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

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2003 by McCormick, Betsy

This matrix of designed memory was referred to for textual information, certainly, but the primary goal for such training was intellectual and ethical guidance. While an individual's mental architecture was used to store and create literary texts, its highest use was the invention of a personal ethos by providing the mind with ethical examples and instruction upon which the individual could draw for ethical counsel as needed.

To the medieval audience, this interrelationship between reading, memory, and ethics was a fundamental premise. Initially, the act of reading was experiential because a reader experienced what he or she was reading as if it were directly happening to him or her.11 Therefore, because the text was in some sense "lived," reading also merged into one's experiential memory-if that memory were properly trained. Finally, the experience of reading, recalled through systematic memory training, would shape individual character by providing the reader with an internal memorial structure to serve as an ethical guide. Consequently, individual ethics were derived through the act of reading: "More importantly than growth in knowledge, reading produces growth in character, through provisioning-in memoria-the virtue of prudence" (Carruthers, Book of Memory 191). As one of the four cardinal virtues of the Middle Ages, prudence was traditionally composed of three parts: memory, intelligence, and foresight. The ethical use of prudence involved using one's memory to recall ideas and concepts; then using one's intelligence to understand those ideas; and, finally, using one's foresight to apply those ideas wisely to a given situation. Thus, the prudent practice, or praxis, of memory produced ethical behavior; by using the memory as an ethical repository and guide, an individual would be equipped to act prudently and ethically.

Because the memorial architecture employed by an individual directly affected his or her ethical formation, the individual memory had to be properly trained in prudent memory praxis. Therefore, Christine creates a textual city to serve as an artificial memory system that will train the ethical memory of her female reader. First, she designs the Cite as an authoritative guide to revising the anti-feminist tradition that was already a component of her, and her reader's, memory. As she wants her female reader first to remember and then to reject the anti-feminist tradition, she purposefully invokes anti-feminist authorities, particularly the Roman de la Rose and Giovanni Boccaccio's De clans mulieribus, in order to rewrite them in her reader's memory.12 But in addition to rewriting anti-feminist into pro-feminist rhetoric, she purposefully designs an architectural memory space for the creation and practice of this new memory. She builds the text as an architectural mnemonic by using one of the debate's rhetorical conventions, the catalogue of exempla; these exempla serve as the allegorical building blocks of the system she constructs to create her new definition of "Woman."