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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

INTERROGATING BOUNDARIES:
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN AND HER INFLUENCE
IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

presented by

DOMINIQUE TIEMAN HOCHE

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

PHD. degree in English

 

 

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Major professor

February 19, 2003 /
Date

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DATE DUE

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 cJCIRCJDateDuopss-pJS

 

INTERROGATING BOUNDARIES:
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN AND HER INFLUENCE
IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

BY

Dominique Tieman Hoche

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOEHY
Department of English

2003

 

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ABSTRACT
INTERROGATING BOUNDARIES:

CHRISTINE DE PIZAN AND HER INFLUENCE
IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

BY

Dominique Tieman Hoche

The politics of book ownership and the politics of
book readership are not that fundamentally different: they
share an interest in the provocative relationship between
writer and reader. Christine de Pizan enjoyed a vibrant
readership in late medieval France, and her influence
spread to England, but little has been known about the
details of her influence. This study asks who were these
English readers, what works did they own and read, and why
did they enjoy reading Christine de Pizan? Establishing the
characteristics and range of Christine’s original
readership (the Yorkist, Lancastrian, and ultimately Tudor
court) allows us to begin understanding the ways in which
England responded to an author as celebrated and as unusual
as Christine. Her popularity in England began with the
readers associated with Anthony Woodville (Earl Rivers),
and her influence spread through the interaction of this

circle to the larger literary culture of the time, and then

further, beyond the scope of her own popularity. Her

 

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writings became a part of both broad cultural texts and
cultural mores. Feats of Arms, the touchstone of this study
because it was favored by the Woodville circle, not only
contributed to the rise of military professionalism in the
16th century and modern humanitarian law, but provided
readers a new way to approach chivalry and masculinity.
Christine’s readers were exposed to early modern ideas that
question the theories and politics of identity and
responded to her provocative new challenges to the

conventions of gender, which in turn contributed to her

influence on late medieval society.

 

Copyright by
DOMINIQUE TIEMAN HOCHE
© 2003

 

To DMT, for encouraging me to begin this long journey

To JLS, for helping me reach the finish

To my father, for inspiration

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................. 1
CHAPTER 1

THE PROVENANCE OF THE WORKS OF CHRISTINE DE PIZAN IN
FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND ................................. 9
CHAPTER 2

“HERE IS A COYSY WERD”: THE WOODVILLE LITERARY CIRCLE....49

CHAPTER 3

‘PROUFFYTABLE VERTUES’: CHIVALRIC TEXTS IN FIFTEENTH-
CENTURY ENGLAND .......................................... 98
CHAPTER 4

FEATS OF ARMS: ORIGINS, CONSTRUCTION, AND THE ARISTOCRATIC
MYSTIQUE ................................................ 147
CHAPTER 5

CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, EARLY MODERN THOUGHT, AND RENAISSANCE
VIEWS ON WAR ............................................ 180
CHAPTER 6

READING CHRISTINE DE PIZAN: WHAT WAS THE ATTRACTION --
IDEOLOGY, POETICS, OR JUST PLAIN QUEERNESS? ............ 229
WORKS CITED ............................................. 272

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Introduction

Christine de Pizan fascinates me: the risks she took
as a woman writer; her commitment to women's well-being,
respect, and treatment; her love of education and teaching;
her thoughtful and innovative approach to politics,
chivalry, history, biography, and philosophy; but I am also
equally entertained by her wit, and find ideas and
expressions of thought in her writing that provoke me to
challenge not only the accepted academic views of medieval
chivalry, masculinity, and identity, but also gender.

Christine’s readers have all shared in her sense of
learning and discovery, her joy in gaining knowledge, and
her deliberately intimate relationship with her literary
audience. My goal in this study is to explore a reader's
response to Christine’s works, focusing on her immediate
legacy in fifteenth and sixteenth-century England.
Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) enjoyed a vibrant readership
in late medieval France, and her influence spread to
England, but little has been known about the details of her

iJifluence. This study asks who were these English readers,
‘Wflat works did they own and read, and why did they enjoy
Ieading Christine de Pizan?

While there is quite a range of writings by Christine,

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my focus is on the works that appealed to what is called
the Woodville literary group, and specifically Le Livre des
Fais d’Armes et de Chevalierie (translated as The Book of
Fayttes of Armes and Chyvalrye by William Caxton in 1489,
and most often called Deeds of Arms). I choose Deeds of
Arms for several reasons: first of all, it is the least
studied of Christine’s significant works, and this gives me
a great opportunity to offer original research. Second,
next to Epistle of Othea, Deeds of Arms is one of the
favorite works of the Woodville circle, and the examination
of the historical and literary circumstances behind the
translation and dissemination of the work reveals the
influence and appeal of Christine's writings on the
Woodville circle and the interaction of the group with the
larger literary culture of the time. Third, Deeds of;Arms
is a text that looks deceptively simple, and yet is
surprisingly complicated: it is a mix of Christine’s
interpretations of prior military manuals and her own
research, and as a result is a combination of what one
might call military tactical ‘chestnuts’ and Christine’s
<3wn idiosyncratic approach to power, authority, class, and
gender. While the military information would most likely
b6? the reason a fifteenth-century reader picked up the work

tC> read, it is certainly Christine’s own personality and

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her approach to masculine identity made the work appealing
and ultimately worth including among the first printed
books. In that she was a woman writing about masculine
identity, her popularity suggests a public awareness of
Christine's deliberately protean and provocative gender
identity as a writer.

I have divided the dissertation into six chapters,
each of which builds on the previous in order to move from
concrete facts to speculative theory. Each of the chapters
is a whole within itself but they are not independent of
each other. Chapter Four was written first because the
central material focus of this dissertation is Deeds of
Arms. Chapter One was next, which positioned both
Christine and Deeds of Arms within the historical context.
Chapter Three allowed me to present Deeds of Arms within a
textual perspective, and Chapter Two gave me the background
for a prosopographical perspective. The fifth chapter
allowed me to bring together the three final material
elements of historical influence, political inheritance,
and cultural reflection. Once these studies were finished,
<Jnly then did I feel comfortable in presenting the more

ephemeral literary theory in the sixth chapter. In all,

true parts are interrelated and dependent upon each other to

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provide the integrity of a new interpretation of
Christine’s value and influence.

I began with the provenance of Christine’s works,
determining which manuscripts were used by Christine's
readers, translators, and printers in England. I discuss
provenance as it applied to Christine’s works, and then as
a master example I follow the provenance of London BL MS.
Harley 4431. I identify, for each of the works used in
England, the applicable French manuscripts and their
provenance, and the English manuscripts and incunabula and
their provenance. And finally I suggest the nature of why
these particular texts were chosen for dissemination.

The second chapter examines the small literary group
in England that encouraged and translated many of
Christine's works, introducing them to the court of Edward
IV and Richard III. I began with an overview of the
Woodville literary circle, then describe and discuss the
persons and personalities of the group. The preferences of
the Woodville circle led to the introduction and
dissemination of Christine de Pizan’s L’Epitre d’Othéa,

lzroverbes Mbrales, Le Livre du Cité des Dames, Le Livre du
(:kDrps de Policie, and Le Livre des Fais d’Armes et de

Chevalerie. Through a comparison of their libraries I was

 

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able to reach a general picture of the circulation and
knowledge of Christine's works among the Woodville circle.

The third chapter offers the reader an overview of
chivalric texts that were available to the Woodville
circle, with the intention of placing Christine's works and
appeal within a larger social/literary context. Framed
between an analysis of Sir John Pastons' reading interests,
including his own work, the Grete Book, the primary focus
of this chapter is a discussion of the scope of chivalric
texts available in fifteenth-century England. Based on this
discussion of chivalric texts, I begin to speculate on the
psychological appeal of Deeds of Arms for the Woodville
circle.

The fourth chapter focuses on Deeds of Arms: I begin
with the origins of the text, looking at John the
Fearless’s request for Christine to write the work, then I
discuss her own background in regards to Mirror for Princes
texts, the construction of the text, and Christine's
portrait of the ideal knight and her understanding of the
aristocratic mystique and its connection with early modern
individualist thought.

Chapter Five extends this inquiry into the influences

Of’ Deeds of Arms. Christine's direct popularity fell in

Enggland by 1545, and so this chapter looks at the rise of

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Christine’s indirect influences on Renaissance views of
chivalry. I have divided this chapter into three parts: the
first part considers the arguments for and against her
position in the early modern canon; the second part builds
on this to discuss Christine and Deeds of Arms’s
affiliation with and influence on medieval political
thought; the third part pursues the influence of Deeds of
Arms on Elizabethan popular culture, namely Shakespeare’s
Henry V, which shows some identifiable parallels in thought
and political philosophy with Deeds of Arms.

The sixth chapter draws together the speculations and
theoretical musings I have offered since the third chapter:
what were the implications of someone like Sir John Paston
reading Christine de Pizan? What was the appeal? Drawing
on the contemporary gender and queer theory of Judith
Butler and Jonathan Dollimore, I explore Christine’s ludic
play on identity and her ‘performance' as a gender
dysphoric writer.

It is highly likely that Sir John was able to peel
back the layers of queerness in Christine's presentation of
(l) a woman writing, (2) a book on chivalry, (3) using a
Imanly female persona, (4) which tells men how to perform in

COdth and battle, (5) while speaking to the men with a

Pelrsonal tone that is outside of cultural norms, (6) and

 

 

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stating that she was just as qualified to know this
information as men were.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore boundaries:
to find the scope of the Woodville literary circle, to
define and undefined chivalric texts, to discover how
Christine defined masculinity and through her explorations,
discover how Christine defined the boundaries of herself.
To interrogate a boundary is to test its edges -- to see
how far it can be pushed out, and how far it can be
stretched or crushed into itself before it loses its form
or essence. I question the dividing lines between medieval
and modern, the limits and inclusions of reader-identity,
and the nature of the “queer” in medieval literature.

In my pursuit of these boundaries I rely on the
invaluable criticism of historian Lee Patterson, who has
provided Medievalists with an astonishingly fertile ground
of inquiry by renovating Medieval Studies. In this
dissertation I rise to Patterson’s charge that “what needs
to be challenged is the crude binarism that locates
modernity (“us”) on one side and premodernity (“them”) on
the other, thus condemning the Middle Ages to the role of
aill—purpose alternative” (“Margin” 93), and part of my

Efiirticular challenge is to the idea that the generation of

mociern identity did not begin with the Renaissance, but

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existed in the Medieval mind as well. Patterson insists
upon “the connection between writing and the making of
history,” leading to “knowing that the understanding of the
past determines the shape of the future” (“Margin” 107).

It is upon this understanding of the Medieval and Early
Modern that I am able to build my argument in my final
chapter on the queerness of Christine. Interrogating
boundaries brings us back to the issue of Christine's
influence, the provocative nature of her writings, and the
fact that her imagination captured her contemporary readers

as much as in the present it captures us.

*************

I would like to thank Dr. Evelyn Gajowski for her
suggestion of the title “Interrogating Boundaries.” Her
eternal enthusiasm for Shakespeare and her faith in me and
professional guidance will always be a source of
inspiration. My deepest thanks to Dr. Lister Matheson for
his patience, perpetual good humor and encouragement

despite the fact that we live in interesting times.

 

Chapter One
The Provenance of the Works of Christine de Pizan

in Fifteenth-Century England

In order to begin a study of the influences and
reception of Christine de Pizan in fifteenth-century
England, it is necessary to determine which manuscripts
were used by her readers, translators, and printers in
England. While others have preceded me in this task, they
have concerned themselves with the provenance and reception
of individual texts, instead of looking at the larger
picture.1 My aim in this chapter is to gather together the
provenances of Christine's works that were translated into
Middle English in order to determine the scope of the
general circulation and knowledge of her works in late
medieval England.

The texts that were translated into Middle English
are: L’Epitre au Dieu d’Amours or The Letter of Cupid
(1399); L’Epitre d’Othéa or The Letter of Othea (1400);
Proverbes Mbraulx or Morale Proverbes (1400-1401); Le Livre
de la Cité des Dames or The Book of the City of Ladies
(1405); Le Livre du Corps de Policie or The Book of the
Body of Policy (1406); and Le Livre des Fais d’Armes et de

_

1 See Bfihler, Byles, Campbell, Curnow, Fenster and Erler, Hindman,
and Willard.

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Chevalerie or The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry
(1410). Beginning with discussing provenance as it applies
to Christine's works, we will then as a master example
follow the determination of the alleged provenance of BL
MS. Harley 4431, then identify for each above work the
applicable French manuscripts and their provenance, and the
English manuscripts and incunabula and their provenance.
Finally, I will suggest the nature of why these particular
texts were chosen for dissemination, in order to explore
the characteristics and range of Christine's original
readership and the implications for our understanding of
the audience for her prose works in late medieval and early

modern England.

I. Provenance of Christine's Works

The problem of identifying Christine’s manuscripts in
fifteenth-century England has been somewhat eased by the
work of bibliographers Kennedy and Yenal, but the question
of provenance is still uncertain for many works.

Provenance is “the pedigree of a book’s previous ownership”
according to John Carter (166), and the evidence of
provenance is used to determine information about the

owners of a book. This information can be determined from

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armorial bearings stamped in gold on bindings, stamped
names, initials or mottoes, and notes of ownership in
manuscripts. A binding style or decoration may identify
the traditional style of a previous owner, but “the fact
that a particular volume has stamped on its covers the arms
of an historical figure does not necess-arily mean that the
book ever belonged to or was in the library of such a
person” (Nikirk 20). Louis XV, for example, regularly gave
copies of books as gifts each year that bore his arms on
their bindings. Christine herself made many presentation
copies in hopes of royal patronage, and ostensibly these
copies were bound in a way that would be favorable to her
desired patron.2 In determining ownership one must always
follow what Paul Needham designates the (Neil R.) ‘Ker' law
of provenance: Identification of ownerships should be based
on definable and classifiable evidence (541).

The evidence that most readily contributes towards

identifying provenance can also be determined from the

 

2 According to Willard, “These manuscripts, written on vellum and
handsomely illustrated, were prepared for the royal bibliophiles of the
French court. Among these is the Harley 4431...a presentation copy for
the Queen of France. Others are the Due de Berry's Cite des Dames (BN
Fonds. Fr. 607), his Epistre d’Othéa (BN Fonds. Fr. 606), and the Due
de Burgundy's MDtacion de Fortune (Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale 9508)”
(“Trois Vertus” 435). J. C. Laidlaw points out: “Miniatures painted at
the beginning of extant copies of the Debat des deux amans, the Livre
des Trois jugemens, and the Epistre d’Othéa show Christine presenting
her work to her patron. Thus the dedication of a work to a patron can

be taken to imply the preparation of a presentation copy” (“Publisher”
41).

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interior of a book: from “book plates displaying arms or
names or both; a name or a motto written on a fly-leaf or
on the title page; perhaps a shelf mark or auction lot
number; or a clipping from an old catalogue” (Nikirk 21).
From this, one might think it would be easy to determine
the provenance of a magnificent manuscript like the
‘Queen's Text' Harley 4431, where Christine herself is
depicted in an illumination presenting the manuscript to
Isabeau of Bavaria. Christine controlled the copying and
illustrations of her works, and her portrait is found in
all of her presentation copies and in many of her works
copied after her lifetime, making her an easily recognized
character (Dufresne 106).3 But the BL Harleian manuscript
catalogue as late as 1808 noted that
mthis book, which seems originally to have been
written for some exalted personage, has a mark in it
which shows that it was once also in the collection of
the Duke of Newcastle.... To whom it had belonged in
France does not appear. (144)

Was the exact provenance unclear in 1808 because of lack of

evidence?‘ This is unlikely, as historian Sir Frederic

 

3 Some good examples are in the BL Harley 4431, Boston Public
Library Fr. Med 101, Brussels Bibliotheque Royale 9551-2, Brussels
Bibliotheque Royale 9235-7, Yale Beinecke 427, and Paris BN f. fr.
1177.

‘The flyleaf may be seen reproduced by F. Madden in his
“Narratives of the Arrival of Louis of Bruges, seigneur de la

Gruythuyse, in England, and of his creation as Earl of Winchester in

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Madden in 1836 was able to establish a clear-cut provenance
for Harley 4431. Was it because of a lack of necessity for
elaborate cataloguing? Most likely, as Nikirk points out:
Since booksellers' catalogues reflect the collecting
tastes and standards of their time, until compara-
tively recently catalogues listed only author, title,
place of printing, date, and size. For up until at
least the early nineteenth century, few collectors
bought books from the viewpoint of provenance. (27-28)
The Harleian catalogue of 1808, then, would appear to be
exceedingly informational by these terms. Indeed, Nikirk
notes:
muntil the preSsure of scarcity occurred in post-war
times, not even a Gutenberg Bible up for sale in the
old London auction houses would move the cataloguers
to paroxysms of description. (37)
Thus researchers of provenance in that light, it seems,
ought to be grateful for the Harley cataloger's verbosity.
Provenance researchers must often rely on the
descriptions in catalogues. Unfortunately, sometimes a
description in a catalogue is all we have left of a

manuscript or incunabulum, as is the case of what appears

to be an early printed edition of the Letter of Cupid.5

 

5 Known as “Le Centre roman de la Rose nomme le Gratia Del," this
incunabulum.is “the only known copy of [the] early printed edition of
the Epistre au Dieu d'Amours” (Kennedy 78), once held by the Biblioteca
Colombina in Seville, a library formed by Fernand Colomb between 1510
and 1539. Curator H. Harisse noted in the Colombine's 1887 catalogue
that “Ce livre, dérobé a la Colombina, a été vendu a Paris en 1884 pour
60 frs" (80), and Maurice Roy substantiates the theft, stating that the
manuscript was “acquis en 1884 par M. Le baron Pichon” (II, ix). All
we know of the incunabulum is that “11 consiste en une plaquette in-12
de quelques feuilles, sans date ni nom d’imprimeur," and Roy speculates

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Determining the provenance of a manuscript or incunabulum
can be difficult and frustrating, but it can also provide
an insight into collecting motives, and for the purpose of
this chapter, provide an understanding of the original
readership and its implications in a specific time period.
My identification of the manuscripts suspected to be
used by Christine's readers, translators, and printers was
approached in the following manner: using Kennedy and
Yenal's bibliographies, I made a list of Christine's works
that had been printed in English between 1489 and 1721.
From this list of six works I compiled a list of extant
manuscripts that might have been accessible to French and
English readers. From this list I determined a list of
libraries that held the manuscripts in, and extracted all
available catalogue descriptions of the manuscripts. Some
manuscript catalogues, especially those of the 1868
Bibliotheque Impériale catalogue part of the Bibliotheque

Nationale, which has a majority of Christine’s manu—

 

that “Gette edition, fautive comme toutes celles de son epoque, parait
cependent avoir été établie sur un bon texte, c’est-a—dire d’aprés un
ms. de la famille A” of which he means a family of texts close to A} (BN
f. fr. 835, 606,836, and 605) and A? (BL Harley 4431) (II, ix). Neither
Roy nor Kennedy's research states why a book stolen from the Colombine
prior to 1884 would be listed in the 1887 catalogue, nor how the
curator knew of its ‘fenced’ price, nor how Maurice Roy came to know of
the owner of the ‘hot' incunabulum, nor how Baron Pichon managed to
keep the work once it was discovered that it was stolen, nor what
happened to the work after Baron Pichon bought it. Unless auction
records of the Pichon estate are brought to light, the intriguing trail
of this incunabulum is lost. Thus we see the advantages and
disadvantages of relying on catalogues, as the descriptions can become
detective mysteries in themselves.

14

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scripts), gave only title, author, and a quote from the
first and last sentences of the work. This was not
surprising, based on Nikirk's observations on the nature of
catalogue descriptions. The result was a list of 96 extant
manuscripts that were possible sources for readers,
manuscript translations and early printed editions in
Middle English. During my research, I also discovered
mistaken numbering (Bodley 824 for 821), mistaken work
title identification (Paris BN f. fr. 812), and a
manuscript that had been completely missed by a major
Christine scholar (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Add. 48). Such is

the nature of provenance research.
II. BL Harley MS 4431 or ‘Queen’s Text’

Before describing the provenances of the individual
manuscripts, it is important to briefly discuss the
provenance of British Library Harley MS 4431, the ‘Queen’s
Text.’ This manuscript, dating from 1415, is considered
the ‘signature’ manuscript for many of Christine's works,
as it is a compilation by Christine herself of 29 separate

works, marking the “culmination of Christine’s literary

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career” (Hindman 93).6 It is important to discuss first not
only because it contains manuscript versions of four of the
six texts that were translated into Middle English, but
also because it has a clear provenance from which one can
model other provenance descriptions.

Cyril Ernest Wright, the Deputy Keeper of the
Department of Manuscripts of the Harley Collection,
accepted (in 1972) for the ‘Queen’s Text’ the ownership of
Isabeau of Bavaria (1371-1435), wife of Charles VI, and
Henry Cavendish, the second Duke of Newcastle (1630-1691),
and yet there are many more signatures on the frontispiece

(folio C1) of Harley 4431 than just Cavendish's.7

 

‘ The “Queen's Text” or “Queen’s Manuscript” (1415) contains the
following works: Dedication to the Queen, Cent Balades, Autres
Ballades, Plusiers Autres Ballades, Virelais, Rondeaux, Balades
D'Estrange Facon, Lais, Jeux a vendre, L’Epistre Au Dieu d’Amours, Le
Debat De Deux Amans, Le Livre Des Trois JUgemens, L’Epistre d’Othéa,
Les Enseignements Mbraux, Les Proverbes Mbraux, Les Epistres Sur Le
Roman De La Rose, L'Oroyson Nbstre Seigneur, L'Oroyson Nbstre Dame, Les
Quinze Joyes Nbstre Dame, Le Livre Du Chemin De Long Estude, Le Dit De
La Pastoure, L’Epistre A Eustache Morel, Le Livre Du Duc Des vrais
Amans, Le Livre des Trois vertues, Le Livre Da La Cité Des Dames, Le
Livre De Prudence, Complaintes Amoureuses, Encore Autres Ballades, Cent
Ballades D'Amant Et De Dame.

7The construction of Harley 4431 has been under debate. Laidlaw
suggests that the “Queen's Text” was the result of a single effort
(“Publisher” 66); Hindman suggests that it was the result of a
compilation of previously written works. She argues that, “In her
dedications, Christine usually described the circumstances underlying
the composition and presentation of her work, and she did so with a
historical exactitude that was perhaps unusual for writers of her time.
These few hints from the author, coupled with the more telling physical
evidence, appear to sustain the hypothesis that the Queen had asked
Christine to make a book that consisted of her complete works and which
was formed by joining those books already owned by the Queen with
Others, newly written, that the Queen did not yet possess" (112). This
is a very persuasive argument, as it would not have been the first time

16

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Uncovering these two previous owners was not difficult: the
text is shown being presented to Isabeau in an illustration
on the frontispiece, and the illustration itself cleverly
contains Charles VI's insignia. The signature of Cavendish
must also have been easily identified, as the Cavendish-
Holles Library was removed from Welbeck and sent whole to
the Harley estate following the death of Edward Harley's
mother-in-law, the Duchess of Newcastle, in 1716. Wright
justifies his decision by explaining that:
Formal ex libris inscriptions in manuscripts offer as
a matter of principle no difficulty...Where a name is
written with obvious care, or one might say
calligraphically, in a manuscript in a conspicuous
place such as the first page of the text or
prominently and neatly on a flyleaf or even a paste-
down, I have assumed it to be that of the owner. (45)
This explanation is in accord with Nikirk, Carter, and
Needham’s suggestions, and even follows the ‘Ker' law of
provenance. It is also (at least) an expansion from the
1808 notation where the cataloguers acknowledge only the
Duke of Newcastle and have no idea to whom it belonged
originally in France. What about the other signatures?
Wright does not acknowledge them, following his principle
that, “Names scribbled in a manuscript whether on flyleaves

or in the margins present more difficulty, but they may be

important in supplying a pointer to a possible source or

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that Christine responded to a book request; for example, her biography
0f Charles V and Deeds of Arms were requested works.

17

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provenance or locality of circulation, more particularly so
if they occur in groups; they are therefore recorded” (45,
italics his). Therefore, according to Wright, the
‘scribbled’ names present on fol. Ch were not important
enough to be recorded.

Hindman disagrees with this decision, and protests the
strictness of Wright's determination of provenance (despite
the ‘Ker' law), saying that:

Although such caution is commendable, it seems to be

too conservative when such close ties can be shown to

exist between successive owners and when it seems to
have been unusual to sign a book except as an

indication of ownership. (“Reassessment” 120)
Hindman's protestation is supported by the conclusions of
Madden and Roy regarding the signatures on one of the
flyleaves (fol. C1), where several bibliophiles or owners
have signed their names. The earliest signature on the
flyleaf is of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, whom John of Bedford
(d. 1435) married in 1432 as a second wife, and she also
wrote her motto, Sur tous autres, under her name. Hindman
surmises that, “If Jacquetta owned the book, as it seems
likely, she might have acquired it from her husband, the
Duke of Bedford, who was regent of France following the
death of Charles VI in 1422 and who in this capacity

appropriated many royal belongings” (96). Roy suggests that

the actual date was 1425 for the ‘appropriation’ of the

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text from Royal Library (III, xxi). Two years after the
Duke of Bedford died, Jacquetta was remarried to Sir
Richard Woodville, who became Earl Rivers in 1466. Beside
her signature is that of her son Anthony Woodville (d.
1483), the eldest son by her second husband, accompanied by
his motto NUlle la vault. Beneath Woodville’s is the
signature of Louis of Bruges (d. 1492) who beneath it wrote
Plus est en vous, Gruthuse, although Hindman points out
that Harley 4431 appears in none of his inventories.
Finally, Henry Cavendish signed the work, adding His boke,
1676 [sic], and it was through his heirs that the book came
into the Harley family library in 1716, and later into the
possession of the British Library in 1753.

Despite ‘Ker’s law’ and Wright’s choice of non—
inclusion, when three scholars agree on approving the
provenance of a work based on historical and paleographical
evidence, one should take such designations of provenance
seriously. Indeed, the links between Woodville and William
Caxton, the printer, are strengthened because of the
(alleged provenance of Harley 4431. Unfortunately,
determining the reading practices of the Duke of Bedford is
not clarified by this designation; while it is possible he
appropriated the Queen’s Text because he was interested in

its contents, its author, or its reflection of the

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Burgundian court, it is also equally possible that he took
the manuscript because of the value of its rich illumin-
ations. One cannot imagine that much discrimination was
made between literature and ‘eye-candy' in the 1425 pillage

of the French Royal Library.

III. The Letter of Cupid

The provenance of the Epistre au Dieu d'Amours (1399)
is difficult to determine, and indeed for the purposes of
this chapter, not entirely necessary, as Hoccleve's
translation/ adaptation was available for English readers
in 1402.8 Christine’s French work survives in eight French
manuscripts: Chantilly, Musée Condé 492; London, BL Harley
4431; London, Westminster Abbey Library 21; Paris, Arsenal
3295; Paris BN f. fr. 604; Paris BN f. fr. 835; Paris BN f.
fr. 12779; and Paris, BN Moreau 1686. From these we can
eliminate BL Harley 4431 as it has been discussed above.

Three of the manuscripts can be grouped together, as they

 

9 Fenster and Erler point out, “Hoccleve’s principal debt, of
course, is to Christine’s poem, though as numerous readers have
noticed, his version might more accurately be called an adaptation
rather than a translation. Christine’s order is considerably
rearranged as lines or sections of her poem are juxtaposed in new
combinations to create an English poem slightly more than half the
French one’s length. Hoccleve's frequent practice is to translate a
sentence of Christine's as the first two or three lines of a stanza,
then to fill the rest of the stanza with his reflections on her
sentiments, or his expansion of them”(l60).

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are considered to be copies of a lost original, prepared
close to 1399. The first of these is the Chantilly, Musée
Condé 492, which was listed by Roy as having been sold in
1882 by the Count of Toustain to the booksellers Morgand
and Fatout; it was acquired by the Library at Chantilly in
1888 (I, xix). The second is Paris BN f. fr. 12779, which,
according to Fenster and Erler “was owned in the eighteenth
century by Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye, who had two copies
made of it, presently codified as B.N. Moreau 1686 and
Arsenal 3295” (24). And the third is Paris BN f. fr. 604,
an incomplete manuscript, of which Epistre au Dieu d’Amours
is the thirteenth part of a collection of Christine’s works
on vellum (beginning on fol. 51), and whose provenance is
unknown. London, Westminster Abbey Library 21, is a
manuscript that follows an exemplar not unlike Harley 4431.
Christine scholars consider it to be a defective
manuscript, as it is a miscellaneous collection of works
from the 1430-403 that happens to include three of
Christine’s writings (Fenster and Erler, 24). Its
provenance is unknown.

Paris BN f. fr. 835 is actually a section of a larger
collection called the ‘Duke’s Manuscript,’ known to have
been originally prepared for the Duke of Orleans, but after

his murder in 1407 the new recipient of the work was the

21

Duke of Berry, who paid a high price for the manuscript and
added it to his library in 1408-09 (Laidlaw “Publisher”
58). Somehow, the ‘Duke's Manuscript' was taken apart and
rebound sometime between 1409 and 1523 when Pierre Antoine,
a commissioner for Francois Iufl inventoried the library of
the Duke (Roy I, xi). The manuscripts are now (in order)
BN F. Fr. 835, 606, 836, 605, and 607. Epistre au Dieu
d'Amours is in the ninth part of the collection in F. Fr.
835 (beginning on fol. 45) on vellum. That the manuscript
was once a single volume is confirmed by the signature of
the Duke at the end of folio 607, “Ce livre est au duc de
Berry. Jehan.” In 1523, Francois Iex confiscated the
Bourbon properties in Moulin and brought the library to
Paris to the Chateau de Fontainbleau for the King's
pleasure and to help begin the Bibliotheque du Roi of
Charles IX.

As the triplet copy-texts and the ‘Duke’s Manuscripts’
allegedly never left France, it is unlikely they were
available to readers in England. The Westminster manu-
script is a good candidate (since it is in England), but
since its provenance is unknown, the determination is
incomplete. Thus for the purposes of exploring Christine's
readership in England, Hoccleve's 1402 translation/adapt-

ation attracts the most attention. In late 1399 Christine

22

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sent her thirteen-year-old son Jean de Castel to England to
provide companionship for the two sons of the Earl of
Salisbury. With her son and Salisbury went copies of her
works, a collection of poetry that included Epistre au Dieu
d'Amours. This set was not bound into one book (as
Christine did not make her first book until 1402) but was a
group of separate presentation-quality manuscripts (Laidlaw
“Salisbury” 135). It was a copy made from this group of
manuscripts that Thomas Hoccleve used to write his Letter
of Cupid in 1402. J.C. Laidlaw suggests that “the
manuscript of Epistre au Dieu d'Amours on which Hoccleve
relied for his Letter of Cupid was probably a presentation
copy. It may have been sent to Salisbury and then have
passed into the king's hands. Alternatively, it may have
been presented directly to the king” (“Salisbury” 136).
Unfortunately, “it seems unlikely that the manuscript
survives from which Hoccleve made his translation” (Fenster
and Erler 171), as “very few of these early, separate
copies of Christine’s works survive today, and none that
can be linked with Salisbury or Henry IV” (Laidlaw
“Salisbury” 136). From the point of view of determining
provenance or readership of any French manuscript of the
Epistre au Dieu d’Amours read in England, the trail ends.

Yet the Hoccleve translation/ adaptation of the work

23

 

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had a healthy dissemination of its own, surviving in eleven
English manuscripts and several sixteenth-century editions.9
The readers of Hoccleve's translation/adaptation did not
realize they were reading either Christine or Hoccleve’s
poem because the work was attributed to Chaucer in all
editions until 1532 (Fenster and Erler 172). It wasn’t
until 1598 that Thomas Speght’s edition correctly named
Hoccleve as author, but even as late as 1718 the poet
George Sewell argued that the poem was nevertheless
Chaucer’s work. B. Lintot finally printed the poem with a
proper assignment in 1721. Indeed, it is possible that the
work was not available to the public in French, literate or
general, until Roy published Christine's collection in
1885. The audience for Christine’s work would have to be
determined through the popularity of Hoccleve’s poem, but
that is a poor way of determining readership. TherefOre,
the provenance of Epistre au Dieu d'Amours does not assist

us in broadening our understanding.”

 

9 Letter of Cupid survives in Bodleian use 1782, 2078, 3354, 3896,
10173; Cambridge University MS Ff. 1.6; the Trinity College Cambridge
600; the Advocates 1.1.6; Durham University Cosin V.ii.13; Huntington
Library MS HM 744; and extracts in BL Additional 17492.

N There is a suggestion of a connection between Scrope's Letter
of Othea and Hbccleve's Letter of cupid in that Sir John Astley read
them both. Scrope dedicated (c. 1460) what is now Pierpont Morgan
Library manuscript M775 to Sir John Astley, and the Astley family
armorial bearings are found on Oxford Bodley 638, a manuscript dating
from 1450-1475 that contains works by Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Letter

24

 

.4 I

“L‘

IV. The Letter of Othea

The provenances of Christine's manuscripts of
L'Epistre d'Othéa la déesse, que Elle Envoya a Hector de
Troye Quant Il Estoit en l'Age de Quinze Ans“ (1400) lead
us almost immediately to the Woodville literary circle, as
the work was brought to England and translated early in the
fifteenth century. L'Epistre d'Othéa is found in 47
manuscripts of which 6 have clear provenances that indicate
they were available to English readers. Like Epistre au
Dieu d'Amours, the Epistre d’Othéa was translated into
English, and while it was not done during Christine's
lifetime, the translation took place not long after her
death.12 For the purposes of this chapter, I shall focus
on the manuscripts that either have a clear provenance, or

provide a clue to the connection with readers in England.

 

of Cupid by Hoccleve on fol. 38v. Astley appears to be at least
peripherally included in the Woodville literary circle.

“ Translated as The Letter of the Goddess Othea, which she sent
to Hector of Troy when He was Fifteen Years Old.

” Some manuscripts of L’Epistre d'Othéa were copied in the 15th
century, but are in books that contain other works. Paris, BN f. fr.
1185 and 1644 manuscripts only contain L'Epistre d'Othéa, but Paris, BN
f. fr. 1186 contains L'Epistre d'Othéa as well as a La Dance aux
Aveugles by Guillaume Machault and an anonymous La Danse Macabre. It
is a paper manuscript with colored images, and the Catalogue of the
Bibliothéque Imperiale lists it as dated in 1482. The Paris, BN f. fr.
1187, 2141 and 5026 and the Oxford, Bodley, 421 also contain L'Epistre
d'Othéa in addition to other works.

25

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The provenances of the French manuscripts of L'Epistre
d'Othéa can be divided in four different areas, as the
manuscripts were dedicated to four different patrons: the
Duke of Orleans (18 M83), Berry (2 M88), and Burgundy (3
M85), and to Henry IV of England (2 M88). Laidlaw points
out that “in the extant copies the dedication found most
frequently is that to the Duke of Orleans” (‘Publisher”
41). L'Epistre d'Othéa in Paris BN f. fr. 606 is a part of
the aforementioned ‘Duke's manuscript,’ and Paris BN f. fr.
848 is the earliest copy of L'Epistre d'Othéa that was
dedicated to the Duke of Orleans. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam
Add. 49, CFM 22 contains a dedication to the Duke of
Orleans, and the Fitzwilliam catalogue notes that it was
once in the hands of a French convent, although the
ownership note is “obliterated.” C. Fairfax Murray (who
also owned a copy of Fais d’Armes) gave it to the Fitz-
william in 1905. The Duchess of Orleans also appears to
.have been a patron who enjoyed L’Epistre d’Othéa, as she
had a copy prepared for her, now Paris BN f. fr. 604. It
was copied from Chantilly, Musée Condé 492-93, a sister-
text to Paris BN f. fr. 12779, which were both collections
of the works Christine first had copied and illustrated
under the author's own supervision (Laidlaw “Author” 533).

