Le Chant de la douleur dans les poésies de Christine de Pizan (review)

This slender volume is essentially an extended essay on the motif of grief and bereavement in the lyric poetry of Christine de Pizan; an Appendix provides a selection of nine poems from the main collection of ballades, two virelais, seven rondeaux and seven poems from the collection of 'Autres Ballades'. In the first section, Kosta-Théfaine comments on the poems of widowhood, which always appear at the beginning of each section of Christine's lyric corpus. While it is generally assumed that Christine's poetic career began with these poems expressing the grief of bereavement, Kosta-Théfaine points out that one cannot assume that all such poems were necessarily written at the same time, as they might simply have been placed in lead position when the collection was organized into a book. Christine uses the motif of bereavement and grief to mark her entry into poetic creativity: this is how she defines her authorial voice, both in the lyric corpus and in the opening lines of most of her other works as well. In the second section, Kosta-Théfaine traces the varied contexts in which Christine treats the twin motifs of deuil and douleur: not only her personal bereavement, but also the communal grief at the death of public figures, as well as the torments of fin'amors. The third, and final, section identifies two innovations attributed to Christine: poetic depiction of female suffering in love and the adoption of a gender-neutral voice to articulate the pain of love in a way that might apply equally to either men or women. Kosta-Théfaine points out that Christine's poetic corpus as a whole portrays men as deriving pleasure from the suffering caused by love, while women in love suffer a harsher pain in which no pleasure can be found. There follows a brief and somewhat inconclusive discussion of whether or not the earlier 'chansons de femme' were actually written by women, and whether or not the poetic motif of the cruel lady driving the male lover to distraction parallels that of the faithless man who causes such distress for Christine's poetic heroines. Kosta-Théfaine ends by asserting that Christine makes no distinction between male and female suffering. The 'sexual politics' of Christine's poetic universe are certainly of great interest, and it is regrettable that Kosta-Théfaine did not pursue these questions in greater detail. As it is, it is not entirely clear how he understands the concept of a 'gender-neutral' voice, or even why he assigns certain poems to this category. Nor are the arguments regarding the equivalence of male and female experiences entirely convincing, as they are illustrated only by snippets of verse with no consideration of poems in their complete state, and the commentary is relatively brief. The book does, however, provide an introductory overview of a topic that is extremely important not only in the works of Christine de Pizan, a major poet in her own right, but also in late medieval French literature overall.