GENDER TROUBLE IN THE GARDEN OF DEDUIT: CHRISTINE DE PIZAN TRANSLATING THE ROSE

Gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender—where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self—and desire—where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires. . . . This concept of gender presupposes not only a causal relation among sex, gender, and desire, but suggests as well that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender reflects or expresses desire. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity^[1]

It is well-known that Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson participated in a scholastic epistolary debate with the Col Brothers and the Chancellor of Paris in 1401-1402 about reading the Roman de la Rose. Commenting on the use of bawdy words in Jean’s Roman, in L’Epistre au dieu d’Amours (written May, 1399, and very possibly the first document in the debate),^[2] and in her three major letters (to Jean de Montreuil, Gontier Col, and Pierre Col), she specifically criticizes Jean de Meun (ca. 1275). This Franco-Italian woman’s critique of the French cleric may have followed from the model generated by the epistle in which the Italian poet-laureate, Petrarch, criticizes Jean de Meun.^[3] In her postmodern-sounding chastisement of Pierre Col, Secretary of the King, on October 2, 1402, for not recognizing Meun’s willful polemic in constructing characters like the immoral Old Woman, she writes, “You respond to Lady Eloquence and me that Master Jean de Meun introduced characters in his book, and made each one speak fittingly, according to what pertained to him. I readily admit that the proper equipment is necessary for any particular game, but the will of the player [la voulanté dou joueur] manipulates such equipment to his own purpose. And it is clearly true (may it not displease you) that he was at fault in attributing to some of his characters functions which do not properly belong to them” (my emphasis, Baird 130; Hicks 132). She specifically names Genius, his “priest,” who exhorts men to “bed the ladies” and keep up the work of nature but then also exhorts them to flee women—she insists, “never, in all his characters, can Meun resist the temptation to slander women viciously” (130).

Christine specifically rebuts and refutes Jean de Meun’s misogynistic conceptions of desire as masculine and sexual and his reification of the female as an object and projection of masculine desire. Her argument exists in two forms, one explicit and didactic, the other implicit and metaphorical and therefore more interesting in its subtlety. In her account of Gontier Col accusing her of being “passionné comme par nature” (“impassioned by nature”), she in turn explicitly criticizes him for his passions in a letter dated October, 1401. He should not reproach her “par erreur voluntaire” (“willfully”) and with “impacience” because she disagrees with him and because his “erreur pointe et touchee de verité” (his “error was punctured by truth,” Hicks 25; Baird 62). Labeling his attacks injurious to “mon femmenin sexe” (Hicks 25), she reverses his gender stereotype to show that women are rational and assertive by offering an inverse pedagogical metaphor in her experiential testimony of “vast numbers of excellent, praiseworthy women, schooled [aprises] in all the virtues” (my emphasis 63; Hicks 25). Her martial metaphor for the battle between the two—Christine versus Gontier Col, but also Jean de Meun—is that of the “petite pointe de ganuvet ou cotelet” (“small dagger or knife point”) that “puet percier un grant sac plain” (“can pierce a great, bulging sack”), just as a small fly can rout the lion (Hicks 25; Baird 63).

In addition, in her later reply to Pierre Col on Oct. 2, 1402, she consciously appropriates the image of Jean’s Rose/(female) rose in the Garden of Deduit (pleasure, desire) to use as contrast for her own artistic and Christian purposes with the fruit of the Tree in the Garden. She first employs a florilegium metaphor to characterize Pierre Col’s distorted reading of her comments taken out of context: “you have ill chosen the flowers of my writing [fleurs de mon dictié] and have made a clumsily arranged bouquet [chappel mal acoultré et mal sorti], saving your grace” (my emphasis, Baird 129; Hicks 131). Because of this distortion she wishes to “pull up by the roots the very great fallacious lies [erragier les tres grans mensonges fallicieuses (sic)] which it [Jean de Meun’s book] contains” (Baird 130; Hicks 132), especially in relation to the deceptive nature of women, as if the origin of such lies was itself the false and dangerous Tree of pride in the Garden of Eden that seems to dominate Jean’s garden. Criticizing the evil spoken by Genius and remonstrating that the Rose pertains to those who wish to “live in wickedness” and selfishly shield themselves (140), she quotes the “bon preudomme” who said, “Pleust a Dieu que telle Rose n’eust oncques esté plantee ou jardin de Crestienté” (“Would to God that such a rose had never been planted in the garden of Christianity,” Hicks 145; Baird 141). Learned men and princes have found this book dishonorable—but Pierre Col, she says, attacks the little “branches par desseure” (“upper branches”) of the tree rather than destroying the root of the “gross tige” (“great trunk,” Hicks 146; Baird 141).