Paris BN f. fr. 604 was prepared for Valentina, Duchess of

26

 

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Orleans who, according to the inventory of her possessions
drawn up after her death in 1408, owned two other
manuscripts of Christine’s works. Her ownership, indicated
in the 1417 catalogue of the library at Blois made for the
records of Charles of Orleans, reads “Le livre de Christine
fait pour feue madame d’Orleans, convert de rouge marqueté”
(Delisle 106). While there is no way to tell whether the
book was prepared as a present or as a commission, the
royal patronage of the House of Orleans is indubitable.

A work as popular as L'Epistre d'Othéa (judging from
the number of surviving manuscripts and extant early
printed editions) was no doubt brought to and copied in
England early in the fifteenth century, probably not too
long after it arrived in 1425, as article #17 in the
‘Queen's Manuscript,’ Harley 4431 (Roy III, xxi).:13 Three
manuscripts show evidence of having been copied by English
scribes: Oxford Bodleian Laud 570 was copied in England
between 1425-1440 (Buhler "Fastolf" 128). London, BL
Harley 219 contains Epistre d’Othéa as a fifth text, and
the Harley cataloger notes that the manuscript was “Mis en
vers Francois, et dedié a Charles V..Roy de France, par
Christine fille de Thomas de Pizan de Buloin 1e Graffe, et

Conseiller du mesme Roys avec Commentaires amples la

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n For 1425 date, see Roy; for 1415 date, see Bfihler.

27

 

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dessus.” P.G.C. Campbell proposed that the manuscript was
the work of a fifteenth-century English scribe, “qui
connait mal les sons du francais et altere souvent les
mots: on trouve, par exemple, greek pour grec, uncore,
taunt (tant), countre (contrée), lesson (lecon), Joeudy
(jeudi) etc” (664). This suggests that the manuscript was
copied in England, and that it was the faulty scribe (and
not the cataloger) who misascertained that the work was
dedicated to Charles V (as he had died in 1385) instead of
Charles VI. And finally, London, BL Royal 14.E.II was made
at the request of Edward IV between 1473 and 1483, and was
copied by an English scribe from a French original
currently in Brussels (Campbell 665).14

Like Epistre au Dieu d'Amours, Epistre d'Othéa was
translated into English, but its significance differs as a
result of the work's popularity. BUhler points out that,
“Not many French contributions of so early a date aroused
sufficient interest to call forth three separate English
translations within the space of a hundred years, so that
on this basis, too, Othea must be regarded as a work of
considerable literary significance” (“Othea” xiii).

Debating the importance of Othéa is not the focus of this

¥

11Also in the Brussels Bibliotheque Royale is Jean Miélot’s
Burgundian revision of L'Epistre d'Othéa (Bibliotheque Royale 9392),
Completed around 1455, an indicator of “a new wave of interest in
Christine’s writings at [the Burgundian] court” (Willard “Paix” 91).

28

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chapter, but Bfihler's point regarding the number of
translations and printings certainly has merit. The French
work was first printed in Paris in 1499 by Philippe
Pigouchet, then by an unknown printer in Lyon in 1519, then
by Philippe Le Noir in Paris in 1522, and three more
editions by later printers followed: thus the French editio
(princeps went through six editions in twenty-five years.
Stephen Scrope's English translation of Epistre d'Othéa as
The Epistle of Othea to Hector, or, the Boke of Knyghthode
(c. 1454) survives in six manuscripts (BUhler "Fastolf"
128). It was translated by Anthony Babyngton in 1537 (found
solely in BL Harley 838), and translated and printed in
1540 by Robert Wyer.

It is the Scrope translation, however, that appears to
have had the widest audience. It was mentioned in the
Paston Letters in 1468 (Davis "Modern" 168n.2), and
according to Bfihler, “other manuscripts of Scrope's
translation must have once existed” (“Othea" xvii). The
missing manuscripts begin with Scrope’s working copy, the
actual presentation copy to Fastolf, the one to Buckingham,
the one to a “High Princess,” and the two owned by Sir John

Paston (“Othea” xvii).15 This indicates that a larger group

——_

n In determining which manuscript Stephen Scrope used for his
translation, BUhler came to the conclusion that three manuscripts were
candidates: Paris, BN Fonds. Fr. 12438, Paris, BN nouv. acq. Fr. 6458,

29

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of readers had access to Scrope’s Letter of Othea, possibly
as many as had access to the literary circle connecting
Scrope, Worcester, Fastolf, Woodville, and Caxton. Stephen
Scrope was the stepson, ward, and secretary of Sir John
Fastolf, and William Worcester was a secretary to Fastolf
as well. Earl Rivers (born Anthony Woodville) and Sir John
Fastolf were connected through service in the wars in
France, and Woodville, the brother-in-law to Edward IV, was
also a good friend and patron of William Caxton. The
Woodville literary circle thus provides a greater picture
of the circulation and knowledge of Christine’s works in

England, and merits further consideration.

and Oxford Bodleian, Laud 570 are all dedicated to Jean de Berry.
Scrope says in his introduction that Christine compiled the work for
the Duke, and so it was necessary to find a manuscript that contained
that dedication. Bflhler then eliminated the Paris manuscripts as
unaccessible, and that left Laud 570, a decision supported by six
corresponding “misreadings” in both the Scrope and Laud texts that are
found in no other texts. Since Laud 570 also contains the motto of Sir
John Fastolf, Me fault faire, on folios 23 and 93, BUhler asks, “What
could be more natural than to suppose that Laud 570 was the very
manuscript which Scrope held in his hand while making his translation
of Christine's work?” (“Fastolf” 126). But this is not to be, as
Bfihler finds three errors in the Laud manuscript that do not appear in
the Scrope translation (“Fastolf” 127). Harley 4431, which BOhler uses
as the authoritative text, likewise avoids these errors. In this
light, Bfihler comes to the conclusion that not only was Laud 570
written in England, but, “If one assumes that a French original was in
the possession of Fastolf about 1440, that Scrope made his translation
from this particular manuscript (apparently no longer extant), and that
in the year 1450 (or 1454) a copy of this French manuscript was made
for Fastolf, all the textual problems are resolved. It seems
reasonable to infer, therefore, that Laud 570 is a “sister-text' to
Scrope’s English version and that both these texts derive from a common
ancestor” (“Fastolf” 128).

30

V..Mbrale Proverbes

The path to the English audience of Christine’s
Proverbes.Mbraulx (1400) is short, and leads almost
immediately to Caxton’s press. Proverbes.Moraulx is
available in four manuscripts: London BL Harley 4431, Paris
BN F. fr. 605, Paris BN f. fr. 812, and Paris BN f. fr.
1990. The first one, the ‘Queen's Manuscript,’ contains
Proverbes Mbraulx on fols. 261v-2633, and the second one is
part IV of the ‘Duke’s Manuscript’. The other two contain
Proverbes Mbraulx as part of a collection of Christine’s
works, each collection being of different works plus the
proverbs. However, there may be more manuscripts yet
unknown in collections, as Kennedy points out “It is
likely that a number of manuscripts of this text have not
yet come to light, since the text is sometimes classified
anonymously in catalogues Sub. Proverbes”(116).

The.Mbrale Proverbes of Christyne was first printed by
Caxton in 1478 at the command of “my special lorde Therle
Ryueris;” three incunabula exist of this printing, but the
manuscript of the English translation is unknown (Blades
II, 47). Woodville inherited the ‘Queen’s Manuscript’ from
his mother Jacquetta of Luxembourg, and this is a likely

source of Woodville’s translation. But if this is so, then

31

why did he not translate other equally didactic works in
the manuscript? It is possible that Woodville never looked
at his mother’s manuscript for translation purposes at all,
but instead used the copy received from his meeting with
Louis de Bretaylles, a Gascon Knight, with whom he sailed
in 1473 on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of
Compostella. During the voyage, Bretaylles gave him his
copy of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, which
Woodville translated and Caxton then printed in 1477
(Blades II, 39). It is interesting to note that Paris, BN
f. fr. 812 has both a French version of Christine’s
Proverbes Mbraulx and a French translation of Les Dis
Mbraulx des Philosophez in it, and the presence of the two
works of similar didactic tone together suggests that it
was not uncommon for them to be associated in one
manuscript. Unfortunately, Christine’s readership of
Mbrale Proverbes cannot be certain from such a small number
of manuscripts and incunabula, but, like Letter of Othea,
an examination of the Woodville literary circle will shed
new light on addressing the scope of her general

circulation.

32

VI. The City of Ladies

Like Woodville's translation of.Mbrale Proverbes,
Christine's Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) had a
lbmited circulation in English, but it had a large
circulation in French and Flemish. Maureen Curnow states,
“copies of Cité des Dames were to be found in the royal
library, as well as in the libraries of the noblemen and
noblewomen of the houses of Berry, Burgundy, Orleans,
Bourbon, and Savoy; other copies were owned by members of
the lesser nobility, by members of the bourgeois class, and
by religious order houses” (118). Nineteen manuscripts
were possibly accessible to English readers: like.Mbraulx
Proverbes, the Cité des Dames is in both the ‘Queen's
Manuscript,’ Harley 4431, on fols. 292a-375b and the
‘Duke's Manuscript,’ BN f. fr. 607, in part V. Several
texts exist in single manuscripts: Paris, BN f. fr. 609,
1178, 1179 are separate manuscripts, illustrated and with
ornate capitals, containing no other texts but Cité; Paris,
BN f. fr. 608 is likewise a separate manuscript, but unlike
the others it is unillustrated.

Several manuscripts place Cité des Dames as well as
Livre des Trois vertus together as sister-works. One of

these is Brussels Bibliotheque Royale 9235-9237, a copy

33

made around 1450-1475 for the Croy family that was later
the property of Marguerite d'Autriche (Willard “Trois
Vertus" 439). Another is Paris, BN f. fr. 1177, a copy made
around 1460 for Louis of Bruges, and it has “traces of its
passage through Louis XII’s collection...evident in the
shelfmarks for the library at Blois” (Willard “Trois
Vertus” 439). And Paris, BN f. fr. 1182 contains Cité des
Dames in an unusual combination with Le Livre de Paix, as
well as two other minor texts.

The above manuscript provenances do not suggest a
close relation to English readers, and so we must turn to
BL Harley 4431 and London BL Royal 19.A.XIX, as it appears
that both were in England in the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries. The latter manuscript, according to
Curnow, was copied in France, but the British Library
catalogue suggests that the white rose of York and the
fetterlock (without a falcon) on the lower part of the
first decorative border may show ownership by Richard,
Third Duke of York (1411-1460). His daughter Margaret was
married to the Duke of Burgundy (who himself owned three
manuscripts of Cité des Dames), and his son Edward IV owned
two copies of L’Epistre d'Othéa. Curnow states that it was
BL Royal 19.A.XIX (or a close relation) that Bryan Anslay

used for his translation into English (123).

34

Henry Pepwell's printing of Brian Anslay’s translation
as The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes (1521) was done at the
request of Richard Grey, Earl of Kent. No manuscript of
the translation has survived, but the printed text is
extant in two copies and one fragment (Bornstein “Distaves”
xiii). There is a question about the woodcuts that
illustrate the printed work, as they are remarkably similar
to those in the ‘Queen’s Manuscript,’ but Curnow suggests
that either Pepwell (a member of the court of Henry VIII)
or Anslay (a yeoman of the wine cellar of Henry VIII) were
both in the position to be able to consult the ‘Queen's
Manuscript' for the design of the woodcuts because of their
connection with the court. As Richard Grey was the nephew
of Anthony Woodville, one of Christine's works again owes

its reproduction to the Woodville literary circle.

VII. The Body of Policy

The English readers of The Body of Policy also owe
their reading pleasure to the Woodville literary group,
although through a different chain of provenance than seen
previously. Nine French manuscripts of Christine's Le
Livre du Corps de Policie (1406) survive, but only one has

a clear provenance: Paris, BN f. fr. 12439 is Philip le

35

Bon’s copy of Corps de Policie (Willard “Trois Vertus”
435n). Its sister-texts are Brussels Bibliotheque Royale
10440 and London BL Harley 4410, the latter of which is
unfortunately not described with the same attention to
detail as many of the other works in the Harley Library.
The cataloguer gives the first rubric, and notes that, “On
a blank leaf prefixed is an account of the author & her
various works, written in the 17w‘Century, and founded on
the Authority of Labbe, Naudaus, &c.” But no other
relevant provenances are noted.

A second group of sister-texts are Paris BN f. fr.
1197, Paris BN f. fr. 1198-9, Chantilly Musée Condé 294,
Paris Arsénal 2681, and New York Public Library, Spencer
Collection 17. The provenances of these manuscripts are
unknown. Paris, BN f. fr. 1197 and 1199 are illustrated
manuscripts, containing no other texts but Corps de
Policie, and Paris, BN f. fr. 1198 and 1199 is a two-volume
version of the text, also illustrated and with ornate
capitals.

The only text that has been determined to have a link
with England is Chantilly, Musée Condé 294. While the
provenance of this text is unknown, it appears to be the
text closest to the edition printed by John Skot on the 17th

of May, 1521. As Diane Bornstein has pointed out, it was

36

uncertain for many years as to whether Cambridge,
University Library MS. Kk.1.5. (a manuscript dated from
around 1470) was the basis for Skot's printing. After
studying the textual relationships, Bornstein comes to the
conclusion that:
Skot’s text appears to be printed from a later copy
since the orthography, vocabulary, and some of the
grammatical structures in his version are more modern.
If this were not the case, he must have modernized the
spelling and usage before printing the work...In
almost every case, phrases that appear only in the
English manuscript or only in Skot occur in the
French. The phrasing of the two versions is usually

identical. Therefore, it is evident that they derive
from the same translation. (“Policie” 26)

This conclusion would be a minor point, except for the fact
that the 1470 translation is attributed to Anthony
Woodville. Cambridge, University Library MS. Kk.1.5
contains as its frontispiece the coat of arms of the
Kentish family of Haute, and William Haute married Joan
Woodville, Richard Woodville’s sister, in 1429. The Haute-
Woodville branch of the family was the most likely owners
of Corps de Policie, and the work was probably the
possession of Richard Haute, the second son (Bornstein
“Policie” 18). Richard Haute served in the court of Edward
IV, and was a close friend of his cousin Anthony Woodville,
who made Haute the overseer of his will (Bornstein

“Policie” 19). The manuscript made its way to the library

37

of Richard Holdsworth, Master of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, between 1590 and 1649, and was acquired by the
University after his death.

This literary group therefore encompasses Scrope's
translation of The Letter of Othea, Woodville’s translation
of Mbrale Proverbes, Henry Pepwell’s printing of Brian
Anslay's translation of The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, and
Woodville’s translation of The Book of the Body of Policy.
The choice of these texts in the Woodville circle shows a
similar interest in what was popular in the courtly
Burgundian-influenced circles of Edward IV: “The genres
favored are mythological histories, encyclopedic works,
chronicles, theological treatises, works on scriptural
history, chivalric manuals, and romances” (Bornstein
“Burgundian” 3). Through the work of Caxton, those who
were interested in the reading matter favored in the
Burgundian court could now read the printer's translation

of Christine's Deeds of Armes.
VII. Deeds of Armes

The provenance of Le Livre des Fais d'Armes et de
Chevalerie (1410) follows one of the most interesting

trails of Christine's works. At the request of John the

38

Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, and inspired by Petrarch’s
.letters, Christine wrote a manual which combines a lesson
on princely education and politics, a treatise on practical
strategy and martial law, and a study of the philosophy
that emphasizes Roman virtues. The French texts survive in
seventeen manuscripts, and are divided into two types: the
first acknowledges Christine as author (9 copies), and the
second is anonymous (6 cOpies). The former are, in order of
quality determined by Byles: London BL Royal 15.E.VI;
London BL Royal 19.B.XVIII; London BL Harley 4605; Brussels
Bibliotheque Royale 9009-9011; Brussels Bibliotheque Royale
10476; Paris BN f. fr. 603; Paris BN f. fr. 1183; Paris BN
f. fr. 1241; Paris BN Duchesne 65. The latter are, in
order of quality: Oxford Bodley 821; Brussels Bibliotheque
Royale 10205; Paris BN f. fr. 585; Paris BN f. fr. 1242;
Paris BN f. fr. 1243; Paris BN f. fr. 23997.

In order to examine the provenance of these works, I
will go from the least known to the most known
determinations. Paris BN f. fr. 603, Paris BN f. fr. 1183,
Paris BNf. fr. 23997 and Paris an f. fr. 1242 all bear the
red stamp of the Royal Library with the double monogram of
Louis XV (1710-1774), and one may surmise that the texts
were rebound and added to the library during that time.

According to Byles, Paris, BN Duchesne 65 consists of

39

extracts of literary and historical works (including Fais
d’Armes) written in the hand of the historian Andre
Duchesne (1584-1640) (xxiii). Paris BN f. fr. 1243 and
Paris BN f. fr. 1241 both have on their bindings the arms
of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83), the chief finance
minister to Louis XIV of France. And Cambridge, Fitzwilliam
Add. 48, CFM 21 is, according to the Fitzwilliam catalogue,
a French manuscript from the second half of the 15th
century. It is described as “Ashburnham Barrois 378, Lot
115, Sotheby’s, 10 JUne 1901. Given by C. Fairfax Marray in
1904.” Only the Fitzwilliam manuscript was readily
available to English readers; the others are eliminated
from this study.

The better known provenances include those of Oxford
Bodley 821, Paris, BN f. fr. 585, and Harvard, Houghton
Lib. 168. Bodley, 821 is of English origin, judging from
the binding of stamped, white parchment on boards,
suggested by Byles to be typical of English work in the
late sixteenth century. The Bodleian catalogue agrees, and
adds that “A rather later English note on the arms of
maister Movun (Mohun) is on fol. 140” and that it was
bought by John Starkey in the sixteenth century, and a
later hand wrote “bowght [sic] at 2-hand of Mr. [Denis]

Edwards 17 May 1615 fer 33” (506). Paris BN f. fr. 585 was

40

made in Bruges for Louis of Bruges, Seigneur de la
Gruthuse, and while the nineteenth century calf binding
says “Le Livre des Fais d’Armes et de Chevalerie par
Christine de Pizan” there is no mention of Christine in the
manuscript itself. And Harvard, Houghton Lib. 168 is
listed in the 1962 Harvard College Library catalogue as
having been owned by “Comte Pierre Louis Roederer; Baron
Gaspard Gourgaud (1838); book-label of Adriana R. Salem.
Deposited in 1955 by Mr. and Mrs. Ward M. Canaday”(Willard
“Pilfering” 32). According to Willard, the name of the
first owner was Guillaume de Nest, and Baron Gourgaud (the
son-in-law of Comte Roederer) was Napoleon’s aide-de-camp,
General Gourgaud (32). Of these three, Paris BN f. fr. 585
is a very promising link, as Louis of Bruges is connected
with William Caxton’s early publishing ventures (Willard
“Paix” 91). The best known provenances are for London, BL
Royal 15.E.VI, London, BL Royal 19.B.XVIII, Brussels,
Bibliotheque Royale 9009-9011, and London, BL Harley 4605.
London, BL Harley 4605 is a sister-text to Paris, BN f. fr.
7087 and Brussels Bibliotheque Royale 10476, as the
illuminations are almost identical (Byles xix). According
to the 1808 Harley cataloguef16 manuscript 4605 dates to
1434, and the cataloger supplies the entire colophon:

“ As of 2003, there is no updated version of the 1808 catalogue,
although the catalogue itself is becoming available on-line.

41

“Explicit. Digatz [at this point the cataloguer notes that
the inscriber probably meant Deo gratias]. Uh pater noster
et un Ave.Maria per.mossen Pey [the cataloguer adds or Rey]
de la sita, qui a escrivt a quest livre en l’an de n[ot]re
seng[io]r mil ccccxxxiiij°. Et fut feit alondres, a xv de
May” (178). The catalogue also notes that an inscription
on the first leaf shows that this manuscript once belonged
to a Burgundian monastery “Mbnasterii SanctJ Crucis
Burdigal, congregat. Sancti Mauri, Catalogo inscriptus an.
1718” (178).17

Brussels Bibliotheque Royale 9009-9011 used to belong
to the library of the family of de Croy, which was begun
under Jean de Croy, first Comte de Chimay, who was the
literary adviser to Philip le Bon. The manuscripts of the
de Croy library are marked with the de Croy arms and the
device “Mby seu.l” Jean's son Philip continued the
library, and, in turn, Philip’s son Charles, who died in
1527. Byles notes that on fol. 236 verso is written the
inscription, “C’est de livre de l’arbre des batailles et
d’aucuns fais d’armes, et se‘y a quatre (sic) histoires,
lequel est a monseigneur Charles de Croy, comte de Chimay.

Charles” in the Count’s own hand. Byles also observes that

n The male sign of [d] is the original abbreviation mark in the
nanuscript.

42

the inside cover of the manuscript bears the arms of Marie
of Hungary, and this is sensible, as “many of the de Croy
manuscripts subsequently passed into the library of
Margaret of Austria, later inherited by her niece Mary of
Hungary and were eventually deposited in the Royal Library
of Belgium"(Willard “Paix” 91). This manuscript does not
appear to have left Belgium or to have been available to
the average English bibliophile.

The most interesting provenance of French origin is
London BL Royal 15.E.VI, a marriage gift to Margaret of
Anjou, queen to Henry VI, from John Talbot, the first Earl
of Shrewsbury, who escorted her to England for her marriage
in 1445. A miniature on fol. 2 depicts Talbot in the act
of presenting the book. Byles suggests that Caxton could
have possibly had access to this French manuscript, but
because of omissions of political nature in Part I of
Chapter 5, which Caxton translated in full in his edition,
the printer could not have used this text exclusively. The
alternate text is London BL Royal 19.B.XVIII, an English
copy of the manuscript. This manuscript, according to
Byles, "corresponds most closely with Caxton, and has been

used as the basis for collation in [this] edition" (Byles

43

xviii).18 Nevertheless, Willard suggests that it was the
presence of BL Royal 15. E.vi in the Royal Library that
“suggested to Henry VII the idea of having William Caxton
translate and print the text” (“Pilfering” 31). According
to Caxton’s epilogue, Henry VII sent a manuscript via the
Earl of Oxford so that the proper social classes would be
able to read, in translation, about proper and chivalric
battlefield behavior.

Indeed, Christine's Le Livre des Fais d'Armes et de
Chevalerie is best known through William Caxton's Middle
English version as The Book of anttes of.Armes and of
Chyvalrye, translated and printed in 1490. The Caxton
exists in twenty copies, and according to Byles's
accounting, only three Caxtons are extant in a larger
number of copies than Faytes of Armes (20): they are Tulle
of Olde Age (26), Golden Legend, lst edition (33), and the
Polychronicon (40) (xxxi). The English readers of this
incunabulum included Samuel Pepys, the Earl of Arundel, Sir
John Lumley, Thomas Payne, Thomas Lovelace, John Warren,
and other bibliophiles.

Those readers interested in Christine’s work in
England could have had access to the Fitzwilliam

manuscript, but probably not to Louis de Bruges’s Paris BN

 

” Byles chose BL I.B.55131 "Lumley" as the Caxton from which he
made his edition (xxxii).

44

f. fr. 585. The Bruges manuscript, however, since it was
anonymous, could be a part of the provenance trail for the
French printings of the anonymous Fais d'Armes by Verard in
1488 and Le Noir in 1527. In determining the readers of
Fais d’Armes, the Caxton edition (due to the popularity of
the text in English) appears to be the most fruitful path

to follow in looking for Christine’s readership.

IX. Preliminary Identification of Christine’s Readership

Who read Christine de Pizan? Did class or country
divide her readership? The answer to these questions
cannot be one simple response, as Christine wrote many
different kinds of works, each having a different appeal.
Like any professional writer, she was constantly aware of
her audience and her patronage. For example, Epitre au
Dieu d’Amours and Epitre d’Othéa were written under the
patronage of the Duke of Orleans, who preferred poetry and
romance. When Orleans lost favor, Christine began to write
for the Duke of Burgundy, who preferred didactic and
historical works and had a taste for early humanistic
writings. This is the reason behind Christine's shift from
poetry to prose and explains her moving in less than six

inonths from Le Dit de La Pastoure, an allegorical poem

45

written in May of 1403, to Le Livre des fais et Bonnes
Meurs du sage Roy Charles V, the official biography of
Charles V written in January of 1404. Christine herself
thus wrote for a courtly audience, indeed, the highest
levels of the court, including the Queen and the Dauphin as
well as the Dukes of Burgundy, Orleans, and Berry.
Christine’s writings themselves did not stay within those
lofty circles, but radiated out as the years progressed
into the bourgeois and merchant classes.

One might think that the English copying of her French
manuscripts would be an indication of her popularity in
England: BL Harley 219 and BL Royal 19. B.xviii were both
copied in England, and BL Royal 15 E.vi was presumably
copied for English readers at court. And we know for
certain that BL Harley 4605 was copied specifically in
London, finished on the 15m‘of May in 1434 - only three or
four years after Christine’s death. But, as P.G.C.
Campbell points out, in the fifteenth century the French
language was losing its hold in England, even at the Royal
court. She concludes that, “Donc, pour le grand public,
meme pour la plupart des courtisans, les oeuvres de
Christine devenaient livres clos, ou du moins peu
intelligibles et, dans la suite, nous voyons paraitre toute

‘une suite de traductions” (665). Thus to determine the

46

distribution of her works, one must look at the scope and
provenance of the translations.

To this end, Campbell adds a final observation, “Il
est a remarquer que ces manuscrits exécuté en Angleterre et
ces traductons en anglais ne témoignent pas seulement de la
popularité des oeuvres de Christine, mais indiquent en meme
temps que c’est surtout parmi les grands seigneurs qu’elle
jouissait d’un renom particulier” (669). The works of
Christine, then, were not only popular but also read by the
bluest of bloods in England in the fifteenth century.
Therefore, Caxton's printing of Mbrale Proverbes and Deeds
of Arms only spread her popularity to the middle-class
English public, instead of introducing her to England. The
evidence of Fais d’Armes alone would support this evidence,
but Frances Teague notes the irony of Eais d’Armes,
“Written to advise a French prince on war with the English,
the work proved more popular in English than in French”
(32). Cynthia Brown suggests that while “Caxton played a
critical role in introducing to the middle-class English
public the works of Christine de Pizan; she already had a
readership among the nobles since her own association with
the English court earlier in the century” (218), and the
connections between Christine's writings and the Woodville

literary circle appear to support this idea.

47

Her popularity in England suggests a cycle that rose
in 1400, crested in 1478, and fell in 1536-45 (Brown 215).
While the first-generation of printers in France chose to
misrepresent Christine's identity and show a lack of
interest in her writing, English printers took full
advantage of her popularity. Not until 1536 did French
printers restore Christine's popularity in her homeland,
beginning with Jean Andre’s printing of Trésor de la Citié
des Dames, which finally presented the biographical and
authoritative information that had been removed by previous
printers. Despite Christine’s increasing popularity in
France in the middle of the 1500's, her writings apparently
disappeared as a voice in both England and France in the
late 1500’s, perhaps due to the waning interest in medieval
authors, or perhaps due the difficulty of reading
Christine's medieval French. Therefore we may now conclude
that the audience for Christine's prose works in England
began with the aristocratic and moved to the middle-class:
the popularity of her manuscripts in the royal court and
the number of incunabula that still exist today provides

this evidence.19

 

n Willard sums this point up, “The evidence show that Christine’s
book was indeed widely read. In addition to two French imprints and
the Caxton translation and imprint, a number of manuscripts still
exist, including some rather handsome early ones and some later paper
copies that give evidence of hard use” (“Art” 14).

48

Chapter Two

"Here is a coysy werd": The Woodville Literary Circle

The reading group which was fascinated with reading
and translating Christine de Pizan’s works consisted of
Anthony Woodville (brother to Elizabeth Woodville who was
the wife of Edward IV), William Caxton, Stephen Scrope, Sir
John Fastolf, William Worcester, Richard Grey (the nephew
of Anthony Woodville), John de Vere, the thirteenth Earl of
Oxford, and Sir John Paston II. Stephen Scrope was the
stepson, ward, and secretary of Sir John Fastolf, and
William Worcester was also a secretary to Fastolf. Earl
Rivers (born Anthony Woodville) and Sir John Fastolf were
connected through service in the wars in France, and
Woodville was also an acquaintance and patron of William
Caxton (as was John de Vere). This chapter will examine the
small literary circle in England that encouraged and
translated many of Christine's works, introducing them to
the courts of Edward IV and Richard III. Beginning with an
examination of the political and historical contexts, I
will look at the biographies of the members, seeking clues
to their literary preferences. I intend to reach a general

picture of the circulation and knowledge of Christine's

49

works among the group in particular so that I may build

upon these conclusions in Chapter Three.1

I. A Lancastrian or a Yorkist Literary Circle?

The translation of The Letter of Othea suggests a good
origin point of the group’s interaction in terms of
interest in Christine de Pizan. The French manuscript
arrived in England in 1425 as a part of the ‘Queen's
Manuscript,’ BL Harley 4431, and was copied in England by
English scribes between 1425-1440 (BUhler "Fastolf" 128); a
second Epitre d'Othéa was copied by an English scribe from
a French original at the request of Edward IV between 1473
and 1483 (Campbell 665). The Scrope translation undertaken

between 1440 and 1459 suggests an origin date for the group

 

1 Samuel Moore’s article “Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and

Suffolk, c. 1450” presents a strong argument that several additional
members of the gentry in East Anglia participated in the literary
circle of the area, but as of this time it is evident that they were
not connected with the dissemination of Christine’s works in
particular. These members were: Sir Miles Stapleton (d. 1466), Sir
John Fastolf’s cousin; John Metham, author of pseudo-scientific
treatises; William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (1396-1446), author and
patron; Richard, Duke of York, father of Edward IV; Henry Bouchier,
Earl of Essex; John Lydgate, author and poet; Abbot William Curteis,
Lydgate’s superior from 1429-1446; Osbern Bokenham, author and poet,
Thomas Burgh, patron of Bokenham. These members were either
acquaintances or patrons of Lydgate, Bokenham or Metham.

In addition, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) had
connections with the literary circle around Fastolf and Woodville
because of his patronage of Lydgate and Oxford University, but
according to Susanne Saygin, the Duke's focus was on providing the
University with books that focused on the Italian models of education.
There is no evidence yet available, however, that Gloucester was
connected to the dissemination of Christine’s works, and therefore he
is not included in this study.

50

"in the earliest years of the first decade" or 1440-1445
(BUhler "Epistle" xxi).

The translation of The Body of Policy is attributed to
Anthony Woodville circa 1470. Bornstein provides
suggestions for external and internal evidence supporting
the claim that Woodville translated the text, and "taken
all together, this evidence provides a good case for
Woodville as the translator of Corps de Policie" (Bornstein
"Policie" 36). The.Morale Proverbes of Christyne as a work
is confirmed to have been translated by Woodville, and was
printed by William Caxton in 1478. Likewise, the trans-
lation of Fais d’Armes in 1490 is documented by Caxton's
printing of the work. The patron of the printing of Fayttes
of Armes was John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, at the
bequest of Henry VI.

The last work by Christine connected with the
Woodville group is The Boke of the Cyte of Ladies,
translated by Brian Anslay between 1509 and 1521, and
printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521. The printing of the work
was encouraged by Richard Grey, the third Earl of Kent. I
am hesitant in including this text as a translation in the
Woodville circle for two reasons: first, because Woodville
was executed in 1483, and some time prior to his death he

gave his copy of BL Harley 4481 to Louis of Bruges, who

51

died in 1492,2 and second, because of the puzzle of the
political allegiances of the members of the group.3

Bornstein makes a persuasive argument for the Anslays'
connection to the Woodvilles:

Pepwell states that he consulted the Earl of Kent
about the advisability of printing the translation and
published it with his encouragement. Therefore, he
dedicated the work to this nobleman. In 1521, the Earl
of Kent was Richard Grey, third Earl of Kent. He was
the son of Anne Woodville and George Grey and a nephew
of Anthony Woodville. Anthony Woodville had owned a
manor at Lee, which passed to his brother Richard, who
died in 1492. Therefore, the Woodvilles and the
Anslays probably knew each other. This is significant
because Anthony Woodville was an important literary
patron as well a translator of the works of Christine
de Pizan...He owned a manuscript that contained a copy
of the Cité des Dames (BL Harley 4431). Although this
was not the manuscript used by Anslay in doing his
translation, it may have been consulted by Anslay or
by Pepwell in designing the woodcuts for the printed
edition since they closely resemble some of the
illustrations in the manuscript. (Distaves xii)

The resemblance between the woodcuts and the illustrations
suggests that the illustrations could have been consulted
in order to make woodcuts, especially if Pepwell had in
mind the printing of the work. Bornstein continues:

Various details suggest a connection between Anslay's
translation and the literary activities of Anthony

 

2 If Richard Grey, the third Earl of Kent followed his Yorkist
family allegiances still in 1521 when the Yorkists had lost power to
the Tudors, this would strengthen the hypothesis that the City of
Ladies' translation and printing may be attributed to a group with
Yorkist leanings.

3 McFarlane thoroughly describes the treacherous twists of the
Lancaster-York allegiances, "To speak of a Yorkist or a Lancastrian
family, apart from the royal houses themselves, is almost impossible
when successive generations changed sides with so much freedom"(247).

52

Woodville. The publication of the Cyte of Ladyes may
provide evidence for the continuation of a literary
circle of the late fifteenth century that had been
centered around Anthony Woodville. (xii)
Bornstein’s focus is on the City of Ladies in her research,
and does not take into account the other works of Christine
which were available to the group, but she does make a
valuable connection between Anslay's translation and a
Yorkist literary circle:

Anslay's translation is very close to BL Royal Ms. 19

Axix; it is likely to have been done from this

manuscript or from one very closely related to

it....The [BL Royal 19 Axix] bears two symbols of the
house of York in the lower part of its first decorated

border." (xiv)

She refers to the BL cataloguer George F. Warner's
suggestion that the symbols indicated possession by either
Richard, Duke of York, and/or his son Edward IV, who owned
two copies of Christine's Epistle of Othea, and concludes
that "...we have evidence for the continuation of a Yorkist
literary circle that was interested in the work of
Christine de Pizan" (xiv).

The idea of a Yorkist literary group appears to be a
sufficient reason for including The Book of the City of
Ladies and a tempting explanation for the interest in
Christine's work; however, the idea is not completely

compelling because the group was not grounded in solely

Yorkist alliances. The idea of a group of like-minded

53

friends is much more reasonable in that many of the
participants in the group managed to skirt the Lancaster-
York political battles precisely because they were not
politically connected to either Anthony Woodville or the
rest of the Yorkist party. Frances and Joseph Gies argue on
behalf of the Pastons that:

[Their] position in the Wars mirrors that of much of
their class. They were neither Lancastrian nor
Yorkist by tradition or conviction but were drawn into
one camp or the other by the combination of their own
private interests and the posture of whatever great
noble -- duke of Norfolk, earl of Oxford, Lord Scales,
Lord Hastings -- they depended on at the moment for
patronage. In the course of the Wars, the Pastons
received summonses from both sides to serve; they
evidently declined to heed those from Lancastrian
Henry VI in 1459 and Yorkist Richard III in 1485,
while acceding to those from the Lancastrian earl of
Oxford in 1471 and Yorkist Edward IV in 1475. John
Paston III was wounded by a Yorkist arrow at the
battle of Barnet in 1471 and lived to be knighted on
the battlefield of Stoke in 1487 by Tudor-Lancastrian
Henry VII. In part, the Paston men survived the Wars
because they were gentry rather than nobility; while
their social betters were commonly hunted down and
beheaded after losing a battle, Sir John Paston and
John Paston III successfully sued for pardon after
fighting on the losing side at Barnet. (17)

Despite the Gies argument of non-partisanship on the part
of the Pastons, the historical evidence suggests a more
complex set of reasons behind the Yorkist favorings. Indeed
the Pastons appear to be not so much favored as forced.
John Paston did not fight on the Lancastrian side at the

"rout of Ludlow" (12 October 1459) under Henry VI (even

54

though at the time he was "held favorable" by the
Lancastrian Duke of Suffolk)4 probably because there was no
actual battle to be found: Richard, Duke of York, Edward,
Earl of March, Richard, Earl of Warwick, and Richard, Earl
of Salisbury fled when their reinforcements failed to
arrive and when Andrew Trollope (the Master Porter of
Calais, one of the most skilled soldiers of the time)
refused to fight against the King and withdrew the Calais
garrison (Lander 95).

