Une femme et la guerre à la fin du Moyen Âge: le Livre des faits d'armes et de chevalerie' de Christine de Pizan ed. by Dominique Demartini et al. (review)

By focusing on a single—as yet unedited—work by Christine de Pizan that has previously received little scholarly attention (the Livre des faits d'armes et de chevalerie), and putting forward a variety of perspectives from scholars from a range of fields, including palaeography, art history, and military history, this collection of essays demonstrates the enduring originality of Christine studies. Far from being inaccessible but to specialists, the Introduction to the collection works as much as an introduction to Christine's works as to the Fais d'armes itself. The goal of the volume (and of the 2013 journée d'études of which this is the proceedings) is in part to make the case for a critical edition of the Fais d'armes. In her essay Gabriella Parussa sets out the preliminary challenges to such an edition, which, she argues, will need to be based upon a collation of manuscripts rather than a single base manuscript. Christine Reno's contribution also describes some of the codicological differences between two of the surviving author manuscripts. Karen Fresco turns to an examination of the links between the various works in compilation manuscripts that include the Fais d'armes, in which the manuscript's visual programme proves key. The next three essays discuss the practical advice on warfare contained in the manual. Thierry Lassabatière examines the vocabulary Christine uses to describe military roles, and the configuration these had in her sources; next Loïc Cazaux focuses on the terms of service under which Christine argues that professional soldiers should be employed; finally, by looking closely at the ending of the Fais d'armes, Inès Villela-Petit's essay concerns Christine's conception of heraldry and the right to bear arms. She argues that Christine creates a coat of arms for herself, which stands in contrast to her earliest surviving manuscript, in which she is depicted without. This might have fed into a wider discussion of the self-representation of the author in the Fais d'armes more generally. Three essays by Claire Le Ninan, Bernard Ribémont, and Hélène Biu form a sub-section on Christine's use of her source material, especially Honorat Bouvet and Vegetius. The first two focus on the figure of Minerva, who is seen to underscore the bipartite nature of the Fais d'armes, and Ribémont and Biu's contributions offer contrasting views of the didactic roles carried out by Christine and Bouvet. The final essays focus on the reception of the work as witnessed in Jean de Bueil's Jouvencel (for which Michelle Szkilnik argues that the Fais d'armes was a direct source) and in fifteenth-century England (Andrew Taylor) and France respectively (Liliane Dulac and Earl Jeffrey Richards). The final contribution is one of several to address the question of why Christine's name came to be erased from the 'group B' manuscripts: the authors suggest it comes down to Christine's conflation of wisdom and chivalry, which had become unpopular by the mid-fifteenth century. The essays in the volume will be of interest to students and scholars from a range of fields, who may anticipate a rich critical edition in due course.