Again, her imagery of the rose tree is appropriated from the Garden of Deduit: she has no rosebuds to protect, but she loves wise and well-written books (142); her desire, also expressed through flower and garden imagery, is for study and the writing of poetry (weaving of garlands) rather than for the fulfillment of sexual need:

There is nothing more to be said, save that I can confess, in truth, that I love study and the solitary life so much that by cultivating them I may perhaps have gathered some lowly little flowers from the garden of delights [basses florettes du jardin delicieux], rather than climbing the tall trees to gather the beautiful, sweet-smelling, and tasty fruit [haulx arbres pour queillir de ce beau fruit odorant et savoureux]—not, certainly, that the appetite and will are lacking, but that the weakness of my understanding prevents me, and even, I must confess, the fragrance of the little flowers, from which I have made slender garlands [l’oudeur des flourettes dont j’ay fait grailles chappellés]. Although I would never have dreamed of sending them out, these people who desired to have such garlands [les ont voulu avoir] were amazed at my efforts, not, I recognize, for the greatness, but the novelty, of the thing. Although these my little flowers lay hidden for a long time, they are no longer so. (My emphasis, Baird 143; Hicks 148)

In Epistre au dieu d’Amours she had explicitly protested that “if women had written these books, I know full well the matter would have been handled differently” (Baird 37).

This autobiographical gloss on Rose reveals her intent to “translate” the Rose into a form and substance appropriate to her aims as woman author. Scholars have recently established how much of her writing responds to and rewrites the Rose in different, critical or ironic ways, although usually in reference to Epistre au dieu d’Amours and Le Dit de la rose (1402), or other courtly poems.^[4] Elsewhere in her writings she will build on the disgendering of rose or rose-garden and battle-attack or castle-defense—metonymies for the two components of aristocratic life, courtly love and chivalry. Her project was, I will argue, not merely the exposure of aristocratic courtly love as misogynistic and sexual desire as masculine in construction, as framed especially by Guillaume’s Roman de la Rose, but in addition the presentation of the option of a female chivalry, a female clergie (for which it stands as a metonymy for education and wisdom), and a female writing and authority, which replaces that false clergie represented by Jean de Meun. Because these latter options also occur within frames bounded by the Roman, perhaps more subtly than in her early poetic responses to the thirteenth-century poets, they have not been yet understood as so specifically grounded in her critique of Jean de Meun.

Her point in her early poems is to feminize courtly love by associating with love chastity and loyalty and thereby expropriate the female body as a site of masculine desire. Indeed, she presents the goddess De Loyauté (Of Loyalty) as the sign of women in love and agent of the God of Love, Cupido. Using variations on the dream vision and the garden of Deduit as a structural and thematic frame for her rewriting, Christine repudiates the masculinist construc-tion of desire in the portions of both Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Her poetic feminization of the Roman de la rose in Epistre au dieu d’Amours and Dit de la rose^[5] de-essentializes the Roman’s view of the female, transforming the Rose into roses and differentiating the love of women from that of men as loyal and chaste rather than sexual and casual.

Specifically in Epistre au dieu d’Amours women have been slandered by their exploitive lovers, who joke about them with other cavaliers—a situation that might reflect the nature of the Epistre as a continuation, and consequence, of Jean’s Roman, after Amant has deflowered the Rose. The evil defamation about women decried by Christine in the Epistre is the realization of the Roman’s personification of Malebouche. As the serpent in the garden, the enemy of Amant in the Roman, Malebouche plays a different role in Epistre, as the enemy of the lady. For Christine, to avoid defamation and slander (Malebouche), live chastely and honorably. A lady’s good name and reputation can be soiled by chevaliers exchanging bedtime stories of their amours—hence the best defense is not to give them such an opportunity. Here she also regenerates a gloss on the creation of the female body, from Genesis,^[6] to establish as canonical the origin of feminine authority and its moral superiority.

In Dit, the bifurcated (Roman-like) poem opens with a congenial, mixed-company dinner party in “une maison close” (line 32, “tight inside” a house rather than in bed, or in a garden); in the second part, when Christine the narrator, graced by Diana, chastity, lies sleepless in bed, the vision (but not dream-vision) of the goddess De Loyauté appears before her. The female liaison of the God of Love, Loyalty is thus linked with Diana, chastity. Christine wishes to feminize the rose as an emblem of identity—the roses offered by the God of Love to signal the new Order of the Rose come from chaste Diana’s garden, or else are artificial embroiderings made by her women followers, and thus exist as signs both of feminism and of chastity.

Her general conclusion is that masculine sexual desire requires the Roman’s metaphor of an “assault” because women are neither as fickle or changeable as men proclaim. Note her use of the besieged “castle” as a metaphor for the beleagered woman under “attack”—it is not so much desire as it is power involved in such “seductions,” and the military metaphor invites subversion through Christine’s deployment of the “masculine” means of attack for her own feminized usage, as we will see later in Le Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie (1410). As she remarks in the Epistre au dieu d’Amours, “There is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured. . . . See how many men beg and plead, see what trouble and difficulties they undergo to undo a mere little girl by deceit and guile—this is its (Jean de Meun’s Rose) purpose. Does then a weak place need a heavy assault?” (trans. Baird 37).

The two works most explicitly responding to the assault depicted by Jean’s Roman are Le Livre de la cité des dames (1405), specifically in the construction of a female Raison in response to Jean’s^[7] and in the removal of feminine subjectivity altogether from the garden, and Fais d’armes, with its categorization of martial strategies. Indeed, the female Raison from Jean’s Roman, who lectured on the nominalist-realist controversy (there is nothing wrong with the word “testicles” because it names a thing created by God), and the social construction of euphemism as a means of disguising the ugly and inappropriate in Cité deconstructs La Vieille’s miso-gynistic instructions to women (and her mimed readings of classical women as victims of men) within an Ovidian amatory context.

Although the influence of the Roman on Cité des dames has not generally been recognized, Cité des dames can be regarded as a translatio of Jean’s Rose, especially if we trace her argument countering the designation of Jean’s rose as a sign of female genitalia, beginning from the sign of female ontology in Epistre to the full stories of individual women in Cité. In its construction of female subjectivity Cité provides what might be essentialized as the allegorical response of the Rose to the Lover (that is, the imprisonment of Belacoeuil in the castle), through Christine’s dramatic narrative that frames the exposition in that visionary poem. The community of women is envisioned soberly and rationally rather than from within a pubescent (and masculine) wet dream, and literally constructed—built—within a city, or extended castle, by women who secure themselves safely within a female subjectivity rather than outside, in some fragmented psychological projection of their “Fair Welcome” toward Amant. That is, for the castle in which the Duenna locks Belacoeuil (Fair Welcome) to protect the Rose from the Lover Christine substitutes the city built by women from foundation to roof. In this castle male sexuality is no longer the imperative that controls female behavior—the setting heralds a community in which female gifts and talents are identified and recognized. The difference is that the women inhabitants of her castle are neither virgin nor wily old woman whose goal is to procure the virgin for sexual assault—they are historical and legendary rulers, inventors, and virtuous and wise women who have shaped their lives and history in accord with their own desires and not with a clerical and misogynistic construction.

By feminizing the masculine excesses of the Rose, Christine performs an act of translatio, just as, in Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune (1402-3), she has imagined herself as a female “text” transformed to male, and just as she has also appropriated for herself a feminized genealogy of the male poet Orpheus in the Boethian exemplar of the wise poet who descends into the underworld in echo of Jean’s own birth scene in the Rose. Explaining herself as having been transformed from female to male by means of Fortune, “Qui de femelle devins masle / Par Fortune” (142-3), with her body only (“mua et corps”) changed into that of a perfect natural man (“homme naturel parfaict,” 144-5), she adds that this transformation occurs, par ficcion, in her own story, istoire, entitled, “La Mutacion de Fortune” (1:lines 141-156).^[8]

While some of her techniques, characters, concepts, and iconographical descriptions in Mutacion come from Jean de Meun, in many ways the persona she adopts is Boethian, with certain key features in her istoire deli-berately modeled on the mythological foils for Boethius, Orpheus and Ulysses, as types of the poet or philosopher she desires to emulate. By invoking these well-known types her story of mutation portrays the process of the female transformed into a (male) writer, her sexual transformation also a reflection of her desire for a self that is gendered. That is, Hymen, god of marriage lifted from Jean de Meun’s Roman, presides over the conception and marriage of her soul and body (820ff), the gifts of father and mother, God and Nature, and more figuratively over her change into a poet who writes her self as text—once again, the story of “The Mutation of Fortune.”

In Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae, which Jean de Meun also translated into Old French, the meter at the core of the five books establishes poet Orpheus as a foil for the philosopher-poet Boethius. Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice led to her ultimate loss because of his weakness in looking back to see if she followed; commentaries on the passage by Remigius of Auxerre in the ninth century and William of Conches in the twelfth century as well as other mythographers identified the source of his poetic ability in his goddess mother Calliope, the muse of epic poetry whose doctrines and science spring from the fountains of Parnassus.^[9]

In the Mutacion de Fortune (ca. 1402-03) during the passage in which Christine tells her life story (or establishes her genealogy, her inheritance), she begins (157) with her own inheritance, but from her father and his patrimony, “c’est la fonteine qui sourt” (201), the original fountain. Later identified as “la fonteine de grant pris” (418), the fountain is located on that same mountain of Parnassus (217) where Pegasus was engendered and where the Nine Muses, including Calliope, along with the “tenth Muse,” the god of poetry and truth, Apollo, live. Among the rich treasures here given her by her physician-astrologer father who served at the court of Charles V are two crystals of great price, presumably knowledge of the heavens (from astrology) used to heal the body. According to Andrea Tarnowski, in “Maternity and Paternity in the Mutacion de Fortune,”^[10] the two stones at the bottom of the fountain invoke those two stones at the Well of Narcissus in Guillaume’s Roman that represented the lover’s eyes in reflection and according to Jean de Meun able to see only one half of the garden of Deduit at one time. Tarnowksi argues that in Mutacion these two crystals are the “family jewels,” Christine’s inheritance from her father being science and wisdom, and from her mother Nature’s treasure, the four stones in Nature’s garland being discretion, consideration, retention, and memory. Her mother’s heritage is the healing that comes, says Tarnowski, from virtue, as the father’s learning has been applied to healing the body.

This important “Genealogy of Christine,” in its repudiation and critique of the Rose, also may be read in the light of an alternate source by her countryman, Boethius, which Christine fits over the Roman duplication as a kind of poetic gloss on the source of her authority as a writer. Christine’s indebtedness to Boethius in Mutacion has been acknowledged by her editor, Suzanne Solente, especially for the prosimetrum form, the appearance of Fortune with two faces, and the image of exile.^[11] Christine’s indebtedness to Jean de Meun appears in her use of allegorical personification (Fortune, Richesse, Pauvreté, Hymeneus), use of abstractions in the garland of Nature as well as for her coronation and for her designation as mother of all humans, and for her iconography of the castle of Fortune.^[12] By borrowing from the latter to reinterpret the former she manifests the spirit of Italian Renaissance humanism while she simultaneously repudiates the misogyny of Jean de Meun in his treatment of love. Presumably as a corrective to the carnal and potentially vicious nature of “love” in the Roman, in her Reply to Pierre Col, she acknowledges the role of Lady Philosophy showing Boethius “one good love in which one ought to set his heart and affections,” (136).

By thus overlaying her sources, Guillaume de Lorris / Jean de Meun with Boethius, she establishes her authority as Orpheus-like poet whose knowledgeable and learned father, rather than muse-mother, was responsible for her inheritance. Too, like Orpheus she had lost her spouse, Etienne du Castel (although not from looking back at the underworld or being too devoted to the desires of the body, as the glosses on that meter proclaim); her sexual mutation into a man in this passage as a result of the power of Fortune may suggest, then, the way in which her inheritance (family jewels, knowledge and wisdom as poetic “virility”) becomes the well-spring of her translatio, her desire to transform the Rose into her own poetry and writing—her words as virility. That female desire comes from her mother and not her father: whereas her father wanted a son her mother, the more powerful, who wanted a daughter who would resemble her more, won: “Car ma mere, qui ot pouoir / Trop plus que lui, si voult avoir / Femelle a elle ressemblable” (389-91).

Despite the desire of the mother for a daughter, the inheritance from the father’s “fountain” coupled with Christine’s own desire to resemble her father results in a “Christine” subsequently transformed into a writer through her appropriation of her father’s symbolic virility, his inky wisdom spilled out so richly and wisely on her pages. The use of “fountain” as Horatian image for (male) writing was adopted by Jean de Montreuil, in his Latin letter “Etsi Facundissimus” (Baird 44), written possibly to Gerson (but it is not clear), in addressing an “illustrious man” as “that which is the fountain of writing.” And the female sexual symbol of Nature’s circular garland or chaplet (chappel) bearing the four virtues, Consideracion, Retentive, Memoire, Discrecion, underscores the gender of Jean de Meun’s Nature, both mater and materia and the handmaiden of God whose very gender will reinforce Christine’s own desire. That is, the “creation” of Christine here comes not from Jean de Meun’s Genius and his phallic exhortation to the Barons of Love to apply hammer to anvil, pen to parchment, but from heroic Nature herself, “Ma mere Nature la belle” (469), and from the natural desire of Christine to “resemble my father,” “Y avoie inclinacion / De ma droite condicion / Et pour mon pere ressembler” (my emphasis, 1:449-51). Christine’s desire for great knowledge counters her biological nature, “Car je desir ce que n’ay pas, / C’est le tresor que grant savoir / Fait a ceulx, qui l’aiment avoir, / Et, combien que femmelle fusse, / Par quoy l’avoir dessus dit n’eu”sse” (my emphasis, 1:444-48). Because Christine’s body was female, her mind male, Fortune may have naturally and providentially changed her into a man after the death of her husband in forecast of her career as a writer. This Ovidian “miracle”^[13] was normally reserved for the gods, as her title for the section beginning in 1025 reveals. If Christine considers herself godlike, then it is important to remember that elsewhere, in L’Epistre Othea a Hector (1399), Christine defines the gods as wise and worthy humans venerated as if gods—through the doctrine of euhemerism.^[14]

