Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France by Adams Tracy (review)

This is an outstanding volume, slim in size, but packing in a treasure of contextualisation. Tracy Adams crosses seamlessly between historical and literary analysis in explaining both the murky politics of France in the early fifteenth century and the significance of the contribution of Christine de Pizan to the political debate of the period.

There have been many different perspectives on the position Christine took in relation to the two major protagonists who divided the realm during the troubled reign of Charles VI (1380–1422): on one side, the king's uncle, Philip of Burgundy, and his son, Jean of Burgundy (who succeeded his father as Duke of Burgundy in 1304); on the other, the king's brother, Louis of Orleans, assassinated in 1307 at Jean's behest and succeeded by his son, Charles, Duke of Orleans (1394–1465), the celebrated poet. Adams's driving argument is that Christine – far from being detached from partisan politics (whose excesses she frequently lamented) – was heavily committed to the Orleanist or Armagnac cause. The author has already provided an in-depth introduction to the period in her outstanding study, The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Elegantly and concisely, she situates Christine's literary output within the context of the Armagnac–Burgundian feud, which she sees as located in the unfinished legacy of Charles V in the aftermath of the protracted wars within England during the fourteenth century. The key political difference between the two camps lay in their attitude to the English crown, the dominant military force for much of this period. The instability was exacerbated by the mental instability of Charles VI, and the need for his spouse, Isabeau of Bavaria, to manage the ambitions of the competing factions. In this situation, Christine emerged as an important political advisor to the Queen.

Adams provides a convincing template for understanding the emergence of such literary classics as The City of Ladies, along with the host of other writings that marked the evolution of Christine's literary career from, initially, a skilled poet to a thoughtful theorist on the body politic and the roles of both women and men (particularly those of the political elite) within society. Literary studies of Christine tend to be ignorant of the historical complexity of the period, while historians may be obsessed by political drama, but lack finesse to handle the complexity of her writing. Adams organises her study into close analysis of a few periods. After situating her poetry against the beginnings of the feud (1393–1401), she looks at the emergence of political allegories in the years 1401–04, and the impact of the access of Jean of Burgundy in reconfiguring Isabeau's regency in 1405. Adams then explains how Christine articulated her sympathies in a flurry of prose treatises about the body politic in the years 1405–07, after which the assassination of Louis of Orleans provoked ongoing military conflict, with the English asserting their authority. Adams is to be congratulated for an outstanding work of concise synthesis.