Building the ideal city: Female memorial praxis in Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames

By representing herself as an idealized female reader within the text, Christine resists not only anti-feminist authority but also the medieval allegory of woman as misreader. Susan Noakes describes this negative image as the "generalized 'woman' who reads on the surface only or who distorts the author's intention" (Timely Reading 98).8 Not surprisingly, one of the central accusations leveled against Christine by her opponents in the "querelle de la Rose" was the charge that, because of her gender, she was misreading, and thus misinterpreting, Jean de Meun's true intentions in the Roman de la Rose. Christine's opponents saw her critiques-or misinterpretations, as they defined them-as examples of just such female misreading. However, while her male opponents perceived her gendered reception as an interpretive misprision, for Christine, reading as a woman rather than as a man was an equally valid perspective. Certainly, a main tenet of Christine's critique in the "querelle" was that not all readers interpret in the same manner because different readers will, depending on their subject positions, interpret the same text differently: "Christine did not concern herself with the question of how the Roman ought to be read, but how, in her opinion, the work would be read by different readers," which is why Christine concluded that "readers would interpret the Roman according to their own lights" with the virtuous finding virtue and the vicious finding vice (Schibanoff 93; italics hers).9 In this case, Christine demonstrates that female readers do not necessarily read and interpret in the same fashion as male readers. Noakes observes of such a situation: "When a woman writes in a field that has long cast women in the role of misreader ... she must seek ways to invert that role, to create another allegory to replace the allegory of woman as misreader. Clearly, its central positive figure must be a female reader" (Timely Reading 110). In the Cite, Christine enacts this principle, creating just such a central positive figure by re-allegorizing female reception practice and presenting her own reception as a model for her female audience.

To this end, Christine creates a mnemonic city that allows her to rewrite women's history while simultaneously providing a new memorial space to house this revision. As Mary Carruthers has demonstrated, the medieval conception of memory differs significantly from the contemporary view of memory and memory training.10 In the medieval rhetorical tradition, built upon classical principles, a trained memory was required not only for didactic purposes but also for ethical practice. Since knowledge was memory based, education was designed to train the memories of students to develop a personal "library" in their minds. Carruthers provides the best description of the kind of rhetorically trained memory system demonstrated in the Cite:

I must ask my readers ... to conceive of memory not only as "rote," the ability to reproduce something (whether a text, a formula, a list of items, an incident) but as the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating "things" sorted in a random-access memory scheme, or set of schemes, a memory architecture and library built up during one's lifetime with the express intention that it be used inventively. (Craft of Thought 4; her italics)