Cebille/Sebile: Jeanne Flore, Reader of Christine de Pizan?

The identity of the author of Jean Flore's Contes Amoureux (1539) has been much debated in recent years: male or female? individual or group? feminist or misogynist? This essay proposes to answer some of the above questions by comparing one of the characters from the Contes Amoureux with a character of the same name in Christine de Pizan's Livre du Duc des Vrais Amans (1403-05). Although the two women, Sebile and Cebille, play similar roles in the two books, they are evaluated by their authors in diametrically opposed ways, giving rise to the theory that not only is the gender of the two authors different, but that their ideologies vary widely, from critique of courtly love to desperate attempt to salvage it.