The self of Christine is here the fiction, the carnal text or body conjoined to the figurative meaning or “science,” the writing of the father’s inky fountain. Given the medieval image of fate as a book in which individual destiny is written by God’s Providence and Christine’s declaration that God gives grace and a soul as Nature provides the body, then Christine seems to appropriate for her own gendered use the concept of a (masculine) Providence directing a (feminine) Fortune. This influence occurs from the power of her father’s fountain in the construction of her soul’s desire and then her body’s mutation through Fortune (667ff), with language taken from Jean about the celestial origins of the soul and the material origins of the body. The mention of Ulysses, who evaded the transformations of his men into pigs by Circe, at this point also picks up the Boethian thread (from Book 4, meter 3, the mythological meter following that on Orpheus and his fountains, 3m12). In William of Conches’s commentary on Boethius, Ulysses’s wisdom protects him against the poisonous seductions of the body: Christine’s gendering of her mutation reverses the negative connotations of the transformation to suggest that for a woman such transformation into a man, or overthrowing of sex, is necessary to allow her to display her wisdom and creativity.^[15] The figurative bisexual Eros of Christine as a description and source for her creativity is akin to the description of the androgynous mind in Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own.

The concept also reappears in Fais d’armes as part of her disgendering strategy, when she recognizes chivalry as open to female as well as male participation because of her vision of society as interlocking chain mail in which the individual becomes part of a larger moral and social community.^[16] Through chivalry knights could establish their own idealized community, or city of gentlemen, as delineated in Christine’s biography of Charles Fifth through their relationship with and obligation to women and the poor (Truce/Peace of God). Further, in Epistre Othea, she was interested in the moral education of young men, whether her son or the Dauphin. Convinced that men had made a mess of civilization through wars like the Trojan War, the Hundred Years War between France and England, and the civil wars dividing France, she also promulgated the idea of the Amazons as female warriors and military leaders in both Epistre Othea and Cité des dames.

Mostly she was interested in disgendering Jean de Meun’s Rose, which she achieves by gendering her discussion of chivalry in Fais d’armes et de chevalerie, written after Cité des dames and Le Livre des trois vertus (1405) and existing only in two manuscripts during her lifetime, the earliest owned by the Duke of Burgundy.^[17] So important a text on chivalry and warfare that William Caxton translated it into Middle English in 1490 at the command of Henry VII, Fais d’armes used, among other primary sources, the Roman Vegetius for the first book, translated into French by Jean de Meun in his De re militari (On Military Matters) in 1284,^[18] and Christine’s near-contemporary Honoré Bonet for material from his Arbre des batailles (1387) in the last two (that is, the third and fourth books). At the beginning of this work she genders her treatise by acknowledging that normally women attend to household duties and spinning on the distaff (7), but that she, despite her “lytylhed” of person (5, in the Middle French, “La petitesche”),^[19] is compelled by her true affection for noble men in the “office of arms” and not any desire to proscribe to write this work (6). She proclaims her own role here as necessary because, as a woman who does not know the “science of language,” she can speak plainly and clearly, unlike the learned clerks who normally write. She understands the high office of chivalry through contemplation of Minerva of Magna Grecia (Apulia and Calabria, in Italy), who was both goddess and, according to Boccaccio in De claris mulieribus, the inventor of armor, and as an Italian therefore a countrywoman of the Italian-born Christine (8). Having gendered her discussion, she goes on to say, inter alia, in agreement with Cato, that what one does with his body lasts only one age but that what one composes and writes in a book lasts forever (9). She condemns lawless wars, and declares that God opposes wars of vengeance and encourages the prince to aid those less fortunate, including women, widows, and orphans (12). She revises the four estates to include respectively nobles, lawyers, commons, and craftsmen (16).

Her intent was to disgender Jean de Meun’s masculinist constructions of chivalry and warfare and authority by replacing him with herself as female authority. Indeed, Christine deliberately invokes the continuation of Jean de Meun in the Rose and his authority in a parodic dream vision debate at the opening of the third book of her Fais d’armes et chevalerie. She achieves this by parodying the dream vision and imagery of flower and garden in the Roman in the third part of Fais, in which Honoré Bonet, one of her sources whose own book utilizes arborial imagery, appears before her bedside. Christine, in the middle of her book on warfare, and after using her Roman sources so assiduously, stops—just as the Roman stops and then is continued by Jean de Meun, immorally. By adopting the persona of Bonet as monkish authority, she seizes the opportunity to validate her own work as a good woman and to berate Jean for his as a bad clerk.