London itself was divided: the people of London
supported the Duke of York, but the royal garrison was
commanded by the Lancastrian Lord Scales, Richard
Woodville. Twelve years later, the Pastons were called
again into service, and they chose the Lancastrian side
under the earl of Oxford. The decision does not appear to
be a matter of politics, but of a personal connection to
the earl of Oxford and the earl of Warwick. After Sir John

and his brother's capture at the Battle of Barnet, the

 

‘ A letter from Friar John Brackley, written after October 12,
1459 discusses the commissions to arrest the supporters of the Earl of
March after the defeat of the Yorkist at Ludford Bridge:

The Chauncelere is not good to these lordys, &c., for he
feryth the Erle of Marche wyl cleyme be inheritauns the erldam of
Ha(...), &c, of which mater I herd gret speche in Somercede
schyre, &c. Wyndham, Heydon, Todynham, Blake, W. Chambirleyn,
Wentworth, had late commyssyonys to take for tretowrys and send
to the next gayl alle personys, fawtourys, and weel(wyll)erys to
the seyd lordys &c. Mayster Radclyff and 3e haf none of
commyssyonys directid to 30w, &c. for 3e bene holdyn fauowrabil
&c. Wyndham and Heydon bene namyd here cavserys of these
commyssyonys, &c." (Davis II, 1971, pp. 184-5)

55

Pastons immediately turned to their Yorkist friend Anthony
Woodville, a decision which suggests that the natural
political inclinations of the Pastons were Lancastrian.5
The Pastons did accept the call of the Yorkist Edward
IV in 1475, but this war was against foreign enemies,
England allying with Duke Charles the Rash of Burgundy
against France. Edmund Paston, now 24 years of age, was
engaged to serve under the duke of Gloucester (future
Richard III) for one year, giving the family Yorkist symp-
athies. But the Yorkist sympathies did not last long.
They returned to their Lancastrian allegiance with the earl
of Oxford between 1476 and 1485; sometime prior to 1479,
Walter Paston, the second youngest son, made friends with
Lionel Woodville, the queen's younger brother, and they
hoped to graduate from Oxford University together in that
year (Davis II, 1971, pp. 365-6). By 1483, however, the
Woodvilles had lost power with the rise of the Yorkist King
Richard III, and Anthony Woodville himself had been

executed without trial on 25 June 1483 along with Lord

Richard Grey (Elizabeth Woodville's son from her first

 

5 The Gies contradict themselves: they suggest that "John Paston
III was wounded by a Yorkist arrow at the Battle of Barnet in 1471"
(17), and then suggest that "John III was painfully wounded with an
arrow in the forearm, perhaps received in the friendly fire mishap [on
the Lancastrian side at the Battle of Barnet]" (248). I speculate that
JohrtIII's antipartisan attitude might have stemmed from this wound; an
attitude colored by perhaps his realizing the petty uselessness and
aristocratic irresponsibility of the Lancastrian-York conflict.

56

marriage to Sir John Grey of Groby),6 and Sir Thomas Vaughan
(Edward IV's Chamberlain and a Woodville ally) (Kendall
252).

Richard III again called the Pastons into service in
1485, but John III managed to keep a low profile and
decline the Yorkist call from the duke of Norfolk. In a
suggestively anti-partisan move, he also declined his old
patron the earl of Oxford who was supporting Henry Tudor.
John's anti-partisan choice was rewarded by the earl of
Oxford, an action reflected in the joining of the York and
Lancaster sides into one when Henry VII married Elizabeth
of York in 1486. John Paston III's knighting on the
battlefield of Stoke in 1487 was the result of John's
fighting on the side of Oxford.

Outside of the Pastons’ immediate family, the
Lancastrian connection extends to Stephen Scrope. Sir John
II and John III Paston fought under the Lancastrian Richard
Neville, Earl of Warwick, during the Battle of Barnet.

Stephen Scrope sold Neville the wardship of his six—year-

 

6 The Woodville circle had two men named Richard Grey connected to
it, although historians do not always make a careful distinction
between them. The first is Lord Richard Grey, born in 1456, the son of
Elizabeth Woodville and her first husband Sir John Grey of Groby. He
and his brother Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset and Montagu, figure
predominantly in the Lancaster-York battles for power. The second is
Richard Grey, third Earl of Kent, born c. 1481, son of Anne Woodville
and her second husband George Grey, the second Earl of Kent. Both
Richard Greys were nephews of Anthony Woodville, and this point is the
origin of the historical confusion.

57

old son and heir in 1466, which indicated that "Scrope had
more than a passing acquaintance with Warwick" (BUhler
"Epistle" xx). And John de Vere, the earl of Oxford,
married Margaret Neville (daughter of the earl of Warwick)
and later married Elizabeth Scrope, widow of Lancastrian
Lord Beaumont.

Based on the above labyrinth of allegiances, the idea
of a solely "Yorkist literary circle" becomes unconvincing.
Bornstein’s idea that Anthony Woodville was the center of
the group also lacks strength because of the influence of
Scrope prior to Woodville's involvement, and Anslay's
translation after Woodville's death.7 The connection to the
Woodville family is strong, but the suggestion of a group
of like-minded readers is still more persuasive. If they
were more strongly connected by similar tastes in liter-
ature than they were pulled apart by politics, then it is
very possible that it is necessary to use the printing of
The Book of the City of Ladies as a reference for the
group's ending. A solution to this puzzle of whether the
circle was partisan or not, and whether to include The Book

of the City of Ladies, is to look at the biographies of the

 

7 Woodville lends his name to the circle only because he was the

rdxghest ranking member; Jonathan Hughes would no doubt prefer the group
to be called the “Fastolf Literary Circle”; Samuel Moore might suggest
the circle be named after the Duke of Suffolk.

58

group, examine their links and participation in the group,

and look at their literary preferences.

II. Anthony Woodville (Lord Scales, later Earl Rivers)

Based on the series of translation dates: 1440-1470—
1478-1490-(1509-1521), the action and influence of the
Woodville literary circle lasted for nearly three-quarters
of a century.8 Woodville himself was not so lucky. He was
born in 1442, and was brother to Elizabeth Woodville (wife
of Edward IV). He was made Lord Scales by Edward IV in
1461 and became Earl Rivers in 1469. He was executed
without a formal trial by command of Richard III in 1483.
"Pilgrim and knight, worldling and ascetic, Anthony
Woodville was moved by the Vision of both the Grail and the
Good Life," states Kendall, noting that Woodville was also
considered the "most famous jouster of the age" (204).
These quasi-contradictions are apparent in Woodville's

approach to literature as well.9

 

9 The dates 1509—1521 were arrived at by the following
calculations: the end date of 1521 was obvious because that was the
date that Henry Pepwell printed the translation. The beginning date is
a educated guess because the translator Brian Anslay was "a yeoman of
the wine cellar to Henry VIII" and Henry VIII reigned from 1509-1547
(DNB II, 503.)

9 See Kendall, Davis, McFarlane, Painter, and Crotch for
biographical information on Woodville.

59

"His greatest distinction," notes Davis, "was his
interest in literature, especially of an edifying kind"
(59). Woodville's version of The Dictes or Sayengs of the
Philosophres (1477) was the first book printed in England
by William Caxton. In 1478 Caxton printed Woodville's verse
rendering of Christine's.Moral Proverbs, and in 1479 he
printed Woodville's Cordyal, a translation of the French
work on the Four Last Things. Caxton describes Woodville in
the epilogue to Woodville's translation of Cordyale:

And not withstonding the greet labours & charges Pt he
hath had in the seruice of the kyng & of my said lord
prince as wel in wales as in Englonde, which hath be
to him no litle thought & besines bothe in spirite and
in body as the fruit therof experimently she weth.

Yet ouer that tenriche his vertuous disposicion he
hath put him in deuoyr at all tymes whene he might
haue a leyser. Which was but startemele to translate
diuerse bookes out of frensh into english...
Furthermore it semeth that he conceiueth wel the
mutabilite and the vnstablenes of this present lyf and
that he desireth with a greet zele and spirituell loue
our goostly helpe and perpetuel saluacion...Wherfore
he took vpon hym the translating of this present werke
named CORDYALE trusting that bothe the reders and the
herers therof sholde knowe them self herafter the
better and amende thair lyuyng or they departe and
lose this tyme of grace to the recouure of their
saluacion. Whiche Translating in my Iugement is a
noble & a meritorious dede. (Crotch 38-9)

Caxton appears to have been impressed by Woodville's
preference for literary activities over leisure. Or is it
possible that Caxton wanted to encourage Woodville's

literary leanings? After all, for a printer such as

60

Caxton, more translations meant more business. Caxton also
praises Woodville's interest in the salvation of those who
would read his work, but the most interesting phrase is the
idea that Woodville wrote his translations, "trusting that
bothe the reders and the herers therof sholde knowe them
self hereafter the better." Woodville himself gives a good
autobiographical description of his motivations for
translating his works, and this in turn reveals the man
behind the translations -- but not by much, for he was a
man of many contradictions. He says in his prologue to
Dictes:

Where it is so that every humayn Creature by the
suffraunce of our lord god is boren & ordeigned to be
subgette and thral vnto the stormes of fortune. And
so in diuerse & many sondry wyses man is perplexid
with worldly aduersitees of the which I, Antoine
Wydeuille, Erle Ryuyeres lord Scales &c. haue largely
& in many different maners haue had my parte. And of
hem releued by thynfynyte grace & goodnes of our said
lord thurgh the meane of the Mediatrice of Mercy which
grace euidently to me knowen & understonde hath
compelled me to sette a parte all in gratitude. And
droof me by reson & conscience as far as my
wrecchednes wold suffyse to gyue therfore synguler
louynges & thankes. And exported me to dispose my
recouerd lyf to his seruyce in folowing his lawes and
commandements. And in satisfaction & recompense of
myne Inyquytees & fawtes before done to seke & execute
y” werkes that might be most acceptable to hym. And as
fer as myn fraylnes wold suffre me I rested in that
wyll & purpose. (Crotch 111-12)

Woodville suggests that he was caught by his conscience to

give thanks for the blessings in his life, an attempt (most

61

likely) to ward off the downward turning of Fortune's
Wheel. The Woodville family's notorious rise to power and
fame is legendary, but Anthony was in many ways the black
sheep of the family in that he was not caught up in their
lust for power. While his father and brother were executed
in 1469 as traitors to Henry VI, he managed to escape the
Duke of Clarence and Warwick's trap and avoid sharing
captivity with Edward. He traveled to Portugal in 1471,
and returned to more intrigue and warfare. Woodville gives
the reason for his traveling to Spain in 1473 as being "to
gyue therfore synguler louynges & thankes" but a wise man

would also scheme to keep himself out of the way of the

0 He continues:

Lancaster—York battles.1
Duryng that season I vnderstode the Jubylee & pardonne
to be at the holy Appostle Seynt James in Spayne
whiche was the yere of grace a thousand CCCClxxiii.
Thenne I determyned me to take that voyage & shipped
from Southampton in the moneth of Iuyll the said yere.
And so sayled from thens til I come into the Spaynyssh
see there lackyng syght of all londes the wynde being
good and the weder fayr. Thenne for a recreacion & a
passyng of tyme I had delyte & axed to rede somme good
historye. And among other ther was that season in my
companye a worshipful gentylman called Iowys de
Bretaylles, whiche gretly delited hym in all vertuouse

 

m McFarlane notes that between 1460 and 1470, "Victories and
disasters succeeded one another so rapidly that it was impossible to
foresee what would be the outcome. Nevertheless it was difficult for
any members of the class, however constitutionally wary, to hold aloof.
Their position involved them. To opt out meant the sacrifice of their
expression of their lordly status. Even so a surprising number
preferred to lie low. Their absenteeism was as marked on the battle-
fields as it was in parliament" (244-45). Woodville enjoyed his lordly
status, but not so much that he involved himself in his sister's
machinations.

62

& honest thynges. That said to me he hath there a book
that he trusted I shuld lyke it right wele and brought
it to me whyche book I had neuer seen before and is
called the saynges or dictis of the Philosophers.
(Crotch 112)
I divided his prologue into these two blocks of narrative
because there appears to be a change in style between the
prayerful reasons behind the trip, and the narrative of the
trip itself -- a good example of Woodville's complicated
personality. His language changes from flowery courtly
praise to specific action-oriented travel description. He
is a knight upon a quest, and yet during his quest he can't
resist wanting to read "somme good historye,” probably a
chronicle featuring exciting tales of knightly action. He
does admit he is bored, since the ship was "lackyng syght
of all londes." He strikes up a friendship with Louis of
Bretaylles, who gives him his copy of the Dictes, much to
Woodville's pleasure. And so we see a man who loves
adventure, travel, excitement and has a keen sense of
spirituality and a love of the quiet contemplative life.
What did Anthony Woodville enjoy reading? We may
assume that he enjoyed reading the works that he
translated, and since they were literature that dealt with
moral improvement, the works suggest an interest in self-

fashioning. The Dictionary of National Biography describes

Woodville as having a "zeal for morality" (XXI 884), and

63

while Caxton describes Woodville as having a "vertuous
disposicion," it does not necessarily follow that
translating pithy sayings is equal to having a zeal for
morality. Woodville did have a natural daughter named
Margaret and his will is marked by guilt over unjust
property transactions, suggesting that he was neither a
faithful man nor one able to avoid the seven deadly sins.
As far as evidence for the actual works Woodville may
have read, one may begin the list with the three texts he
translated for Caxton. Caxton also mentions that Woodville
wrote "diuerse balades ayenst the seuen dedely synnes"
(Crotch 39) which have not survived to the present day. I
might add to that list the mention of the "good historye"
he was reading on the voyage to Spain, and his signature is
on the ‘Queen's Manuscript,’ BL Harley 4431, which strongly
suggests that he read this manuscript of Christine’s works.
I speculate that Woodville may have read prior to his
death in 1483 most everything coming out of Caxton's press,
since he was one of Caxton's patrons. Indulgences and
advertisements aside, Woodville would have had a broad
range of works to choose from since Caxton began printing
in England in 1477 with Woodville's own translation of the
Dictes, and he lived long enough to see his translation be

printed in a second edition in 1479 (but not the third

64

edition in 1489). Woodville would have had access to the
first edition of the Canterbury Tales, the Chronicles of
England, Godfrey of Boloyne, and the Polycronicon, among
other works. Woodville's personality was complicated and
this suggests his reading interests may have followed his
varied social interests; therefore I cannot eliminate any
of Caxton's books as 'uninteresting' to Woodville.11

Oddly enough, the only work connected to the group
that Woodville had not read was Scrope's 1450 translation
of The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, made for Sir
John Fastolf. According to G. D. Painter, "Blades and
others are mistaken in thinking [Caxton and Woodville]
plagiarized Scrope's version and pretended they had never
heard of it. Comparison shows that apparent resemblances
are coincidental, being due to the prevalent habit of

taking over any difficult French words into English, and

 

n Woodville was executed with no trial and only a minimal amount
of warning, but he was permitted to write his last will during the two
months (between April 29 and June 23, 1483) he was imprisoned in the
castle of Sheriff-Hoton in Yorkshire (Historica Excerpta 244). While
imprisoned he wrote a ballad, and had the opportunity to appoint
executors, and amend his will. His will is very detailed, listing
items as valuable as land holdings and cups of gold down to basic
personal items such as "myn aray for my body and my horse harnes"
(247). However, he does not mention his book collection, which had to
have been large and quite valuable on a personal and financial level.
He mentions a general "all other stuffe of howsehold in the Mote and at
my place in the Vyntree" but nothing specifically having to do with a
library or even a single favored book. He is very concerned in his
will with paying off his debts, and he does owe money to "divers
creditours" (including Tybold his barber). His memory is very precise
in his listing of his possessions and accounts, but I find it out of
character for a bibliophile such as he to sell his precious books to
pay his bills.

65

that Scrope's many errors are not repeated by Rivers" (87).

Nevertheless, the coincidence is thought-provoking.

III. William Caxton, translator and printer

From Woodville, we move to William Caxton, as the
printer was of necessity influenced by the interests and
literary tastes of the court.12 Caxton was born in Kent in
1422 (Crotch xxviii), and spent most of his life in
business on the continent. He entered the service of the
Duchess of Burgundy in 1469 as the result of her interest
in his translation of the Recuyell of the Histories of
Troye, and the popularity of his translation spurred him to
looking into the new art of printing. At Bruges in 1475 he
printed his translation of the Recuyell, the first book
printed in the English language. A shrewd businessman, he
realized the opportunity within the business of printing,
and began a second career by returning to England in 1476
and setting up a printing press at Westminster. His
courtly connections paid off, and in 1477 he printed
Woodville's translation of The Dictes or Sayengs of the

Philosophres; from that date to 1491 he printed at least

 

n See Crotch, BUhler, Bornstein, and most important, William
Blades for an authoritative biography on Caxton.

66

ninety-six separate books, the most famous being Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (1478), The Golden Legend (1483), and
Malory's Mbrte d'Arthur (1485).

Caxton's connection to Woodville has been discussed
above, but he also had a connection with John de Vere, the
thirteenth Earl of Oxford and Sir John Fastolf. Oxford had
been a patron of Caxton from the beginning of his printing
career, but he stepped in as a primary patron after the
death of Woodville in 1483. Oxford encouraged Henry VII to
become a patron of Caxton as well, and the King did so,
beginning in January of 1489. Caxton tells how he gained
the patronage of Oxford in the prologue to The Four Sonnes
of Aymon (1489) a work he translated at Oxford's request.l3
However, this was not the first time Caxton had printed a
work for Oxford; evidently Caxton printed the Life of
Robert Earl of Oxford some time prior to Aymon, but we have
no record of either the print or the manuscript.

Caxton also explains in his prologue to Cicero’s De
senectute, or Tullius of Old Age how he was asked by Sir
John Fastolf to print the English translation in 1481:
"Whiche book was translted and thystoryes openly declared

by the ordenaunce & desyre of the noble Auncyent knyght Syr

 

u Painter notes that Caxton called Oxford "my singular and
especial lord," a title he had used previously only with Woodville and
Arundel (165).

67

Johan Fastolf of the countee of Norfolk banerette" (Crotch
41). The book was translated from Laurent de Premierfait's
French version by Scrope, although it is possible that
Caxton received William Worcester's revision (BUhler
"Dicts" xliii). Woodville's name is in the circle, but it
appears to be Caxton's connections, no doubt coming from
his ability to charm the aristocracy, that provide the
outlet for the group's literary interests.

Diane Bornstein suggests that his choice of reading
material came from the influence of the literary tastes of
the Court of Burgundy, not that of the English court:
"Burgundian fashions had a stronger effect on Caxton and on
the English aristocracy than has been generally
acknowledged. They influenced the specific works Caxton
printed as well as the rhetorical formulas and ideas that
appear in his Prologues and Epilogues" (Bornstein "Burgund-
ian" 1). She argues that the Burgundian influence is the
reason why Caxton printed so many chivalric works, the
result of "a brief chivalric renaissance" (1) during the
reign of Edward IV. Bornstein points out that the chivalric
manuals Caxton chose to print were popular reading at the
court of Burgundy, and most of the individual works printed
by Caxton were in the libraries of Philip the Good and

Louis of Bruges (5)-

68

What did William Caxton enjoy reading? It would not
be objective to assume that he enjoyed reading everything
he printed and translated, but Caxton does carefully
explain in the prologue to The Four Sonnes of Aymon his
rationale:

As the Philosopher in the fyrst booke of hys metha-

fysyque sayth yt euery man naturally desireth to know

and to con newe thynges: And therfore haue the Clerkes

& people of gret vnderstandynge desyred and coueite to

lerned sciences and to know vertues of thinges. Some

by Phylosophy, other by Poetrye, and other by

Historyes and cronyckes of thynges passed. And vpon

these three they haue greatly laboured in such yt

thanked be God, by theyr good dylygence and laboures:
they haue had greate knowledge by innumerable volumes
of bookes, whiche haue be made and compyled by great

studye & payne vnto thys day. (Crotch 106)

If Caxton's literary tastes did not lean towards the work
he was translating, he at least "desyred and coueite" the
knowledge he was transmitting to fifteenth-century England.
Indeed, he printed "Encyclopedias, education, true Classics
(though few), morality and religion, allegory, chivalry,
Romance, history and the Poets" (Crotch cxxv) and he would
have included travel in his lists had he been able to print
Mandeville's Travels before he died in 1491.14

The variety of works coming from Caxton's press should

not be mistaken for heterogeneity of opinion. For example,

 

u Painter suggests that "Perhaps Caxton was prevented from
printing Mandeville by his death in 1491; but probably the plan was
made inopportune by serious trouble between St. Albans and the Crown
soon after he received the manuscript" (179).

69

devotional texts were extremely popular in the late middle
ages, and yet Caxton chose not to publish them until the
end of his career. Since devotional texts were read
primarily by women, and Caxton was sensitive to literary
trends and markets, it is possible he decided to avoid
devotional texts because his patrons were male, and he
chose to appeal specifically to masculine interests.
However, he did understand the interests of his female
readers, and cleverly managed to print works that would
appeal to both genders. Caxton translated and printed
Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489) by the request of Margaret
of York, and in his prologue he does a very careful
balancing act between the reading interests of his male and
female patrons, saying that while the work "specyfyeth of
the noble actes and fayttes of warre achyeued by a noble
and victorious prynce named Blanchardin...for the loue of a
noble pryncesse," it is good reading for both young men and
women:
...for under correction in my Jugement / it is as
requesyte other whyle to rede in Auncyent hystoryes of
noble fayttes & valiaunt actes of armes & warre which
haue ben achyeued in old tyme of many noble prynces
lordes & knyghtes / as wel for to see & knowe their
walyauntnes for to stande in the specyal grace & loue
of their ladyes. And in lykewyse for gentyl yonge
ladyes & damoysellys for to lerne to be stedfaste &

constaunt in their parte to theym that they ones haue
promysed and agreed to suche as haue putte their lyues

7O

ofte in Ieopardye for to playse theym to stande in
grace. (Crotch 105)

Caxton thus straddles the psychological relations of
patronage between genders and the capitalist relations
between the printer (producer) and his reader (consumer).
He manages three wins at once: to produce a work that will
please his female patron and appeal to female interests; to
print a work that will sell on the market to men and women;
and to please himself by printing a work that appeals to

his own masculine interests.15

IV. Stephen Scrope, the stepson, ward, and secretary of Sir

John Fastolf

Stephen Scrope may appear on the surface of an
investigation into the circumstances of the Woodville
literary circle to be a minor participant, but his
translations, friendships, and acquaintances, like tree
roots, keep touching and connecting the individual members

of the group.16

 

u On the connection between the printer and his product, see
Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe;
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact
of Printing 1450-1800; and Book Production and Publishing in Britain
1375-1475 Ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall.

m For an excellent biography and character analysis of Scrope,

Worcester and Sir John Fastolf, see Jonathan Hughes “Stephen Scrope and
the Circle of Sir John Fastolf: Moral and Intellectual Outlooks.”

71

Scrope was born in 1396 to Millicent Tiptoft and Sir
Stephen Scrope. When Sir Stephen died, Millicent married
Sir John Fastolf and since young Scrope was only 13, and
heir to his father's large property, Fastolf took him as
his ward. Fastolf sold the wardship to Chief-Justice
Gascoigne for 500 marks; after three years, and after
Scrope caught an unknown sickness, Fastolf bought the
wardship back again for 500 marks. When he came of age, he
served Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and Sir John Fastolf in
France, but did not profit from the service. He married
disadvantageously, and had a daughter, and was forced to
sell her wardship to a knight in the same manner which he
himself was bought and sold, and he was very regretful of
his necessity. Many years later Scrope became involved in
the lives of the Pastons because he made an offer to marry
20-year old Elizabeth Paston, but the match was not agreed
upon. Scrope finally married Joan, the daughter of Richard
Bingham, judge of the King's Bench, in 1459 (Gairdner
clxxvii).

Scrope was intimately connected with Sir John Fastolf

through family, social, and military ties, and to William

 

Hughes takes liberties in his analysis of the contributions of Scrope
and Worcester to English literary culture, but his social projections
based on their psychology appear to be sound, despite the slim material
evidence. See Gairdner, BUhler, G.D. Painter, Crotch and McFarlane for
additional biographical evidence.

72

Worcester through serving in the same household. But
Scrope held a stronger connection to Worcester because they
had similar literary tastes and ambitions. BUhler suggests
that Worcester was ScrOpe's literary executor and it is
evident that Worcester revised all of Scrope's work after
his death in 1472 ("Dicts" xli).

A good example of Scrope's connections comes from
Caxton's printing of Cicero's Of Friendship. In his
prologue, Caxton praises John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, a
very unpopular man known as the "Butcher of England" for
his judicial killings under Edward IV. Tiptoft was also a
man of pilgrimage, learning, and morality, and was consid-
ered to have been very charming, and he was murdered
because he defended the Woodvilles against Warwick.
According to Painter, "Caxton's praise of Tiptoft was
undercover propaganda for the dissatisfied Rivers, who
doubtless rewarded him" (114) and suggests that "Caxton's
readers would understand the hidden message, that a living
man shared the martyred Butcher's virtues and deserved his
advancement" (113). Caxton attributes the translation of Of
Friendship to Tiptoft: "Here foloweth the said Tullius de
Amicicia translated in to our maternall Englissh tongue by
the noble famous Erle / The Erl of wurchestre sone & heyer

to the lord typtoft" (Crotch 44). However, Sir John

73

Pastons’ book list includes a “Tully de Amicitia left with
William Worcester” and this doubling of the name Worcester
makes it difficult to discern whether Caxton confused the
scribe with the Earl as translators. Caxton appears
certain that Tiptoft translated the work, but the doubt
remains because of the connection between Scrope, Tiptoft,
Worcester, and Caxton, not to mention the Earl of Oxford:

Tiptoft was Constable of England from February 1462,
when he beheaded Oxford's father, to August 1467, when
he was sent to Ireland at the Queen's wish to
liquidate her enemy Desmond, and handed over his post
as Constable to Rivers the father, evidently as part
of the deal. Father Rivers held it till beheaded by
Warwick in 1469, and Anthony was supposed to have
inherited it in theory until Tiptoft regained it in
March 1470. To make matters more complicated, Scrope
the translator of Old Age was a cousin of Tiptoft the
translator of Friendship; Scrope's mother Millicent,
who married Sir John Fastolf in 1409, was the widow of
Sir Stephen Scrope and a daughter of Robert, third
Lord Tiptoft, the elder brother of Tiptoft's father.
(Painter 114)

BUhler suggests Of Friendship was translated by Scrope and
revised by William Worcester, and that Caxton unwittingly
confused the reviser of the manuscript with the famous Earl

).17

("Dicts" xlvi G. D. Painter disagrees, insisting that

 

17Both G. D. Painter and Buhler make valid points in this argument
regarding the possible translation of de Amicitia, and both agree in
three areas: that the Earl of Worcester was an excellent Latinist and
could easily have done the translation; that William Worcester was a
poor Latinist and is the least possible candidate for translator; and
that it is suspicious that Stephen Scrope would have translated one
sister-text and not the other. McFarlane, however, argues in
Worcester's favor:

But whether it was [Worcester's] version that Caxton
printed in 1481 as from the pen of John Tiptoft, Earl of

74

 

Caxton was too well connected with the aristocracy not to
be correctly informed, and stresses that while the Earl was
an excellent Latinist, Worcester was a notoriously poor
one, and that the original translation had to be done by
the Earl because "both pieces in English are so close to
the Latin originals that they can only have been translated
directly from the Latin” (113). While G. D. Painter dis-
agrees with Bfihler's theory about Scrope and de Amicitia,
the discussion illustrates that Scrope's literary abilities
and social connections placed him in an unusual position:
he was not well-born enough to be able to gain financial
advantages from his contacts, but he was able to make the
most of his position and education to gain literary
privileges. He did marry twice (evidently succeeding in the
marriage market at some level) and managed to translate

four of the most popular works of his time.

 

Worcester (1427-70), is not so clear, though there are several
circumstances that make it probable. It was, Caxton tells us,
composed at Fastolf's 'ordinance', and even if it did not strike
the printer as odd that a knight could command the services of an
earl it must strike us. The terms in which the proem speaks of
Fastolf are similar to those used elsewhere by his secretary and
would come better from him than from Tiptoft; and there are in
places obvious parallels between the wording of the translation
and that of Worcester's known works. Tullius of Old Age seems to
be his rather than the earl's; and that may be true of its
companion Tullius of Friendship also. ("Worcester" 218-219)

While it is not necessary to ascertain the translator of de
Amicitia for the purposes of this inquiry, I would in the future like
to make a linguistic examination of Scrope's skill with Latin and
compare his skill with Worcester's "peculiar Latin" ("Worcester" 210),
as it may give an answer as to who the translator might have been.

75

It is possible, however, that his translations were
what made the works popular, and not the other way around.
He did have an understanding of what reading material would
be interesting to those affiliated with the English court,
and had the linguistic skills to advance that understand-
ing. What did Stephen Scrope enjoy reading? We know his
translations include Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers
(1450), Boke of Nbblesse (prior to 1459), Tully of Old Age
(prior to 1459), and Epistle of Othea (after 1440).18 If we
categorize these works, we have a treatise on morality, a

chivalric manual, a philosophical treatise influenced by

 

m There is an argument as to whether Scrope or Worcester wrote
the Boke of Nbblesse. When J. Gough Nichols edited the book for the
Roxburgh Club in 1860, he said he did not know the author of the text.
He suggested it was either William Worcester or Peter Basset because
they had both been connected with Sir John Fastolf, but he had no
"presumptive proof that either of them wrote Boke of Nbblesse" (Nichols
liv). Sir George Warner argued in 1904 that Worcester was responsible
only for the additions written in the margin of the manuscript, but
that the translation was most likely done by Stephen Scrope (xlv).
BUhler furthered the investigation in 1940 by comparing the Emmanuel
College manuscript of the Dicts in conjunction with the Bodleian
manuscript and the University Library, Cambridge manuscript of the
Boke, and argued that "from MSS. B and H we know that Stephen Scrope
was the original translator, and from the colophon in U we learn that
‘WOrcester was the revisor" ("Dicts" xl n.1). Buhler concluded, "On the
basis of analogy, it seems safe to assume that the Boke of Nbblesse
Suffered the same fate as the Diets and Sayings of the Philosophers,
'that is, that the work was originally translated by Stephen Scrope and
=3ubsequently 'corrected' by William Worcester" ("Dicts" xl n.1).
l"ICFarlane disagreed, and believed that Worcester was the author of the
lioke of Nbblesse despite the similarities between the manuscripts and
WOrcester's interlinear comments in both manuscripts (Emmanuel College
Rflanuscript of the Dicts and Royal manuscript of the Boke). He argued
141 1981 that "To make him the reviser and then 'on the basis of
allalogy' to give Scrope a hand, if not the chief part, in the compo-
Sition of the Boke of Noblesse is justified by neither evidence nor
lOgic. If Worcester revised one of Scrope's books it does not follow
that all books he revised, still less all the books he claims to have
WKitten, must really have been by Scrope" ("Worcester" 218).

76

the classics, and a 'Mirror For Princes' allegorical/
chivalric lesson. These follow what was popular for the
literary tastes of the court of Burgundy; Scrope even chose
two works connected to Christine de Pizan. Epistle of
Othea, of course, is a direct connection through Scrope's
translation of a manuscript of the text owned by Sir John
Fastolf. Boke of_Nbblesse is also a translation of a
French manuscript owned by Fastolf, but the text itself is
a compilation borrowed from French works, primarily from
Fais d'Armes.

Epistle of Othea was a popular text, judging from the
number of French manuscripts which survive today (over 43)
and by the number of translations into English in less than
a hundred years (three), and its printing in 1540 suggests
that Othea was still well-read into the sixteenth century.
Scrope chose a text that was an example of "that large and
influential tradition of moral, didactic, and encyclopedic
works...which are now almost totally ignored, but which
Clearly enjoyed a large readership in the Middle Ages"
(Gray 238). Scrope was aware that the work would enjoy a

wide appeal, and in his preface in the Longleat manuscript
53tates: "And all-so ye schal fynde here in this seyde Boke
Cfo Cheuallry how and in whatte maner ye, and all othir off

“Hiatte astate, condicion or degre he be off, may welle be

77

called a knyght that ouercomyth and conqveryth his gostly
ennemyes by the safegard repuignand defence off hys sovle"
(BUhler "Epistle" 122). Scrope knew the question of “how
to be a good knight” would have relevance to all "astate,
condicion or degre"; while his immediate audience was Sir
John Fastolf himself, his vision included a broader English
audience, including gentry like John Paston II (who owned a

copy) and antiquarians like William Worcester.

V. William Worcester, secretary to Fastolf

William Worcester, being born on the "fringes of the
gentry" (McFarlane “Worcester” 201), is farther out from
the periphery of the group, but his connection to the group
is a valued one. If indeed he did translate De Amicitia
and compile the Boke of NOblesse, then his connection to
the group is closer, but his value to the focus of this
investigation does not increase except to provide a name
for whichever man chose to translate and compile excerpts
from Christine's Fais d’Armes before Caxton acquired her
work.

Worcester was born in 1415 in Bristol and died in
1482. Like Scrope, he was descended from a wealthy family

and he often made sure his fellows understood his origins,

78

calling himself William Botoner after his mother's maiden
name. He entered Oxford in 1432 and became Fastolf's
secretary in 1436, where he managed Fastolf's legal
business, wrote his letters, and was trusted by Sir John
(although not well paid). He had a full professional life
with Sir John for twenty-one years, including marrying the
niece of Thomas Howe, Fastolf's chaplain. He is discussed
in the Paston Letters, beginning in 1456, because of the
lawsuit between Worcester and the Pastons resulting from
Worcester’s attempt to claim what was due him when Fastolf
died in 1459. Worcester contested the estate going to
Paston, saying that Fastolf had made him a grant of land
for the support of his family, but his suit was settled and
he was awarded property in Norwich and Southwark in
addition to his own house in Bristol. In his later years
he worked for Sir John Paston II and his brother.
Worcester had much less free time than Scrope, and it
wasn't until 1478 that he was able to pursue his interest
in antiquities and scholarship. He revised Scrope's
translation of Dits.Mbraulx in 1472, translated De
Senectute in 1473, and wrote his Itinerarium based on
field-work done from 1477-80 (McFarlane “Worcester” 220).
What did Worcester enjoy reading? We can answer this

question if we assume for the sake of argument that he

79

translated and compiled the Boke of NOblesse over a twenty-
two-year period, beginning in 1453 and finishing in around
1475. McFarlane's argument does have merit in that
Worcester had interests peculiar to himself which show up
in the work. However, this does not prove that Scrope did
not write the book, but only that Worcester definitely
influenced or corrected the final version, which can be
seen from his interlinear comments. Therefore, the follow-
ing analysis could apply to either Scrope or Worcester
since they had equal literary advantages within the Wood-
ville group (although not social advantages). Regardless
of who translated and compiled the Boke of NOblesse, we are
able to learn a great amount about Worcester’s literary

interests and education.19

 

n One might wonder how Worcester or Scrope managed to get his
hands on a copy of Fais d'Armes prior to Caxton. Of course there may
have been other copies of the work in England in 1453, but BL Harley
4605 (in French) dates from 1434 and was most likely in a Burgundian
monastery until 1718, not arriving in England until 1808. BL Royal
15.E.VI (in French) was a marriage gift in 1445 from John Talbot the
first Earl of Shrewsbury to Margaret of Anjou, queen to Henry VI, but
was still in the royal library as of 1490, as it is the most likely
manuscript given by Henry VII to Caxton for translation and printing
(although the sumptuous illustrated vellum original probably did not
leave the court library, but a copy was made at the King's request),
and the Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Add.48, CFM 21 was copied in French
after 1450. While Stephen Scrope had better connections with the court,
there is little potential for a secretary such as Worcester to get a
copy of a manuscript that had not yet trickled down to the gentry,
unless Fastolf's trust of Worcester allowed him to have access to books
that otherwise would be out of his reach. On the other hand, the
connection may come from Anthony Woodville, who took a part in the
arguments over Fastolf's will, especially over the ownership of Caister
castle. The Duke of Bedford's purchase of the library of Charles VI
allowed books to make their way into the hands of his wife Jacquetta of
Luxembourg, and then into the hands of her son Woodville, and one of

80

Living with Fastolf did provide Worcester with access
1:0 books, and his notebooks attest to his interests.20 They
zinclude extracts from a French compendium of the histories
<>f Orosius, Lucan, and Suetonius and from the Quadrilogus
<3f Alain Chartier.m'McFarlane points out that since
VVorcester was taking extracts from a French work, this
eeliminates Warner and BUhler's objection that Worcester did
riot know French ("Worcester" 215 n.102); Worcester's notes
also contain many of the authorities cited in the Boke of
.Noblesse: Civitas Dei, the Cbmmuniloquium of John of Wales,
Cicero, Ovid, Boethius, and by 1459 he could have drawn on
the books in Fastolf's library, including 'Basset's
Chronicle', a Livy and a Vegetius ("Worcester" 215 n.103-
4). If, indeed, Worcester used his notes to write the Boke
(Bf Neblesse, then we have evidence of the writer's journey
kDetween 1453 and 1475. The problem with this conclusion is
6i matter of the dates, because many of the arguments apply
tlo the problems that the English faced between 1449 and
1.451; Charles VII of France, for example, is spoken of as
"youre grete adversarie". Scrope was actively writing his

k

these books may have been Fais d'Armes. If so, then would Woodville
have allowed a secretary like Worcester to handle the valuable
manuscript? Or would Scrope, being Fastolf's nephew, have had a better

Chance at getting his hands on the work? It seems to me that Scrope's
Connections would win out.

