Paths of Long Study: Reading Chaucer and Christine de Pizan in Tandem

‘‘Paths of Long Study’’: Reading Chaucer and Christine de Pizan in Tandem Theresa Coletti University of Maryland Consider the following. Thomas Hoccleve translated Christine de Pizan’s L’Epistre au dieu d’Amours into Middle English as the Letter of Cupid, a poem that invoked Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary authority and circulated alongside his courtly writings in important fifteenthcentury anthologies such as Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16 and Tanner 346. Despite its clear debt to Christine’s poem, Hoccleve’s Letter found its way into the Chaucer apocrypha and subsequently appeared in Renaissance editions of the poet’s collected works.1 The triangulation of texts and writers illustrated by the case of the Epistre and the Letter of Cupid instances a pattern that elsewhere marks the relationship of ChauEarlier versions of this essay were presented at the Biennial Conference of the New Chaucer Society, University of Colorada, Boulder; the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland; the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of Michigan. I am grateful to my interlocutors at all these venues for their helpful commentary. I also want to thank Anne Coldiron, Richard Emmerson, Lynn Staley, and Sarah Stanbury for their suggestions and encouragement and Frank Grady for astute editorial advice. 1 For editions of the two poems, see Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. and trans. Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). An early discussion by J. A. Burrow treats Hoccleve’s Letter solely in terms of homage to Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women, but a more recent analysis corrects the prior neglect of Hoccleve’s source text. See ‘‘Hoccleve and Chaucer,’’ in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 54–55; and ‘‘Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets,’’ in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 36. For detailed considerations of this triangle of authors, see Roger Ellis, ‘‘Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Hoccleve: The Letter of Cupid,’’ in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 29–54; and Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 45–75. 1 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cer and Christine de Pizan in late medieval England. Two important texts of the Chaucer apocrypha, the anonymous Assembly of Ladies and The Flower and the Leaf, exhibit thematic and narrative features that point to the influence of Christine de Pizan’s Dit de la Rose and Livre de la Cité des Dames.2 A shared commitment to promoting the good wife’s prudent counsel produces complex textual connections between Chaucer ’s Tale of Melibee, Philippe de Mézières’s Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, and Christine’s Livre des Trois Vertus.3 In 1526 Richard Pynson decisively linked the woman writer and the English laureate: his edition of The Boke of Fame, made by Geffray Chaucer: with Dyuers other of his Workes included in that diversity Anthony Woodville’s fifteenthcentury translation of Christine de Pizan’s Proverbes moraulx. The texts and careers of Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan crisscross each other with dizzying complexity. Although the woman writer holds a place in the reigning critical narrative of Chaucer’s relationships to his literary influences and his contemporaries, she has yet to lay claim to the prominent position in it that is warranted, I contend, by her extensive rhetorical, historical, and cultural affiliations with the English poet.4 This essay sketches a provisional map of those affiliations. 2 Jane Chance, ‘‘Christine de Pizan as Literary Mother: Woman’s Authority and Subjectivity in ‘The Floure and the Leafe’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies,’’’ in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmerman and Dina De Rentiis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 245–59. 3 See Carolyn P. Collette, ‘‘Chaucer and the French Tradition Revisited: Philippe de Mézières and the Good Wife,’’ in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts...