The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames by Maureen Quilligan (review)

REVIEWS series. Among the twenty-five more titles planned, mostly from the four­ teenth andfifteenth centuries, of special interest are The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, edited by John Bowers, which appeared in late 1992, and King Arthur's Death, long out of print and much regretted by many teachers, edited by Larry D. Benson and Edward Foster, scheduled for 1993. These volumes and those reviewed here are being printed in runs of 500 copies each, so that errors can be corrected (though I found all four typographically very clean), glosses can be augmented as needed, and introductions and notes can be updated frequently. Teachers are invited to send the general editor reports on how the texts work in the classroom as well as suggestions for improvement. HOWELL CHICKERING Amherst College MAUREEN QUILLIGAN. The A//egory ofFemale Authority: Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames. Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xv, 290. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. Women artists have sometimes been thought to work small, but Christine de Pizan (or Pisan) wrote large, in long prose and verse treatises about the big topics: history, gender, morals, politics, and literary tradition. Christine has been neither a forgotten nor a neglected author since her death about 1430; her fortunes compare favorably with those of many another late-medieval author. However, the works once most in vogueL 'Epistre Othea, the Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie, the Livre des Trots vertus, and other courtly-chivalric works-have been, for many mod­ ern readers, decisively displaced by the Livre de la cite des dames ( 1405). That work is now well served by Maureen Quilligan's book, the first full­ length study of the Cite. Many of Christine's ideas were conventional enough, her style often pedestrian, and her politics distinctly conservative. What was remarkable and innovative about Christine was that she ambitiously constructed herself as author, indeed distinctively as woman author, and as public figure at a time when women-though actively engaged in productive labor of all kinds-did not often occupy those particular positions, excluded as they 263 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER were from the major sites of cultural production in university, priesthood, and high public office. It is Quilligan's purpose to investigate the tech­ niques of this self-construction-"the creation of female subjectivity" (p. 237)-as they are revealed in the Cite. The format-"page-by-page commentary" (p. 2) on the text-makes it somewhat difficult to follow the coherent development of an argument, but is justified as necessary to clarify "all the details of [Christine's] can­ onical maneuvering as she creates for herself a place in the list of texts by constructing the list through her own deft revisions" (p. 4). The idea of maternity is central to these revisions as a major source of female authority, both in the frame story (where the narrator's mother enters the text) and in many of the stories narrated. Indeed, Quilligan concludes, "the author's relationship to her mother was a foundational one for the writing of the Cite" (p. 237). By tracing the web of mother-daughter and father-daughter relations in the book, Quilligan is able to illuminate the inner structures of Christine's textual city. Chapter 1, "The Name of the Author," defines some basic concepts and practices that arise early on in the text. Quilligan uses Dante as model with respectto self-naming, Chaucer and Boccaccio as foils on otherissues,such as the misogynist tradition or voicing through a female character. I would have liked a quotation or page reference in support of Quilligan's assertion (p. 39) about the masculinist intention of Boccaccio's De mulieribus clans (Christine's main source), for her interpretation does not square with Boccaccio'sdedicatory letter or preface. I saw this as a minor instance of the Boccaccio bashing that seems to inform much Christine scholarship as a prerequisite to celebrating her revisionary art (Boccaccio too was revising, of course, and, he said, in the interest of women). This opening chapter accounts for two attitudes that modern readers might question in Christine's work: essentialism...