2OBL MSS. Cotton Julius F.vii, Royal 13.C.i, & Sloane 4.

21BL MS. Royal 13. c. i, fol. 135-46.

81

xnorks between 1450 and 1459, and much of what was written
.in the Boke of NOblesse applies to the court of Henry VI
<during 1459; however, the description of the work in the
jpreface (as we have it today) does not fit the material
inside the book. In addition, the writer of the Boke of
Abblesse used many classical sources, and McFarlane admits
that Worcester was not a humanist in any form:
... he read the classics as he studied modern authors,
to use what they taught him. He was less interested
in their manner than in their content. The ancients
possessed knowledge he was anxious to learn; it never
occurred to him to alter his Latin prose in imitation
of theirs. This is what lovers of humanism find it
impossible to forgive in him. He came into contact
with the greatest stylists of old Rome, he made pages
of extracts from Ovid, Cicero, and Seneca -- and wrote
nothing to show that he was touched by their beauties.
He left it to others to ape these models; he stuck to
the argument. His attitude was so obstinately
'medieval' that he went to the classics only for
wisdom. ("Worcester" 217)
FVorcester's poor Latin and his lack of humanist interest in
1113 writing seems to be the trait of a man who was a career
Seecretary and antiquary, and suggests that a compilation
Juike the Boke of NOblesse -- if we see it as only a
bempilation of war-history -- would have been the product
CXf'a man who was less of a artist with words and more of a
Seensible businessman. Nevertheless, the Boke is more than

jllst a military treatise, and does contain ideas which were

atypical for the 'medieval' mind (although these ideas may

82

simply be the reflection of Christine de Pizan's thought as
transmitted through her translator). This lack of
confirmation of Worcester's authorship adds to the doubt
behind the question of authorship of Tullius of Old Age.
Scholars do not doubt Worcester's authorship of his two
antiquarian works: the Antiquitates Anglie in three books
and the De Agri Norfolcensis familiis antiquis, but any
claims to his authorship of more literary works remains

questionable.

VI. Sir John Fastolf

Sir John Fastolf, in his retirement, encouraged the
translation of many of Christine's works, and followed the
[Drecedent set by John, Duke of Bedford, in his love of
koooks. The collecting of books was both fashionable,
fkollowing the lead of Henry VI and others of the court, and
<>f personal interest to Sir John, since his collection
rseflects his personal interests as well as works of
treeligious and didactic nature.

Fastolf was born in 1380 and was descended from
“Haalthy merchants and ship-owners. Through his mother's
marriage it was able for him to be educated in the

h0usehold.of the Duke of Norfolk's grandmother, and in 1398

83

he served as a page to the Duke of Norfolk. At twenty-one
he began to serve Thomas of Lancaster, one of Henry IV's

sons, and was still a squire in 1415 when Henry V invaded

France. Fastolf distinguished himself at the siege of
Harfleur and the battle of Agincourt, was knighted at the
and was appointed governor of the Bastille in

age of 37,

Paris. Two years later, Henry V's death made the Duke of

Ekedford regent, and Fastolf was rewarded by being appointed
time grand master of the regent's household. Fastolf

cxontinued campaigning and began amassing a fortune, and

wtien he finally retired in 1439 he owned almost a hundred
nuanors, several ships, and estates in France, enjoying

tllousands of pounds in revenue. He died on 5 November,

14159.

What did Fastolf enjoy reading? The Fastolf Papers, a
CEitLalogue of Fastolf's possessions drawn up by Worcester to
bee <given to the executors of Fastolf's estate, lists the

b<><>1<s held at Fastolf's primary residence, Caister Castle,

as of 1450:22

EEZSEzgch works: Liber de Sentence Joseph

 

ZStOnomie Liber Etiques

1&1E3<>ok of Julius Caesar Liber Geomancie cum.iiij

B'e Bible aliis

Bible cum historia scolastica Meditacions Saint Bernard
rLlte in ryme Petrus de Crescentiis
\

 

22 Fastolf Paper 43 and 70.

84

Problemate Aristotelis
Lez Propretez dez Choses by
Barthe Glanville

Romaunce la Rose
Veges de l'arte Chevalerie

Vice and Vertues

English works:
In chapel: 2 antiphoners, 1

Legend of Holy Service, 2
Missals, 1 Psalter

Cronicles d'Angleterre
The Cronycles of France

The Cronicles of Titus Livius
Instituts of Justien Emperor

Josephus
Liber de Cronykles de Grant

Bretayne in ryme
Liber de Roy Artour

’The problem of 'a book owned is not a book read' is a

.little easier to answer when one considers how much of a

rniser Sir John Fastolf was. It is not likely that such a

puersonality would buy a book that he was not prepared to

eaither read or enjoy. While it is true that book-buying

arid collecting was fashionable, Fastolf supported at least

sjmx authors, and his involvement in literary patronage

irndicates that he did read his own books:23 His dealings

knitzh the military, financial investments, legal situations,

311C! years spent in France suggest an ability to read and

wxiirte fluently in both French and English. H.S. Bennett

rlcDtlees that, "What happened to most of these books when Sir
K7‘31'11'1 died is unknown, for there is no evidence that any of

tTIEBDn went to the Pastons," and he cites the 1479 inventory

of’ 53ir John II's books (111). However, twenty years passed

\

 

Na 23 Stephen Scrope, Peter Bassett, Christopher Hanson, Luke

thntron, John Bussard, and William Worcester. Scrope dedicated one of

see manuscripts of his translation of Letter of Othea to Fastolf, as
en in Longleat MS. 253 (Bilhler "Epistle" xvii).

85

between Fastolf's and Sir John's death, and the disappear-

ance of the books is a mystery.

VII. John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford

John de Vere, the thirteenth Earl of Oxford, was a

patron of both the Pastons and William Caxton, and is known

as "a hero, a fine soldier with a shrewd grasp of strategy

and tactics" (Seward 14) . While his patronage of the

Pastons does not necessarily qualify him as an addition to

the Woodville circle, the assistance given to William

Caxton does ensure that he must be added to the center of

literary acquaintances and friends.“ McFarlane points out,

'Wrilough wealth and inherited position could do much,
Saccessful patronage was an art to the mastery of which the
lord had to bring a number of obvious but by no means
uni‘rersal qualities: a cool judgment, some insight into
0ther men's springs of action, some firmness of purpose, an
affability however rough and a reputation for success"
(253) . Oxford does exactly that: even though Caxton's
previous patron had been Anthony Woodville, a Yorkist,

Oxford was wise enough to see the opportunity and

\
2‘ See Seward, McFarlane, G. D. Painter, and Hope's edition of

Oxford's will.

 

86

advantages of the new printing press, and took Caxton into

his service.

John de Vere was born in 1443 into a strong

Lancastrian family. His father was executed by Yorkists in

1462; young Oxford was granted his family's lands and title

be'Edward IV. He was still viewed as a Lancastrian and

.fell under suspicion, but was reprieved by the restoration

()f Henry VI in 1470. He fought at the battle of Barnet and

tmas on the losing side, fleeing to France; there he

[Iracticed piracy against the Yorkists. He avoided the
resign of Richard III by supporting the Lancastrian position

ir1 France, and returned with Henry VII to fight the Battle

01? Bosworth in 1485. He was Very well rewarded for his

lcxyalty and his lands were returned along with a series of

lllczrative offices. Oxford served Henry VII as high steward

urltiil the king died in 1509, and he acted as a commissioner
for Henry VIII.

Sometime prior to 1488, Oxford asked Caxton to
traillslate and print a Life of Robert Earl of Oxford from
IthSP French (both Seward and G. D. Painter suggest it was
pr'<>l:>ably the Robert de Vere who witnessed Magna Carta).
CaAlton writes in the prologue to The Four Sonnes of Aymon,

Therfore late at y‘ request and commaundement of the
ryght noble and vertus Erle John Erle of Oxeforde my
good synguler and especial lorde I reduced &

87

translated out of Frenche into our maternall and
Englyshe tongue the lyfe of one of his predecessoures
named Robert Erle of Oxeforde tofore sayd in diuerse &
many great myracles whiche God shewed for him as wel
in his lyfe as after his death, as it is shewed all
alonge in hys sayde booke. (Crotch 106)

This was most likely the beginning of Oxford's patronage of
Caxton; like Woodville, Oxford asked Caxton to translate a
book that was clear to his own interests, not thinking of
the larger impact of having such a text in print. But it
didn't take long -- Oxford soon became intensely interested
in the press, and Caxton notes that, "my sayd Lorde
desyreth to haue other Hystories of olde tyme passed of

vertues chyualry reduced in lykewyse into our Englishe

tongue" (Crotch 106) . Oxford asked Caxton to translate and

Plaint The Fbur Sonnes ongymon in the latter half of 1489,
_'Ha .booke in Frenche conteynyng thactes and faytes of warre
doone and made agaynst ye great Emperour and King of Fraunce
ChEirlemayne by y° iiii sonnes of Aymon"(Crotch 106). The
SUD‘?€e of printing may have worked to overcome partisanship
be(Zause Henry VII became Caxton's patron by January 1489
(no doubt through the assistance and recommendation of
Oxford), asking Caxton to translate and print the English
version of Christine de Pizan's Fais d'Armes.

What did Oxford enjoy reading? Oxford's will does not

“We books in detail, but several books are listed. He

88

made a bequest for a Cowcher and a mass—book to be given
out of his private chapel to the priory of Colne. To Lady
Oxford, he gave "his second antiphoner." The inventory of
his estate lists a "Matteyns Boke wt a clapse of silver wich
my lorde was wont to use hymself" among a box of plate from
Colne (298). Sir William St. John Hope, who analyzed
(Oxford's last testament and inventory, notes "The list does
riot seem to have been made in any definite order, and in
:four or five cases only are the ornaments that formed a
sndt.or set grouped together. There is also an absence of
cietails" (299). However, one lot does list diverse books:
ij Portuous an older and a newer, an olde masse boke
written, and a masse boke in prynte; ij Psalter bokes
on Reed and the lesser blake lymnid; a nother psalter
coverid wt blake and silver clapsys; also a litle masse
boke; a Chest full of frenshe and englisshe bokes; a
masse boke wt clapsys of silver; iiij masse bokes
written in velom; a greate Antiphoner, a legend
complete; ij grayles, iij processionales; vij
antiphoners; vj grales and xx processionales; ij half
Legendes; ij printid masse bokis; vij Pricke song
bokis bounde in leder; and xij Prick song bokis; a
Gospell boke wt thone syde covered wt silver and a
picktur of or Lorde in it trussid in a cofer wt in the
college of Sudbury. (300)
‘A53 typical of the early 1500's, the Earl of Oxford owned
bC>C>ks both "written" and in print, and for all the supposed
I
atlsence of details,‘ the scribe who made the inventory

lj~SVt distinguished between manuscripts on vellum and

llicndnabula. For our purposes, it would be very valuable to

89

have an inventory of the "Chest full of frenshe and
englisshe bokes." That the chest was separate from the
rest of the religious texts suggests that they were secular
in content, but beyond that it would be impossible to
speculate on the contents, as Oxford was wealthy enough to

purchase any books he wanted.
IX. Sir John Paston II

Sir John Paston II is known as "the most enthusiastic
bibliophile" of the Pastons (Bennett 112), a family that
scholars consider to have had "more than the ordinary
degree of education for their times" (Thompson 409). All
the male family members could read and write, and knew
Latin and French. The patriarch Justice William Paston was
an educated man, made a judge in 1429; his son John Paston
I was educated at Trinity Hall at Cambridge, and the Paston
letters suggest that John II was educated in the same way;
the youngest of John Paston I’s sons, Walter Paston, went
to Oxford in 1473. The women of the family were probably
not book-educated, but did have enough education to deal
with the running of the family estate, probably more -- in
1434 we know that Agnes Paston had a copy of the Stimulus

Conscientiae lent to her, and in later years Anne Paston

9O

owned a copy of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes. Sir John Paston
II was a product of this bookish family, and it is not
surprising that he followed the vogue from the court of
Henry VI and Edward IV of reading for entertainment.25

John II was born in 1442 and at age 19 joined Edward's
IV's court. He was knighted in 1463, with his father paying
for the dignity that John I himself had cautiously
rejected. He preferred a life at court to life under his
father's command in Norfolk, and easily slipped into the
courtier's role, serving in Princess Margaret's train for
her marriage in Bruges in 1468. He took the Lancastrian
side in 1470 and fought in the battle of Barnet under
Warwick in April 1471; as was common for the gentry, he was
pardoned for being on the losing side. He was engaged in
1468 to Anne Haute, first cousin to the queen, Elizabeth
Woodville, but the marriage was amiably called off in 1472.
John II died suddenly in 1479 of the plaque, and the Paston
estate went to his brother John III.

Sir John was "a free spender, a collector of books, a
devotee of knightly pleasures (including the pursuit of
women) and a sometimes indifferent guardian of his estates"
(Gies 187). He was not of the same temperament as his

father who was forceful and aggressive when it came to

 

25 See Bennett, Thompson, Gies, Lester, Davis and Gairdner.

91

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defending the Paston property; John II preferred to use
compromise and diplomacy instead of confrontation and
litigation to defend the family estate. Sir John was a
courtier, a lover of jousting, and was very interested in
buying, collecting, and when he could, claiming without
purchasing (i.e. stealing) his favorite books. The story
in the Paston Letters of his efforts to obtain the books of
the family chaplain Sir John Gloys is well known -- Sir
John was more than happy to ask his mother to pack up the
books without paying Gloys' estate for them.

What did Sir John enjoy reading? Of all the members
cf the Woodville circle, we know the most about Sir John's
individual tastes because an inventory of his personal
books has survived. The inventory has been dated between
1475 (the publication date of Caxton's first edition of The
Game and Playe of the Chesse) and no later than 1479, since
Sir John died on 15 November of that year.26

The Inventory off Englysshe bokis off Joh[n Paston
knyght] made he v daye off Novembre A° r.r. E. iiij27

 

“ Norman Davis confirms that the hand in which the inventory was
written was Sir John's ("Paston" 516). The paper was damaged along the
right side so that some of the text was lost, but Davis and Gairdner
made educated guesses as to the proper titles. Arabic numerals precede
the first eleven entries; after that they are in a simple list. I have
taken the liberty of combining both scholars' judgment as to the
missing titles.

N Gairdner expands as, "anno regni Regis E. iiij" (#869, 300) for

the 4th year of the reign of Edward III because the year has been lost
at the edge.

92

9.

10.

A boke had off myn ostesse at be George...

off pe Dethe off Arthur begynyng at Cassab[elaun,
Guy, Earl of]Warwyk, Kyng Richard Cure delyon, a
cronicle...

To Edwarde be iij, pric...

Item, a boke off Troylus whyche William Bra...
hathe hadde neer x yer and lent it to Da[me]
Wyngfelde, et ibi ego vidi; valet M...

Item, a blak boke wyth The Legende off Lad[ies,
La Belle Dame]saunce Mercye, pe Parlement off
Byr[des, the Temple of]Glasse, Palatyse and
Scitacus, The Med[ditations of]..

[Sir Gawain and] the Greene Knyght; valet --

Item, a boke in preente off pe Pleye of be
[Chess]...

Item, a boke lent Modelton, and therin is Bele
Da[me sanslMercy, be Parlement off Byrdys,
Balade...

off Guy and Colbronde, Off the Goos, be

be Dysputison bytwyen Hope and Dyspeyre...
Marchauntys, be Lyffe off Seint Cry[stofer]...

A reede boke pat Percyvall Robsart gaff m[e]...
off the Medis off pe Masse, pe Lamentacion...
off Chylde Ypotis, A Preyer to be vernycle, [a
book]callyd The Abbeye off pe HOIy Gooste...

Item, in quayerys Tully de Senectute in d...
wheroff ther is no more cleere wretyn...

Item, in quayerys Tully or Cypio de Ami[citia]
leffte wyth William Worcester, valet --28

Item, in quayerys a boke off pe Polecye off In..

Item, in qwayerys a boke de Sapiencia...

 

n Gairdner remarks: "It is a curious circumstance that this book

should be here mentioned as left with William Worcester, who...
translated it" (301 n.2). Seeing de Amicitia next to de Senectute side
by side in Sir John's catalogue strongly suggests that the two works of
Cicero were a joint endeavor, and since we do know Scrope translated de
Senectute, it does look odd that Sir John would leave a book with the
man who supposedly translated it in the first place. One would suspect
that the translator would presumably have his own original copy.

93

wherin pe ii parson is liknyd to Sapi[ence]...

11. Item, a boke de Othea, text and glose, valet...
in quayerys --

Memorandum, myn olde boke off blasonyngs off a[rms].
Item, the nywe boke portrayed and blasonyd...

Item, a copy off blasonyngys off armys and t...
names to be fownde by letter--

Item, a boke wyth armys portrayed in paper...

Memorandum, my boke off knyghthod and ther in m[aner]
off makyng off knyghtys, off justys, off torn[eauments
off]fyghtyng in lysts, paces holden by sou[ldiers (?)
/ eraignes(?)] and chalengys, statutys off weer and de
Regimi[ne Principum]...valet--2

Item, a boke off nyw statutys from Edward...
the iiij --

In addition to this inventory, the contents of Sir
John's "Grete Boke" are extremely valuable in determining
what he liked to read. The "grete boke" survives as British
Library MS. Lansdowne 285, and was copied by William
Ebesham in 1468 from the manuscript known today as Pierpont
Morgan Library MS. 775, which was owned by Sir John

Astleyf3o While Ebesham billed Sir John for copying 'Othea

29 Lester notes, "From the correspondence of this to L [Lansdowne
285] and to the Grete Boke of Ebesham's letter and bill, there can be
no doubt that it is the Grete Boke (i.e. L) which is being referred to"
(41).

m Lester notes that "Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, features
Prrmdnently in the [Grete Boke] and his relationship with the Pastons
is; therefore of some significance. When he first became involved in
tJIeir affairs it was as an enemy, one who in 1466 had designs not only
or! the late Sir John Fastolf's fine castle at Caister but also on the
Palaton manor of Cotton. His attention seems, however, to have been
disrerted by the acquisition of the lordship of the Isle of Wight, and
thereafter he became a special champion of the Paston family interests,

94

Pistill' along with the other quires that were included in
Lansdowne 285, Christine's work was never bound in with the
manuscript, but was kept separate (Lester 39). The "grete
boke" was developed by accretion: the deeds of arms were
acquired from Woodville's household; the ordinances of war
and the summons for the surrender of Le Mans were acquired
from Fastolf; the description of the jousts held by Richard
Beauchamp were most likely acquired from Richard Neville's
household (Lester 45-6). "The sequence of events was
perhaps this," speculates Lester:
A miscellaneous collection of texts mainly to do with
knighthood had grown up around certain longer works -—
Vegetius, The Book of Governance, Othea -- in the
1450's. The fairly random order was retained when a
professional fair copy was made in [Sir John Astley's
manuscript] before 1461. Sir John Paston caused
William Ebesham to copy from [Astley's manuscript] the
texts most relevant to chivalry, and to place the
shorter items in a more logical order near the
beginning of the new transcription. Having decided to
develop the volume into a great manual of knightly
practice -- a grand design, judging from the title
'Grete Boke' -- he decided to exclude Othea, which was
not practical enough for what he had in mind. (47)
Judging from Sir John II's love of the court and tourn-
aments and the Burgundian influence on his reading habits,
it is not surprising that the 'Grete Boke' reflects his

aspirations as both a courtier and a knight. The 'Grete

Ekake' contains the majority of what the late fifteenth-

 

 

tourneying alongside Sir John in 1467" (44) . This is another good
example of McFarlane's description of the aristocracy being able to
"Change sides with so much freedom" (247) .

95

century court was interested in reading: it was a practical
treatise on chivalric combat, as well as containing
"heraldic ceremonial record, the military manual, the
collection of statutes and ordinances for war, and the
mirror for princes" (Lester 48). The romances and
chronicles of the time may have provided the emotional and
historical examples, but for a knight to get practical
information regarding the chivalric life, he needed to turn

to military manuals and other works.

X. Richard Grey, nephew of Anthony Woodville

Although his influence and presence in the Woodville
circle is small, Richard Grey must be briefly mentioned in
that he encouraged the printing of the Boke of the City of
Ladies in 1521. Brian Anslay, a yeoman of the wine cellar
to Henry VIII translated Christine's book, and "in a
preliminary copy of verses the printer, Henry Pepwell,
states that the translation was published at the instance
of the Earl of Kent" (DNB II, 503). In 1521, the Earl of
Kent was Richard Grey, third Earl of Kent, born c. 1481.
He was the son of Anne Woodville (Anthony Woodville's
sister) and George Grey, second Earl of Kent, who died in

1503.

96

To include The Book of the City of Ladies in the
Woodville group makes sense if we consider the printing of
the work to follow the same impulse that Sir John Paston
had when he included the various Mirror for Princes texts
in his Grete Boke, for Christine's work is, in its least
definition, a mirror for princesses. It was not a
chivalric manual, but it functioned for women in the same
way that a chivalric manual functioned for men. Therefore,
we may use Christine's City of Ladies to mark the circle's
ending, but the work asks us to broaden the definition of
how the fifteenth-century reader saw chivalric texts.

The next chapter follows this line of thought, giving
the reader an overview of these chivalric manuals available
to the Woodville circle, with the intention of placing
Christine's works and appeal within a larger social and
literary context. Now that we have an idea of who was in
the Woodville literary circle and what was available for
the group to read, I intend to reveal the patterns behind
the texts' physical quantity and literary appeal, and in
turn formulate a theory as to the circle's ideological or

psychological approach to reading chivalric texts.

97

Chapter Three
‘Prouffytable vertues’: Chivalric Texts in

Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century England

In 1925, Virginia Woolf tried to imagine what might
have gone through Sir John Paston II’s mind as he collected
his library:

The money that might have bought [John Pastons'

tombstone], or more land, and more goblets and more

tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trink-
ets, and upon paying a clerk to copy out treatises
upon knighthood and other such stuff. There they
stood at Paston -- eleven volumes, with the poems of

Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange

air into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to

indolence and vanity, distracting their thoughts from
business, and leading them not only to neglect their
own profit but to think lightly of the secured dues of

the dead. (224)

Woolf was an advocate of reading for pleasure, but believed
that “we have of course to control ourselves...we must not
squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting
half the house in order to water a single rose-bush” (1).
Sir John's choosing books over respecting the dead struck
her as being undisciplined and disrespectful, and she sees
Chaucer and Lydgate as being the only authors worth
mentioning, putting "treatises upon knighthood" on equal

terms with "other such stuff." Woolf was most likely

familiar with Chaucer and Lydgate but the other contents of

98

Sir John's Grete Boke (c. 1468) were largely unknown to
her; if she had known of the actual contents of the Grete
Boke she would not have dismissed so lightly the "treatises
upon knighthood" as extraneous interests for Sir John.
Woolf continues her imagining:
For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to
inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir
‘ John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on
the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind
lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he
would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming
-- or what strange intoxication was it that he drew
from books? ...Lydgate’s poems, or Chaucer’s, like a
mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and
compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and
people whom he knew, but rounded and complete.(224-25)
Sir John was undisciplined and disrespectful, but Woolf
does not blame him for being a dreamer, for she believes
she understands him. She applauds Chaucer for being a
powerful storyteller, and uses Sir John as an example of
how Chaucer's stories enthralled his audience, both then as
they do now. She is correct in her observations about
Chaucer, but misses the point in her observations about Sir
John: the man was no doubt an admirer of Chaucer, but the
reasons Sir John neglected his father's grave in favor of
books and courtly life were not a symptom of irrespon-
sibility or an untamed love of books, but the sign of a man

who understood the fact that the predictable pastoral ways

of his father and mother were no longer functioning in Sir

99

John's unpredictable urban world. Sir John may have been
neglecting his responsibility to make a financial profit,
but he was certainly not neglecting the art of ‘reading
profitably,’ that is, the idea of reading for only moral or
intellectual value. Woolf is correct in surmising that Sir
John was looking for entertainment, but a deeper analysis
shows he was also looking for facts and clues to the
puzzling and changing nature of chivalry.

Chivalry has eluded definition as its meanings shade
according to context, yet scholars have tried to codify the
term by attempting to set down the basic principles
according to their time and era. The Grete Boke is an
example of Sir John's try at defining chivalry, and another
is the Black Book (c. 1470) of Edward IV. The latter work
was written out of necessity when the King was twenty-eight
and a rising number of'men were joining the court:

[and] as the number... increased, so did the

obligation to provide proper occupation and

instruction for them all - the king’s own children,
the ‘henchmen’ (the six or seven young companions of
honor who walked or rode beside the king in
processions etc.), the various squires and pages of
the household, and all the other youthful gentlemen

who gave service. (Lester 55)

This obligation required clarifications of the requirements

<Df service, and the Black Book was the result. The book

Chammands the Master of Henchmen (who was employed along

100

with the Master of Grammar and the Master of Song) to
educate the young men in ‘1ettrure' (basic literacy and
scholarly study) and ‘noriture’ (the art of polite
behavior) (Lester 55). Specifically, the Master of
Henchmen was responsible for educating his charges in:

...the schoolez of vrbanitie and nourture of Ingland,
to lern them to ride clenly and surely, to drawe them
also to justes, to lerne hem were theyre harneys; to
haue all curtesy in wordez, dedes, and degrees,
dilygently to kepe them in rules of goynges and
sittinges, after they be of honour. Moreouer, to
teche them sondry langages and othyr lernynges
vertuous, to herping, to pype, sing, daunce, and with
other honest and temperate behauing and pacience; and
to kepe dayly and wykeley with thees children dew
conuenitz, with correcions in theyre chambres
according to suche gentylmen; and eche of them to be
vsed to that thinges of vertue that he shalbe most apt
to lerne, with remembraunce dayly of Goddes seruyce
accustumed. This maistyr sittith in the hall next
vnto benethe theez henxmen, at the same bourde, to
haue his respectes vnto theyre demenynges, how
mannerly they ete and drinke, and to theyre
comunicacion and other fourmez curiall, after the
booke of vrbanitie. (Myers 126-7)

Thus, the Master was not only responsible for the physical
welfare of his charges (teaching them how to ride, joust,
and wear armor) but also for their mental welfare (teaching
them courtesy, respect, languages, and giving them a
religious education). Of course, not all young men of noble
descent were able to be educated at court, but they knew
that they would not be excused on account of their

ignorance of courtly and chivalric customs and laws. The

101

only way for a young knight to make up for this disability
was to purchase - or have a collection made for him (as Sir
John did) - a ‘booke of vrbanitie' or chivalric manual in
which he could learn those customs vital to his advancement
and survival at court. G.A. Lester points out:

...the value of the Grete Boke to Sir John is fairly
clear. Containing, as it does, a wealth of practical
information about jousts and other 'actez marciablez',
the correct wearing of harness, observing due decorum
in 'goynges and sittinges', exemplifying polite speech
and 'othyr lernynges vertuous', and even recording

(for good measure) a couple of short passages from

'cronycles of kinges', it is obviously -- in part at

least -- a book of 'noriture'. As such, it has a

place alongside the well-known courtesy books and

presumably alongside the ‘booke of vrbanitie’
mentioned... The Grete Boke is, in a sense, Sir John's

own, personal ‘booke of vrbanitie'. (57)

Sir John's interest in reading becomes more apparent when
one realizes that it is a form of his learning physical,
social, and political survival skills during the York-
Lancaster civil wars.

Virginia Woolf's interest is in Sir John's fantasy
life, a life utilized to praise Chaucer’s talent; Lester's
interest is in Sir John's practical education, a facet
utilized to raise the academic value of the Grete Book to
the level of the Black Book. However, Sir John's
fascination with Chaucer and "treatises upon knighthood"

followed a path neither completely fantastic nor academic.

The chivalric manuals available to the Woodville literary

102

circle appealed to a reader's need for fantasy and his need
for education -- and were written specifically to exert
that charm.

This chapter will first attempt to define chivalry as
it is manifested in romances, historical writings, and
manuals of chivalry, and then I will narrow to review the
chivalric manuals available to the Woodville circle. From
these facts, I will suggest a definition of "chivalry" as
Sir John Paston may have understood the term, and use this
definition to place Christine's works within the available
material and historical context in order to suggest the

nature of her appeal to the fifteenth-century reader.

1. Knights in Shining Armor, etc.

Chivalry means different things to different
audiences, but there remains a constant in that a sense of
idealism recurs. Sometimes the idealism appears as
personal identification, and in other hands it becomes
public ideology, but the end result returns to the same mix
of applying the facts and fantasies of chivalry to everyday
life.

Maurice Keen admitted at the end of his magisterial

work Chivalry (1984) that he had "fallen...in love with his

103

subject" (253). In a work aiming (and succeeding) in
finding a definition of chivalry there is a certain
‘queerness' to that confession. The act of definition,
especially defining something that is considered an
important part of masculine identity, gives us access to
the nature of the voice we bring to the dialogue between
the historical text and our own personal discourse. Keen
reveals the investment he has made in his construction of
masculine chivalric identity, and opens himself up to the
consequences of his confession. His identification with
chivalry suggests that the modern masculine subject still
requires deliberate construction based in relationship to
an Other, but the Object/Other does not necessarily have to
be female, or alien, strange, or hostile.1 Keen does
identify with chivalry and the "otherness" of knighthood,
not in terms of class identity, but with the image of a man
of honor, personal integrity, and a sense of duty to defend
the weak and oppressed, a man who is invulnerable and
invincible in his armor, dedicated to a higher calling, and

is ultimately 'bigger than life.‘

 

1 Greenblatt suggests that ”Self-fashioning is achieved in
relations to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This

threatening Other -- heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor,
Antichrist -- must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked
and destroyed” (10). While his views are no longer considered by New

Historicists as irrefutable, they remain the lingua franca of the
discourse.

104

For the purposes of this chapter, I am going to use as
the touchstone Keen's definition of chivalry, but I must
insert Lee Patterson's caveat that:

Whether we rely upon previous texts [in interpreting a

text], social and political formations, or a period

consciousness, we are turning not to "extrinsic data,"
in the sense of something instantly apprehensible and
self-evidently meaningful, but rather to a mass of
material, almost all of it textual, that requires
interpretation before it can enter into the process of
historical understanding. Indeed, however much as we
may be committed to the idea of original meaning, we
must finally acknowledge that, in every way that
counts, "original meaning" is indistinguishable from

"meaning to us." (44)

Thus in attempting to define such an elusive and derivative
term as chivalry, we must consider our discourse as part of
a process, a reconstruction of the past through our own
lenses, and not a distinctive or determining answer.
Therefore, in order to answer the question I must reveal
part of my own identity in relation to the text -- that my
identification with the social mystique of chivalry has
permanently biased my approach towards any definition. Sir
John’s quest for information and definition regarding
chivalry follows this same path - his identification with
chivalric norms may have been a more explicit part of his
culture, and the modern scholar's identification may be

more implicit, but it is nevertheless the same journey

towards finding meaning.

105

Keen sees the term chivalry as an "evocative word,
conjuring up images in the mind, it is also, for that very
reason, a word elusive of definition." The noun Chevalier
is definable in its closest French meaning of 'knight,‘ but
Keen reveals that chivalry "is a word that was used in the
middle ages with different meanings and shades of meaning
by different writers and in different contextsmbut it
remains a word elusive of definition, tonal rather than
precise in its implications" (1-2). Nevertheless, he does
try to come to a working definition, stating that:

...chivalry may be described as an ethos in which

martial, aristocratic, and Christian elements were

fused together. In a given context, one facet may be
to the fore, but it remains hard to exclude overtones
from elsewhere. The military aspect of chivalry is

associated with skill in horsemanship specifically, a

costly expertise which could be hard to acquire for

one not born to a good heritage. The aristocratic
aspect is not just a matter of birth; it is connected

with ideas of the function of knighthood and with a

scale of virtues which implies that aristocracy is a

matter of worth as much as it is of lineage. The

Christian aspect is presented surprisingly free of the

imprint of ecclesiastical prejudice and priorities.

(Keen 16-17)

This definition has more of a psychological approach, which
ids not surprising since Keen admits he feels a sense of
Personal identification with the subject. He describes

Cfilivalry as an "ethos," which implies that he sees the

HUJlitary, aristocratic, and Christian aspects to be part of

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a belief system, and a virtuous one at that. Keen
concludes that:

Chivalry essentially was the secular code of honor of

a martially oriented aristocracy. mIt flourished, in

the period between the mid-twelfth and the sixteenth

century, as the ethos of the dominant secular estate
of Christian Europe, and its characteristic trappings
were fashioned by the social, political, and cultural
conditions of those times. mThe rise of the secular
courts, as centers of culture and as a natural meeting
ground of clergy with nobility, provided the context

for it to grow up from a warrior's code into a

sophisticated secular ethic, with its own mythology,

its own erudition, and its own rituals which gave

-tangible expression to its ideology of honor. (252-3)
As a "secular ethic" chivalry provides a code of honor that
is understandable for a male identity that may not
otherwise find an affinity with the warrior ideal. Keen's
point of view sees chivalry as an ethic with which one may
form an emotional alliance -- or not -- as one chooses.
For Keen, chivalry may be defined as less of a type of
ideology, and more of a selective lifestyle chosen to
promote personal honor and glory.

Law historian Theodor Meron, on the other hand,
provides a definition of chivalry which is based on his
analysis of chivalry as an ideology that promoted personal
accountability instead of honor and glory. In Bloody
Cbnstraint (1998), Meron sees chivalry as, "...the

principal normative system providing a code of behavior for

knights, nobility and the entire warring class in the

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endemic wars in which they were involved" (4-5). Seeing
chivalry as a "normative system" as opposed to a "secular
ethic" suggests a vision of chivalry through the lenses of
a Hegelian dynamic in which there is a power struggle
between those promoting the system and those who have to
live under the constraints of that system of rule.2 Meron
continues his definition by elaborating on that system:
As a code for the upper classes, chivalry also
radiated values for other members of society. The
humane and noble ideals of chivalry included justice
and loyalty, courage and honor and mercy, the
obligations not to kill or otherwise take advantage of
the vanquished enemy, and to keep one's word --
sanctity of the chivalric oath was particularly
important -- and the duties to protect the weak,
women, widows and orphans, to help people in distress,
to be gentle, to act nobly and generously, to redress
wrongs, to avenge injustice and to renounce the
pursuit of material gain (but not the spoils of war
and ransom).(5)
This system of values is focused on the rewards of
externally virtuous action and conforming to a code of
behavior that is not always in the knight's self-interest.
Indeed, in order to be dubbed a knight, a squire must

reflect "merit, courage and service to the community, in

accordance with these principles" (5). Since these

 

2 A solid literature on medieval masculinity and codes of behavior
is emerging: three major semiotic works are the 1990 anthropological
study by D.D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of
Masculinity, the 1994 historicist study of medieval cultures collected
by Claire A. Lees: Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the.Middle
Ages, and the 2000 gender study edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and
Bonnie Wheeler, Becoming Male in the Middle Ages.

