CHRISTINE DE PIZAN'S LIVRE D'EPITRE D'OTHEA A HECTOR AT THE INTERSECTION OF IMAGE AND TEXT BY Martha Breckenridge Submitted to the graduate degree program in Art History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Professor Stephen Goddard Co-Chairperson Professor Marilyn Stokstad Professor Emerita Co-Chairperson Committee members Professor Sally J. Cornelison Professor Charles Eldredge Professor Ernest Jenkins Date defended: December 12, 2008 1 The Dissertation Committee for Martha Breckenridge certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: CHRISTINE DE PIZAN'S LIVRE D'EPITRE D'OTHEA A HECTOR AT THE INTERSECTION OF IMAGE AND TEXT Committee: Professor Stephen Goddard Co-chair* Professor Marilyn Stokstad Co-chair* Professor Sally J. Cornelison Professor Charles Eldredge Professor Ernest Jenkins Date approved: December 12, 2008 2 ABSTRACT Christine de Pizan, the first professional author in Western Europe, wrote the Book of the Epistle of Othea to Hector in 1399. Of Italian origins, Christine had moved with her family to the Valois court of Charles V in approximately 1368. The French king had invited her father, a professor at the University of Bologna, to Paris as his personal physician and court astrologer. Surrounded by the nascent humanism encouraged by the French monarch, Christine gained the rudiments of a classical education, including the notarial script with which she would early support herself and her family upon the deaths of her husband and father. Having begun by writing lyric poetry for her personal use, the author created the Epistle of Othea mixing poetry and prose, using the format of earlier Latin works. Scholars generally concur that Christine participated in the facture of her numerous manuscripts. Although the extent and nature of her participation remain unclear, this paper assumes that she played some role in directing the contents and style of the illustrations with which her artists embellished the work. Comparisons among eight manuscript copies and one printed edition of the Epistle of Othea, the most popular of Christine's literary creations, constitute the basis of the present study. A collection of one hundred vignettes loosely related to the Trojans (from whom the French believed they were descended), the Epistle of Othea contains an illustration accompanying each of its allegorical stories. Although its purported subject falls in the "miroir des princes" genre, the work's disjunctive nature leads to the conclusion that its author's actual motivations in writing it lay elsewhere. Specifically, 3 this paper contends that Christine created her first serious prose work as a vehicle to establish herself within the royal and aristocratic community as an author to be respected, a voice to be heard. She designed it as a demonstration of the proper form of allegorical writing, in which the author clearly guides readers' interpretations. Furthermore, she herein embarked upon a lifelong battle against misogyny. Finally, Christine began with this work her efforts to rehabilitate her astrologer/father's tarnished reputation. Comparison of the verbal and visual imagery in the earliest three copies, created under the author's control between 1399 and ca 1410, discloses the close association between text and image. No textual comparisons among the later copies were included in the study, but the research shows that later illuminations diverge increasingly from the originals. The changes result both from new media (grisaille, watercolor and woodcut print) and from the social milieux of the owners. That is, the art work in the Bodmer mixed-grisaille copy for Antoine, Great Bastard of Burgundy, demonstrates elements suggesting a highly enlightened court, while increased violence and sensationalistic qualities characterize the watercolor copy at Lille, created for bourgeois buyers. The reductive nature of the woodcut images, like that of the watercolors, relates to their medium. The most significant changes occur in the Lille watercolor on paper, whose artists sought innovation to please their clientele, according to the Lille Médiathèque Jean-Lévy in whose collection it is found. Similarities among the three later generations suggest possible ancestry in the ca 1400-50 Beauvais copy for the Bodmer and Lille manuscripts (both of approximately 1460) and the Paris incunable of 1499 created by Philippe Pigouchet. Although no 4 clearcut family relationships can be identified at this time, it appears that the latter three copies and the Beauvais manuscript may all descend from an earlier copy, now lost. 5 to Breck, the great joy of my life 6 I want to publicly articulate my appreciation to Professors Marilyn Stokstad and Steve Goddard for their long-time support on this project. I thank the University and the Department of Art History, especially Professors Linda Stone-Ferrier and John Pultz, as well as Maud, for their assistance. With Marilyn and Steve, Professors Sally J. Cornelison, Charles Eldredge, and Ernest Jenkins have served as my committee for the dissertation, and I thank them all. I am honored that they agreed to serve in this capacity. I am indebted to Professor Caroline Jewers of the French Department for guiding me to Christine in the first place, and I thank her, as well as Professor Rick Clement and Professor Edmund Eglinski for their help. In addition, my dear friends and my son have my endless gratitude, which I hope I have appropriately expressed, for their unfaltering encouragement. 