University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Women, Reading, And Literary Culture: The Reception Of Christine De Pizan In Fifteenth-Century England Sarah Wilma Watson University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Watson, Sarah Wilma, "Women, Reading, And Literary Culture: The Reception Of Christine De Pizan In Fifteenth-Century England" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2956. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2956 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2956 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Women, Reading, And Literary Culture: The Reception Of Christine De Pizan In Fifteenth-Century England Abstract This dissertation challenges the concept of literary communities defined yb national boundaries, arguing that men and women in late-medieval England imagined themselves as members of a transcontinental, multilingual reading group. To this end, I investigate the cross-channel circulation of works by Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1430), a Parisian author who is often described as the first professional woman writer in the West. Through extensive archival research in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and New York, I uncover Christine de Pizan’s influence on English literary history, demonstrating how Christine’s love lyrics, political manuals, and proto-feminist texts were read and shared among readers in England. I consider the insular reception of Christine’s texts as part of a larger translatio of French literature to England, a cultural exchange facilitated by the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and mediated by the physical transfer of books and people across the English Channel.