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principles are socially motivated, the chance a knight will
engage in recreant behavior increases in proportion to his
difficulty in living in such a normative system.

Keen and Meron's definitions of chivalry come to the
same conclusions about the romantic aspects of chivalry,
even though Keen approaches it by seeing chivalry as a
'larger than life' social mystique, and Meron sees
chivalry's romantic aspects arising from overcoming
unrealistic expectations for men living in an environment
based and surrounded by endemic warring. One must admit
that these definitions are much more attractive than Jeremy
Adams' essentializing chivalry into A, B, and C:

When educated speakers of current English mention

"chivalry" in a discussion of the European Middle

Ages, it is safe to assume that they are referring to

one or more of three connected phenomena: (A) the

expert horsemanship of the military landed aristocracy
and, by extension, its mode of making war; (B) the
class which developed and was at least partly defined
by that expertise and its consequences, cultural as
well as political and economic; or (C) the codes of
behavior developed by that class as self-definition,
especially from the twelfth century onward. For
convenience, let us call the military Chivalry A, the
social class Chivalry B, and the code -- or codes --

Chivalry C. (43)

Adams' definition in his article “Modern Views of Medieval
Chivalry” (1988) removes all of the splendor, mystique, and

ideological ambiguity that are necessary for a full

appreciation of chivalry. Such an anatomized chivalry does

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not contain the spirit of those who lived it its height,
nor does it reflect any sense of the inspiration chivalry
gave to those in the fifteenth century or during the
Victorian revival or even in chivalry's manifestation
today. By seeing chivalry as a "phenomenon," Adams denies
the chivalric value system still prevalent in our own
western culture (especially in the military, sports,
business, and Hollywood films), as well as the fact that
his definition is only one interpretation, part of a

”process of historical understanding."

II. Knights and Other Romantic Aliens

The definitions of chivalry in the romances are
intertwined with the genre‘s treatment of women, but as the
genre engages with femininity it paradoxically focuses
attention on masculinity. The earliest surviving romances
date from around 1150, and the genre is associated with the
appearance (originally in Occitania) of a type of poetry
that incorporated fin'amour, renamed amour courtois or
'courtly love' by Gaston Paris in 1883. The definitions of
chivalry in romance can be seen as being developed
primarily through the comparison between the knightly

subject and the Other, and secondarily through negotiation

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with another knightly figure in an exchange of a woman.
The knight in this second area may himself be read as an
Other, and this adds to the construction of his knightly
identity in his separation from courtly society.3

Simon Gaunt suggests that "The masculine individual in
romance is necessarily alienated. The feminine is the
agent of his self-discovery, but also potentially the cause
of his alienation" (109). This point is very well seen in
Chaucer's Knight's Tale: we can barely tell the two knights
apart until they start fighting over the woman, and even
then their bare distinguishing characteristics only slowly
arrive in relation to their feelings toward the woman and
towards each other. Locked in prison, with no hope of the
usual chivalric ransom, they are alienated from their own
court, and alienated from the court of Theseus. The moment
they set eyes on Emily, they become alienated from each
other. The negotiations of knightly identity begin at this
point, as Arcite shows his tricky character in subterfuge
after he is let out from prison, and Palamon shows his

slippery character by escaping prison to be near Emily.

3 In addition to Gaunt, see Jean-Charles Huchet, Le Roman
Medieval, a re-evaluation that argues that romance articulates a new
and more complex model of male subjectivity via love and women; Roberta
Krueger, WOmen Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French verse
Romance, argues that romances both endorse the sex/gender system they
mediate and appears to deconstruct it by showing the transparency of
the model.

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The set-up of their final battle is a wonderful
template for chivalric tournaments, and the anachronism of
placing Greek characters in a fourteenth-century joust is
politely ignored by Chaucer. But it is the character of
each knight's chivalric identity that takes up more
storytelling than the actual battle, as the descriptions of
the knight's prayers to Venus and Mars are very telling of
the two sides to chivalry: the pursuit of war, and the
pursuit of love, and finding the right lady to love you so
that you will do well in battle, and to do well in battle
so that the right lady will love you. Theseus remarks on
the irony of the chivalric ideal here, in that Emily knows
nothing about their battles: "But this is yet the beste
game of alle,/ That she for whom they ban this jolitee/ Kan
hem therfore as muche thank as me./ She woot namoore of al
this hoote fare,/ By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare!"
(1806-10). Emily, of course, has little or no say in the
matter, and her knowledge of the situation is irrelevant,
since she is only intended to be a metaphor men may use to
construct their own subjectivity. She is the Other, but
the real impulse for the construction of knightly identity
among Arcite and Palamon occurs between the two men, and
between the knights and the larger marriage-promoting

society embodied by Theseus. In the end, of course, to the

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victor goes the spoils, but with Chaucer's usual sense of
irony one cannot help but wonder if Emily hasn't won the
second best husband, as Arcite knows that "trouthe, honour,
knyghthede,/Wysdom humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede,/
Fredom, and al that longeth to that art"(2789-91) are the
values of good chivalry, and dying in battle is a sure
chivalric guarantee of a direct ascent to heaven.

Gaunt sees this dilemma as the divide in chivalry
between the self and society, echoing Keen's definition of
chivalry in personal, psychological terms, but also
tempering it along Meron's more societal, ideological
interests. Gaunt suggests:

The hero of romance is a divided self, split between

an impulse towards social integration and a counter-

impulse towards socially alienating, but privately
fulfilling desires. The concomitant ambivalence
surrounding the male individual's construction of his
identity is frequently reflected in equivocal public
.perception of his worth... A countertext is suggested
in which the structure of the romance is the reverse
of that suggested superficially by the narrative; the
hero loses more than he gains in his successful quest
for identity; he starts off worthy, but nameless; he

ends up slightly ridiculous and alienated. (109)

This dilemma is seen in several texts: Chrétien de Troyes
Erec et Enide, the anonymous Guy of warwick, Sir Orpheo,
and Stephen Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure.

The Pastime of Pleasure (c. 1500) is an allegorical

romance, once highly esteemed (like Lydgate's poetry) but

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one that fell into disuse as the interest in romance waned.
The hero, dubiously called Graunde Amoure, undergoes
scholastic and chivalric training in order to win La Bell
Pucell, is knighted, does great fayttes of arms, kills a
horrible dragon, marries the fair lady, grows old, and
dies. It does not contain a plot of great consequence.

The story does, however, have some interesting preliminary
suggestions of chivalric self-fashioning, notably:

For knyghthode is not in the feates of warre

As for to fyt in quarell ryght or wronge

But in a cause whiche trouthe can not defarre

He ought hymselfe for to make sure and stronge

Iustyce to kepe myxte with mercy amonge

And no quarell a knyght ought to take

But for a trouthe or for the comyns sake. (3368-74)

A knight should fight in a 'cause' condoned by society, but
he also has a responsibility to his own image and desires,
as Hawes suggests that the knight must decide the surety
and value of his potential battles for himself.

The hero of Sir Orpheo (c. 1325) also undergoes a
fight between his own self-interest and the greater good of
his kingdom, as he struggles to win over the Other, first
in the faerie kingdom, and then by assuring the loyalty of
the steward of his own kingdom. Orpheo must negotiate the
return of his wife Heurodis (and his honor) from the Faerie

King, and as such he must fight using his wits, not unlike

the occasional turn of events in Guy of warwick, who must

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now and then outsmart an enemy he cannot physically kill.
Orpheo wins his battle, but the result is his separation
from his courtly society, and he, like Odysseus, must test
his court before he allows himself and his kingly identity
to be reintegrated into the court.

That a knight must be intelligent, learned, and have
some 'street smarts' as well as excellent battle skills is
very well set forth in Guy of warwick (c. 1330). The hero
begins as a steward's son who loves Felice, the daughter of
an earl, and he goes on adventures in order to gain honor
and glory enough to be worthy to marry the earl's daughter.
As is typical of romance, she is the reason for his
adventures of self-discovery, but she is also the reason
for his greatest heartbreak. Guy and Felice finally marry,
but less than fifteen days later Guy determines he must do
penance for his bloodshedding life prior to his marriage,
and decides to go on pilgrimage. He tells her "Sithe that
y first loued the/ In grete sorowe y haue bee:/ Than y haue
for the d00/ Wrought moche sorowe and woo" (7415-18). Guy
is caught between the impulse for stability and family life
as opposed to fulfilling his desire for honor and glory and
saving his soul. In his chivalric quest he has finally

become a king, but Gaunt's idea of a 'countertext' is

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supported in that the end result of Guy's spiritual quest
is his losing his wife, child, best friend, and country.
Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide (c. 1172)
underscores Gaunt's point about the feminine as the agent
of chivalric self-discovery, as well as the reason for a
knight's alienation. The world of the tale is a constant
battleground for testing, and Erec's identity is not
allowed to rest when he is married. Nancy Bradley-Cromey
suggests that, "Although Chrétien's romances may not
explicitly delineate codes of conduct proper to knighthood,
each offers, through the conflicts which the knight
confronts, a prescriptive enactment of what he should do
and where his priorities lie" (451). The definitions of
chivalry are both explicit and implicit in this tale, as we
see Erec fight honorably in tournaments and battles, and we
see him struggle with the loss of his chivalric virtues and
prowess. His loss occurs immediately after his marriage:
But Erec was so in love with her that he cared no more
for arms, nor did he go to tournaments. He no longer
cared for tourneying; he wanted to enjoy his wife's
company, and he made her his lady and his
mistress...His companions were grieved by this and
often lamented among themselves, saying that he loved
her far too much. (67)
Enide appears to be a three-dimensional character in that

she reacts to the slanders and grumbling by the knights in

a very realistic way:

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...Enide heard them say among themselves that her lord
was becoming recreant with respect to arms and
knighthood, because he had profoundly changed his way
of life. This weighed upon her, but she dared not
show it, for her husband might have taken it ill had
she mentioned it. (67)
That she is a woman whom we hear of after the negotiations
and transfer of the wedding exchange is surprising; that
Chrétien allows the Other to speak and tells us her
intimate thoughts is even more amazing. Woman is most
often seen in romance as a force that destroys social
cohesion, but here Enide is fighting to keep that cohesion
in the face of a husband who is not suppressing his
antisocial desires. As the public perception of his worth
drops, Erec must recover it by denying the woman whom he
sees as the cause for his alienation. Gaunt's suggestion
of the countertext applies strongly in this tale: as the
reader follows the psychological trials of Enide and the
physical trials of Erec, he cannot help wondering if Erec
is worth Enide's worry and Griselda-like patience, since
Erec is behaving foolishly. Erec's behavior might be seen
as alienating not only his wife but also the audience of
the tale, as Chrétien's gift to the audience of Enide's

thoughts makes Erec's scolding into a testing of the

audience's patience as well.

117

Christine de Pizan's Le Livre du Duc des vrais Amants
(1405) offers a problematic definition of chivalry. The
Duke is in love with a young woman named Sebille, and like
Erec, he avoids going to war, preferring to participate in
local tournaments in order to remain near her. The gossip
grows too great, and her honor becomes damaged by the talk,
forcing the Duke to go off to Spain. The love affair
slowly ends with suspicion and jealousy on both sides, with
the Lady being advised to end the affair. Unlike the
typical romance, it does not end happily; the knightly
figure is alienated and never recovers; the Duke does not
care about his own reputation as a knight; and ultimately
both parties lose more than they gained in the
relationship, as no marriage is ever possible. With
hindsight, it is possible to see Christine's deep distaste
for the genre's traditionally male perspective, and her
lack of respect for the self-absorbed Duke echoes her
negative comments regarding such figures in L’Epistre au
Dieu d’Amours and Ballades XLIV and LVII. The tale's
emphasis is not on male chivalrous deeds and honor but on
honor for women, and as such participates in Gaunt's
suggestion of the "divided self." Even though Sebille
manages to suppress her private desires and avoid the

complete destruction of her honor, she is alienated from

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her society because the public perception of her worth has
been questioned.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375-1400) and
Malory's.Mbrte Darthur (c. 1469) are what most people
consider when speaking of English chivalry, and rightly so.
Composed within a hundred years of each other, their blend
of realism and didacticism on one hand, and fantasy and
romance on the other, made them often valued less as
fiction and more as a 'mirror of reality' even for their
fifteenth-century audiences. Though they were written late
in the romance genre, they were a strong force in
transmitting the idea of chivalrous adventure and ideals,
because their situations were familiar and the motivations
of the characters were known to their contemporary
audiences. Howell Chickering suggests that:

...we may reasonably infer that contemporary audiences

tended to see images of themselves in the epic and the

romancem[because] in the later medieval period the
relationships between historical and literary evidence
are much more copious and specific. Whenmwe encounter

Froissart [and] Malory...we see a much closer and

clearer connection between literature and historical

reality. Some knights even modeled their public
personalities and activities directly upon earlier

chivalric literature. (9-10)

As such, these late romances did not add any new definition

to the idea of chivalry, but instead supported the

psychology (or ideology) and mythology of the Arthurian

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court. Sir Gawain and the.Mbrte Darthur added a richness
and depth to the ideal of chivalry, supporting the system's
rituals and ceremonies, and reflecting the complexity and

sophistication of previous manifestations of the romance.

III. Knightly fact and fiction / fact in fiction

That Sir Gawain and the Mbrte Darthur were seen as
'mirrors of reality' is largely due to the historical
writing about Arthur in the Middle Ages. Geoffrey of
Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136)
originated and encouraged the view of the basic historical
veracity of Arthur, and medieval historians used histories
such as his in addition to the romances to "establish what
they thought to have been the rules of the tournament in
the days of King Uther Pendragon, and the terms of the
oaths which newly made knights of the Round Table had been
obliged to swear on admission to the society" (Keen 113).
Geoffrey's view of practical chivalry is unclear at best --
his knights do not behave or use the same cultural
practices as Malory's knights. For example, Geoffrey's use
of milites does not mean the same thing as 'knight,‘ but
closer to footsoldier, and implied not a rank but a battle

position, with little chivalric meaning. The miles is the

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closest to the later meaning of 'knight,‘ seen as "a
warrior of superior kind, with a horse, and riding to
battle...but for that he dismounts" (Tatlock 331).

However, when it comes to Arthur and his creation of
Merlin, Geoffrey defines the ultimate warrior as one who
balanced secular glory and military success. We do not get
glimpses of his relationships with women, or a discussion
of his private or interior life. Arthur is a soldier, and
as Christopher Dean suggests:

Geoffrey thus bequeathed to posterity the figure of

Arthur as warrior-king and conqueror abroad. Writers

of romances later transformed his character into one

more to their own taste, adding the softer qualities
of chivalry to the king and the court around him. But
there is almost nothing of this nature in Geoffrey.

...[His] conception of Arthur caught the imagination

... and most historians preserved that conception for

generations after its author was dead (5).

Not all of the tales in Geoffrey’s history were accepted,
and yet he was not often accused of making up his material
(at least until Higden in 1327 and William Caxton in 1485).
Today we view Geoffrey's conception of Arthur as fiction,
but we must remember that to interpret a text we cannot
turn to ‘real’ or ‘objective' history in order to give us
the materials to "enter into the process of historical
understanding." Just as our history gives meaning to our

art, our art gives meaning to our history, or, in the words

of Patterson, "Art, and culture in general, are not merely

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super-structural consequences of the material processes by
which man makes his world; on the contrary, they are
themselves a form of praxis, a working upon the world in
order to transform it" (53). One may want to see the
incongruities of Geoffrey's text as wrongly interpreted, or
"false" history, but one should try rather to see the text
as a maker of social or ideological reality, especially for
his contemporary audience. The literary text is a cultural
practice that helps constitute our reality, as social
reality is in effect constituted by cultural practice.‘

Sir John Mandeville's examples of chivalry in his
Travels (1356) are more implicit than Geoffrey's, but his
version of reality is not any less constituted. His
description of Prester John's kingdom is very Arthurian,
with knights following special orders not unlike the Round
Table, and with symbolic items such as crosses of gold and
wood to indicate the societal status of Prester's John's
court (gold for war, wood for peace). Prester John's
naming reflects the "rash promise" origin of many chivalric

adventures, combined with the description of the knighting

 

‘ See Pierre Bourdieu’s essay “Reading, Readers, the Literate,
Literature" in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. He
suggests, “Culture and language change because they survive in a
changing world: the meaning of a line of verse, of a maxim or an entire
work changes by virtue of the sole fact that the universe of maxims,
lines of verse or works simultaneously proposed to those who apprehend
them changes: this universe can be called the space of ‘co-possibles’”
(104). '

122

ceremony seen in the Ordene de Chevalerie (c. 1220) or
Charny's Book of Chivalry (c. 1350). It is ironic that the
kingdom of Prester John is seen as an ideal Christian
state, not unlike Arthur's Camelot. Mandeville's critical
view of chivalry follows his views regarding moral and
clerical reform, in that he uses the person of the Sultan
to warn Christian knights: "We.know too by our prophecies
that the Christians shall recover this land again in the
time to come, when you serve your God well and devoutly.
But as long as you live as you do in wickedness and sin, we
have no fear of you; for your God will not help you" (108).
Unless they reform their ways, Christian knights will not
be able to regain the Holy Land from the Saracens -- a
warning not unlike the one given to Lancelot in his search
for the Holy Grail.

With Froissart's Chronicles (c. 1369-1400), the
definition and description of chivalry appears in many ways
to be a return to Geoffrey's love of war and pageantry.5
Froissart's narrative combines authentic personal accounts,
trustworthy official records, and legendary fictitious

exploits, all of which are conflicting in their approach to

 

5 See the introduction to Geoffrey Brereton’s edition of
Froissart’s Chronicles; Howell Chickering's short analysis of Foissart
as historian (compared to Huizinga's approach to history) in The Study
of Chivalry: Resources and Approaches; and J.J. N. Palmer’s collection
Froissart: Historian.

123

history. The narrator has no problem putting himself into
"the process of historical understanding" and thus becomes
a character in his own chronicle. The value in Froissart's
definition of chivalry comes from exactly that advantage --
there is no attempt to find interpretive correctness in his
view of historical reality, because he sees that it is
impossible for one man to make a socially absolute text.
His textual discontinuities are not treated as errors, but
as "the best he could do" under the constraints of an
individual eyewitness of history. Unlike Sir John
Mandeville, Froissart was an admirer of chivalry, and
sometimes his approaches to great knights suggest an
identification similar to Keen's. He was not, however, an
idealist when he came to describing the knightly order, but
more of an admirer of the knightly ideal combined with an
understanding of human nature. His narration of the
conversation with Bascot de Mauléon is a good example of
his understanding of chivalry: Bascot narrates his life in
battle, and interspersed in his tale is his accounting of
how much money he has made from ransoms:

I know of very few, except myself, who were not killed

somewhere in battle. But I have always held the

frontier and fought for the King of England, for my

family estate lies in the Bordeaux district.

Sometimes I have been so thoroughly down that I hadn't

even a horse to ride, and at other times fairly rich,
as luck came and went. (288)

124

Bascot appears to be a reasonable man, a professional
soldier, and one who has a nascent sense of nationalism. He
is also a man who is experiencing the change in chivalry
from the early medieval individualized approach to warfare
(where the noble is offset by his expenses and pains
through ransoming knights of equal or greater nobility), to
the late medieval mass campaigning brought about by large-
scale warfare (where the noble is but a small part of a
greater company of soldiers, many of whom are mercenaries
paid by taxation and plunder).

Christine de Pizan, in Le Livre des Fais et Bonnes
.Meurs du Sage Roy Charles V (1404), also includes herself
as a character in her own narration. To support her
history, she does try to suggest a level of interpretive
correctness in her narration, but she also relies on
chronicles for her dates and names of those in the court
whom she did not meet. Like Froissart, she is an admirer
of chivalric qualities, but Christine is less accepting of
the foibles of human nature, and supports knights only when
they display their chivalric trappings with compassion and
nobility. Charles V was an extraordinary ruler (especially
when compared to the mad and unfocused Charles VI), and her

description of the king is a celebration of his superior

125

qualities. Christine's bias for her constructed vision of
the perfect knight does show through when she rationalizes
how Charles V "could be said to be a true knight":

Now it is time to return to the main purpose of our

material, so that by holding to our promise the truth

will be made clear in the royal portrait -- how our
wise King Charles, notwithstanding that his person
appeared most of the time to be in repose within his
rich palaces, was in fact chivalrous in the manner
that appertains to a true prince, and that the four
aforementioned graces suitable to produce true

chivalry were all found within him (238).

The four graces were his protection of rights, justice and
equality in his realm, his support of the church, his
support of his physical health, and his interest in
increasing his knowledge by supporting teachers,
scientists, and scholars. One cannot help but notice that
Christine does not say Charles V "is" a true knight -- she
lets the definition of knighthood and chivalry remain
implicit in her description so that the disparity does not
become obvious.

William Caxton, while not himself a historian per se,
does like to give the history of his translations, and
included in his epilogues to his chivalric publications are
important views about his definition of chivalry and
knighthood. Like Christine, he expected the king and

knights to be models of behavior, and to live up to the

chivalric code. Caxton's epilogue to Ordre of Chiyvalry

126

(c. 1484) expresses his regret that knights do not live up
to the code. The code that Caxton is thinking of, however,

is not so much that in the work he has just translated, but

that of the:

...noble kyng of Brytayne kyng Arthur with all the
noble knyghtes of the round table / whos noble actes &
noble chyualry of his knyghtes / occupye so many large
volumes/...rede the noble volumes of saynt graal of
lancelot/ of galaad / of Trystram / of perse forest /
of percyual / of gawayn / & many mo" (122)

He also exhorts his audience to "rede Froissart" (123),
reflecting a sense of historical self-consciousness. We
know that Caxton is defining chivalry through the romances
he has read (and translated) as well as through the history
IDf England in texts such as the Polychronicon. By
advocating the reading of exemplary historical texts,
Caxton was transmitting what he considered to be the
(Refining code of chivalry -- an action that suggests
Support for the theory that the literary text is a cultural

Prkactice that helps constitute our social reality.6

\

6 The key word in this sentence is “helps” because if a reader' 3
imler self does not agree with the outer self, which the conduct
literature is endorsing, there will be no correspondence, no matter the
Weight of the authority advocating the text. The gap between discourse
and practice is always there, and Sir John Pastons’ seeing the need to
comPile his Grete Book suggests that he understood this distinction.

127

IV. Textbook Knighthood

Keen begins his search for a definition of chivalry by
listing and analyzing the available materials -- the
romances, the histories, and the chivalric texts. He
eliminates the romances because they are too elastic: he
cannot create a solid definition based on what he terms
"essentially literature of escape" (3). The treatises of
churchmen in the Middle Ages are, on the other hand, too
solid, as they used the conception of a ideal tripartite
society to "portray chivalry in terms of priestly
priorities which most knights either did not fully
understand or felt justified in ignoring" (5). Chivalric
manuals, then, appear to very suitable as they "do make an
attempt to treat chivalry as a way of life in its own
right, and to offer instruction to that end" (6).

Despite this satisfactory conclusion, one must
question the value of chivalric manuals as didactic
literature. There is no doubt that military treatises were
read -- the libraries of the Duke of Burgundy and Henry VI,
as well as Sir John Fastolf and the personal collections of
the Paston family can attest to that. But the practical-
ities and surprises of fighting war negates following any

sort of textbook model in guiding and surviving the course

128

of battle. Therefore, chivalric manuals must have been
read less as "how to fight war" and more as "how to
act/look/sound/behave like a knight." This is not an easy
conclusion to come to, as while early chivalric manuals
focus on virtuous personal attitudes and behavior, later
manuals appear to be more practically oriented, focusing on
the organization and techniques of war.

One possible reason for this change in emphasis is the
change in the ideology behind the knightly role. Patterson
suggests that:

Ideology is not merely a delusive structure of thought

that serves to mystify the true nature of social being

either in order to gain economic advantage or to
provide a merely symbolic resolution of real
contradictions; rather, it is the means by and through
which man gives meaning to his social world and
thereby makes it available to his practical activity.

As an agent of praxis, the symbolic actions of

ideology in effect constitute culture. (54)

Knighthood began as a practical form of defense of one's
territory, and over that practicality evolved a symbolism
resulting from the praxis of knightly culture. As the
forms and means of defense changed, so did the praxis. The
symbolism, which began as a rite of age ceremony, evolved
into deeper and deeper meanings as it integrated the
experiences and rationalizations of the knightly culture.

In the late Middle Ages, jousting and armor faded as the

new techniques of war made horsemanship less relevant,

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chivalrous histories faded as they lost their touch with
contemporary culture, and as the interest in the classics
increased it was difficult to maintain audiences' interest
in the bravery (and reality) of Arthur. One response to
this evolution was to write manuals which appealed to these
new armchair knights, stressing the practicality of the
information within, but couching the information in such
terms as would reflect the psychological identity and
social contour of the reader's mind.7

Despite these reservations, chivalric manuals do
appear to reflect the arc of the definitions of chivalry to
a much greater degree than the romances or histories. The
scope of this section will focus on manuals that are good
examples of early, middle, and late definitions of
chivalry, and will include mentions of like manuals within
each area. One must always begin with Vegetius' Epitome of
.Military Science (c. AD 383-450) the quintessentially

pilfered Roman military manual. Publius Flavius Vegetius

 

7 Teresa of Avila, in her spiritual autobiography The Interior
Castle, admits that as a young woman she loved books of chivalry, as
did her mother, but from her adult perspective that love of chivalry
encouraged vanity. Jennifer Goodman suggests that, “[Teresa’s] reading
in ‘books of chivalry’ might also have fostered her powerful sense of
worldly honour, which she describes as a roadblock to her spiritual
development” (“Wordly” 29). Teresa saw the influence of the chivalric
texts as being negative, but that is the view of a person who has
chosen a spiritual life. If chivalric texts could deeply influence a
young woman (who would never have a chance to support the discourse of
the chivalric ideal with the practice of the ideal), one can only
imagine the powerful effect they had on a young man who could apply
what he had read to his everyday life.

130

Renatus was “in the Middle Ages one of the most popular
Latin technical works from Antiquity, rivaling the elder
Pliny’s Natural History in the number of surviving copies
dating from before AD 1300" (Milner xiii); as a result it
provided much of the primary text material for the idea of
the connection between the Roman miles and the medieval
knight. One did not write on warfare without a reference to
Vegetius, since the whole concept of chivalry was thought
to have originated in Rome.8

Many early military manuals saw the knight as a
representative of Christ, but not all of them. Godfrey of
Boloyne (c. 1183) by William, the Archbishop of Tyre,
depicts the knight as a Christian hero, and Godfrey's
reputation as one of the nine worthies was perpetuated by
Caxton, who, in his translation, names Godfrey "the most
worthy of Christen men" (3). However, in the poem Roman
des Eles (c. 1210) the definition of a knight is that of a
social creature, and the poem "concentrates on telling
knights how to behave rather than elaborating on the
symbolic significance of knighthood. It is a treatise on
cortoisie...[with an] extended passage on love" (Busby 18).
The Roman des Eles by Raoul de Houdenc is not an

essentially religious poem, focusing instead on the social

 

9 See Milner's select bibliography; a full bibliography on the

vast commentary on Vegetius was published by R. Sablayrolles in 1984.

131

virtues of love and the pleasures of women as opposed to
the trials of the battlefield. The anonymous Ordene de
Chevalerie (c. 1220) is quite a different treatise,
describing the dubbing ceremony of the model knight. The
ritual is a very Christian one, but the tone is entirely
secular, with overtones of the chivalrous ideals of the
romances. It was an extremely popular poem, suggesting
that its secular ideals and symbolism initiated and
supported the meaning of chivalry in the social arena. The
Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry (c. 1276) by Ramon Lull, was
the most successful of all the early military manuals. It
raised knighthood to the level of a secular form of
priesthood; the knight was viewed as a nobly born warrior
responsible for maintaining law and justice. Since Lull
himself was a knight-turned-priest, the basis of his
defining the knightly identity as priestly/secular is
fairly overt, but he tempers his religious zeal with
knowledge of the practical tribulations of the warrior. The
manual's success may be explained partially because it did
promote the romance idea of the knight as a representative
of Christ, and partially because it was perfectly in tune
with the ideological presuppositions of French and

Castilian knights.

132

Manuals written during the Hundred Years War
(generally considered to be between 1337 and 1453) presume
that not only is the knight responsible for keeping the
laws and maintaining a level of justice in his lands, but
that he is also involved in the long-term hostilities
between England and France. Thus, in 1350, Geoffroi de
Charny’s Book of Chivalry defines the knight as not quite a
career warrior, but by 1410, in Christine de Pizan's view
there is no doubt of his profession; while Lull's treatise
was the most popular, Charny's was considered the most
practical, as "from this book we can gain a fair idea of
what a knight has absorbed out of the vigorous medieval
world of ideas all around him, what he has rejected or
ignored, what he has added from the yet more vigorous world
of his own experience in camp, court, and campaign"
(Kaeuper 20). That is not to say that the work of Charny
was the most original, but it has a refreshing way of
presenting lay, non-symbolic, pragmatic advice for the
young knight, and while never expecting the impossible of
them, holds them to a high level of responsibility,
especially in his (discreet!) relationships with ladies.

Honoré de Bouvet's The Tree of Battles (c. 1387),
while not quite falling under the definition of a chivalric

manual, does deal with the workings of knighthood, but

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focuses on the legal codes and practices of the soldierly
custom called the 'laws of war' or the 'law of arms.‘ The
manual is about the 'just war' and was immediately
considered popular in face of the questions arising from
the constant warfare between England and France. Bouvet
did not accept the definitions of chivalry from the likes
of Lull and Charny: he found heroism to be too closely
connected with vainglory, and disliked its effect on the
discipline of what was beginning to be the soldier-knight.
As such, his popularity was mostly with civil authorities
rather than the professional knight. Christine de Pizan's
Le Livre des Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie (c. 1410),
follows in this vein (and was often mistaken for Bouvet's
treatise by later translators). Christine follows Vegetius
in the first part of her manual and Bouvet in the last
part, but intersperses her own interviews and information
to update her sources. She also maintains a decidedly
humanist account of knighthood, seeing it with much of the
same eyes as Castiglione did a hundred years later. The
knight needs to be able to fight on a practical basis, but
she knew her aristocratic audience would not be on the same
level as Lull and Charny -- hers were princes who needed a
broader scope of the laws and ideologies of warfare along

with a basic knowledge of the messy details. She knew that

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with proper social manipulation, employment of military
professionals, and a bit of what would be called later
sprezzatura, the prince-general would guide the battle and
not actually participate in it. Christine's work reflects
the changing ideological presuppositions of chivalry and
implicitly acknowledges that the prince can be the purveyor
of ideological meaning as well as a participant in its
praxis.

Late medieval views reflect a change in the idea of
chivalry as an aristocratic mystique. The knight was
beginning to experience a reduction in his sense of value
in war as armies began to depend on yeoman archers, and
campaigns with siege operations became routine. The rules
of knighthood depended on the honor of the one-on-one
encounter, and wars fought by large armies using artillery
were not supportive of taking and ransoming aristocratic
prisoners. The religious wars leading up to and following
the Protestant Reformation also pitted aristocrat against
aristocrat, but in a Christian versus Infidel atmosphere
and the definitions of chivalry strongly precluded giving
quarter to religious adversaries. The result was twofold:
first, a wholesale appeal for a reformation of chivalric

values, and second, the promotion of social chivalry devoid

135

of its military focus, as the knight became the Elizabethan
courtier.

Nicholas Upton, a cleric and heraldic authority,
notices the beginning of this change in knightly personnel
in De Studio Militari (c. 1446):

In these days we see how openly how many poor men

through their service in the French wars have become

noble, some by through prudence, some by their energy,
some by their valor, and some by other virtues which,

as I have said, ennoble men. (48)

The aristocracy is no longer able to hold onto the monopoly
of knightly arms, nor do they want to in the face of the
dangerous and mechanically-inclined late medieval wars.
But the basis of chivalric ideology and psychology still
held an attraction for the aristocracy, which is why the
1458 translation into English verse of Vegetius (titled
Khyghthode and Bataile) was widely read, why Caxton was
asked to translate and print Christine de Pizan's Le Livre
des Fais d’Armes et de Chevalierie in 1489, and why the
translation was (to use an anachronistic term) a best-
seller in England. If Christine’s subject matter held its
attraction eighty-odd years after it was written, there
must have been some merit to her ideological

presuppositions about the changing nature of chivalry.

136

Caxton translated and printed Lull's Book of the Ordre
of'Chyualry in 1484, adding to it some notes and his
epilogue. Along with Caxton's advice to read chivalric
histories, he makes a distinction as to who needs to read
the Ordre of Chyualry:

whiche book is not requysyte to euery comyn man to

haue / but to noble gentylmen that by their vertu

entende to come & entre in to the noble ordre of
chyualry / the whiche in these late dayes hath ben
vsed accordyng to this booke here to for wreton but

forgeten. (121)

Like Upton, Caxton is seeing men like John Paston joining
the ranks of the nobility within two generations, not so
much due to their prowess in arms, as to their prowess in
government administration and law, whose backgrounds were
professional and mercantile. To aspire to nobility and to
join courtly society meant to take up the chivalric
mentality -- which can be seen as an incongruous twist, as
one might say that chivalry was originated in order to get
nobles to behave themselves among the common folk.

Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (c. 1527) is a
lesson in chivalric practicality -- not for war on the
battlefield but for war in the courtyard. The definition
of chivalry in the work has not changed in terms of

concept: nobility is still a powerful force in the social

world, and the basic ideas of loyalty, honor, generosity,

137

courage were not altered. The understanding that force of
might must be balanced by depth of education and knowledge
still remained. Keen argues that "chivalry did not fade or
decline with the coming of the Renaissance. It might
parade in a new dress, Castiglione's courtier might be
expected to know more about the classics and less about
such romantic rituals as the swearing of oaths upon a
peacock...but what this denoted was a change of the
chivalric courtier's wardrobe rather than a change of
heart" (249). The social mystique remained, but the blades

of combat changed from good steel to 'good breeding.‘

V. “...my boke off knyghthod”: Sir John's Collection

A wide range of definitions of chivalry were thus
available to Sir John, ranging from romances to historical
writings to manuals. All of these were available to the
Woodville circle - “available” meaning that the texts were
physically present somewhere in England - but of course
that does not mean the members were able to access the

texts in order to personally read them.9 Woodville himself

 

9 More analysis could be made if we knew the contents of Henry
VI’s library. We know that he was a benefactor of Eton and King’s
colleges, Cambridge, but as Thompson points out, “nothing is known of
his library except that in 1426 an Egesippus and a Liber de observantia
papae were borrowed from the royal library in the treasury by Cardinal

138

may have had access to everything Caxton printed, including
the first edition of the canterbury Tales, the Chronicles
of England, Godfrey of Boloyne, and the Polycronicon.
Caxton most likely had access to an even larger range of
works, and as a businessman, he chose to print only those
which would sell the best, based on the literary trends of
the market. This market, following the literary tastes of
the court of Burgundy, is reflected in Stephen Scrope’s
choice of texts to translate: The Diets and Sayings of the
Philosophers and Tully of Old Age are treatises on morality
and philosophy; The Letter of Othea is a 'Mirror For
Princes' allegorical/ chivalric lesson.10

The contents of The Boke of Neblesse shows that the
chivalric works in Sir John Fastolf’s library were more

extensive than it appears in his final will. The library

 

Beaufort, and there are subsequent notices of the return and reissue of
the same books to the same borrower” (406). On the other hand, the
contents of the library of Edward IV are well known, and his tastes
were towards books that led to “entertainment and edification rather
than serious study” (Thompson 407). Edward, being Caxton's patron, no
doubt had access to everything Caxton printed.

m The tastes of the court of Burgundy were reflected in the
tastes of the English court, and with the ascension of Henry IV, this
taste was reflected back towards the French with an English flavor.
Henry IV was a well-read king who commissioned both Gower and Chaucer
in their old age, and appointed a pension to Hoccleve. The friendship
between Chaucer and Deschamps is well documented, and in turn Christine
de Pizan held the attention of English literary society when Henry IV
invited her to court; although she declined the favor, the offer
increased her prestige in French literary society (see Willard
“Works”). It is possible that the young Henry met Christine (who was
only two years his elder) when he was exiled by Richard II in 1398 and
then lived in the Hotel Clisson in Paris.

