Christine de Pizan: Othea’s Letter to Hector by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Earl Jeffrey Richards (review)

Based on Gabriella Parussa’s critical edition of the Epistre Othea (Droz, 1999), this English translation by two eminent scholars makes accessible Christine de Pizan’s early, but very complex, work, written c. 1399. She combined classical mythology and Christian doctrine in a kind of miroir des princes advocating the principles of enlightened Christian chivalry. She invented Othea, the goddess of Prudence, who instructs Hector, the young Trojan hero. The work is dedicated to Louis, Duke of Orleans (1377–1407), considered another Hector according to the topos of the Trojan origins of the French monarchy and the translatio imperii. In the much-troubled state of France at that time, the author’s political intention and the authority with which a woman speaks are significant features.

The work has one hundred chapters, each in three parts, as in biblical exegesis: Text, Gloss, and Allegory. The texts are imperatives in four lines of verse, each figuring a classical personage; the glosses narrate the story with a brief moral statement; the allegories bring out the higher truth and Christian sense of the example, the author’s authority reinforced with citations from classical sources, the Bible, and Patristic writing. Furthermore, the first forty-four chapters are organized in the format of religious instruction, going from the Four Cardinal Virtues to the Ten Commandments. The rhetorical topos of sapientia et fortitudo, wisdom and military strength or valour, associated with Minerva and Pallas, is the overall organizing principle.

In manuscripts she supervised, Christine de Pizan added illuminations, which provide a fourth visual layer of meaning and a contemporary element. Textual explanations of the illustrations follow the Prologue and allegories 5 to 10 (pp. 33, 45–72). The book cover reproduces one illustration: Othea handing her letter to Hector (Paris, BnF, fr. 606, fol. 1^v).

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Earl Jeffrey Richards have elucidated Christine de Pizan’s erudition, which she had derived from the cultural environment of the bilingual royal court and her father’s learning. This erudition enabled her to move easily from pagan classical thought to the Christian tradition from, for example, Aristotle to Saint Augustine (Chapter 94, p. 125). She herself stressed that the true meaning is hidden under the story and fiction, and must be uncovered. Images of the kernel and the juice of the fruit (chapters 49 and 82), and the mention that ‘because all these things have a figural meaning, one can understand them in many different ways’ (Chapter 76, Gloss, p. 109) impress on readers the need to reflect on the meaning and to interpret the thought. Through careful research the translators have identified Christine’s sources, giving references in various collections and particularly affinities with contemporary vernacular writing. The critical material comprises an excellent introduction, footnotes to the text, and an annotated index of proper names and places, together with an appendix of Cheryl Lemman’s findings on sources for the allegories. This evidence shows convincingly Christine’s knowledge of Latin, ending a long debate.

The translation is clear and concise, capturing the appropriate tones of the French version. The narrative glosses make pleasant reading, for example, the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe (Chapter 38), or the moving tale of Ceyx and Alcyone (Chapter 79). Close comparison of the translation with the French text revealed a few flaws: in Chapter 3, verse 7, ‘ton lignage’ has been construed as ‘his lineage’ (p. 40); in Chapter 4, Allegory, lines 4 and 6, ‘you’ should be ‘your’ (p. 43); in Chapter 17, Gloss, line 4, ‘il plaisoit’ has become ‘it displeased’ (p. 56). Some discrepancies are not explained, such as the elimination of the concluding quotations from the Book of Proverbs in Chapter 1 (p. 38) and that from Aristotle in...