Symphorien Champier: The Ship of Virtuous Ladies transed. by Todd W. Reeser (review)

Todd Reeser's English translation of most of Champier's famous work is a boon companion to Judy Kem's masterful modern French translation and critical edition of the complete treatise, La Nef des dames vertueuses, published by Honoré Champion in 2007.

Reeser opens proceedings with an introduction contextualizing Champier's 1503 treatise historically and in terms of his rhetoric. The Ship is a complex and, in some ways, problematic text. Reeser cautions his reader not to take Champier's claim at face value that he is on a mission to defend women against unjustified misogynist attack. To do so would be to ignore his problematic decision to include a translation of Mathieu (Matheolus) of Boulogne's thirteenth-century La Malice des femmes in his La Nef des princes published the year before. Notwithstanding this, Reeser acknowledges that Champier was a humanist physician who prioritized the art of rhetoric (pp. 9–10). Champier himself writes of the importance of a solid grounding in rhetoric (and the seven liberal arts) for any successful physician (pp. 109–10).

The potential patron to whom the text is offered is all important to Champier. His motivation, apart from demonstrating that he could argue both sides of the woman question, was to secure a post as Anne of France's personal physician, demonstrated by his detailed account of what to look for when appointing a skilled personal physician to a princess's household. He criticizes both Jewish doctors and apothecaries who seek to usurp the authority of Christian humanist physicians whose virtuous integrity is unquestioned. In his exhortation that a princess should take especial care in choosing her physician, Champier shares a similar motive with Machiavelli, whose later political treatise Il Principe was in part framed to offer himself as the perfect advisor to the Florentine court of the newly returned Medici. However, to dismiss Champier's—and Machiavelli's—motivation as being just to secure a job in the prestigious Bourbon—or Medici—court would be a significant injustice. In dedicating his treatise to Anne of France, Champier aims to advise her daughter Suzanne, poised on the cusp of womanhood.

Book 1, 'Praise, Flowers, and the Defense of Women', is 'dedicated and offered to the most noble and virtuous princess Anne of France' (p. 39) and contains Champier's most convincing pro-female arguments. He explains how and why it is that both sexes are complementary to one another, which is clear to him from the way God created them. He argues that it is men who have committed more evil in the world than the too often accused women. Ending Book 1 with a long register of famous mythical and historical women, Champier follows Boccaccio's catalogue of women in his fourteenth-century De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women), making it more accessible to French-speaking audiences. Reeser acknowledges that this was done by Christine de Pizan almost a century before Champier took up his pen but, like Judy Kem in her critical edition, Symphorien Champier: La Nef des dames vertueuses (Champion, 2007), he does not believe that Champier owes any debt (acknowledged or unacknowledged) to Christine's defence of women. There certainly is no evidence of such a specific literary debt, despite the fact that Anne of France owned multiple copies of Christine's works (p. 2).

Champier inserts a 'Ballad for Everyone', Marriage is the Foundation of Everything, at the end of Book 1 (pp. 93–94), translated with sensitivity by Reeser. Book 2, 'Rules for Marriage', although dedicated to Suzanne of Bourbon, daughter of Anne of France. targeted a wider audience of privileged young women. It is a seductive section, full of all manner of advice on all manner of subjects, and not without moments of unintended levity for the modern reader. Reeser does not include Book...