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may have contained a French compendium of the histories of
Orosius, Lucan, and Suetonius, the stories of Cicero and
Ovid, and 'Basset's Chronicle' (McFarlane 215 n103-4). His
final will lists in French the Cronicles d'Angleterre and
The Cronycles of France, A Book of JUlius_Caesar, the
Romaunce la Rose, and veges de l'arte_Chevalerie, plus a
Liber de Roy Artour.

The Earl of Oxford certainly had a collection of
chivalric works beyond The Four Sonnes of Aymon, a
chivalric treatise which he asked Caxton to translate and
print, and it was most likely Oxford’s recommendation that
connected Caxton with Henry VII, and led to the translation
and printing of Christine's Fais d'Armes.

This leaves us with Sir John Pastons’ collection of
chivalric works. He most likely had access to his sister
Anne’s copy of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and it would be
difficult to eliminate any of the books seen in his
inventory of 1475-79 as not having a connection with the
means and ideals of chivalry. He owned a copy of the
chivalric favorite Guy of warwick, a version of the Death
of Arthur, a book of Troilus, two books in which Chaucer’s
writings were compiled, a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green
Khight, and Christine’s Boke de Othea [sic], which he notes

in his listings as including both the text and the gloss.

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He had several books of blazonings and arms, and his Grete
Boke topped off the collection.

Sir John has been called a “bibliophile,” and yet that
name only applies because we have the evidence from the
Paston Letters and his own inventory that indicates he felt
a deep love of books. However, we do not have any evidence
that his reading habits were out of the ordinary - he was a
courtier who followed the trends of the Burgundian court,
and as such he followed in the steps of his social
superiors. His collection does not indicate that he was
following any innovative process: he was trying to
entertain and educate himself, as was most, if not all, of
the English court, following the idea of ‘profitable .
reading.’11

Judging from the book collections of his peers in the
Woodville circle, his actions were perfectly normal in his
collecting of heraldic records, military manuals,
collections of statutes and ordinances for war, and ‘Mirror

for Princes' works. And yet the very act of collecting this

 

n Jennifer Summit elaborates on the idea of ‘profitable reading':
“Caxton offerted] Caton to readers ‘that they maye thereby prouffyte
and be the better,’ and the Mirror of the WOrld as an example of ‘men
somtyme travaillyng in prouffytable virtues.’ That such a model of
virtue comprises both moral and commercial ‘profit' finds particularly
graphic support in Caxton's Dialogues in French and English, for
example, which promises ‘grete prouffyt’ to readers should they ‘lerne
this book diligently’, and thereby learn French in order to master the
art of international trade” (159).

141

information reflects a desire to contain and create a
correspondence between Sir John’s personal experiences and
the experiences of those men and women he had read about in
his books, which in turn suggests that Sir John did not
find his reading material to be ‘profitable’ - or at least
not profitable enough for Sir John to be satisfied by
simply making a financial outlay for a particular book. He
had to create his own book in order to feel that sense of
‘profitable reading.’

I must return to Lee Patterson’s caveat regarding
interpreting texts to explain this curiosity: when Sir John
collected his books, he was looking for information which
would allow him to interpret the social and political
formations around him. Chivalry, even to Sir John, who
lived in a time when jousts could be attended, was not
something “instantly apprehensible and self-evidently
meaningful” as Patterson describes “extrinsic data,” but
something that required interpretation, that is, something
within which Sir John had to find his own meaning. We
cannot know if his definition was closer to Keen’s personal
identification or Meron’s view of it as a form of social
ideology, but these are admittedly two extreme views.
Judging from Sir John’s relaxed approach to his familial

duties, one might come to the conclusion that his politics

142

were just as relaxed and moderate, and perhaps his views of
chivalry followed the same middle path.

Sir John’s attempt to define chivalry suggests that
he, too, was aware of the fact that this definition was not
final, but a part of a process, a reconstruction based on
his own personal lenses. The other chivalric manuals and
conduct literature may have aimed at making a solid
correspondence between discourse and practice, but Sir John
may have found that they did not appeal to his needs and
individuality and so compiled his own “booke of vrbanitie”
which allowed him to speak as a subject in his own right.

Neither Sir John, nor Christine de Pizan, nor anyone
participating in finding meaning within one’s culture can
avoid the expression of their own personal interpretation
of that “extrinsic data.” But the works of Christine de
Pizan within this context create an unusual situation
because while she did appeal to the fifteenth-century
reader, Christine’s view was not that of an ordinary man --
or woman -- and thus her interpretation of her
environmental data would of necessity be innovative. On the
most basic level, she was a woman writing about chivalry,
and this in itself defied the norms of her culture. What
is even more unusual is that her interpretation of the

extrinsic data around the mystique and facts of chivalry

143

was publicly accepted by both the French and English court
-- even though the definition of chivalry was seen through
the personal interpretation of a woman -- allowing a woman
to redefine a vital part of the masculine identity of the
fifteenth century. Not only was Christine’s view accepted,
but it was promoted by more than one king.

The Woodville circle’s reading of Christine’s
interpretation would have to be aware of the original and
innovative nature of her writing and her approach to
chivalry. Religion was narrowly defined by the Church, but
chivalry was not so narrowly defined, and was Open not only
to public reinterpretation, but also private dialogue, it
appears.12 The Woodville circle’s delight in books reflects
minds that delight in education and information and
temperaments that do not seek “official” answers. This is
a thirst for personal improvement, a reflection of the
thoughts beginning to flourish as the ideas of the Italian
Renaissance make their way north. Christine’s appeal in

England reflects this thirst, a desire not marred by

 

n Rondeau, following Foucault and deCerteau, links “the
historical creation of the closed discourse of history - and of
hegemonic ‘discourse’ generally - to the claims to institutional power
of the clergy. Clerics’ claims to speak officially, in the name of
religion - itself a historically defined category - both refer to and
foreclose the possibility of examining transparently the “practice,
hence...reality” of past cultures. Clerical claims to authority rest
upon specific modes of linguistic control, framed in terms of the
authority of the written word and Word - “discourse” in a word” (18).
The texts chosen and embraced by the Woodville circle reflect a private
discourse outside of the Church’s control.

144

discrimination against her sex that was seen in her French
publishers and copiers.

Sir John knew that he was reading the writings of a
woman, and there is no evidence that he cared about her
gender. That he was reaching for a definition of his own
masculine identity through the medium of a woman writer may
have not been an issue for him - on the other hand, a
woman’s interpretation of chivalry may have been the very
factor that made her appealing. As we will see in later
chapters, Christine’s voice may be read on different levels
of text and subtext, and part of her popularity may truly
rest on the cleverness and insightfulness of those who
could decode and profit from those multiple levels, knowing
that their historical, psychological, and ideological
lenses matched hers, or at least were fascinated by her
thought.

The next chapter will discuss the interaction between
Christine’s “conduct literature” writings, focusing on her
“bestseller” Deeds of Arms, and the appeal of her
innovative approach to chivalry. A certain amount of
voyeurism exists in the study of something as touchy and
intimate as honor and courage, no matter the century.
Chivalry is an ideal, but it is also the lifestyle of

living, breathing human beings, making decisions to solve

145

everyday problems based on a code that does not reflect a
high amount of self-preservation. To be chivalrous means to
be constantly thinking about causes and effects, to be one
step ahead of one's enemy, and to enjoy the rush of
adrenaline should combat begin. Chivalry is a good code
(or ideology) for social cohesion because one constantly
must look after one’s fellow human being -— it is not,

however, a good code for personal survival or profit.

146

Chapter Four
Deeds of Arms: Origins, Construction,

and the Aristocratic Mystique

Christine de Pizan’s The Letter of Othea, and The Book
of the Body Politic were owned by members of the Woodville
circle, and Deeds of Arms was present in the group in the
form of The Boke of Neblesse. However, Deeds of Arms had a
second life when it was deemed significant enough by Henry
VII for him to request its translation and printing into
English, and thus it had an influence beyond Christine’s
other works. This chapter reveals the history behind Deeds
of Arms, and suggests why this particular text was chosen
by a duke and two kings to be a standard for chivalric

behavior in their time.

I. A New Manual for War

In 1410, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy,

commissioned Christine to write a new manual on warfare for

the Dauphin of France, Louis of Guyenne.1 The Duke's

 

1 By December 28, 1409, the Duke had triumphed over his political
rivals, the Armagnacs, and on that date had been named official
governor of the Dauphin, making him the ruler of Paris in all but name.
The history behind these events and their connection to Christine may

147

interest in the Dauphin's education prompted him to provide
the prince with tutelage, and in 1410 the prince was
thirteen years old, the year considered proper for a future
knight to begin military training.2 A number of factors may
have played a role in the decision to commission a new
manual for war. The Duke could have just given the Dauphin
a copy of Honoré Bouvet's 1387 military manual, The Tree of
Battles (a copy of which had been owned by Philip the Bold,
the Duke's father).3 However, warfare had been changing
rapidly under the influence of artillery use in the latter
half of the fourteenth century. Between 1377 and 1424 the
use of cannon overtook older ballistic weapons of siege
warfare such as the trebuchet and the mangonel. In 1377,
at the siege of Ardres, only one cannon was used to fire
ZOO-lb. balls; in 1415 Henry V used three cannons during
the siege of Harfleur, taking nearly a month to collapse
the walls of the gate-defense (Keegan 80). But by 1424
"English artillery battered down the walls of Le Mans

within a few days, and during the great campaign of

 

be found in Willard ("Treatise" and "Works”), Teague, and Vaughn
("Fearless”).

2 The starting age for training is suggested by Willard to be

thirteen ("Treatise' 184), and by Delbruck to be from twelve to
fourteen (228).

3 For an analysis of the libraries of Philip the Bold and John the
Fearless, see Vaughn ("Bold" 194-95 and ”Fearless” 234).

148

reconquest in 1449 the French took sixty fortresses with
the aid of cannon, many surrendering as soon as they saw
the big guns in position" (Wise 167). Bouvet's manual
dealt with legal and theoretical arguments relating to
warfare but, as it did not discuss the day-to-day details,
it did not include any reactions or stratagems regarding
the new technology.4 Clearly a manual of warfare was needed
that bridged the connection between the old laws and ethics
of warfare and the new technical practicalities and, at the
very least, detailed new strategies and customs for knights
to navigate and survive these advances.5

John the Fearless chose Christine as the author
because he knew what he would get (or at least thought he
knew what he would get) when he asked her to write such a
work. As the first professional woman writer in Europe,

Christine had demonstrated repeatedly her ability and

 

‘ Wright suggests The Tree of Battles presents a picture of the
ideal soldier's role in society: "a picture which must have appeared a
long way from reality in fourteenth-century France...[It was] only a
theoretical treatise whose fine rules and generous exemptions were
rarely observed" (29-30).

5 Vale points out with a sense of irony, "Had it not been for the
French siege-guns, the outcome of the Norman and Gascon campaigns which
effectively ended the Hundred Years War might arguably have been very
different. The challenge they offered to traditional methods of siege-
craft and fortification led to the creation of new techniques of both
attack and defense. In the realm of ideas, the gun was accepted
without serious reservations, just as former innovations had been
accepted. The existing gulf between chivalrous idealism and the
reality of war was merely widened as a result of its appearance. The
gun posed no threat to a society in which 'chivalrous' behavior in
warfare was, perhaps, the exception rather than the rule” (72).

149

confidence to write on a wide variety of topics while using
a number of methods.6 John was also well known for
patronizing those writers who gave him Burgundian
propaganda or "enthusiasm" (Vaughn, ”Fearless" 235), and he
ran a fully fledged propaganda campaign from 1404-1413 in
order to give him the support and deference he needed to
keep control of Paris. In this propaganda campaign,
Christine had presented Le Livre de la MUtacion de Fortune
to the John the Fearless on the first of January, 1404, and
had been commissioned by Philip the Bold, the previous Duke
of Burgundy, to write Le Livre des Fais et Bonnes Meurs du
Sage Roy Charles V, which she finished on November 30,
1404. These two works were very generous in their praise
of all French princes, and demonstrated her sympathy with
the court of Burgundy's reputation.

Evidence for John's regard for Christine has been
found in an item recorded in the Burgundian accounts and
dated May 13, 1411, regarding the financial compensation

for Deeds of Arms:7

 

5 For Christine as "the first professional woman writer" see
Bornstein "Policie," Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Cerquiglini, Quilligan,
Richards ”Ladies," Willard "Works.“ This idea was championed by the
grande dame of Christine criticism, Charity Cannon Willard, and it is
now considered by scholars to be a fact that Christine was the first
woman to write on commission.

7 Willard suggests this item is for Christine's payment for the

Letter on the Evils of Civil war and Feats of Arms (”Treatise" 186),
received on May 13, 1411.

150

To Demoiselle Christine de Pizan, widow of the late
Master Estienne du Castel, a gift of 100 crowns, made
to her by my lord the duke, for and in acknowledgment
of two works which she has presented to my lord the
Duke, one of which was commissioned from her by the
late Duke of Burgundy, father of the present
Duke...shortly before he died. Since then she has
finished this book and my lord the Duke has it
instead. The other book my lord the Duke wanted to
have himself and...he takes much pleasure in these two
books and in others of her epistles and writings. Let
these books be entered in the inventory and kept for
my lord the Duke.8

The account suggests John chose Christine because he liked
what and how she wrote. John inherited his father's
collection of books: Philip the Bold's taste was for
devotional and religious literature, but there were more
than a few romances, histories, and didactic works in the
library (Vaughn, "Bold" 194). The evidence suggests that
John was aware of Christine's familiarity with humanist
works, and we have evidence he himself was partial to
humanistic thought through the forty selections he had

9 including a copy of the

commissioned for his library,
history of the discovery of the Canary Isles in 1402—4
titled Le canarien, and manuscripts of Laurent de

Premierfait's French translations of Boccaccio's Decameron

 

8 Translated by Vaughn with ellipses, ("Fearless' 235). Quoted in
Vaughn from the Archives departmentales de la Cote-d'Or, Dijon, MS.
31543, fol. 107, found in De Laborde's Ducs de Burgogne, 1.16, no.63.

9 The manuscripts are, respectively, BL Egerton MS. 2719, BV MS.
Pal 1989, and BA MS. 3193.

151

and De Casibus Virorum et Esminarum Illustrium (Vaughn,
"Fearless" 234).

The Duke's acknowledgment that Christine had served
him well with her Burgundian "enthusiasm" suggests that she
was attuned to the needs of the Duke, and thus understood
the necessity for influencing and educating the Dauphin in
Burgundian ways, guiding the young prince away from the
influence of the rival court of Orléans. Under these
circumstances Christine was asked to write a treatise on
warfare, and she explains in her preface to Deeds of Arms
that:

I have not been inspired by arrogance or foolish
presumption, but rather by true affection and a
genuine desire for the welfare of noble men engaging
in the profession of arms. I am encouraged, in the
light of my other writings, to undertake to speak in
this book of the most honorable office of arms and
chivalry...as set forth in divers laws and by several
authors, just as the builder who has already put up
several strongholds is bold enough to construct a
castle or fortress when he feels he has the materials
to accomplish the work. So to this end I have
gathered together facts and subject matter from
various books to produce this present volume.10

 

m Translated by Sumner Willard as The Book of Deeds of Arms and
of Chivalry, ed. Charity Cannon Willard (12). All further translations
of Deeds of Arms are from this edition. The French original is thus:
WMby, nonne mene par arrogance en fblle presumpcion, mais admonestee de
vraye affection et bon desir des nobles hommes en loffice dez armes,
suis enortee apres mes autres escriptures passees, sy comme cellui qui
a ja abastu plusieurs fors edifices est plus hardy de soy chargier
dedifier ung chastel our forteresce quant garny se sent de conuenables
estoffes en ce neccessaires...ainsy qua propos Iay assemble les
matieres et cuilles en plusiers liures pour produire en mon intencion
on present volume." From Christine's prologue to Fais d'Armes,
reprinted in Byles 5-6.

152

This statement has led scholars to believe Christine felt
she was in a "peculiar" (Teague 27) or "awkward" position
(Willard, "Treatise" 182), using the wording of the
standard apology in her preface to the work to support the
idea that Christine was out of her league. But the above
quote and the historical evidence promotes the opposite
conclusions: John had great confidence in Christine's
ability to write a book of war because of her previous
works on chivalry.

John the Fearless appears to have received more than
he expected from Christine. While she did fulfill the
basics of the commission she was given, the tone of Deeds
of Arms, when compared with other military manuals of the
time, suggests she also interpreted the command to her own
taste, rising above the level of political propaganda. She
knew the Dauphin needed a practical education, but
Christine's description of the man she considered to be the
wisest man in France, Charles V, suggests that the future
ruler of France would also need to be educated in the
classics of philosophy and science coming to the French
court for the first time from Italy:

Even though he understood Latin well and there was no

need of translating for him, he was so provident that

because of the great love he had for those who would
follow him in times to come, he wanted to provide them

153

with teachings and knowledge leading to all sorts of

virtue, and for this reason he had all the most

important books translated from Latin into French by
solemn masters highly competent in the sciences and
arts... [including] the Bible, ...Saint Augustine,...

Aristotle, ...Vegetius, ...The Properties of Things,

...Valerius Maximus, ...The Policraticus, Titus

Livius...and a great many others.11
Christine drew attention to Charles V's love of science and
philosophy so that readers would see the benefits of a
humanist education. If the Dauphin could follow the same
path as his grandfather, he would theoretically overcome
his enemies and not repeat the social, economic, and
military mistakes of his father, Charles VI.

The result of her creative decision is twofold: on the
first level Deeds of Arms is a plain-speaking manual for
early modern warfare, made of an evenly distributed
synthesis of ancient and medieval sources and Christine's
own annotations, research, and Opinions. The work argues
that war is lawful for a just cause, either self-defense,
defense against tyranny, or preserving freedom of a
(country; Christine also discusses weaponry, military

strategy, and rules of engagement. On the second level,

.Deeds of Arms articulates in full what Christine considered

 

n See Book III.xii of The Book of the Deeds and Good Character of
.King'Charles V the Wise in Willard (”Writings' 240-241). Willard
‘points out in a note that "Charles V's library was...supervised until
1411 by Giles Malet, an especially trusted member of the royal
household and a friend of Christine's husband's family, [and] this
collection of manuscripts had no equal in Europe except for the
Visconti Library in Pavia" (247).

154

to be proper and improper knightly behavior, constructing a
more classically-based pragmatic soldier in opposition to
the older norms of the chivalric knight. This dual purpose
is no doubt one of the reasons why the book was chosen by
Henry VII to be printed (and thus perhaps becoming required
reading for his court): it appealed to both his softer
courtly tastes and his tougher military requirements, and

provided an excellent balance between the two.

II. The Construction of Deeds of Arms

The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry (1410),12 is
representative of the medieval military text as a genre in
that it draws together three of the most influential
military treatises available in Christine's time: a
military history, a military strategy manual, and a
courtier's manual or ”Mirror for the Prince.“13 Christine's

choice to include personal interviews with contemporary

 

u Sumner Willard’s 1999 translation of Deeds of Arms was based

on Brussels, Bibliothéque Royale MS. 10476, as it “dates from the
lifetime of Christine de Pizan” (2).

n It could have been placed in her times in the same categories
as the De Regimine Principum by Ptolemy of Lucca, written around 1250
and translated into French for Charles V in the 1360’s; De Bello
written by the Italian legist John of Legnano around 1365; and A Toute
la Chevalerie by Jean de Montreuil in 1408. It would not have
surprised a reader of Deeds of Arms to see Christine using De Re
IKilitari, as it was the most translated of all military treatises in
her time, nor to see her using L’Arbre des Batailles, as its main
source was De Bello.

155

military men reflects her understanding of the anxieties of
her audience regarding new techniques and tactics of
warfare. While sometimes accused today of offering an
"idealistic" description,“ Christine says that she sought
to write a plain-speaking manual for warfare, because
...military and lay experts in the aforesaid art of
chivalry are not usually clerks or writers who are
expert in language, I intend to treat the matter in
the plainest possible language so that, with God’s
help, I may make clear and comprehensible to all
readers the doctrine set forth by the several authors
whose works I have consulted. 5
While she has been instructed in rhetoric and Latin, she
acknowledges that her audience is not, and thus writes for
those men who were already practicing in the arts of war
and were used to plain language. As Latinity was a mark of

elite masculinity, Christine's emphasis on plain language

and her writing in the vernacular indicates a non-clerical

 

“ Bornstein states that in Deeds of Arms, "The portrait of the
knight as a soldier appears in its most idealistic form” (“Mirrors”
39). Willard disputes this idea saying, “If the ideal upheld by both
Christine and Bouvet has been criticized as far removed from the harsh
reality of the day, it does provide evidence of a desire to reform
chivalric conventions that were not longer useful to society. Both
books were immediately popular, an indication that their ideas found
favor with many knights, and it was in fact during the course of the
fifteenth century that national armies evolved out of the various
orders of knighthood. These books are less an indication of the
decline of chivalry than of its potential for adapting itself to
changing circumstances" ("Works" 186).

u (12) In French, her focus on clarity is even more pronounced:
"...les exerceans et expers en l’art de Chevalerie ne sont communement
clercz ne instruis en science de langage. Je nentens a traittier ne
.mais au plus plain et entendible langaige que je pourray, a celle fin
que la doctrine donnee par plusiers acteurs...propose en ce present
.liure declairer, puist estre a tous cler et entendible” (Byles 5-6).

156

audience -- or a Dauphin who has not yet learned his Latin
wellfi16 In this aspect the manual is a work of
popularization, a "Reader's Digest" as it were, of the
Roman classics pertaining to the basics for being a good
warrior and the practical skills of rough warfare. As such,
it is an intellectually opposite work to her earlier
chivalric poem, The Letter of Cupid (1399), which endorsed
the cultivation of the courtly ideals of chivalry.

The text of the Deeds of Arms is divided into four
books and includes a personal prologue from Christine. The
text is a compilation of several authors and Christine's
own annotations, research, and opinions, but the
distribution between compilation and her comments and
research is fairly even. Her first seven chapters are
considered "original" in that they are not paraphrased from
or connected to outside works. Vegetius's Epitome Rei
.Militaris is used by Christine as the source of nineteen
chapters in Book I, and eleven chapters in Book II.
Frontinus's Strategemata (supplemented by Valerius
Maximus's Facta Dictaque.Mémorabilia) are the sources of
chapters 1—12 in Book II. The second book is also

supplemented in sixteen chapters by the work of military

 

“ See Ruth Mazo Karras for a discussion on literacy and its
connection to the formation of elite masculine identity in medieval
universities.

157

advisors "wise knights, experts in these military
techniques" (117) who assisted Christine but have asked not
to be named in her work. The source of her last two books
is Honoré Bouvet's Tree of Battles, but Christine is
indebted only to Bouvet's fourth part, as she uses it to
examine Bouvet's views on droit de guerre, so that this
part of her work may be regarded as a commentary on the
earlier treatise. Thus out of sixty—seven chapters,
Christine is responsible for twenty-seven chapters and a
prologue, as well as for the translation and editorial
decisions involved in the general compilation of the work.
In her seven "original" chapters, Christine builds
her argument by discussing under what situations a king may
wage war, the five causes of war, and the steps that must
be taken before declaring war. In Chapter 6 she outlines
the care that must be taken to avoid the king's physical
presence being harmed at a battle:
It is not, however, to be considered lightly if a king
or sovereign prince should go [into battle] in person.
It is better to avoid battle than to be present...For
if Fortune should go against the prince who was there
in person, an if he were thereby killed, taken
prisoner, or should flee, this would be a loss of
dishonor not merely to his person, but to those of his
blood and, in general, to all his subjects, and loss
and disruption to his land and country. (22)

"IADSS and disruption" is a rather understated way to

reflect on the difficult practicalities of maintaining the

158

king's body and social position. Christine also points out
in this chapter that many kings, Charles V included, fought
wars from their thrones, and that it is often best to do so
to avoid social tensions, as "good sense and diligence are
more useful in warfare than the presence of the prince”
(23). Christine's sense of humor shines through in this
quip, and she truly understands the anxieties and
intimidations experienced by those rough warriors in the
presence of majesty.

In Chapter 7 this practicality comes to the front in
her long and detailed portrait of the ideal constable or
commander. In the selection of a constable he must, of
course, be a person "who is outstanding in all things that
the bearing of arms requires, which is to say that through
long experience they should be so accustomed to the conduct

of warfare that it should seem like a natural calling” (23-

17

4). She advises not to discriminate based on age, but on

skill, and that experience is more essential than lineage:

...in this selection greater attention should be given
to perfection of skill in arms, along with the virtues
and the character and good bearing that should
accompany this, than to exalted lineage or noble

blood. (24)

 

‘7 An underlying theme in Christine's works (especially seen in
her pro-feminist prose) is a commentary on the classes, following the
classical idea that virtue is not solely inherent to nobility. It is
strongest in her works where she uses the philosophies of Boethius to

ma ke her point .

159

After discussing philosophically the constable's abstract
qualities, including his need for wisdom and courage, she

lists the most important psychological moeurs:

Thus the qualities and conditions that should be found
in a good constable are these: he should not be
stubborn, short-tempered, cruel, or malevolent, but
rather moderate and temperate, firm in justice, kindly
in conversation, of upright bearing and few words,
with a composed face, not given to light talk,
truthful in word and promise, brave, sure of himself,
diligent and not covetous. (25)

Christine lays out her standards of manners from the
beginning of her description; her adjectives are based on
detailing the psychological self-control of the ideal male

character.18 The description of his internal qualities as

 

” Christine follows the Aristotelian notion of hexis, in Latin
habitus, often translated as "habit" or "manners." Aristotle defines
it as "A state of character arising from the repetition of similar
activities. Hence we must display the right activities, since
differences in these imply corresponding differences in the states”
(Nicomachean Ethics 1103b25) . Forhan points out that Christine calls
this concept moeurs which she understood as

habit, morals, manners, and even custom, depending on

context. For Christine, this concept has important theoretical

implications because it combines public and private behavior, the

world of morality with the world of law. If the correct habits

of virtue are inculcated early, they will be reflected in the

individual person's morals as well as his or her manners.(xxii)
If a man is able to justify and accept the differences between public
and private behavior, then his character does not suffer stress, but
this is difficult, as there are conflicts between the desires of
corporal knightly existence and the demands of projecting an ideal
knightly image. According to N.A.R. Wright, there was a difference
between the droit de guerre and the droit d'armes. The former was
applied to the code of laws (such as in the Tree of Battles) that would
allow the creation of "disciplined national chivalries in a world where
chivalry had traditionally accepted neither discipline nor nationalism
as virtues" (19) . The latter applied to the relationships between
knights "in which one party was temporarily at a disadvantage with
regard to another" and their interests in authority were based on
personal advantage or survival as opposed to "public duty" or "common
good" (19). In The Book of the Body of Policy (1406), Christine

160

temperate will also, hopefully, be the description of how
the knight will behave in a crisis situation. However, the
droit d'armes gives a knight the opportunity to project
these traits artificially in order to win a battle. I see
Christine as giving her ideal knight these temperate traits
as inherent to his character, but the traits he cannot
artificially project are those of the warrior, and thus
Christine continues with standards of physical action in
dealing with external forces:
[He should be] proud before his enemies, magnanimous
to the vanquished and to his inferiors, not easily
angered or given to impulsive acts, not readily
impressed by appearances or by words that do not seem
truthful. (25)
Christine's constable fights to the proscribed limits, and

no more, and never fights due to anger or insults. Part of

having the correct moeurs is being aware of the emotional

 

acknowledged this difference (which in itself is a conflict between the
survival of the body and the survival of the state) and she pulls the
two military interests together in her discussion of boldness and honor
in battle. She quotes Scipio as saying "no one ought to fight his
enendes, that is, attack them, without just cause. But if the cause is
just, they ought not to wait until they are attacked, for in a just
cause, right gives greater boldness" (II.9). She is not advocating
individual heroism that will senselessly cause death in battle, but is
following Bouvet's guide in advocating that a knight should understand
the reason and justice behind the battle, and not go to war for glory,
hatred, or fear of dishonor. Spontaneity in war will only cause harm
to the knight and to the plan of battle. True boldness comes from
courage despite the odds, she argues, "And in such a case a man ought
to fight securely, but not unless he is forced to fight. But in the
case where he is attacked, if he does not defend himself, it is
shameful because it would be cowardice and show little confidence in
good fortune, which would be bad” (II.9). Honor invites boldness, and
boldness invites a warrior to use trickery when it is merited, and
Christine argues for the virtue of the action, "for whatever he does,
if he finds any good and just deception, I believe that it is well and
wisely done" (II.9).

161

deception of others, and being able to interpret illusive
from significant discourse. Deception crumbles under hard
evidence, and manipulating material evidence -- from swords
to entire lands -- is the realm of the warrior. The
presentation of his personal materiality must also be
temperate, as he must avoid appearing either fashionable or
physically fragile:
[He is] not tempted to vanity, ornaments, or jewels.
He should be well provided with equipment and saddle,
and should present himself proudly. He should not be
lazy, slow, or sleepy, too easily tempted by food and
drink or a dissipated life. (25)
That he should “present himself proudly” suggests the
psychological self—control inherent in proper moeurs. The
“equipment and saddle” most likely also refers to knightly
armor, and reinforces the categorization which "locates
that sexual difference for men, in particular, in

distinctive dress and clothing" (Burns 118).:19 A man may

have a male identity out of armor, but in armor his

 

u See Burns, Kuchta, Schultz regarding the link between clothing
and gender. Burns argues that "Civilian dress for aristocratic men...
was in fact...a unisex garment that could have been worn by either man
or woman. The identity of the kneeling knight remains uncontested
by...historians, who seem to presume that as long as a courtly figure
is dressed in armor, whether in a visual image or in a literary text,
one can readily recognize and identify him as a proper knight. But as
soon as this male figure is "disarmed" (desarme, in Old French) and
divested of that key marker of masculinity, his gender comes into
question: he looks in fact more like an aristocratic woman” (112).
Schultz disagrees, arguing that "vestimentary masculinity is defined
not by armor itself but by the ability to move freely between armor,
courtly dress, and exposed skin" (108). Christine, however, is
concerned with putting knights in armor, and so her argument is
prescriptive of the distinctiveness of gender (and social class).

162

identity is that of a knight, and as such, the wearing of
armor becomes a symbol of his identity as well as a means
for protection. Granted, in 1410 armor was still useful
for physical protection, but the battles at Crécy (1346),
Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415) "had shown that the
feudal horse and its tactics were no match for the English
longbowmen," not to mention artillery,
...although the cavalry could and usually did stay out
of the range of these cumbersome early guns, the
artillery deprived the heavy horseman of his chief
tactical advantage —- his comparative immunity from
wounds. Defensive positions supplied with artillery
were safe from his charges. Thus the fifteenth century
saw the noble cavalry forced to share its place in the
army with mercenary infantry and trains of artillery.
(Painter 23-24)
Christine's having to point out the obvious -- that knights
should "dress richly in harnesses" -- comes from the
changes in military technology which were rendering armor
obsolete except in its ceremonial function. The dispar-
aging comment about "the delicate life" echoes Christine's
complaint in Letter of Cupid that instead of exercising

military prowess, the bad courtier leads a life of

leisure:20 Christine continues in describing the Constable's

 

3” In Letter of Cupid, the God of Love orders men to behave
themselves, the irony of which suggests a parody of the chivalric
ideal. Christine makes a mocking portrait of those knights who imitate
the ideal in the extreme, or imitate the wrong elements of the ideal.
She shows, for example, that men who physically pose as characters out
of Arthurian romances appear quite ridiculous:

They spur their horses up and down the streets

Jaunty and handsome, jingling as they go.

163

public manners:
He should rather inform himself everyday regarding his
adversaries state of readiness, be subtle, farseeing,
and cautious in defending himself against them,
assailing them wisely, and remaing well-informed of
their traps. He should know how to govern his own
people, keeping them in order and commanding due
respect, carrying out the right, disdaining games,
honoring those who merit it and keeping them near him,
rewarding those who are deserving, and showing
generosity where the situation requires it. (25-26)
This section emphasizes the labor necessary to be
considered a productive knight, and his service on the
battlefield had to be a balance between exceptional prowess
and remarkable tactical planning. But knowing how to
defend oneself from enemies and govern one's people is
knowledge earned through experience, and cannot be learned
from books. It can only be the result of long-living and

the ability to adapt to circumstances. This part of her

description echoes Christine’s often-seen argument that

 

They make a show of great activity,

And spare no horse or mule. Then ever so

Attentively they tender their requests,

Inquiring for the weddings and the feasts

At which those polished, ardent, gallant swains,

Display how much they feel our arrow's cut,

So much that they can barely stand the pain! (51-59)

These men are imitating the theatrical elements of the characters
that one might read about in Chrétian de Troyes's romances, but they
are twisting the intent of the tales. In displaying themselves "a-
jingle" they are advertising for the on-the-spot jousting associated
with knight-errantry, and in asking at weddings about ladies they are
indtating the necessary inquiries a young knight must make in order to
find and succor damsels in distress. They are physically playing at
.being a knight, a reflection of their vanity, and instead of
internalizing the chivalric virtues from the tales of valor, bravery,
.and.honor into their lives, they are imitating only the superficial
elements of adventure.

164

experience is more valuable than lineage, as "age of itself
does not give any guarantee of skill and manner of combat,
but rather experience” (24). Written when Christine was
fourty-six years old, this work certainly advocates wisdom
over youthful prowess.

Finally, Christine describes proper action in the
larger worldly sphere, and includes again a description of
the proper "ordinary talk" or expression for an ideal
knight. Speech and action are restricted to that which
presents his knighthood in the best light:

His ordinary talk should be of arms and deeds of

chivalry, and of the valiant accomplishments of good

men. He should avoid boastfulness, be reasonable,
love his prince and be true to him, be helpful to
widows, orphans, and the poor, refrain from
exaggerating small slights to his person or minor
disagreements, but readily pardon those who repent.

Above all, he should love God and the Church and

uphold what is right. All these conditions are

suitable to a good constable, and likewise to marshals

and all thos who hold similar offices. (26)

Her ending is decorous, with the proper references to God,
and the Church. The warning about "boastfulness" reflects
her development from the poetic description in Letter of
Cupid: "They spur their horses up and down the streets /
Jaunty and handsome, jingling as they go. / They make a

Show of great activity, / And spare no horse or mule" (49-

54), to one more concise, as befitting plain language.

165

Her advice to not count the "personal trespass"
suggests a reference to dueling. In Book IV of Deeds of
Arms, Christine details the rules of dueling from the Tree
of Battles, and includes her own authority in the matter,
asking "if such a battle is just and permitted by right"
and defining the duel:

In my time I have seen it in France, and even before

my time it was used in deeds of arms. This is a

contest carried out between only two contenders, or

sometimes several over a single quarrel, in restricted
fields, a conflict that is called single or judicial

combat, which one gentleman undertakes against another
to prove with the strength of his body some hidden and

concealed crime. (197)

Her reply is that the duel is not permitted because it was
fighting for the sake of determining justice, an act of
presumption against God's will or vengeance, and a
temptation of God. But the decline in the judicial duel
paralleled the rise of the duel of honor (Bryson xxiii).21
Honor, as Christine suggests in the first part of The Book
of the Body Politic, is won less by the sword than by the
possession of virtue. Thus honor must be acquired through

the practice of grace and not merely the practice of arms,

because "it is true, as it has often been seen, that the

 

n According to Frederick Bryson, the official "judicial duel in
France ended with the combat between Jean Legris and Jacques Carronge
in the presence of Charles VI in 1385. But it seems that the judicial
duel in France did not become extinct until toward the end of the
fifteenth century" (xvii). He further explains that "many duels
contained features of more than the three main types [state, judicial,
honor]. Thus the state duel resembled the judicial duel and the early
duel of honor when it was regarded the judgment of God" (xx).