In both of these senses—the criticism of Jean de Meun and the disgendering of chivalry—Christine’s purpose in writing her own work echoes Bonet’s, although she only uses the fourth part of his four-part book in her work. It should come as no surprise to learn that Bonet (born ca. 1343, in Provence; died 1400), driven from his Benedictine abbey, wrote a satirical work entitled Apparition de Jehan de Meun which, like Christine’s work, criticized Jean; further, his Arbre des batailles can be said to be pacifist in intent given his depiction of the emperor, pope, kings, knights, and serfs as covered with blood. So also Christine moralizes chivalry by promulgating a broadminded and charitable set of guidelines in regard to warfare (for example, she is especially sensitive to Jews and Saracens).

In a dream vision in Fais she encounters the masculine projection of herself, that is, Bonet, whose authority and mastery she appropriates for herself, in her desire for wisdom. He will act as master and she, as disciple—in a school setting that resembles the convention found also in Fulgentius’s Expositio Virgilianae continentiae (Expo-sition of the Content of Virgil), in which magister Virgil is questioned by the homunculus (“little man”) Fulgentius, his disciple (and yet also a master). During the dream (caused by Christine’s fatigue of wit from writing the first two parts) Honoré appears before her bed and names her (=validates her authority) as “dear loue crystine” (189). By identifying her in terms of “dear love” he differentiates love from the masculinist desire of Guillaume and defines as appropriate to the female the sexual energy of Genius in Jean, but does so in terms uniquely suited to Christine’s own project: he acknow-ledges her labor and her ceaseless study for the purpose of increasing wisdom and virtue, “of which in dede or ellis in thoughte the laboure of bpe excercyse of studienge neuer more doeth ceasse atte the contemplacyon of the grete loue that thou haste to thoo thynges that the lettres can shewe specyally in exhortacyon of all noble werkes and ver-tuouse condycyons” (my emphasis, 189). He has appeared to her almost as an act of grace, a Macrobian dream mes-senger who will help her finish her book, like Philosophy appearing to Boethius, or Virgil to Dante, or even Raison to Christine, in Cité des dames. She is not, however, in despair, like Boethius, Dante, or herself earlier in Cité, but tired out from a learned and specific labor. On the other hand, her dream visitor provides the exact authority necessary for her to finish her task, one of learnedness, like Raison or Philosophy, but here masculine instead of the eternal feminine in most dream-vision personifications of abstractions. And when she mentions Jean de Meun as having taken the fruit in his work from others the ironic and parodic nature of the visitation frame is set.

Christine’s work introduces the question of mimesis as plagiarism specifically in a context damning to Jean de Meun. For centuries male scholars have appropriated from their predecessors the materials necessary to create poems and treatises. Thus Bonet has authorized her to use the fruits of his tree of battles in completion of her work, although she is hesitent to do so for fear of being accused of plagiarism. “It is good that thou take and gadre of the tree of bataylles that is in my gardyn somme fruytes of whiche thou shalt vse. So shall vygoure and strengthe the bettre growe wythyn thy self therfore for to make an ende of thy pesaunte werke and for to bylde an edyfyce pertynaunt & couenable to the sayenges of vegece & of the other auctours of whyche thou hast taken help” (my emphasis, 189-90). He urges her to take the branches of the tree to set a foundation for her “edyfyce.” Yet Christine says to her beloved authority, “I pray the to telle me yf eny rebuke shal mowe be caste to the regarde of my werke for this that thou hast counsylled me for to vse of the sayde fruyte” (my emphasis, 190). Bonet’s answer suggests (in a very modern sense) that the more a work is cited and used (“wytnessed and approved of more folke”) the more it is “auctorysed and more auctentyke” (190). In his response he indicates, first, that his disciples normally “gyue and departe one to other of the floures that they take dyuersely out of my gardyns” (my emphasis, 190), suddenly reminding us of a garden as metaphor for learning and the flower as sign of specific knowledge.

That the garden image is being deliberately invoked is clear from Bonet’s second argument—that Jean de Meun took from the garden of Guillaume de Lorris: “Dyde not mayster John de Mown help hym self within hys boke of the rose of the sayinges of Lorrys and semblably of other?” (190). By invoking Jean, Christine places before the reader his authority as a plagiarist and as her bête noire, but also, since this frame sequence is about authorization and authority, offers her an opportunity to present the flower of her reading of Bonet, and a moral reading at that, as analogous to Jean’s reading of Guillaume. Most important, using the authority of Bonet allows Christine to justify her own morality of writing and to imply Jean de Meun’s immorality in witnessing Guillaume’s vicious vision: “But there as were euyll to propos men shulde doo serue thynges whiche were taken ellis where there were the vice doo soo thenne hardly & doubte the not for thy werke is gode and I certyfye thee that of many a wyse msn hit shal be yet ryght well commended and praysed” (190-91).

