Christine de Pizan: A Casebook (review)

This collection of essays edited by Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L. McGrady embraces Christine de Pizan in all her guises: poet, polemicist, feminist, politician, historian. In their introduction, the editors suggest that the 'challenge' for twenty-first century scholars of Christine 'is to nuance our understanding of her uniqueness' (pp. 1-2). This carefully worded exhortation avoids casting Christine in any one critical mould, and alludes instead to the fluidity with which sheherself navigates theoretical boundaries. The Christine that emerges from this volume is distinguished chiefly by her 'unique'ability to elude categorisation.

The Casebook also professes its own 'uniqueness', as a collation of previously unpublished articles at the forefront of post-millenium Christine scholarship. The collection begins with a brief review of the critical reception of Christine in the twentieth century: Charity Cannon Willard's anecdotal and entertaining foreword maps out her scholarly interest in Christine in the twentieth century with a light, personal touch. Altmann and McGrady acknowledge this legacy of academic study in their introduction, but stress that the volume's intention is to reflect, and even to generate, a 'new shift in Christine studies' (p. 2).

Part I, 'Christine in Context', proposes readings of Christine's oeuvre within the historical, social and political context of fifteenth-century France. It includes instructive essays by major scholars Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsksi, Lori J. Walters and Earl Jeffrey Richards. Margarete Zimmerman's intriguing 'Christine de Pizan: Memory's Architect' concludes the first section by exploring Christine's attention to memoria, and her promotion of her work, both textually and visually, to secure its future survival.

Part II reviews the feminist approach to Christine, with a particular emphasis on feminine space: Rosalind Brown-Grant reminds us that the defense genre provides the foundation of the Cité des dames, while Roberta L. Krueger accentuates the female domestic sphere in her examination of the link between the spiritual and economic well-being of women in the Livre des trois vertus (also known as the Tresor de la cité des dames). The exploration of feminine space culminates with Judith L. Kellogg's article, 'Le livre de la cité des dames: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Reimagining Gendered Space', which focuses on Christine's representation of a feminine body politic, where the physical space in which the City of Ladies is constructed is ultimately grafted onto the female body.

The miscellany of textual analysis of Christine's works in Part III, 'Christine's Writings', lacks the engaging internal unity of Parts I and II. But the collective eclecticism of the contributions, might be interpreted as indicative of Christine's versatility in her own century, as well as in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship. Tracy Adams's article, which focuses on the Cents balades,sees Christine channelling her own experience in life and love stylistically into her ballade cycles. Marilynn Desmond re-examines the three letters Christine contributed to the early fifteenth-century epistolary debate, the Querelle de la rose, arguing for their significance in relation to Christine's corpus and to the Early Modern Querelle des femmes, while Andrea Tarnowski elucidates Christine's deliberate representation of herself as both a 'fictional character' and a 'producer of texts' (p. 182) in the oft-appraised Chemin de long estude.

Liliane Dulac and Christine Reno's article on the Livre de l'advision Cristine expicitly articulates the generic elusiveness of Christine which underpins the volume: 'The autobiographical and political dimensions of the Advision are thus inextricably linked to such a degree that it is impossible to classify the work neatly according to a single genre that would exclude or downplay the importance of one or the other' (p. 209). It seems to me that the same could be said of the collection as a whole. Willard's intimate prefatory remarks spill over into the collection itself, and the result is an attempt to cancel out anachronism by recovering Christine on a personal level. The foreword resonates throughout the entire volume, but perhaps...