Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender (review)

176 Reviews the results of a very thorough search through the relevant literature of the medieval and ancient past. John O. Ward Department ofHistory University ofSydney Brown-Grant, Rosalind, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 40), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999; cloth; pp. 224; RRP AUSS140.00; ISBN 0521641942. Rosalind Brown-Grant's study of Christine de Pizan's defence of women provides an overview of the most important prose works written by Christine as part of her project to create a textual representation of w o m e n different from that predominant in the works of medieval men. Brown-Grant begins with the debate over de Meun's additions to the Romance of the Rose and emphasises the connections between the concern that Christine shows for authorial responsibility and her objections to the representation of women as immoral, lustful and untrustworthy, characteristic of the Rose. This chapter serves to introduce Christine's own method which is explicitly didactic and in which allegory is used to encourage the reader to search for higher spiritual truths. The framework of the first chapter allows Brown-Grant to set up a discussion of Christine's Epistre Othea as a carefully contrived anti-Rose in which allegory is clearly put to work as a means of moral education and reform. Unlike de Meun, Christine is unambiguous in her program of advice, her depiction of worthy and unworthy behaviour in both sexes, her warnings against foolish love and her encouragement of due respect for women's knowledge. More contentiously, Brown-Grant includes the Advision-Christine among the texts that are relevant to Christine's defence of women. She sees this work as sharing with the Epistre Othea the dual character of a 'mirror for princes' and a defence of women, and argues that it should not be treated merely as an autobiographical defence ofChristine's own authority. In Book II ofthe Advision Christine uses Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics to argue that difference in gender is not difference in species, but only an accidental difference within the species. This view will serve as an important premise for Christine's most explicit defence of women, the Livre de la Cite des Dames. Brown-Grant Reviews 177 suggests that it also enables Christine to offer 'herselfas a model for her princely reader' (p. 121) and that 'in using a w o m a n as an exemplar for a man, the Advision contributes to Christine's stand against misogyny' (p. 122). Here I failed to find the analysis convincing. It assumes that the intended audience for the Advision is male, which is unjustified, since no dedication exists. Secondly, although there clearly is an element of defence of w o m e n in this text it relates more obviously to the analogy set up between Christine and Boethius, w h o both leam that tribulation may offer a surer path to virtue than does success, and whose parallel experience serves to emphasise the moral and spiritual equality of the sexes. Brown-Grant also discounts the allusion to Boethius (and Dante) in the opening passages ofChristine's Cite des Dames which she reads as more strikingly and persistently evocative of the Annunciation (p. 146). This observation could usefullyhave been extended to a fuller discussion ofthe role ofthe Virgin Mary and the mystery of the Trinity in Christine's work, but this is something w e are not offered. Instead Brown-Grant treats this text both through its relationship with Boccacio and Petrach's catalogues of illustrious m e n and women, and through a discussion ofattitude ofthese authors tothe myth ofthe Golden Age. Inher discussion Brown-Grant observes that, although elsewhere (as in her accounts ofthe parlous state ofFrance) Christine sees France as in decline, she treats women's achievements as contributing to the progress ofhumanity (pp. 159-61). She overlooks the passage inBook HI, chapter 18 ofthe Citethatties Christine's progressive view with Christian revelation. There Justice contrasts the attacks on w o m e n in the works of pagan authors with the generally positive account of w o m e n...