The metaphor here begins with the tree (of knowledge of battles), as it does in her reply to Pierre Col, inviting comparison with the biblical tree in the Garden of Eden, and the building on a foundation also alerts us to the city of ladies constructed in Cité des dames. The difference is that this is, ostensibly, a secular work, and one normally associated with the masculinist preoccupations of chivalry and warfare. Yet by conflating all of these paradigms—the dream vision of interiorization, the master-student rela-tionship, the biblical garden, the edifice—Christine also degenders the poetic authority of her predecessors. As a woman she places herself in that tradition of passing on of authority from a master to a student. And as a woman her dream is not one of abstraction (Boethius’s Philosophy), or of desire (Guillaume’s garden of Deduit), but of practical consequences of long study.

The illustrations to Fais are pertinent to Christine’s argument of her authority: at Part One, chapter one, the prologue, she is portrayed in British Library manuscript Harleian 4605, fol. 3, on the left, writing with pen in her room; on the right, outside her window, appears Minerva with an upraised sword and a large shield (see figure one). That one is the authority or alter ego for the other is made apparent through the equivalence of the pen: sword. At the opening of Book Three, when Bonet appears at her bedside, in Bibliothèque Royale manuscript Brussels 9009-11, the illumination for Book Three, chapter one, places her prone, in bed, and the Prior at the right with arm upraised (see figure two). For a monk to appear in a woman’s bedroom may seem incongruous, but that may be the point: it is a dream, she is sleeping, and dreams are not always constructed out of masculine desire, Deduit. The monk has taken the place of Italian Minerva (appro-priate signifier for the Roman Vegetius and Frontinus) as authorizer, or author. Minerva and Bonet together occupy
the roles of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the Roman de la Rose in its articulation of male desire projected into the rose. Christine, we can see, by attemp-ting to codify and regularize the rules of battle and martial conduct also attempts to moralize and feminize both, or to civilize both. Her work responds, then, to the gendered poem of the two Frenchmen Guillaume and Jean and in its reappropriation of the female persona Minerva and the male persona Bonet as part of her authorial self represents one more stage in her rewriting—or Righting—of the Rose.

^[1](New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 22. Butler also indicates that, “The internal coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby requires both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality. That institutional hetero-sexuality both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system.” Butler responds to recent work on feminist reading and essentialism, in particular Diana J. Fuss, “Reading like a Feminist,” Differences, vol. 1: The Essential Difference: Another Look at Essentialism 1 (1989): 76-92, which was incorporated into her book on Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989).

^[2]Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, trans. La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1978), 11; for the original, see Eric Hicks, ed. Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose,’ Bibliothèque du XV^e Siècle 43 (Paris: Champion, 1977). In her Reply to Pierre Col, Christine responds to his warning that her criticism of Jean de Meun—opening her mouth—will lead her to “step into an abyss.” She exclaims, “Is he then equal to Jesus Christ or to the Virgin Mary?” (117). Although her focus in this reply is Reason’s naming of the privy parts of man, her alarm is clearly directed at the exaggerated authority granted to Jean de Meun. Subsequent references to the Baird and Kane translation will appear in the text.

^[3]Petrarch criticized the shortcomings of Jean de Meun’s Rose in his Letter to Guido Gonzaga (1340); see Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Christine de Pizan, the Conventions of Courtly Diction, and Italian Humanism,” in Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, ed. Richards, with Joan Williamson, Nadia Margolis, and Christine Reno (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1992) 261f.

^[4]See, for example: Sylvia Huot, “Seduction and Sublimation: Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun, and Dante,” Romance Notes 25 (1985): 361-73; Kevin Brownlee, “Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Rose,” Romance Review 79 (1988): 199-221, argues that Christine uses the “learned discourse of clergie to critique and expand the clerkly system” (200), as evidenced in three works—her Epistre au dieu d’Amours, 1399, her Dit de la rose, 1402, and her Epistres sur le débat du Roman de la rose (1401-1402). Thus in the first she speaks through the voice of the god of love, Cupid; in the second, she displaces Guillaume as a poet and protagonist and “recontextualizes” the Rose; in the Debate, she poses as a “clerk” to challenge in her own voice Jean de Meun and his clerical authority. Lori Walters also notes, in “Fathers and Daughters: Christine de Pizan as Reader of the Male Tradition of Clergie in the Dit de la rose” (Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan 63-76), that “In the Dit de la rose Christine presents her version of what Jean’s ‘Rose’ would have said had the character spoken in her own voice” (63). Nadia Margolis in “Elegant Closures: The Use of the Diminutive in Christine de Pizan and Jean de Meun” (Reinterpreting Christine 111-23), demonstrates that, while male authors like Jean de Meun used diminutives to condescend, Christine uses diminutives in “dissonant contexts,” borrowing the technique from Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (ninth-century). Margolis concludes, “More research needs to be done on the extent of Christine’s debt to the Rose, although whatever the result, one aspect—one discursive weapon—she never procured for her polemical arsenal was ribald language” (121). Sandra Hindman in a paper she delivered at the First International Congress on Christine de Pizan, June 4, 1992 in Berlin, noted that the illustrations in the Le Livre du duc des vrais amans (1404-05), which follow the romance pattern found in Roman, show that there are two halves more or less coincident with the two parts of the Roman, a structural duplication in this anti-romance intended to draw attention to Christine’s critique of courtly love (“Responding to Romance: Text and Illustration in the Livre du duc des vrais amans”).

