Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference ed. by Marilynn Desmond (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER MARILYNN DESMOND, ed. Christine de Pizan and the Categories ofDiffer­ ence. Medieval Cultures, vol. 14. Minneapolis and London: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press, 1998. Pp. xix, 287. $57.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. The twelve essays comprising this important collection, like the 1995 Binghamton University conference engendering them, attest to the re­ cent "boom" in Christine studies, not only in the domains of literary history and women's writing but also in those of patronage and dissemi­ nation, law and social issues, and medieval medicine. This volume also gratifyingly introduces several newcomers: not only younger scholars but also those well established in other fields. The editor's introduction intriguingly conjoins Christine's unique talent for textual and symbolic hybridization (an aspect keenly analyzed among Christine and her contemporaries by Kevin Brownlee in 1989 in A New History ofFrench Literature, though uncited here) with Donna Haraway's modern-daycyborg, doubling as an attempt to unify the vari­ ous strands represented in the volume. This hybrid image segues neatly into the first of the volume's three main divisions, entitled "The Belly of the Monster." In "Christine and the Art of Warfare," Christine's way of dealing with the monster of war is masterfully discussed by the ven­ erable pioneer of Christine de Pizan scholarship, and particular expert on the Fais d'Armes, Charity Willard. Another plenary address from the conference, Roberta Krueger's "Christine's Anxious Lessons: Gender, Morality and the Social Order from the Enseignemens to the Avision," deftly marshals much current scholarship together with her own in­ sights to extend our perceptions of Christine's notion of pedagogy well beyond Astrik Gabriel's classic 1955 study, while situating Christine within the (otherwise male) tradition of medieval conduct manuals for women. Diane Wolfthal brings an art historian's expertise to examining the dark specter of rape as represented in Christine's works both visually and textually. Mary Anne Case applies legal ethics and actual decisions to less violent but equally self-defense-oriented aspects of the Cite des dames's pragmatic feminism in "Christine de Pizan and the Authority of Experience." Part2, entitled "Situated Knowledges," begins with Thelma Fenster's "'Perdre son latin': Christine de Pizan and Vernacular Humanism," which explores her ideas of gender, politics, and language as applied to her translations of Latin works. Benjamin Semple, in "The Critique of 472 REVIEWS Knowledge as Power: The Limits of Philosophy and Theology in Chris­ tine de Pizan," elucidates her critique of theological and philosophical knowledge in the Cite and, later, the Avision, comparing them to Aris­ totle's Metaphysics and Jean Gerson's Montaigne de contemplacion. An effec­ tive visual component to this section is ably supplied by Mary Weitzel Gibbons's "The Bath ofthe Muses and Visual Allegory in the Chemin de long estude," marred only by (minor) errors in translation (pp. 138-39). Christine's opinions on a less sibylline realm of knowledge, gynecology, benefit from Monica Green's elegant analysis in '"Traittie tout de men­ fOnges': The Secres des dames, 'Trotula,' and Attitudes toward Women's Medicine in Fourteenth- and Early-Fifteenth-Century France," of why the Citedes Dames excludes the legendary female doctor Trotula (another hybrid: part person, part book) from its pantheon: a paradox Green rightly parallels with Christine's near-omission of Heloise. "Engendering Authorship" titles part 3, primarily devoted to pub­ lishing and patrons except for the first essay, Judith Kellogg's "Trans­ forming Ovid: The Metamorphosis of Female Authority," a compre­ hensive treatment of Christine's reworking of Ovid, perhaps more appropriate to part 1 (the beast of male mythographical authority) or part 2 (exegesis as a path to knowledge). More to the point of this sec­ tion, Deborah McGrady's "What is a Patron? Benefactors and Author­ ship in Harley 4431, Christine de Pizan's Collected Works," deploys an astoundingly mature command of material, ranging from Christinian codicology to Foucault's theories, in arguing that the poet controlled her patrons rather than vice versa. In "The Reconstruction of an Author in Print: Christine de Pizan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," Cynthia Brown carries Christine's posterity a major step further into the complex...