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  • Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan
  • Stephanie Downes
Green, Karen and Constant J. Mews, eds, Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Disputatio 7), Turnhout, Brepols, 2005; cloth; pp. xxi, 264; R.R.P. €60.00; ISBN 9782503516363.

It has been known since Raymond Thomassy's 1836 essay that Christine de Pizan was an author of political as well as courtly works. It is only in more recent decades, however, that a fuller analysis of Christine's engagement with, and place within, traditions of political thought in the Middle Ages has occurred. This collection of essays, edited by Monash University-based scholars Constant [End Page 155] J. Mews and Karen Green, seeks to restore assessment of Christine's writings to the mutually informative fields of political theory and philosophy. Green's introduction to the volume calls for a reassessment of Christine's 'feminism' along these lines, dovetailing the medieval author's own status as a woman who wrote of her concern for female virtue with the very disciplines which excluded her. It makes the point that the author, as philosopher or political thinker, cannot be divided from her gender, just as she cannot be divided from her historical or social context. Christine demonstrates this in her own writing, where she inscribes herself as a character that exists inside her text, or lays out her authorship alongside her gender in prologues to her work.

The collection boasts an impressive list of contributors, amongst which Australian and New Zealand university affiliations are well represented: a testament to the growing scholarly output on Christine in the antipodes. Barry Collett aligns Christine's mirrors-for-princes with the extant medieval and classical genres, but demonstrates her innovation within those templates. In placing Christine inside this genealogy, he outlines her relation to the medieval political theorists that preceded her, and opens a space for others to consider the influence that her own works may have exercised during the Renaissance. The piece provides a fitting contextualisation of Christine's place in contemporary political traditions and demonstrates her to be a literary player on both national and international political stages. Cary J. Nederman examines Christine's unique deployment of the metaphor of the body politic by way of a comparison with that of fourteenth-century philosopher Nicole Oresme. A contribution by Susan J. Dudash closes this opening section with a social and historical contextualisation of Christine's often controversial attitude toward the menu peuple through a consideration of the space occupied by the medieval tavern in her works.

In an important section on the role of 'prudence' in Christine's political writings, Constant J. Mews considers Christine's working knowledge of Latin, with particular reference to her Livre de paix; Earl Jeffrey Richards also looks to Christine's sources in the same work, demonstrating the extent of Christine's careful strategies of interpretation and compilation, via the writings of Italian Bartolo da Sassoferrato. Michael Richarz shifts the textual focus to Christine's well-known biography of Charles V and how it understands medieval virtues of 'prudence' and 'wisdom' in a vision of the ideal leader. Karen Green delves into a deeper examination of Christine's use of 'prudence' and the difficulties modern translators confront and generate in glossing the French term with its quickly-grasped equivalent. Glynnis M. Cropp explores Christine's interpretation [End Page 156] of philosophy in both her Mutacion de fortune and L'Advision Cristine. An essay by Julia Simms Holderness brings us back to Christine's fashioning of princely virtues via her conception of the intellectually prosperous space of the court, city or castle.

The final section presents Christine in the context of her direct engagements with contemporary political affairs. Tracy Adams suggests that several of Christine's works extend her role beyond that of would-be mediator or advisor, to public promoter of the figures she addresses to the status of 'icon' (p. 180) under whom a divided country might be united. The essay revises the narrative of a critical Christine in works such as the Epistre a la royne de France, a letter addressing Charles VI's queen, Isabeau. Louise...

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