Gallica Volume 4 CHRISTINE DE Pizan’s CHANGING OPINION A QUEST FOR CERTAINTY IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan1 1 19/12/2006 18:07:47 Gallica ISSN 1749–091X General Editor: Sarah Kay Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, 303 East Pyne, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Managing Editor, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Already Published 1 Postcolonial Fictions in the ‘Roman de Perceforest’: Cultural Identities and Hybridities, Sylvia Huot 2 A Discourse for the Holy Grail in Old French Romance, Ben Ramm 3 Fashion in Medieval France, Sarah-Grace Heller Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan2 2 19/12/2006 18:07:48 CHRISTINE DE Pizan’s CHANGING OPINION A QUEST FOR CERTAINTY IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS Douglas Kelly D. S.BREWER Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan3 3 19/12/2006 18:07:48 © Douglas Kelly 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Douglas Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2007 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 111 1 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan4 4 19/12/2006 18:07:48 CONTENTS Preface vii Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 Opinion as a Concept: Definition and Cognition 7 2 Opinion as a Personification: Description and Invention 41 3 Misogyny, Introspection, and Radical Opinion 77 4 Love, Reason, and Debatable Opinion 107 5 Self-Interest, Common Opinion, and Corrective Encomia 142 6 Opinion and Subjectivity 169 Bibliography 181 Index 213 Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan5 5 19/12/2006 18:07:48 Wie van ons kan ten volle navoelen wat voor degenen die toen leefden concepties als die van de Rede en van het Gevoel betekend hebben? wat voor een omwenteling en innerlijke tegenstrijdigheden die veroorzaakt hebben in van huis uit door starre rechtzinnigheid, standsvooroordelen en rigide seksuele opvattingen beheerste gemoederen? Hella S. Haasse [Who among us can fully sense what notions like Reason and Feeling meant to people living in those days? What an upheaval and inner conflict they aroused in minds dominated by an inflexible sense of rectitude, class prejudices, and rigid conceptions of sexuality?] Mit dem Wort ‘gewiß’ drücken wir die völlige Überzeugung, die Abwesenheit jedes Zweifels aus, und wir suchen damit den Andern zu überzeugen. Das ist subjektive Gewißheit. Ludwig Wittgenstein [With the word ‘certain’ we express complete conviction, the total absence of doubt, and thereby we seek to convince other people. That is subjective certainty.] Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan6 6 19/12/2006 18:07:48 PREFACE Nous ne supposerons à aucun moment de rencontre particulière entre la pensée ou la sensibilité médiévales et les nôtres.1 Christine de Pizan’s focus on opinion in her writings corresponds with a new emphasis in late medieval French literature. As Claude Gauvard has noted, ‘“Ut opinor”, jamais cette expression chère à Nicolas de Clamanges n’a été aussi actuelle’.2 Christine herself clearly reflects the importance of opinion in her writings, for example, in her description of Lady Opinion, a personification that appears in the second part of the Advision Cristine (1405). This ‘shade’ is continually changing, in shape like a cloud, in color as if under shifting stage lighting. Around it, or her, swarm clouds of similar shades that illustrate diverse opinions on all manner of subjects by their own variegated, changing hues and shapes. Like Lady Opinion, opinions are in constant flux. Christine too changes her opinions, replicating the attribute of change in both Lady Opinion and her attendants. Her writings develop, modify, and correct her views of the world around her and their effect on her life and thought. Simply put, this book studies ‘changing opinion’ in the writings of Christine de Pizan. Christine de Pizan flourished, and languished, during the terrible years for France between the death of Charles V in 1380 and the advent of Joan of Arc in 1429. Much as she likens her own fate in the Mutacion de Fortune (1403) to a shipwreck in stormy seas followed by a strenuous recovery, so too did France, already reeling from the Schism, shipwreck on the rocks of Charles VI’s madness and under the steady pounding of war and rebellion. The social and moral realm was in chaos.3 The full autumn tide, ‘es levens felheid’ 4 [the violence of life], as Huizinga portrayed the late Middle Ages, ramped over Christine’s world and her work, blighting her happiness, undermining her certainties, and often suspending life and thought in the rough seas of a chaotic world. Perhaps this accounts for her heightened awareness of the role of opinion and changing opinions in human affairs. 1 M. Zink 1985, p. 8. 2 Gauvard 1995, p. 121. 3 See Krynen 1981, pp. 43–48; Rossiaud 1986. 4 Huizinga 1997, p. 13. Cf. Advision, II.xxii.64: ‘tu es venue en mauvais temps’ [you came into this world in bad times]. Kelly, Christine de Pizan's chan7 7 19/12/2006 18:07:48 viii DOUGLAS KELLY Hella S. Haasse’s questions, cited in the epigraph to this book,5 suggest how difficult it is to understand opinions that were formed and defended in bygone times. Let me illustrate this issue with another modern novelist’s approach to the issues she raises. In Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus a character relates an anecdote that offers a ‘humane’ reading of a woman burned at the stake for having allegedly engaged in illicit sexual concourse with an incubus three times each week while in bed with her unwitting husband. Confessing her sin, she and her inquisitor agree that the stake is the best solution because it liberates the woman from contact with the demon and from eternal torture in Hell, rewarding her confession with Heaven, thanks to God’s forgiveness.6 Do not such opinions evoke the mentality and the world Huizinga so tellingly describes in his scholarly masterpiece on the late Middle Ages? They also reveal something of the world Christine de Pizan knew and experienced. She too confronted issues of humanity such as the one Thomas Mann evokes fictionally. Her origi- nality, as I hope to show, consists in relying on reason and experience in order to adapt her views to the diverse opinions she knew, some of which she shared, others which she rejected or modified. In the end she emerges in her writings as a remarkably enlightened writer for her times – enlightened in a more modern sense than we find in Mann’s inquisitor and his victim. Just as Christine’s opinions about the Roman de la rose differed sharply from the opinions of those whom she called the ‘disciples’ of Jean de Meun, so too nowadays opinions differ and spark controversy on the meaning of Christine’s own opinions and their significance for her time and ours.7 To be sure, understanding thought and emotion in past times is as problematical as Haasse suggests. Yet, ‘to say that one cannot read a medieval text “on its own ground” ... does not mean that one is entitled to ignore evidence of what that ground might have been’.8 Parsing opinion in Christine’s writings gives us insight into her thought on often controversial issues. This book attempts to 5 Haasse 1996, p. 34. Widespread medieval and cool modern reception of Christine de Pizan’s moralistic Epistre Othea is a good illustration of the issue Haasse raises. For an enlightened approach to Othea reception, see Parussa, ed., Othea, pp. 28–30, 81. 6 ‘Welche warme Humanität aus der Genugtuung darüber, diese Seele noch im letzten Augenblick durch das Feuer dem Teufel entrissen und ihr die Verzeihung Gottes verschafft zu haben!’ (Faustus, p. 155) [What sincere human feeling emerges from satisfaction in having, at the last moment through fire, wrenched this soul free from the devil and gained it God’s forgiveness!] 7 For representative illustrations of scholarly differences regarding Christine’s opinions about women and their roles, see Delany 1987 and 1992 vis-à-vis Quilligan 1991, pp. 7–10, and Reno 1992a. Such opposing views suggest that ‘Christine as a reader and a writer was both resistant to and complicitous with medieval construction of femininity’ (Krueger 1993, pp. 237–38). For mediating positions on Christine’s alleged anti- versus profeminism, see Solente 1974, pp. 372–73; Gottlieb 1985; Huot 1985; Hicks 1988 and 1995b; Brown-Grant 1999b and 2003; Stedman 2002; Haidu 2004, pp.