^[5]See the new translation with the original of these two early poems by Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Erler, eds. Poems of Cupid, God of Love (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990); all references to the translation of the Epistre au dieu d’Amours, however, are to the excerpts in the Baird and Kane translation.

^[6]In lines 591-604 Eve is created first and made to resemble God. See the discussion of the creation of two human races, particulrly as expounded by Philo Judaeus, in R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1989): 9-15.

^[7]Walters shows Christine correcting Jean’s picture of Raison, in “The Woman Writer and Literary History: Christine de Pizan’s Redefinition of the Poetic Translatio in the Epistre au dieu d’Amours,” French Literature Studies 16 (1989): 1-16.

^[8]In Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, ed. Suzanne Solente, 4 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1959-66).

^[9]Boethius declares that, in the underworld, “blanda sonantibus / Chordus carmina temperans / Quidquid praecipuis deae / Matris fontibus hauserat” [modulating gentle songs/ On the sounding lyre / All that he (Orpheus) drew from the foremost springs/ Of his goddess mother], 3m12.20-23, in Boethius, trans. H. F. Stewart and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1978), 308-09. There is no complete text of William of Conches on Boethius; some of the mythological excerpts are contained in Édouard Jeauneau, “L’Usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 32 (1957): 35-100. For the gloss on Orpheus as wisdom married to eloquence, Eurydice, see 46. In Letter of Othea to Hector, Christine’s gloss on Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to retrieve his wife warns against asking for the impossible, which will cause melancholy, or for miracles, “called tempting God”—as Christine herself would do in desiring to become a writer. See fable 70, in the translation of Chance, Focus Library of Medieval Women (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1990), 95-96.

^[10]This paper was delivered at the first International Congress on Christine de Pizan, Berlin, June 4, 1992.

^[11]These examples are cited by Solente, 1:xxxviii-xxxix.

^[12]In addition to these examples, cited by Solente, 1:xxxix-xli, Christine borrows Faux Semblant for her portrait of the cunning counselor (5559-5700).

^[13]See the recent discussion of Christine’s understanding of composition as abbreviatio and truth in relation to the poetic/prose text of Mutacion and its use of integumenta by Jeanette M. A. Beer, “Stylistic Conventions in Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune,” in Reinterpreting Christine, ed. Richards, 124-36.

^[14]See, for example, John Daniel Cooke, “Euhemerism: A Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical Paganism,” Speculum 2 (1927): 396-410.

^[15]In the words of Judith Butler, “According to this Foucaultian model of emancipatory sexual politics, the overthrow of ‘sex’ results in the release of a primary sexual multiplicity, a notion not so far afield from the psychoanalytic postulation of primary polymorphousness or Marcuse’s notion of an original and creative bisexual Eros subsequently repressed by an instrumentalist culture” (96).

^[16]See the translated excerpt of the biography of Charles the Fifth in Charity Cannon Willard, “Christine de Pizan on Chivalry,” in The Study of Chivalry, 511-28, ed. Howell Chickering and Tom Seiler (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988), 520.

^[17]See Willard (189), “Christine de Pizan’s Treatise on the Art of Medieval Warfare,” in Essays in Honor of Loris Francis Solano, ed. R. Cormier and U.T. Holmes (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1970), 179-91.

^[18]Jean’s Vegetius was thereafter put into rhyme, by Jean Prior at Besançon, and then two additional translations followed, one by Jean de Vignay, early 14th c., and Anonymous, 1380. Other primary sources for the first books include the less important Frontinus (ca. 84-96), a Roman consul and Governor of Britain, in his Strategemata, and Valerius Maximus, in De dictis et factis memorabilibus. See the introduction to The Book of Fayttes of Armes and Chyualrye, ed. A. T. P. Byles, trans. and printed by William Caxton from the French original of Christine de Pizan, Early English Text Society, O.S. 189 (1932; rpt. with corrections, London: Oxford UP, 1937; rpt. Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1985), xxxvi-li, the only modern edition of Fais d’armes, but of Caxton’s Middle English version. All citations in the text come from this edition.

^[19]In her own country Antoine Verard changed her sex and omitted her name in his 1488 printed edition, L’Art de chevalerie selon Végèce suivi du livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie, rpt. Philippe le Noir, 1527, with a changed title. See Willard, “Christine de Pizan’s Treatise,” 189.