Le Livre des epistres du debat sus ‘le Rommant de la Rose’ by Christine de Pizan (review)

Andrea Valentini offers a new editorial approach to the content and construction of the letters exchanged between Christine de Pizan, Gontier Col, and Pierre Col in 1401 and 1402, concerning the Roman de la Rose. Eric Hicks’s Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Champion, 1977) has hitherto been the standard critical edition of these documents; Valentini’s choice and presentation of text differs in key ways from those of Hicks, so that this edition forms an important new supplement to Hicks’s volume. Hicks’s version of the well-known ‘Débat’ aimed to be comprehensive, and thus included a wide variety of texts from a range of sources. He ordered his pieces chronologically as far as was possible, so that his edition formed a putative reconstruction of the way in which the controversy unfolded, as each of its participants responded to interventions by others in different formats. As Valentini cogently argues, however, this has resulted in the exchanges being arranged in a way that never actually existed in any contemporary manuscript, as far as we know, and therefore may never have been read fully by any contemporary reader. Valentini, rather, focuses on the debate ‘tel qu’il a été conçu par Christine de Pizan’ (p. 9), editing the epistres in the order and format Christine selected for them when she incorporated a shortened version of the exchange between herself, Gontier Col, and (later) Pierre Col into the manuscripts of her work whose production she oversaw. In so doing, this meticulous edition enables a much clearer view of the way in which Christine actively shaped the discussion about the Rose into a new work. It thus facilitates a much more detailed appreciation and theorization of Christine’s version of this discussion — particularly her sustained focus on combating clerkly misogyny and promoting a defence of women — and integrates this into her wider literary practice. Because of this emphasis on Christine’s version of the documents, Valentini takes as his base manuscript the so-called ‘Queen’s manuscript’ (BL MS Harley 4431), which was the latest that was overseen by Christine, thus preserving her most up-to-date iteration of the epistres. Variants from the three earlier manuscripts — which we know to have been overseen by Christine — are included in a clear apparatus at the base of each page, with full explanatory endnotes and a detailed exploration of the linguistic features of these manuscripts. The edition therefore enables the ‘évolution’ of Christine’s debate, as she reshaped it and added to it, to be very clearly discerned. Valentini’s decision to number paragraphs and sections within them, rather than using the more conventional line numbers, results in a text that is easy to navigate, and (in the case of his epistre iii) easy to compare with a misordered version that also circulated (edited from its sole manuscript witness in an appendix). In sum, this is a very welcome addition to scholarship on the fifteenth-century debate about the Rose, and most particularly Christine’s central place within it.