166

one who was right has lost” (198). Christine is suggesting
that dueling, like warfare, is no longer a measure of
manhood for a warrior but an action or ‘performance’ that
must only be done with just cause. This lack of promotion
parallels the shift in the historical signification of the
meaning of the duel, making it less of a judicial act and
more of a staged performance of stereotypical masculine
honor.

There are certain points left out of her description.
There is not a warning against drunkenness, nor against
women of ill repute, nor is there the suggestion that a
normal man does not really enjoy life without women,
similar to the argument in Letter of Cupid that "reasonable
men / should value women, love and cherish them.../ For
woman rightly is that single soul / Whom man loves deeply
through the natural law" (718-724). Even so, the chapter
identifies particular physical and social behavioral
patterns, and promotes bonding with other men who share
those same patterns.

Christine’s identification of specific knightly norms
must have held a fascination because of their reinforcement
of social behavior that was daily being broken by the
nobility and the gentry in their violent personal

conflicts. As an agent of social stabilization, Deeds of

167

Arms held a powerful argument because of the combination of
Christine’s use of respected classical sources and her own
modern additions. But Christine provided an additional
twist to her treatise: while she identified proper knightly
behavior, she also was writing for the Dauphin, Louis of
Guyenne, who would have the power to uphold the standards
while changing or even breaking those standards for his
personal use and identity. When it came to Henry VII’s
turn to read Deeds of Arms, he could not have missed the
‘promotion of individuality and an awareness of the

difficulties in maintaining an absolute masculine identity.

III. Christine’s Understanding of the Aristocratic Mystique

Christine's exploration of masculinity in Deeds of
Arms was an extremely convincing model for those men who
needed advice in learning how to be the best in all things
military. It was persuasive because the work focuses on
the basics: manipulating military techniques, laws and
strategies, manipulating men solely and in huge battalions,
and manipulating one's corporal, material body and one's
abstract, representative body. The material and abstract
realities of Christine's ideal knight were fully integrated

in this work, as her use of moeurs had become an inherent

168

part of her construction of interior and exterior behavior.
Christine's use of ancient and medieval sources in Deeds of
Arms provides the source of power for the dynamic, but the
arrangement of the information in connection with her own
authority suggests that her construction of the knight is
connected to the construction of her personal identity.
While Deeds of Arms integrates the two levels of reality
inherent in the knightly body, Christine's work shows an
awareness that the physical male body and its abstract
representation could be separated and reconnected, and this
suggests that she was also aware that the physical and
abstract representations of the gender of the knight could
also be shuffled -- and possible replaced with another
gender.

The implications of Christine's decision to accept the
commission to write Deeds of Arms were far-reaching: not
only was it received with "much pleasure" by John the
Fearless, but posthumously her treatise was translated and
printed by Caxton in 1490, supposedly by order of Henry VII
of England. It was also capable of attracting the interest
of military men four centuries later, evidenced by Harvard
MS. 168 being signed by General Gourjourd, Napoleon's aide—
de-camp, and his father-in~law, Comte Pierre-Louis Roederer

(1754-1835). While interest in Christine’s other works

169

faded, Deeds of Arms held its place in the eyes of those
who were searching for information on chivalry and warfare.
The interest may have resulted from Christine's contrib.-
ution to the genre of the military treatise, or the work's
skillful reincorporating of classical values into contem—
porary life, or the acknowledgment of the individuality of
the author. But all of these would have faded in value by
the 17003. What was left, then, was the appeal of
Christine’s understanding of the aristocratic mystique,
especially the mystique of the chivalrous knight.
Christine did not begin her writing career with the
masculine subject in mind; in her Ballades the feminine
subject and its fight for respect and speech in the courtly
arena was her closest interest.22 .Letter of Cupid too, was
a response to social manners that denigrated women, and
suggested a deep—seated conviction in her beliefs in how
the world should be. (This is perhaps why Christine became
so involved with didactic writing that she was able to make
a career out of it.) Her Letter of Othea responded to the
need for an educational text for a young man, and whether
it is seen as a political, allegorical, mythographical, or

plainly didactic text (or all of these together), it

 

22 See E. J. Richards, Christine de Pizan and the Medieval French
Lyric, and Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral
Defense of Women: Reading Beyond Gender.

170

constructs a masculine subject. The knight is still a
courtly and chivalric ideal, but he has touches of morality
which enter into the text, possibly as a result of
Christine's concerns for her young reader's practical
education in the trivium. The didacticism inherent in
Letter of Othea and Christine's later texts uncovers a
deeper level to Christine's construction of masculinity,
that of the conflict between being an autonomous subject

3 As Christine

and being subjected to outside forces.2
constructs or “fashions” the consciousness of her readers,
she too is being constructed: her focus becomes more
socially constituted, the possibilities narrow, and her
avenue of interest leads her to explore the making of her
own and others' material and projected identities. As will
be seen in the next chapter, her exploration of personal
identity was the mark of early humanist thought in France,
and through the Woodville circle, in England.

The identity of the prince is the highest social level
that one can aim at constructing. Ideally, in a stable and
coherent world, the prince would not need to be fashioned,

as it would be from him that all fashioning examples would

be made. The Book of the Body of Policy was her response

 

23 She explored her own identity in the Book of the Mutacion of
Fortune (1400), Book of the City of Ladies (1405), Treasure of the City
of Ladies (1406), and Christine's Vision (1406).

171

to the fact that Christine's age was not stable but
fractured. The head of state in France faced the political
problems of ducal rivalry and English invasion, the
economic problems of financial exploitation of the French
crown by Orleans and Burgundy (Vaughn "Fearless" 41), and
the social problems of Italian-influenced, rapidly changing
intellectual ideals and the first steps of civic humanism
(Ferguson 42). The opportunity to construct the prince's
political identity allowed Christine to become an active
agent in the construction of her society and political
sphere. She became a producer of ideology in addition to
being a participant in it, and her fascination with moeurs
encouraged her to fashion the prince's manners according to
the system of values and beliefs that she thought the most
correct. In addition to constructing masculinity, a whole
new realm of social action opened to her, one in which her
ability to participate and perform was at least
intellectually equal to that of a man.

In the Book of the Body of Policy Christine writes
"Oh, what a noble, honorable, and profitable thing it is in
the kingdom, empire, or country to have brave knights, that
is, good soldiers!" (I.29) In this work, a noble is a
soldier. But in Deeds of Arms the perfect knight is a

rougher, more battle-oriented man. In the Letter of Cupid,

172

the knight only serves Venus; in Deeds of Arms, the knight
only serves Mars. The lack of precise definition occurs
because Christine's portrait of the ideal knight is a
construction grounded in her own identity, and she makes no
attempt to solve the puzzle of this paradox, but instead
plays upon the irony of the situation.

Christine's identification with the warrior figure
comes to its fullest development in her final poem, The
Poem of Joan oanrc (1429). The development of her ideal
knight ends up, ironically, as the description of a young
maid. Christine praises her as the ultimate French hero in
Part XXVI:24

But as for us, we've never heard

About a marvel quite so great,

For all the heroes who have lived

In history can't measure up

In bravery against the Maid,

Who strives to rout our enemies.

Its God who does that, who's guiding her

Whose courage passes that of men.

In this poem Christine expresses her concern for the
guidance of France as well as her interest in creating a

pro-feminist stance. The Maid, guided by God, becomes the

 

2‘ I am using Thelma Fenster's 1994 translation of Le Ditié de
Jehanne d'Arc.

173

greatest hero because she is the bravest and most valiant
knight. But is God on Joan's side because she is the
perfect knight, or because she is a woman and needs divine
aid? Christine answers that it is because she is both, in
Part XXXIV:

What honor for the female sex!

God's love for it appears quite clear,

Because the kingdom laid to waste

By all those wretched people now

Stands safe, a woman rescued it

(A hundred thousand men could not

Do that) and killed the hostile foe!

A thing beyond belief before!"

Christine is rejoicing that Charles VII is finally king of
France, yet her joy is greater that the crowning was made
possible by a young woman. Joan of Arc validated
Christine's convictions that women are capable of
knighthood.

Her vindication suggests Christine's understanding of
the aristocratic mystique behind the ‘perfect knight.’ The
knight is not a masculine being at all, but the warrior's
gender follows instead the figure of Minerva. Willard
suggests that Christine did not consider Deeds of Arms as

adding to her literary credit, since her reputation was as

174

a courtly poet, and she "therefore decided to take refuge
behind the figure of Minerva who, according to mythology,
had invented the art of forging metal armor, likewise a
rather unladylike pursuit" ("Treatise" 182). I see the
reverse: that this "refuge" behind Minerva is not at all a
refuge but a form of identification. Minerva is not
Christine's shield, held outside her body, but masculine
armor, worn on her female body. Christine's use of the
figure of Minerva not only feminizes valor and wisdom,
military strategy and cunning, but also reflects her own
subjectivity, subordinating the traditionally masculine
heroic to a dominant feminine icon.

This identification becomes apparent further into the
prologue of Deeds of Arms after she acknowledges her
womanhood and admits:

As this is unusual for women...so let it not be held

against me if I, as a woman, take it upon myself to

treat of military matters. Rather, follow the
teaching of Seneca, who said, “As long as the words

are good, it does not matter who speaks them.” (11-

12,25
She warns her readers not to be caught up in the novelty of

her gender writing in this genre, as her sex is not as

important as her words. She then "prays" to Minerva,

 

25 "...et pource que c'est chose non accoustumee et hors vsage a

femme...se moy femme me suis chargee de traittier de si faitte matiere,
ains vueillent ensuire lenseignement de senecque qui dit, Ne te chault
qui die mais que les parolles soyent bonnes" (Byles 5-6).

175

praising her for her skills and genius ("desleue
entendement") in military matters:
Lady and high goddess, may it not displease you that
I, a simple little woman, should undertake at the
present time to speak of such an elevated office as
that of arms. (13)26
No male skills are present here: it is Minerva who has
invented the forging of iron and steel, armor and harnesses
to cover the body of man, weapons for battle, helmets,
shields, and battle tactics. And it is not because
Christine is a woman that she asks for Minerva's help; it
is because she does not have Minerva's knowledge. It is
more of a matter of needing knowledge, than feeling
inadequate as result of her gender, which spurs the
request. The final identification sign comes from
Christine's closing nudge: "like you I am an Italian woman"
“et je suis comme toy femme ytalienne”.”' She reminds
Minerva that they are kin, both from the Greco-Italian
area, and not of France. The identification is complete

and justified: Minerva, a literary figure, becomes a

personified historical fact, and by birth, gender, and by

 

2‘ “Dame et haulte deesse, ne te desplaise ce que moy, simple
femmelette, sy comme neant enuers la grandeur de ton renomme scauoir,
ose presentement emprendre a parler de sy magnifique office comme est
celuy des armes" (Byles 5-6).

m This isn't the first time our attention has been called to
Christine's decidedly unfeminine identifications: her mentor Deschamps
even noticed it, saying in a letter on February 10, 1404, "car je te
voy, comme Boece a Pavie / Seule en tes faiz ou rayaume de France."

176

psychological inclination Christine sees herself as having
the right, privilege, and power to write about knighthood,
chivalry, and war.

Christine de Pizan, in Deeds of Arms, connects
multiple layers of interest, history, social, and political
beliefs. She participates with confidence in an area of
intellectual achievement not open to women, and her
previous writings put her in a position where she could
receive compensation for her performance. She constructs
an agent in her ideal constable who is able to connect to
her male readers and listeners through his corporeality,
his focus on the practicalities of labor and protection,
and his goal of exceeding in a military career. She also
constructs an agent who is the representative of an ideal,
a projection of what a knight should be, and how he would
ideally fit into the larger chivalric-based social sphere.
And.finally, she places herself in a position of authority
which allows her to become one with her idol, the wise
warrior queen Minerva. For Christine, the reality of Joan
of Arc must have overwhelmed her greatest dreams: the image
of a wise, honorable, and chivalrous knight connected to
the body of a virtuous young woman, and this creation is
using her gendered authority to return France to glory. It

was as if the goddess Minerva had come to life.

177

The text of Deeds of Arms was cherished by both the
English and the French court for its value as a practical

28 and an important addition to any

military treatise,
reader’s classical education, but the subtext had to have
been the primary reason why the work was read. In both the
French and the English courts the works of Vegetius were
openly available, and other works on chivalry and war
existed in equal measure. But Deeds of Arms enjoyed an
elevated readership that went beyond the ordinary — it
spoke to the knightly mind and attitude, in a way that
other chivalric manuals did not, by bridging the practical
needs of the military man and the new forms of thought
regarding the philosophy of war. In 1970, the modern
military historians R. Ernest Dupuy and Treavor N. Dupuy
praised Christine’s contribution to the art of war: “One

example of the appearance of professionalism was the

resumption of theoretical studies of warfare, almost

 

” Willard suggests that the “continued popularity of the text was
[due to] the reform of the French army under Charles VII around 1445.
The group of later manuscripts, notably the paper ones, appears to date
from this period of reform. One of the king’s principal advisors
during this period was Arthur de Richmont, an important leader in the
campaign that finally expelled the English from France. Richmont would
surely have been acquainted with Christine’s book, for he was one of
Louis de Guyenne’s companions at the French court at the time the Fais
d’armes was presented to him. Furthermore, he later married the
dauphin’s widow, Marguerite de Guyenne, the princess to whom Christine
had dedicated the Livre des Trois vertus. Richmont made an important
contribution to the reorganization of the French army by bringing into
hand the undisciplined freebooters and by insisting on adequate
leadership, discipline, and regular pay, all qualities insisted upon by
both Vegetius and Christine” (“Deeds of Arms” 8).

178

unknown since the time of Vegetius. Representative of this
new intellectual approach to military affairs was the
‘treatises of war and on chivalry by Christine de Pizan”
(400). Christine’s ability to lead in this “new
intellectual approach” comes from her exposure to Petrarch
and other early humanists, and we will explore her

connections to humanist thought in the next chapter.

179

Chapter Five
Christine de Pizan, Early Modern Thought,

and Renaissance Views on War

By 1545, general interest in Christine’s writings was
diminishing in England: the date of decline comes from
Robert Wyer’s 1545 printing of his translation of L’Epistre
d’Othéa as the C Hystoryes of Troy. According to Cynthia
J. Brown, “[Wyer’s] edition is the only known evidence of a
French-English print connection in the publication of
Christine's works during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries” (229). In comparison to Christine’s other
works, Deeds of Arms managed to enjoy a longer life span,
aided by Caxton’s 1490 translation and printing of the work
into English, but by the 16005 the immediate appeal of
Deeds of Arms had greatly faded.

In France, her readership was still active, as seen in
Jean André’s printing in 1536 of the Trésor de la Citié des
Dames. After 1545 a limited, smaller group of readers
remained in France, usually made up of scholars who could
read medieval French. Earl Jeffrey Richards points out:

Christine is never mentioned in a vacuum. Her name

usually crops up during discussions of royal

historiography, of female erudition, of the “new”

literary history undertaken at the beginning of the
eighteenth century or of fanciful, romanticizing

180

 

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author biographies. Despite these unfavorable
premises, though, Christine’s memory did not fade:
quite the contrary is the case. There are more than
fifty references to Christine between 1545 and 1795.
(“femme auteur” 103)
Richards organized these references into four groups of
readers:
(I) French national historians who record Christine as
a source for the reign of Charles V; (II) pro-feminine
writers who explicitly situate Christine within a
tradition of femmes auteurs; (III) literary historians
who try to situate Christine within a newly conceived
scheme of literary history; and (IV) romanticizing
writers who concentrate their attention on an invented
love affair between Christine and the Earl of
Salisbury. (“femme auteur” 103-4)1
Richard’s discussion of the literary historians is brief,
sketching out the major developments in France and bowing
to the analysis by historian Franco Simone. One might argue
that the readership in England, based on our earlier
discussion of the Woodville circle, follows along similar
lines: the person who translated and paraphrased
Christine’s Fais d’Armes into Boke of Nbblesse had a
different view and historical interest than Caxton, who
translated Christine’s work with its anti-English

references intact, as well as making sure that Christine’s

name and gender was praised and not erased.

 

1 Horace Walpole (1717-1797) was taken with the idea of
Christine’s romantic liaison with the Earl of Salisbury, and published
a version of it in 1786, but it was based on his imaginative response
to the French scholar’s speculations, and not on any books or
manuscripts he had read on his own.

181

Unfortunately, outside the more general references in
France and the evidence from provenance studies in England
for Christine’s works, there is no evidence of direct
citation except for Fais d’Armes. Kate Langdon Forhan sums
up the situation:

There is no evidence to date that any later political

thinker quoted directly from her works, explicitly

refuted them, or named them in any way in the
construction or elaboration of political views. In
terms of some great chain of being of political ideas,
or some orderly evolutionary flow, Christine de Pizan,
cannot, with that one exception [Fais d’Armes], be
shown to have had any direct role in the development

of Western political thought. (160)

Forhan, of course, writes of this disappointment because of
her wish to connect Christine with other early modern
political thinkers such as Machiavelli, but that is not
possible. Forhan overcomes this setback by turning away
from the ‘great chain of political ideas’ and focusing more
realistically on Christine’s influence in France:

That said, however, she does have indirect

significance in the evolution of European political

ideas. It must be recognized that Christine’s
contribution to political thought in fifteenth-century

France is collective as well as individual. She was

one of a great wave of intellectuals who, confronted

with national tragedy and incompetent rule, were
concerned with the fate of France and shared

observations, criticisms and ideas. (160)

Forhan concludes by describing Christine as “a renaissance

woman in every sense” (167), and it is this understanding

of Christine as a “renaissance woman” that will be

182

discussed in this chapter. What are the requirements for a
“medieval” versus an “early modern” or “renaissance” label?
Should scholars identify a paradoxical writer and
personality like Christine de Pizan as ‘early modern’
instead of ‘medieval’? Drawing a conclusion from those
answers, I discuss the influences, direct and indirect, of
Deeds of Arms on medieval and early modern political
thought. Finally, I explore the effect of this influence on
the ideas of ‘just war’ theory within Elizabethan popular
culture, namely theatre, exposing an indirect parallel
between the ideas about war within Christine’s Deeds of

Arms and Shakespeare’s “Henriad.”

I. Christine as a medieval or early modern writer

Many scholars have tried to place Christine de Pizan
in the “early modern” category instead of the “medieval”
because of the problematic nature of her place within the
intellectual movements of her time. Part of this effort
comes from a clearer understanding of Christine’s thought
resulting from a greater variety of her writings becoming
more accessible in both original form and in translation;
part of this effort comes from efforts of scholars, both of

literature and history, to “demodernize the Middle Ages.”

183

Medieval Studies in the twentieth century began with the
idea that the Middle Ages were the origins of modern
authority and liberty (Freedman and Spiegel 679). John
Matthews Manly remarked in Speculum in 1930 that
...the Middle Ages must not be neglected. It lies
close to us. In it arose many of our most important
institutions. Our social life, our customs - our
ideals, or superstitions and fears and hopes - came to
us directly from this period; and no present-day
analysis can give a complete account of our
civilization unless it is supplemented by a profound
study of the forces and forms of life, good and evil,
which we have inherited from it. (250)
The medieval was obscure and strange, on one hand, and on
the other its alterity offered a sense of sympathetic
kinship to the developing literature and philosophies of
western academic culture. In the 19603, the collapse of
governmental prestige and the waning of the Cold War,
however, encouraged scholars to begin to see the medieval
in more realistic light, as the pressure to see literature
and history in terms of individuality, pluralism, and human
autonomy gave way to an appreciation of medieval
“otherness” and of the “grotesque” which had fascinated
nineteenth century medievalists. This opened the door for
an exploration of the sense of marginality where three
developments became apparent, according to historians Paul

Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel in their article,

“Medievalisms Old and New”: the effort to uncover women’s

184

history and the historical production of gender; the
rejection of the universalizing, foundation—oriented
approaches to history in favor of a “new historicism” that
focused on a cultural approach to history based on looking
at transformations instead of foundations; and a focus on
linguistics, the idea of understanding documents as texts
rather than sources, seeing history no longer as a cohesive
narrative but as representations of individuals (696-7).
It is because of these developments that Christine de
Pizan’s placement in the philosophical canon has become
uncertain. A modernist approach to Christine’s writings
would follow the division of medieval and Renaissance
thought, and place anyone writing in England prior to the
Tudors (Henry VII’s ascension in 1485 to be the earliest
date) within the ‘medieval’ category, an assertion that is
simple, unifying, and certain. A postmodern approach
suggests that we abandon any hopes of reaching a continuous
and progressive view of history and accept a fractured and
estranged sense of the past, and the result would be to
call a writer “early modern” or “medieval” based on an
individual scholar’s view of history. The aim of
scholarship should be, of course, the pursuit of compre-
hension, which should aim to synthesize the two modes of

thought (which scholars appear to be overdeveloping into

185

aporia). The next stage of scholasticism appears to be
looking beyond the either/or, inclusion/exclusion dichotomy
of modernism versus postmodernism. The next, as yet
unnamed, stage sees the ideas of both hegemony and
arbitrariness as being totalizing, and embraces the
mediating “And”: the idea that cultures, ideas, and writers
may operate smoothly on two or more highly contrasting
concepts at once without finding those concepts to be
contradicting.2 Instead of putting a writer into a
“movement” or “margin,” an action which achieves modern
cohesiveness and unity but destroys postmodern
individuality and marginality, it allows speakers to speak
for themselves, embracing hybrid, bisexual, biracial, and
diverse stances, and asks us to accept an author’s own
self-definition even though we may see it as conflicting,

and may not comprehend his or her interior distinctions.

 

2 Kiernan Ryan calls this the “holy grail of hermeneutics”: “New
Historicism and Cultural Materialism in particular have striven to do
justice both to the strangeness and remoteness of the texts they
address and to their own entrenchment in the late-twentieth-century
assumptions that govern their aims and methods. But the readings
produced by these approaches turn out time and time again to be
intractably retrospective or stubbornly narcissistic nonetheless. What
is clearly needed is a criticism that can develop a genuine dialogue
between past and present; a criticism that can place the text in
history and trace history itself in the letter of the text; a criticism
that can reconcile aesthetic analysis and theoretical critique, which
refuses to sacrifice the poetry to the politics of the work. But,
although the holy grail of hermeneutics is not hard to imagine, it
remains elusive as ever” (236). Like the search for a unified field
theory in physics, it is simple to conceive but maddeningly difficult
to define.

186

Christine de Pizan is a key candidate for this next
stage. Charity Cannon Willard sees her as "One of the
writers who marked the transition in France between the so-
called late Middle Ages and the Renaissance" ("Franco-
Italian" 333). Willard's argument to place Christine
within the early modern begins with Christine’s well—known
debate over the intrinsic worth of Jean de Meung’s part of
the Roman de la Rose. In 1401, Jean de Montreuil, the
provost of Lille, began the argument by writing a
commentary which praised de Meung’s addition and upheld the
poet’s misogynistic ideals. He sent a copy of what he had
written to Christine, and she rebutted his argument with
eloquence and wit, earning the support of Jean Gerson, the
chancellor of the University of Paris. The intellectuals
within the Parisian court were sent copies of the debate
letters, and soon many others were involved in the
discussion. Willard summarizes:

The whole discussion, in spite of the heat it

apparently generated, is best understood as a sort of

intellectual exercise inspired by debates among

Italian humanists. Its greatest importance for

Christine was that it gave her considerable publicity

as a defender of her sex and encouraged her to

undertake even more ambitious objectives. (337)
Willard lessens the importance of the discussion itself,

yet maintains the importance of Christine’s center position

within the group of Parisian humanists. Christine’s

187

writings flourished, as did her career as a professional
writer, and in 1405 she wrote her autobiography, L’Avision-
Christine, a work that also addresses the political
problems of the time. Willard again promotes Christine as
“humanistic,” describing the work:

In spite of being a medieval dream-vision in form, the
work is basically humanistic in concept - it not only
provides a spiritual autobiography of the sort that
Petrarch had rendered popular, but its advice to the
French rulers follows the tradition already made
popular by Italian humanists, who saw their role as
advisers to monarchs as one of their main functions in
life. (338)3

To this list of Christine’s qualities, Willard adds,
Another essentially humanistic trait is Christine’s
interest in the education of the young, which can
already be noted in two works written early in her
career for her son, Jean de Castel - the Enseignemens
.MOraulx and the Proverbes Moraulx, both of which
enjoyed considerable popularity, the latter being
printed in an English translation by William Caxton in
1477. (338)

In addition, for the dauphin, Louis of Guyenne, Christine

painted a portrait of the perfect Renaissance prince in her

work Le Livre du Corps de Policie.
Maureen Quilligan’s view, however, of Christine’s

“modernity” is much less enthusiastic than Willard’s.

Quilligan entered into Christine scholarship with the

 

3Maureen Quilligan corrects Willard’s view of Christine as having
dream-visions, “Unlike Dante (or Chaucer, or the narrator of the Rose),
Christine takes time out to eat and does not have a “dream” - such as
most allegorical dream-visions insist. Rather, she has a waking
vision, much like Dante’s” (230).

188

insistence on the medieval nature of Christine’s writing,
and struggled against the prevailing views of the
scholarship of the 1980’s that called Christine a
“feminist”; instead, Quilligan stalwartly promoted
Christine as a pro—woman writer, an anti—misogynist,
asserting that to call Christine a “feminist” would be
anachronistic. Quilligan’s view of Christine was equally
grounded on the necessity for firm definitions of terms
when it comes to calling Christine a humanist:
[Christine’s] seeming modernity, predicated...on the
most “medieval” practice of authorial citation and
revision, and her explicit and inexplicit scrutiny of
a misogyny driven by what can be termed various
oedipal anxieties, as well as her focus on the
problematic relations between oral and written
traditions of authority in the representation of the
female body, would seem to place her at the center of
a number of late twentieth century critical concerns
and therefore in a position somewhat anachronistic to
her late medieval movement. (242)
Quilligan acknowledged that Christine wrote “with a sense
of the political instrumentality of literature that we are
only now beginning to appreciate” (242), but would not
label Christine as a humanist, insisting that if we find
anachronism in the middle ages, we would do better to
redefine the idea of the medieval rather than force the
medieval to mirror our political practices.

A few years later, Quilligan made a large concession

towards Christine’s modernity, and suggested that her

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insistence on self-naming, using ‘Je, Christine’

..indicate(s) a practice that we ordinarily associate
with the self-naming Renaissance. Michelangelo’s
famous carving of the inscription ‘Michelangelo hoc
fecit’ across the Pieta may stand witness to the later
age’s resolute refusal of anonymity. While the
appearance of the formula, ‘Je, Christine’ is not
entirely anomalous in medieval literary practice, its
repetition throughout Christine’s oeuvre - especially
in the Livre de la cite des dames - makes its
distinctively idiosyncratic frequency a signal mark of
Christine’s authority. (“Name” 202)

Quilligan argued that Christine’s practice of naming
follows a trend in the medieval genre of chronicle-writing;
Froissart and others established their authority by
including their names in the prologues to their chronicles,
and the act in turn reveals the author as an unique person
located in a specific historical or social arena.
Christine’s use of self—naming reveals:
...[a] new possibility for authorial self
representation. Her rather unusual use of the
chronicler’s self-naming inaugurates not only her
strange “modernity” as an author, it also marks her
practice as essentially gendered, specifically when
she redeploys the chronicler’s signature to make her
own femaleness a social category supporting her
authority. (204)
Quilligan thus admitted a “strange modernity” in
Christine’s writing, but tempered her concession by
suggesting that this modernity was based upon the influence

of the writings of Dante, and “an attempt to capitalize on

the powerful appeal currently felt in France for the

190

beginnings of Italian humanism” (215).

Beatrice Gottlieb, too, is concerned with using the
term ‘humanist’ (as well as ‘feminist’) in connection with
Christine’s modes of thought. Gottlieb, a historian, is
very careful to separate the values we place on words in a
present-day context from those used in a fifteenth-century
context, and believes that “utterances of the past should
never be taken at face value, because ‘face value’ more
often than not means current value, the value derived from
a twentieth-century context” (340). She defines the modes
of thought in the fifteenth century as:

A tendency to think in hierarchical terms, to see both

the physical world and society as naturally existing

in layers arranged in something like a pyramid, a

tendency to explain things by what we call

supernatural causes (whether emanations or sympathies
or miracles), and a tendency to think allegorically
and use symbols not as arbitrary literary devices but
as expressions of a real correspondence between

different spheres of being. (340)

Thus the question a historian must ask is not “is Christine
a humanist” but “did Christine think of herself as a
“humanist?” According to Gottlieb, we cannot say that the
above modes of thought are necessarily medieval, because
these modes are a ‘tendency’ and Christine in her own time
was an exception to the accustomed order. Likewise, if we

follow this line of logic, we cannot define Christine as a

humanist, but must follow the definitions Christine made

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for herself.

Christine was not fond of following standardization or
allowing herself to be confined by definition. She may have
thought in hierarchical terms, but she did not respect
hierarchy for its own sake, instead following the person
and not the leader. From the beginning of her career, with
the “Débat du Roman de la Rose” she resisted having her
identity defined as an inferior subject and women as
“other.” In her works from Charles V'to Jeanne d’Arc, she
searched for historical reasons behind events, looking for
human power and choices in politics instead of identifying
surprising or unexplained events as “miracles.” Christine
was able to write allegorically (such as in the Epistre
d’Othéa), but the allegory was placed on an equal standing
with a didactic gloss, which forces the reader or hearer to
acknowledge that the allegory is a literary device to aid
memorization and understanding.

Kevin Brownlee follows this delicate path towards
exploring Christine’s approach to early modern thought.
Christine was “the first French literary figure who
explicitly incorporated her identity as a woman into her
identity as an author,” and to do that she had to
“radically modify...the two principal vernacular literary

discourses of the late fourteenth century” (199), the

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“courtly” and the “clerkly” traditions. These two
traditions, argues Brownlee, excluded the possibility for a
woman writer, either poet or clerk, to have an identity,
and thus Christine had to “create a new kind of discourse
of the self...On the one hand, Christine utilizes courtly
diction to critique and to expand the courtly system. On
the other hand, she uses the learned discourse of ‘clergie’
to critique and expand the clerkly system” (200). In doing
this, Brownlee concludes, Christine exhibited a “coherent
discursive ego” and redefined the “causal relationship
between writer and text” by modifying the two traditions
for her own purposes and voice. In sum, Brownlee suggests,
Christine’s overall critical strategy thus involves a
systematic insistence on authorial responsibility and
reader response, both in a moral context. Christine’s
notion of the moral dimension of literary discourse is
part of her own self-definition as a writer, for this
is how she conceives of her own literary vocation, her
new kind of female authorial identity. (216)
In insisting on authorial responsibility and reader
response, it appears that Christine is challenging
hierarchical behavior by presenting herself as a model to
be imitated, and a female model at that. She appears to be
aware of the consequences of challenging tradition, and
that a successful challenge will create mimesis.

Therefore, by choosing to participate in the “Débat,” a

very public and aggressive verbal exchange, Christine

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established her own credentials as an author, and also
established a new kind of public self. Here we have
Christine’s definition of self, and that self appears to be
early modern, in that it is based on her ability to
establish her own voice, her own authority, her own
individuality against others, as well as understanding that
the individual is a microcosm of the state.

Earl Jeffrey Richards has made one of the most
consistent arguments for Christine having a humanist
orientation. He qualifies his definition of her humanism by
calling Christine's writings "essentially humanist with a
courtly veneer" but separates Christine from the medieval
by insisting that

Christine’s mastery of these courtly forms and

categories - both social and literary - is essential

to her own implicit ideological program and should not
be construed as Christine’s automatic or obligatory

identification with them. (“Humanism” 263)

Richards sees a clear "courtly/humanist opposition" in her
writings, suggesting that:

On ideological grounds, there seem to be curious

parallels between Christine’s critique of courtly

conventions and later Renaissance humanist criticisms
of medieval courtly romance, so much so that

Christine’s attitude toward courtly literature, far

from being indicative of her opposition to humanism,

as Coville long ago argued, can be directly tied to
her humanist orientation and to her assimilation of

Italian humanist thought. (257)

Richards supports the idea that we must follow the

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definitions Christine made for herself by arguing that the
presence of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Boethius in her
writings connects her to humanism.

In her political persuasion, Christine was a
monarchist, but Richards argues that “her conception of the
role of the monarchy within the French nation was itself
innovative within the context of her time” (267). He cites
the work of Franz Walter MUller, a Marxist historian, who
analyzed Autres Ballades #49 (considered an important
ballade within Christine’s work because of its historical
and political significance for the history of France) and
determined it was critical because “it views the French
nation as one body of subjects under the king rather than
an entity divided along estate lines, and because it
invoked a new ideal of humanity that anticipated later
developments in humanist political thought” (267).
Guillaume de Machaut, in comparison, reinforced the view of
the feudal estate and class separatism. For Christine,
France is first among nations not because of its
Christianity, but because of its humanity, and that shift
indicates a transition from medieval thought to a
renaissance ideal. Richards concludes by suggesting that “a
fuller understanding of the poeto-logical values that stand

behind her works and that led to a penetrating

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transformation of courtly conventions [would lead to] an
appreciation of the consistently provocative, innovative,
and, within the context of her time, revolut-ionary nature
of her writings” (268).4
Forhan also agrees with Richards, seeing Richard’s
qualifier of Christine being “innovative within the context
of her own time” as the key component. For Forhan,
Christine’s vulnerability in life explains her
conventional acceptance of social hierarchy, of
monarchy, and of ‘knowing her place’. . . The world
was a given, and yet she had the perception to see
that it might be constructed differently, including a
functional view of society, a reduced political role
for the clergy, and clear standards on the concepts of
justice and just war. (163)
Forhan’s views follow the clear-sighted approaches
Quilligan and Gottlieb have towards steering away from
anachronism in constructing labels. It is a measured
response, one that is careful not to carelessly throw a
woman who clearly lived in a medieval environment into the
Renaissance cauldron. It is also a necessary response,
because Christine does not suffer labels easily. Forhan
bridges the two worlds:
In a sense, she was utterly conventional yet she was

astoundingly insightful and optimistic within those
limits. She had a clear normative vision and was able

 

‘ Richards continued his challenge in 1998 with “Christine de
Pizan and the Medieval French Lyric” which asks “whether there is a
correlation between Christine’s formal freedom as a lyric poet and the
way in which she addressed the questions of authority, experience, and
women’s place in “the field of Letters” (2).