7 Table of Contents Introduction 8 Chapter 1. The Author and her Times 22 Chapter 2. Manuscripts Created under the Author's Control 72 Chapter 3. The Fifteenth Century Manuscripts: Chantilly, Beauvais, Cologny, Lille 129 Chapter 4. The Woodcuts 164 Chapter 5. Comparison of the Visual Images 222 Works Cited 264 Appendix A. The Stories 273 Appendix B. The Images 275 8 Introduction Christine de Pizan has been my quasi-constant companion for the past seven months, but I encountered the work of this remarkable late medieval woman about ten years ago. The first professional writer in Western Europe, Christine holds an important position historically, but it was her life, and then her first serious prose work, the Book of the Epistle of Othea to Hector, which interested me. Widowed at twenty-five with two children, her mother, and a niece to support, and with her husband's and father's estates in disarray, the resourceful Christine collected monies due her family at the same time as she was launching her prolific and lucrative writing career. She would write well over 150 works, advise royalty, and shape herself into one of the most famed authors of her era, consistently writing against misogyny, before withdrawing to a convent outside Paris in 1418. She died in approximately 1431, having written her last known work in praise of Joan of Arc. Born in Pizzano, Italy, in 1363, Christine was the daughter of Thomasso da Pizzano, whom Charles V invited to Paris as his personal physician and court astrologer. The Pizan family lived very well in the circle of the nascent renaissance thinkers at the Valois court until Christine's father and then her husband died, leaving them destitute. Thomasso's discovery of favorable astrological signs for a "scholarly future" for his daughter had led him to aid his first-born in obtaining the rudiments of a classical education – at a time when women were considered unworthy of education and even potentially dangerous if educated. Moreover, his courtly connections opened the royal library and other collections to his daughter so that she apparently read most of the 9 literature current at the court. From her father or husband, a court secretary, the young woman learned the notarial script which is now recognized in her own hand in over fifty copies of Christine's works in Western Europe and the United States. Much of what we know about Christine comes from a precocious autobiography in allegorical form, the genre she chose for many of her works. Probably having begun her career as a copyist, Christine found in the composition of lyric poetry a vehicle through which to process the enormous grief she experienced on the early and sudden death of her husband of only ten years. Among others, Queen Isabella of Bavaria, wife of Charles VI, encouraged Christine in her writing, and by 1399, the date at which my work probably appeared, Christine had written more than 100 poetic works. Her most prolific period occupied the two decades from 1389 to 1405. Christine dedicated her works and presented luxurious copies of them exclusively to a royal and aristocratic clientele who handsomely reimbursed her through their "gifts" in return. Interestingly, she recopied and rededicated the Epistle of Othea to at least four different patrons in France and in England. In a time when books were valued more as objects to be possessed than as repositories of information, Christine recognized better than any of her peers the desirability of illumination in her manuscripts. Although this is subject to scholarly debate, she is generally understood to have played a decisive role in the production of her works, perhaps directing details of their artistic and codicological elements. The Epistle of Othea, containing 100 mythological tales loosely connected to the Trojan stories, in its definitive form, is embellished with one miniature for each story – by far the greatest number Christine ever included in any work. It is a curious work, at best, and of little 10 merit from a literary standpoint. Scholars have described it as derivative, disorganized, and redundant, and all are justified. As a formative work for the author's career, however, it is fascinating, and its illuminations are delightful. The earliest identified copy, BNF fr 848, seems to be the original, working copy.