The Book of the Mutability of Fortune by Christine de Pizan (review)

Christine de Pizan has come to be appreciated as the first professional woman of letters. She is also often seen as the first truly systematic feminist intellectual in literature, appropriating Italian and French Renaissance humanistic learning toward this end. In simply making Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune (Book of the Mutability of Fortune, 1403) available to an English-speaking audience, Geri Smith would already be rendering a great service to students of women’s history, literature, and related fields. This is not only because Smith ushers in and spotlights yet another Christine text, but also because this particular work, perhaps more than any other in the author’s forty-three title oeuvre, is both the longest (at some 24,000 verses) and most representative, exhibiting her stylistic and thematic versatility at a decisive phase of her overall career, extending from about 1390 through 1429. Smith superbly delineates and analyzes this career in her preface, along with the work’s historical context, sources, structure, themes, scholarly editing, and critical reception from the early modern period until today. For it is in the Mutability that we find Christine shuffling off her initial stage as prince-pleasing courtly (and also religious-devotional) poet and self-consoling widow while retaining the courtly-lyrical mode’s refined emotions, spirituality, and personal voice as she moves on to more ambitious works, mostly in prose. After the Mutability, she progressed beyond the didactic exegetical mythological stories structuring the earlier Epistre Othea (Epistle of Othea to Hector, 1400) to tell the Mutability’s one sustained historical-voyage story, laced with subplots, on a more ambitious scale than in her Chemin de long estude (Path of Long Study, 1402–1403), modeled on Dante’s Divina Commedia’s journey to Beatrice. Both trends—courtly and learned-allegorical pilgrimage—surface in Part One of the Mutability, in which “I, Christine” presents her early life as a tale from classical Latin author Ovid’s Metamorphosis, but in the first-person, complete with her providential and dramatically recreated transformation into a man after the misfortune of losing her husband aboard the allegorical ship of life. Throughout the rest of the poem, Christine navigates alone through all known history (infused with myth and legend), examining other “teaching moments” of Fortune’s alternating goodness and cruelty to famous personages, beyond those in her own life. As a universal moralized history-cum-autobiography, the Mutability, through overt references and subtle echoes, also constitutes a virtual record of the staggering gamut of learned and literary sources ranging from classical Roman poets such as Virgil; early encyclopedias such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (6th c.); theological works such as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (6th c.), the highly influential allegory of love; Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose (13th c.); the above-mentioned Ovid (in his medieval-French, moralized form, known as Moralized Ovid); Dante (in Christine’s works, his first serious appearance in French literature); and Italian humanist poets such as Petrarch. This breadth is impressive enough for a male author, and certainly even more so for a woman writer with less access to education and other scholarly advantages. The Mutability won Christine such admiration from Philip the Bold, the powerful duke of Burgundy, that he commissioned her, rather than any of her male contemporaries, to compose the biography of his late brother and Christine’s family’s patron, King Charles V of France (Les fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V [The Deeds and Good Practices of the Wise King Charles V], 1404). Encouraged by this commission, she became even more productive in her newly polemical prose writing, the most celebrated of which would be the Cité des Dames (City of Ladies, 1405), which marshals sources similar to some of the Mutability...