Solomon au feminin: (Re)translating Proverbs 31 in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames

In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville defines the interpres, or translator, as one situated “between two languages” as well as one who stands “between God, whom he interprets, and men, to whom he reveals the divine mysteries.”¹ Rita Copeland points to this quote as emblematic of the conceptual inseparability of translation and glossing in the Middle Ages, where these related hermeneutic practices shaped the reception of texts and the conversation surrounding them. The interpretive “standing between” was in some sense the necessary yet problematic condition for the “carrying across” of translation. By repackaging ancient Latin texts for a contemporary French audience, medieval translators not only recoded them “word for word” or “sense for sense”; their translations brought old texts into dialogue with contemporary debates, and as such, filled an important social function.² In framing that dialogue, translators did not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the texts they translated, nor were they bound by modern standards of objectivity or of “fidelity” to an “authentic” original or its presumed authorial intent. Indeed, translators who failed to properly situate controversial material within a culturally acceptable moral framework could face public backlash. For example, Jean Le Fèvre frames his late fourteenth-century Livre de Leesce, a verse-by-verse critique of Matheolus’s misogynistic Liber lamentationem, as a response to critics who read his earlier translation of the same work without commentary as an implicit endorsement of Matheolus’s vitriol against women.³

The medieval Bible translator, like the vernacular preacher, was doubly an interpres in Isidore’s definition, one who mediated both words and “mysteries,” or spiritual meanings, according to the perceived needs and aptitudes of a lay audience. The Bible was translated into nearly all European vernaculars during the Middle Ages: in prose and in verse, in pictures and in stage plays, in canonically complete translations as well as summaries, fragments, and commentaries.⁴ Far from Walter Benjamin’s modern ideal of translation “without mediation of meaning,” medieval Bible translation was mediation of meaning.⁵ Guyart des Moulins’s 1295 Bible historiale, the most widely circulated French Bible translation of the Middle Ages, illustrates this well; its biblical text, translated from the Vulgate, is interspersed with and structured by a parallel translation of Peter Comestor’s historical exposition, the Historia Scholastica, and the whole is mediated by the translator’s first-person narration of his choices in compiling and arranging the work.⁶ The biblical text and its explication are given such equal weight that the translator hesitates over which to privilege in his title, ultimately offering two titles, Bible historiale or Histoires les escholastres. Often formatted as inline commentary, as opposed to blocks of text surrounded by marginal gloss, the mise-en-page of vernacular Bible manuscripts further decenters the biblical text and blurs the distinction between a text that contains interpretive glosses and an extended commentary that contains quotations of the scriptural passages it interprets.⁷

Practices of biblical exegesis did not carry over unchanged in the translation from Latin to the vernacular, from an audience trained in monastic lectio divina or scholastic disputatio to one cultivated by the literary habits of the French court. However, exegetical traditions did lay the groundwork for the ways in which vernacular texts could be read, circulated, and used. The scaffolded division of meaning into literal and spiritual senses not only allowed exegetes to negotiate points of contradiction and opacity, but also granted a degree of flexibility and creativity in translation, interpretation, and adaptation. Paradoxically, it also permitted commentators and translator-exegetes to ignore, deny, or suppress literal meanings in favor of tenuously supported spiritual interpretations that better supported a dogma, worldview, or individual argument. Within its vast body of commentary, including weekly oral homilies in the vernacular, the Bible circulated largely as short quotations within the context of hermeneutic argument. Units of biblical meaning—books, stories, parables, and proverbs—traveled into other vernacular texts where they would receive new glosses in the context of an author’s narrative or argument. In fact, citation became a primary means by...