Approaches to Teaching the Works of Christine de Pizan ed. by Andrea Tarnowski (review)

A prolific author whose writings have touched on philosophy, feminism, and politics, Christine de Pizan (1365-1431) penned over forty works, of which the majority had remained inaccessible to scholars and students alike until the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Andrea Tarnowski rightly points out, the historical unavailability of most of these works has effectively limited scholarship on Christine de Pizan's literary style and criticism as well as on her proto-feminist and proto-humanist philosophies. Due to the historical lack of adequate translations from Middle French to Modern French or English, few students have learned about Christine de Pizan's evolution as a writer and intellectual. But thanks to the recent availability of new translations and manuscripts, both the teacher and student can now explore the near entirety of her works and appreciate the breadth of her ingenuity. These newly accessible texts, either translated or online, allow her ideas and literary style to be explored and analyzed as a lifetime evolution rather than be limited to a few texts, namely Le livre des trois vertus à l'enseignement des dames and La cité des dames. But for a student audience largely unfamiliar with medieval history and culture, this poses a methodological problem: which texts by Christine de Pizan should be considered the most essential for undergraduate and graduate students? From the perspective outside of French Studies, how do comparatists and non-French specialists approach these texts? These are the main pedagogical issues that Andrea Tarnowski's edited volume seeks to address.

In order to tackle the novelty of a nearly-complete Christinian canon and its appropriate pedagogical approaches, Tarnowski has divided the volume into two parts. The first part offers a history of the translation of Christine de Pizan's works as well as a comprehensive bibliography of forty-four works that have been at least partially translated into modern French and on occasion, modern English. The "Instructor's Library" organizes primary and secondary source material according to popular Christinian themes such as "Biography and History," "Wives, Widows, and Mothers," "Christine and Feminism," "Responses to Christine," "Poetry, Art, Politics, Theory," and "A Contemporary of Note: Jean Gerson." The last section of the first part consists of Mark Aussems's essay on using approaches from the digital humanities to teach Christine de Pizan to a wide audience of secondary, undergraduate, and graduate students. The second and principal part is comprised of a multitude of interdisciplinary approaches by respected medievalists and early-modernists in French, English, Art History, and Philosophy. This part is moreover divided into three sections that correspond to a rough understanding of Christine's canon: "Gender and Self-Representations: Cultural Contexts," with essays by Jeff Rider, Deborah McGrady, Renate Blumenfield-Kosinski, Julia Simms Holderness, Mary Gibbons Landor, David F. Hult, Daisy Delogu, and Andrea Tarnowski; "Christine across the Disciplines," by Benjamin M. Semple, Cary J. Nederman, Patricia E. Black, Susan J. Dudash, Barbara K. Altmann, and David Joseph Wristley; and "Classroom Contexts" by Ellen M. Thorington, Karen Robertson, Christine Reno, Theresa Coletti, A. E. B. Coldiron, Roberta L. Krueger, Lori J. Walters, and Nadia Margolis.

Professor Tarnowski's edited volume offers a treasure trove of step-by-step narratives and reflections for instructors interested in implementing a seminar on Christine de Pizan, her life and works. The essays offered by Renate Blumenfield-Kosinski, Susan J. Dudash, A. E. B. Coldiron, and Roberta L. Krueger are especially valuable for their insights into teaching Christine de Pizan's lesser-known works both from proto-feminist and historical perspectives, in keeping with the original argument for a more interdisciplinary approach to Christine de Pizan's works. Along these lines, Mark Aussems and David Joseph Wristley guide both student and reader through Christine's world through the use of digitized letters and maps from the same period while proposing methods for the...