Les Sept Psaumes allegorisés by Christine de Pizan (review)

Christine de Pizan’s major works have long been accessible in editions and even translations. However, some of her minor works—minor, as in short and, especially, religious, like Les Sept Psaumes allegorisés, and therefore typically less interesting for a general public than her works about women and politics—remain to be published. Ruth Ringland Rains’s edition of this work (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965) is virtually impossible to find, and, moreover, does not take into account two of its four available manuscripts (a fifth is believed to be in private hands). Bernard Ribémont and Christine Reno’s edition, along with its excellent Introduction situating the work for modern readers, is therefore a welcome addition, filling an important gap in access to Christine’s religious production. In their Introduction, Ribémont and Reno briefly discuss what the seven penitential psalms were, explain their role in late medieval penitential literature, and examine why Christine created her own ‘allegorized’ version. As for the first point, Possidius’s fifth-century biography of Augustine attributes the original classification to the Bishop of Hippo: just before his death, he ordered transcriptions of those psalms of David especially concerned with repentance. Cassiodorus, in turn, specified the series in his commentary on the Psalm 6, justifying the number 7 because of its association with the number of sins. By the time of Bede, the seven penitential psalms were a well-known concept. As for the second point, these seven psalms were central to private penitential practices and spiritual exercises, strongly represented in the late Middle Ages in Books of Hours, where they were often accompanied by litanies, or requests, for divine assistance. The genre thus represents an important form of the vulgarization of devotional practice so important in the late Middle Ages. Allegorizations of the penitential psalms, such as Christine’s, were popular as well. Authors as illustrious as Dante and Petrarch offered versions of their own. Christine’s versions contrast with these, however, in that they were intended to be used for didactic purposes as well as to aid in private devotion. As is always the case with Christine, her work reveals her political orientation. The work was commissioned in 1409, that is, in the aftermath of Jean of Burgundy’s 1407 assassination of Louis of Orleans and subsequent seizure of power, by Charles III of Navarre, son of the pretender to Charles V’s throne, and normally an ally of the Duke of Burgundy. The call for prayers for the souls of the departed members of the royal family in the oldest of the manuscripts, in a private collection, contains the name of Louis of Orleans. In contrast, in the manuscript prepared for Jean of Burgundy Louis’s name does not appear; however, it has been added in the margin, apparently in Christine’s own hand—an act of defiance on her part. Although Christine’s original work offered only the first few words of the Latin verset (except for one exemplar), Ribément and Reno usefully restore the entire versets, followed by Christine’s translations of them into French and her longer commentaries on each. The finished product is a clearly presented and important contribution to Christine studies.