary anti-Rose, thereby offering a convincing resolution to the debate as to whether Othea celebrates or castigates the female sex. In chapter III, Rosalind Brown-Grant demonstrates that the very disparate elements (autobiography, politics, allegory, the debate on gender) that make up the enigmatic Avision-Christine are woven into a cohesive whole within a general programme of ethical and political instruction. Chapters IV and V are devoted to two works aimed specifically at the female reader, the Cite des dames, a catalogue of illustrious women designed to valorize women's contribution to history, and the Livre des trois vertus, a manual of instruction encouraging women to give the lie to misogynist discourse by the practice of virtue in their everyday lives. Brown-Grant makes a decisive contribution here to the debate as to whether the Trois vertus, given its conformist didactic message, should be seen as a betrayal of the Cite des dames: for Brown-Grant, far from being antithetical, both texts demonstrate Christine's concern to show how women can achieve a respected place in society -- but within the constraints imposed upon them by the social and political structures of the age. This important qualification demonstrates Brown-Grant's attentiveness to proper contextualization and her determination to keep her own and her readers' feet firmly anchored on medieval ground, thus avoiding the anachronistic tendency in much recent criticism to praise or blame Christine for the extent to which she does/does not live up to modern feminist ideals. When read within their proper context, these five generically very different texts are shown to reflect an underlying thematic unity: given that gender is seen by Christine as something that is `accidental' (in Aristotelian terms) rather than `essential', the defence of women and the critique of the pernicious doctrine of misogyny are subsumed within the wider ethical goal of demonstrating that moral and spiritual virtues have no gender, and that both sexes have a duty to embark on a programme of self-edification that will equip them better for this life and for the life to come. All future discussion of Christine's defence of women will now have to give due attention to the `Brown-Grant argument' that, to understand Christine fully, we need to read `beyond gender'. One small regret: it is a pity that CUP did not allow space for a full bibliography of all the works cited.

ANGUS J. KENNEDY

Glasgow