196

with great clarity to convey the enormous gap between
what is and what ought to be. (163)

Christine's ability to discern what ought to be the
practical response to a political or social situation
caused her to place prudence as being the highest virtue in
many of her works, the Epistre d’Othéa being the most
visible: “Othéa, deesse de prudence, qui adrece les bons
cuers en vaillance, a toy Hector, noble prince puissant...
salutacion” (Parussa 197). Forhan explains
Prudence is not wisdom in some abstract and
theoretical sense nor is it merely discretion.
Rather, prudence is foresight, expertise, shrewdness
and can even include deceit. [Christine’s] rich
understanding of prudence looks to the modern reader
very much like self-interest; to the political
theorist, it resembles Machiavelli's virtu. Virtue
and the appearance of virtue are important; the former
for salvation, the latter for political survival.
(164)
In this light, Forhan not only sees Christine as an early
modern thinker, but places her on the same level as
Machiavelli. For many scholars, Machiavelli is seen as an
innovator, representing a shift in political thinking, but
Forhan presents a View that views Machiavelli from a more
thematic approach which emphasizes a centered place in the
development of Renaissance thought, not at the lead.
Forhan suggests that there are:
...striking similarities between the lives and ideas

of Niccolo Machiavelli and Christine de Pizan... There
are significant differences between the two writers of

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course, not least being gender, era, and nationality,
but also very real divergences in temperament and
perspective as well. But despite these differences,
they were both consumed by the themes of fortune,
power and political survival. The combination of
intelligence, craft, foresight and skill that
Christine calls prudence is analogous to Machiavelli’s
virtu, and plays the same pivotal role in the defeat
of Fortune. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the
two concepts prudence and virtu are essentially
identical. (165)
One may recall that Quilligan described Christine’s
writings as having a “strange modernity,” but when Forhan
compares Christine to Machiavelli by showing the
similarities between their foundational ideas, Christine’s
writings do not seem so out of place after all. Like
Machiavelli, Christine is the voice of the upper middle
class. Machiavelli, because of his social position and
gender, is able to be openly subversive - Christine, for
the same reasons, must be more tempered, yet they both
advocate prudence and pragmatism in their advice to rulers.
Machiavelli suggests that he is original; Christine denies
the responsibility of originality. Yet, as Gottlieb
suggests, on that subject we must pay close attention to

the context and definition of the idea of ‘originality’ as

seen in fifteenth and sixteenth-century thought.5 With the

 

5 The contradiction between Machiavelli’s concept of ‘innovation’
and the twenty-first century idea of ‘innovation’ is a good example of
the need for context. J.G.A. Pocock follows a Janus-like approach to
the concept, suggesting that “Machiavelli’s development of the theme of
innovation has caused him, first, to employ the concept of virtu in its

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context of their time, it appears that both Machiavelli and
Christine were developing old concepts and ideas into new
approaches. Perhaps ‘development’ may be the key word in
deciding whether an author is medieval or early modern:
instead of asking whether they themselves were original or
individualistic, we might ask whether the author
participated in the development of original or
individualistic thought. One might suggest that, within
the context of the age, a person whose writings represent a
stage in the development of a mode of thought can be just
as brilliant and original as a person who we believe to be
distinctive and ahead of their time.

Paul Oskar Kristeller, the preeminent scholar of
Renaissance philosophy, was clear in his view that scholars
should not fall into a narrow defining process when trying

to identify humanists. His own analysis of Petrarch

 

purely formal sense of that by which order is imposed upon fortuna,
and, second, to do so in a way that separates it from the Christian and
Aristotelian, moral and political contexts in which it ordinarily

functioned" (169). Brayton Polka questions Pocock’s statement,
pointing out that “it was in fact quite impossible for Machiavelli to
have a coherent theory of innovation... Working within what Mr. Pocock

himself calls a medieval, that is simultaneously Christian and
Aristotelian, framework, Machiavelli is unable to conceive of real
temporal change, for virtu, on the one hand, presupposed innovation, in
that the innovator imposes form on fortune, and yet, on the other hand,
virtu is the source of innovation, for the new prince acts boldly,
through his virtue, and thus finds himself exposed to fortune” (180).
Pocock appears to be aware of the Janus-styled thinking of
Machiavelli’s time, while Polka does not, instead choosing to see the
disparity between twentieth and fifteenth-century thought as
contradictory by forcing his definition of innovation to be constrained
by twentieth-century ideas of temporality.

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reflects the idea of allowing medieval or early modern
writers to define themselves:

Petrarch, the great poet, writer, and scholar, is
clearly an ambiguous and transitional figure when
judged by his role in the history of philosophical
thought... His classical culture, his Christian faith,
and his attack against scholasticism are all of a
personal, and in a way modern, quality. At the same
time, everything he says is pervaded by his classical
sources, and often by residual traces of medieval
thought. The old and the new are inextricably
intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the
one or the other side, as has often been done. If we
want to do him justice, and to understand his peculiar
frame of mind, we must accept the old and the new as
equally essential components of his thought and
outlook. (17-18)

It is a temptation to read Kristeller’s comments as
reflective of the search to go beyond the modernist and
postmodernist dichotomy into the mediating “And” that I

6 To do so would

discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
be to favor, in literary analysis, the mirror over the
lamp. E.J. Richards, however, argues that Christine

herself favored Petrarch over all other humanists because

of his inspirational rhetoric and philosophy and when

 

6 Kristeller uses the term “Historical pluralism": “The only way
to understand the Renaissance is a direct and, possibly, an objective
study of the original sources. We have no real justification to take
sides in the controversies of the Renaissance, and to play up humanism
against scholasticism, or scholasticism against humanism, or modern
science against both of them. Instead of trying to reduce everything
to one or two issues, which is the privilege and curse of political
controversy, we should try to develop a kind of historical pluralism...
Complete objectivity may be impossible to achieve, but it should remain
the permanent aim and standard of the historian as well as of the
philosopher and scientist” (Renaissance Thought 105). (italics mine)

200

reading Kristeller’s definition, it is hard not to bring to
mind the parallels between Christine’s and Petrarch’s
thought. Christine, like Petrarch, appears to be ambiguous
- that is, she reflects the mediating “And” - because of
the liberty she found within Petrarch’s aspirations as a
humanist. Her writings were a part of the development of
humanism within France and England, and as such she was a
transitional figure like Petrarch. Being transitional, one
might say that we cannot place her wholly either in the
‘medieval’ or ‘early modern’ periods, but that would say
that Christine was neither lamp nor mirror, and that does
not do her justice. If it is necessary to place Christine
on one side or another, perhaps it is better to follow
Kristeller’s suggestion that we look at aspects more
concrete than philosophy. Kristeller offered:
...I do not think that it is possible to define
Renaissance humanism by a set of philosophical ideas
shared by all humanists, or to regard humanism
exclusively as a philosophical movement, let alone as
the sum total of Renaissance philosophy as some
scholars have recently tended to do... If we compare
the work of different humanists, we are led to the
conclusion that they held a great variety of opinions
and ideas, and that their common denominator is to be
found in an educational, scholarly, and stylistic
ideal, and in the range of their problems and
interests, rather than in their allegiance to any
given set of philosophical or theological views. (4)

A common ideal within education and scholasticism, a View

of common problems and interests brings us back to

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Willard’s emphasis on Christine’s focus on the education of
the young, her tireless pursuit of knowledge and history,
and her interest in the themes of fortune, power, and
political thought. Christine lived in a medieval world, but
her interests were in the development of the ‘early
modern’, and it is in the ‘early modern’ world that
Christine made her contribution.

Christine de Pizan, then, may be categorized as ‘early
modern’ but cannot technically be categorized as a
humanist.7 We must acknowledge her medieval background, but
her education, her position as a respected rhetorician and
poet among her peers, her individualism, her love of

historical and classical learning, her ability to criticize

 

” One of the major aspects of Christine’s work that excludes her
from being a humanist is that she writes in vernacular French instead
of Latin (see Kristian Jensen “The Humanist reform of Latin and Latin
teaching”). Writing in and reviving classical Latin is a necessary
part of the humanist concern, as Susanne Saygin defines:

Renaissance humanism has been understood and defined by

historians as.a broad concern with the study and imitation of

classical antiquity which was focused on the studia humanitatis

(grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history and moral philosophy), and

found its expression in scholarship and education and in many

other areas, including the arts and sciences. Renaissance
humanists recovered, emended, and edited classical texts; they
undertook translations from Greek into Latin and from Latin into
the vernacular. They promoted the revival of classical Latin
and, arguing that the pursuit of eloquence (eloquentia) was
inseparable from wisdom (sapientia), they applied their
rhetorical abilities to the composition of orations, public and
private letters, historical studies, treatises on moral
philosophy and poetical works based on antique models. The works
of the humanists were characterized throughout by a desire to
imitate ancient authors and to emulate them in the elegance of
their style, vocabulary and literary composition. To this the
humanists added a new dimension that was not typical of ancient
literature and that marked a sharp difference from the literature
of the Middle Ages: the tendency to take seriously their own

personal feelings and experiences, opinions and preferences. (1)

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and manipulate tradition, her perception of herself and her
nation as individual subjects and not grouped as part of
estates, her defense of her sex, her valuing prudence over
virtue -- all lead to the conclusion that Christine’s
allegiance was to the secular over the spiritual, to the
authority of human experience over religious dogma. Her
intellectual connection to Dante and Petrarch serves as the
cornerstone for identifying her as a early modern, and her
use of the notion of ‘self as performance’ gives us a solid

view of a charismatic and brave personality.

II. Deeds of Arms and medieval political thought

It would be a delight to be able to connect Christine
directly with a known sixteenth century scholar, writer, or
poet, but even with the surprisingly intimate connection
between Christine and Machiavelli’s secular philosophies,
no connection has yet been established.8 The idea of
Christine’s indirect influence, however, opens a new area,

and Deeds of Arms is an especially fertile area of study.

 

8 Forhan laments “No scholar has yet presented any evidence that
Machiavelli knew or read Christine’s works, at least to this writer’s
knowledge, although it is not impossible that he encountered them,
given her Italian connections and the peripatetic circumstances of her
books... The evidence of any lineal connection between these two
political writers is purely circumstantial.” (166)

203

In order to pick out the trail of indirect influence,
however, we must compile the elements which make up the
trail. We know the direct path in England between
Christine’s writing of Deeds of Arms in 1410 and its
translation into English in 1489-90. In France, the text
continued to be popular, as Willard suggests, not only due
to Charles VII’s reform of the French army around 1445, but
also because Arthur de Richmont, an important military
leader at the time, aided in the reorganization of the army
by following what appears to be Christine’s rules in
regards to leadership, payment, and military discipline.
Willard implies that Richmont must have owned a copy of
Fais d’armes and followed Christine’s advice (“Deeds of
Arms” 8). The trail grows colder, though, after 1545. In
1729 the work was cited in Chacon’s Bibliotheca, which
refers to Christine as a writer (albeit male) on military
subjects, “Christinus de Pisis, Italus natione, inter alia
composuit de re militari lib. 1.” (Richards ‘femme auteur’
103). Thus, Christine’s work, originally cherished by both
the French and the English as a highly valuable and
practical military treatise, appears to slide into a single
mention in an encyclopedia. This appearance, however, is
an illusion; while the evidence of linear connection fell,

the lateral and indirect influence began to rise.

204

“One example of the appearance of professionalism was
the resumption of theoretical studies of warfare, almost
unknown since the time of Vegetius,” says the modern
military historians R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy in
1970, “Representative of this new intellectual approach to
military affairs was the treatises of war and on chivalry
by Christine de Pizan” (400). The reference is oddly
placed - the paragraph containing the information is
sandwiched between one on the rise of gunpowder, the
“reappearance of military professionalism in Western
Warfare” (400) and in the next, the fall of Constantinople.
The mention of Christine is linked to the section on the
“Triumph of Professionalism” and their analysis of the rise
of the new French army between 1445 and 1500. Are they
suggesting that Fais d’armes was the actual template for
what the Dupuys describe as the “first appearance of what
was essentially a modern-type professional army” (425)?
When Charity Cannon Willard points out that “the group of
later manuscripts, notably the paper ones, appears to date
from this period of reform” (8)9, Christine’s influence
seems to be apparent: we have the multiple manuscripts

today; we have the connection between Louis de Guyenne ( to

 

9 Of the seventeen manuscripts known today, one is of parchment,
eight are of vellum and eight are of paper; the paper manuscripts
uniformly originate after 1455 (Byles xvi-xxvi).

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whom Fais d’armes was presented) and his best friend Arthur
de Richmont, who advised the king in creating a
professional army for France; and we have the connection
between Christine’s ideas on military professionalism and
the application of those ideas on the French army between
1444 and 1500. And yet, it is all appearance, and the
influence can only be proven as “indirect.”

Nevertheless, Forhan insists, “...of all Christine’s
political works, Fais d’armes is undoubtedly the most
directly and obviously influential in the development of
international law and in just war theory” (157).10 Indeed,
Christine's definition of just war is what has disting-

uished her among military experts today.11

Christine begins
the work by discussing the problem of auctoritas or the
authority to fight a war; since war leads to destruction

and death, can there ever be a just war? The answer is

that “wars and battles waged for a just cause are but the

 

m Forhan adds, “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that for
many of its early readers, as their opinion of its value and
originality increased, the possibility that it could have been written
by a woman decreased, in a kind of reflexive gender bias” (157),
echoing Richards’s sentiment that “This astonishing case shows only too
directly how readers’ expectations drastically misrepresented a work”
(‘femme auteur’ 103).

u The historians Dupuy and Dupuy feature her as a representative
in their introduction to the rise of military professionalism; Maurice
Keen, also a historian, uses Esats of Arms in his many discussions of
defense, infantry, the changes in the concepts of chivalry, and places
Christine’s works at the cusp of the change between medieval and modern
warfare.

206

proper execution of justice, to bestow right where it
belongs. Divine law grants this as do laws drawn up by
people to repress the arrogant and evildoers” (Willard
“Deeds” 14). Therefore, it is only lawful for “sovereign
princes, which is to say, emperors, kings, dukes, and other
landed lords who are duly and rightfully heads of temporal
jurisdictions” (15). Christine restricts auctoritas very
little, since dukes and other lords usually have a
superior, a point that suggests her favoring the Duke of
Burgundy by including him since he was the patron of her
work. On the other hand, it does point to the realities of
the day, as privilege gave nobility the right to engage in
violence to protect their honor. Richard Kaeuper points
out:
...a combative sense of autonomy is encountered time
and again in all the evidence relating to chivalry;
the sense of honor it conveys was secured with edged
weapons and bloodshed. In the provincial leagues that
formed in 1314, French lords demanded that the
Capetian crown recognize their right of private war; a
generation earlier they had pointedly reminded clerics
that the French kingdom itself had been founded ‘by
the sweat of war'. (8)
There is no reason to restrict auctoritas when it is
pointless. The only solution is to focus on ‘just cause.’
Christine lists the prime causes of war and analyzes

them according to ‘just cause’:

...five grounds are commonly held to be the basis of

207

wars, three of which rest on law and the remaining two

on will. The first lawful ground on which wars may be

undertaken or pursued is to maintain law and justice;
the second is to counteract evildoers who befoul,
injure, and oppress the land and the people; and the
third is to recover lands, lordships, and other things
stolen or usurped for an unjust cause by other who are
under the jurisdiction of the prince, the country, or
its subjects. As for the two of will, one is to
avenge any loss or damage incurred, the other to
conquer and take over foreign lands or lordships.

(Willard “Deeds” 14)

Christine was, of course, following the discussion of just
war that began at least in the time of St. Augustine. The
first three grounds are based on the prince acting on
behalf of the church, the people, or the country, and this
is acceptable because it is his duty to defend those under
or above him. The latter two grounds are unacceptable
because they are a matter of the prince’s will or desire,
and are not supported by either secular or divine law.
Where Christine departs from tradition is her statement
regarding applying the due process of the legal court to
the process of going to war.

Christine removes the decision-making from the
Prince’s hand and puts it in the hands of arbitration and
neutral decision-makers. Christine specifies:

In order that a price may go about this matter justly,

he will follow this course: he will gather together a

great council of wise men in his parliament, or in

that of his sovereign if he is a subject, and not only

will he assemble those of his own realm, but in order
that there will be no suspicion of favor, he will also

208

call upon some from foreign countries that are known

not to take sides, elder statesmen as well as legal

advisors and others. (17)
The prince must reveal the entire matter of the conflict to
this council and he must be honest, so that he can be sure
he is taking the right action. If it appears his cause is
just, then he must “summon his adversary to demand of him
restitution and amends for his injuries and the wrong done
him” (18). The adversary must be allowed to speak without
either favor or spite. Christine concludes, “If these
things are duly carried out, as the law requires, then the
just prince may surely undertake war, which on no account
should be called vengeance, but rather the complete
carrying out of due justice” (18). The departure Christine
makes is in her insistence on due process, and not on
ancient customs or religious fervor. In summoning the_
outside viewpoint from foreign lands and in adding legal
advisors, she creates a professional jury, presenting the
new idea that the law applies to everyone - combatants and
antagonists alike. This point returns us to Christine’s
views on the monarchy, where she held innovative ideas
about seeing France as a united body of subjects instead of
divided along estate lines. The subjective and personal
identity of the individual is enhanced, while the identity

of the nation is taken out of the hands of the prince and

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placed in the hands of the objective legal system. The
aristocracy no longer have their right to wage a private
war for their amusement, because the effects of war
(effects which have been of larger magnitude because of the
development of artillery) now affect a larger international
population.

Christine’s ideas of due process, on seeing the rules
of war as being international, on the steps required to
satisfy the requirements for a war fought under just cause,
all contributed to the reason her work was so widely read,
and gives us a reason why Henry VII “desired & wylled”
Caxton to print the work in 1489. If we add this already
solid offering of new ideas to the attraction of the work
being written in French as opposed to Latin, and therefore
easily understandable to the common listener and reader, we
can see the reason it had an impact on the development of
the rise of international law.

Our pursuit of influence becomes intriguing when faced
with the popularity of Deeds of Arms. If the work was so
popular, then why is it not mentioned in legal treatises or
political documents? Here we run into the mirror/lamp
problem - perhaps Christine’s humanist ideas were so ready
to be accepted that they flowed into popular thought

without hesitation. On the other hand, many times serious

210

ideas are not taken up by the established academic or
political order for the very reason that they are ‘new’; it
often takes the lauding of an idea in popular culture
before it is considered in higher levels of thought. Thus,
the gap of mention between 1545 and 1729 becomes less
difficult to understand if we look at the reflection of the
common man’s understanding of these new ideas regarding due

process within popular culture.

III. “Literatured in the Wars”: Deeds of Arms and Henry V

Gower: Captain Fluellen!

Fluellen: So! In the name of Jesu Christ, speak fewer.
It is the greatest admiration in the universal world,
when the true and aunchient prerogatifes and laws of
the wars is not kept. If you would take the pains but
to examine the wars of Pompey the Great, you shall
find, I warrant you, that there is no tittle taddle
nor pibble babble in Pompey’s camp. I warrant you,
you shall find the ceremonies of wars, and the cares
of it, and the forms of it, and the sobriety of it,
and the modesty of it, to be otherwise. (Hen
V.IV.i.64-74)

The thematic source of Henry V was The Famous
Victories of Henry the fifth, a play registered for
printing in 1594 and published in 1598. Scholars suspect

Shakespeare had seen The Famous Victories on stage as

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well.12 Shakespeare’s main historical sources were the
biography of Henry V by Tito Livio and the chronicles of
Holinshed, who followed those of Hall, but Holinshed
compressed his narrative while adding information taken
from additional sources (Bullough 351). L.B. Campbell
points out, “there is much in the play that is not in the
chronicles, but... the general picture remains true to the
pattern set by Tito Livio and continued in all the English
chronicles” (259). The elements which are not in the
chronicles come forward from the comic interludes of Henry
IV, a continuation of the battle between the practicalities
and actualities of war - a battle of the books, a dispute
between the ancient and the moderns in the school of war.
Fluellen’s concern with the “true and aunchient
prerogatifes” reflects conflicting thinking about war in
Elizabethan England. Campbell lists four works which would
have been influential to those who espoused military theory
over experience: the translation of Frontinus’ Strategems,
Sleytes, and Policies of War, dedicated to Henry VIII in
1539; the translation of Onosander’s Of the General
Captain, and of His Office, dedicated to the Duke of
Norfolk in 1563; Vegetius's Foure Bookes of Martiall

Policye, translated by John Sadler and published in 1572;

 

” See Smidt 124, Bullough 348.

212

and Caxton’s translation of The Book of Fayttes of Armes
and of Chyvalrye, published in 1489.313 All of the military
treatises of Shakespeare’s time were based on the wars on
the continent and any English military works by necessity
reflected foreign experiences and requirements.

Fluellen’s debate with Gower reveals this struggle:
while Gower’s is based on experience, Fluellen’s knowledge
is based on classical military theory, reflecting battle
tactics that used the long bow and an idealized vision of
Roman discipline. This vision was effective, but it needed
to be updated in the light of the current use of weaponry
such as gunpowder and cannons and the disordered warfare
seen in Spanish and French military practices, and that is
why Henry notes of Fluellen, “Though it appear a little out
of fashion, there is much care and valor in this Welshman”
(IV.i.83-4). Gower's knowledge is more practical albeit
less honorable and ethical: he does not react to the French
slaughter of the boys in the luggage, even though Fluellen
points out “’Tis expressly against the law of arms”
(IV.vii.1-2). He is focused on the loss of valuables in

the King’s tent and the loss of ransoms after the slitting

 

u Neither Campbell, nor her source H. B. Lathrop, was aware that
Christine was a woman. Campbell carefully footnotes that “Lathrop
lists him as Christine de Pisan” (297), but corrects Lathrop by
identifying the author of Caxton’s translation as “Christine du
Castel.” (italics mine)

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of the French prisoner’s throats. He appears to be
callous; nevertheless, Fluellen describes Gower to Henry as
“a good captain, and is good knowledge and literatured in
the wars” (IV.vi.149-50). How is it possible for Gower to
be so callous and still be considered a good captain? The
answer is because Gower is a slice of Henry. Fluellen’s
praise of Gower, his captain, reflects well on himself
since Henry likes Gower. Also, standing in front of the
King is not generally a good time to debate military
theory, as Fluellen says wisely, “There is occasions and
causes why and wherefore in all things” (V.i.3-4). This is
the heart of Fluellen’s argument: he admits “I speak but in
the figures and comparisons of it” when discussing the
similarities between Alexander the Great and Henry V, but
his disapproval of Henry’s lack of military knowledge and
discipline is clear. Fluellen concludes, “I’ll tell you
there is good men porn at Monmouth” (IV.vii.52-3) but
judging from Henry’s treatment of Falstaff, those good men
do not include Henry. The joking wager with the soldier
reinforces the appearance of Henry’s flaws, especially
since it occurs before the most horrific of scenes: the
reckoning of the numbers of the dead on both sides.
Experience is a fine teacher, but Henry’s conduct regarding

the prisoners does not follow the laws of war, no matter

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the practicalities or excuses, and Fluellen judges him to
be a flawed King.14

All of the ‘just war’ topics touched on in Henry V are
found in Christine’s Deeds of Arms: the procedures for
declaring and making war, the king’s (or his represent-
ative’s) responsibility to his subjects and soldiers, the
discussion of the philosophy of war and the laws of arms,
the discipline of the troops. The play opens with Henry’s
decision to make war on France and the Archbishop justifies
his decision on high moral and legal grounds. Henry wants
to make sure he can go to war with the knowledge that
justice is on his side, and that he has a worthy cause.

Shakespeare followed Holinshed’s record of Henry’s deathbed

 

“ Fluellen professes to be proud to be Henry’s countryman, “I
need not to be ashamed of your Majesty, praised be to God, so long as
your Majesty is an honest man!” (4.vii.113-15), but one may take his
exclamation in two ways: the first as an honest identification with a
fellow Welshman, brought out by the excitement of finding out the
battle is won, and having the King support the comradeship; the second
may be read as a warning, reminding the King that both a fellow
countryman and a subject of England is trusting him with his life and
honor. Barbara Hodgdon points out that not too long after Fluellen
tests Henry’s honor, Henry in turn tests Fluellen’s honor in the glove
trick (191). Harold Bloom concurs, suggesting that the entire play is
“essentially ironic”; for Bloom, “Shakespeare slyly employs the Welsh
captain to give us a properly ironic analogue for the rejection of
Falstaff in the Alexander the Great monologue” (322). Bloom suggests,
“One great conqueror or “pig” is much like another, as Fluellen
argues,” (323) a point that supports my conjecture that Fluellen’s
“honest man” exclamation is a warning. Yet Bloom echoes Fluellen’s
ambivalence, in that, “A king is necessarily something of a
Counterfeit, and Henry is a great king... no one could fall in love
With Henry V, but no one altogether could resist him either” (323-4).

215

protestation to create the theme of the first act,315 and one
cannot help but recollect Christine’s discussion of just
war and the series of legal steps that must take place
before war may be declared. Henry “gather(s) together a
great council of wise men in his parliament” and
“assemble(s) those of his own realm” as Christine suggests,
including “elder statesmen as well as legal advisors and
others.” True to form, Shakespeare introduces the nobility
before he allows the clergy into the scene. Next, Christine
advocates that “he will propose or have proposed the whole
matter in full without holding anything back, for God
cannot be deceived.” Henry echoes this by asking the
Archbishop of Canterbury, “May I with right and conscience
make this claim?” and the Archbishop responds, “The sin
upon my head, dread sovereign!” (I.ii. 96-97). Once this
point is reached, Christine presents the next step, “if
through such a process it appears that his cause is just,

he will summon his adversary to demand of him restitution

 

” “...neither the ambitious desire to inlarge his dominions,

either to purchase vaine renouwme and wordlie fame, no anie other
consideration had mooved him to take the warres in hand; but onlie that
in prosecuting his just title, he might in the end atteine to a perfect
peace, and come to enjoie those peeces of his inheritance, which to him
of right belonged: and that before the beginning of the same warres, he
was fullie persuaded by men both wise and of great holinesses of life,
that upon such intent he might and ought both begin the same warres,
and follow them, till he had brought them to an end justlie and
rightlie, and that without all danger of God's displeasure or perill of
soule.” (Holinshed, III, 583.)

216

and amends for his injuries and wrongs done him” and the
adversary must be allowed to defend himself “without
special favor, but also without willfulness or spite” (18).
Indeed, the Ambassador restates Henry’s claim regarding the
dukedoms before rejecting the claim, a point that makes the
legal balance clear: Henry has followed the rules of due
process by advising the King of France of his perceived
injuries and wrongs. The tun of tennis balls, which are
sent by the Dauphin as a reflection of his “willfulness and
spite” are received without violence, although the slow,
simmering anger of “We are glad the Dolphin is so pleasant
with us,/ His present and your pains we thank you for”
rises to ice-cold threats: “And tell the pleasant prince
this mock of his/ Hath turn’d his balls to gun-stones, and
his soul / Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful
vengeance / That shall fly with them” (I.ii 281-85). There
is neither willfulness nor spite in this passage, at least
from Henry’s point of View; his question regarding
rectifying the wrongs done to his estate has been supported
by a jury of his peers and council, and his maturity as a
King has been scorned, giving him license to begin the war.

If due process is carried out, then, as Christine defines

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it, the resulting war may not be called vengeance, but
“rather the complete carrying out of due justice” (18).16
More thematic parallels exist between Henry V'and
Deeds of Arms: Christine gives practical advice on war and
money in her original chapters.17 In 1.21, she takes
Vegetius’s advice regarding addressing troops before a
battle, and creates her own battle speech “template,” which
has many similarities to the “St. Crispin's Day” speech
Henry gives in IV.iii., especially in the “band of
brothers” imagery and the sentiment that the men will be
remembered and honored for their victory, and in turn will

be proud to boast of their bravery. Fluellen’s knowledge of

 

m Shakespeare understood due process, and set it out clearly in

the play. Henry follows the letter of the law, but his appreciation of
the spirit of the law is lacking, as Robert Ornstein points out,
“Whatever else has grown stolid in [Henry], his moral casuistry is as
ingenious as ever. In his world-view the problem of ethical choice
exists for others, not for him, because his responses are automatic and
automatically justified. He begs other men to be merciful, but sees
the prosecution of his “just" cause as his only obligation. He never
ponders whether his ancient claim to the French throne or the Dauphin’s
insult really merits the annihilation of cities and peoples” (182).

U Christine’s advice in her fifth chapter concerns the
practicalities of finances and manpower: no prince may make war without
sufficient men and sufficient money. Henry is more than aware of this
requirement, for after he is satisfied that he has the moral and legal
grounds to go to war, Henry accepts Canterbury’s encouragement to go to
war along with (almost in the same breath) the offer of “a mighty sum”
of money from the church. The King questions the need to defend
against the Scots, but agrees to take only a quarter of his forces into
France to defend his claim, since his cause is just and therefore
approved by God. The first act ends with the command, “Therefore let
our proportions for these wars be soon collected,” and therefore Henry
will have his men and money to go to war. Granted, the subtext of the
scene is the fight between church and state, but the end result is the
same, as each gets what they desire.

218

military names and events is mirrored in Deeds of Arms
II.l-13 where Christine translates and comments on the
Strategemata of Frontinus. Henry’s musings on his
responsibility to his subjects and their duty to him has
parallels in Christine’s reworking of the Tree of Battles
in her third section, and the issue of troop discipline is
discussed in Christine’s first section.

From the point of view of indirect influence, it
appears that Shakespeare was following the accepted formula
for due process and common military knowledge; however, can
we account for the precision with which Christine’s
teaching is followed in the first act of Henry V?
Christine’s thoughts on the matter of ‘just war’ were hers
alone: she did not begin to quote and rework her sources
until the seventh chapter of Deeds of Arms. W.H. Schofield
argues that the best source for Shakespeare’s “spirit of
chivalry” is Honoré Bouvet’s Tree of Battles, citing
resemblances in I Henry IV and The Merchant of venice.

G.W. Coopland, an authority on the Tree, argues otherwise.
Coopland admits that there are resemblances between I Henry
IV and the Tree, but the “other examples really belong to
common form in these matters in the middle ages” (23 n43).
Bouvet's work was a successful treatise for military ideas

and customs, but the thoughts and approaches towards the

219

philosophy of the laws of war are firmly medieval; as
Coopland admits, “from the standpoint of the medievalist,
the Tree marks not the rudimentary beginnings of
International Law, but a phase near to the declared and
accepted end of an older system” (68); the intrinsic
difference being in Bouvet’s understanding of the
distinction between sovereignty and nationality. While it
is true that the Tree was printed in French several times
after 1477, and that there were manuscript copies in Anglo-
Scots (from Gilbert of the Haye’s translation in 1456), the
lack of an English edition and printing (except inside the
Deeds of Arms) suggests that Bouvet’s work was not as
readily accessible as Schofield would like.18

Based on this fact, it is doubtful that Shakespeare
used the Tree as his sourcebook for the medieval nature of
war in the Henriad because everyone in Henry V behaves as
an Elizabethan soldier, not a medieval one. Their actions
follow the plot of Holinshed’s history but their worries
and reactions to the laws of war and their musings about a
man’s responsibility to his sovereign and to his soul
reflect a humanist manner of thought: the men share a
similar approach to prudence and self-interest but have

only a passing respect for the standards of chivalry.

 

” See N.A.R. Wright.

220

Moreover, they have less sense of feudal loyalty to their
knightly overlord, King Henry and more allegiance to the
state, England. This focus on political thought and
national unity within a secular and individualist attitude
was not usual among medieval soldiers, as seen in Charny
and Lull’s works on chivalry. Because of this, we have to
return to the appeal of Deeds of Arms: due to Christine’s
presentation of the procedure and process of the
deliberation to wage war and the arbitration to make peace,
Deeds of Arms was prized for its humanist influence on the
construction of international laws of war. Robert Ornstein
asks:
Shall our guide to Henry V'be medieval and Renaissance
treatises on the proprieties of war? Or shall we see
war feelingly through Shakespeare’s eyes and recognize
that, despite the appeals in Henry V to God and
Christ, despite the references to justice and mercy
and the talk of ancient disciplines and rules, war is
an assault on the foundations of civilization. (191)
Deeds of Arms also holds the same skepticism and
comprehension that war is a terrible crime against
humanity. Wars touch “the lives, the blood, and the honor
and the fortunes of an infinite number of people,"
Christine admonishes in her original sections. “There is
absolutely nothing that so needs to be conducted with good

judgment as war and battle... No mistake made in any other

circumstances is less possible to repair than one committed

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by force of arms and by a battle badly conducted” (18-19).
Christine’s disapproval of the imprudence of war comes from
her understanding that while there are laws of war,
Abelard’s laws of jus ad bellum and jus in hello, there is
no power strong enough to execute those laws with complete

justice.

IV. “Coup’ la gorge!”

An article in the 17 June 1996 New Yorker, “Take No

 

Prisoners: How would Henry V have fared at the war-crimes
tribunal in The Hague?” by Lawrence Weschler examines the
stage portrayal of the killing of the prisoners and the
death of the boys in the baggage -- and why these two
scenes have been glossed over in most recent productions,
including the Olivier and Branagh films -- focusing on the
1996 staging of Henry V'by Douglas Hughes that reintroduced
Pistol’s cry “Coup’ la gorge!” before the prisoners are
slain. Woven into his analysis of that production is a
secondary interview with Theodor Meron, a leading scholar
of international humanitarian law (he advised the chief
prosecutor at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in 1995),
who is the author of two acclaimed works on the evolution

and application of the laws of war. Meron is also a highly

222

regarded Shakespearian scholar, which is why he was called
upon to advise Hughes’s production.

Weschler had no idea that there were any laws of war
in the Middle Ages, a notion that Meron was quick to
correct: “Actually, during the Middle Ages there was an
extremely right normative system of military law, enforced
across boundaries and often honored far more than anything
we have today” (55). The code, as we have seen, was
customary and for the most part unwritten, but as the
system broke down and the rules were beginning to be
ignored, that is when (Meron argues) there began to be an
upswing in the amount of chivalric literature, “almost as
if in desperation.” Meron puts Shakespeare’s Henry V'at the
top of the list of chivalric literature, because “from the
point of view of a historian of international law,
[Shakespeare] can provide a quite unparalleled optic m a
vast panorama of attitudes towards chivalric norms among
the various characters, but especially within the character
of the King himself” (55). For example, Henry’s rationale
for Bardolph’s death is a precursor of the humanitarian
norms of today, and Henry’s threats read like the war
crimes that Meron dealt with at the Yugoslavian tribunal.

Meron makes the point that there was one threat that Henry

did follow through — the killing of the prisoners.

223

The authoritative 1623 First Folio, containing close
to 3000 lines for Henry V, dropped out Pistol’s “Coup’ la
gorge!” and the scene ends with the King’s order “Give the
word through.” But the first “bad” Quarto, printed in 1600
and based on actor’s notes and recollections, included
Pistol’s line. The Riverside edition offers Pistol’s shout
as a part of the textual notes, and the New Cambridge
edition dismisses Pistol’s exclamation in a footnote as a
‘comic catchphrase.’ The Oxford edition, however, offers
Pistol’s exclamation in optional brackets, and that edition
was the basis for Hughes’s production. Pistol’s exclamation
is very powerful when it is heard across the stage,
especially since earlier he threatened the French prisoner
with the same phrase in a comic situation which
individualized both the knight and the boy. When Henry,
against all chivalric norms, orders his men to kill the
prisoners, his order would have been met with shock, and
having Pistol reiterate his catchphrase before murdering
his own prisoner would bring the horror to a crisis.

The validity of Henry’s order has been often debated
-- some arguing that it must be excused because of the raid
on the King’s camp and the murder of the baggage-boys —-
others refuting that argument by saying that killing

unarmed prisoners who were not involved with those French

224

knights who committed the raid was simply vengeance and not
justice. Others argue that it was a necessity because of
the reorganization and approach of French troops -- the
reply to that argument reminds us that the knights were on
the ground, in the mud, in seventy pounds of heavy armor,
and weaponless according to Holinshed’s chronicle. “It was
like killing turtles,” Meron argues, and therein is his
point: Shakespeare does not relieve Henry of his guilt and
responsibility for killing the prisoners. He does not write
Henry as avoiding any blame for his actions during
Agincourt, and Meron argues that Shakespeare’s “implied
criticism of Henry's behavior can be read as a sort of
rear-guard defense of the kinds of chivalric norms that
were already fast receding” (58). Meron suggests that
Shakespeare recognized the need for a sober reintroduction
of an internationally recognized law of war, one that took
into account the inclusion of technology within the
parameters of chivalric rules, and one that acknowledged

that there is a notion of ‘crimes against humanity.’19

 

19In 1996, Hughes’s production of Henry V was played against the
larger political backdrop of the Yugoslav Tribunal and focused on the
horrors of war. Recent productions have had to be sensitive about
patriotism and war since the tragedy on September 11, 2001. The
unfortunately timed September 2001 production of Henry V'at the
University of Puget Sound chose to be “about the people and not about
the war” and the September 2002 production at the Jean Cocteau
Repertory carefully mixes the pro-war and anti-war messages of the
play, making a mixture that critics call “profoundly subversive.” The
staging, however, is set during the Vietnam war, a point that would

225

Today, we have a complicated system of humanitarian laws
that are guided and maintained by experts and the normative
system that Christine and Shakespeare lived by has long
faded. Many scholars such as Meron, however, question what
we have lost: the natural rise of law in a society on the
basis of experience; the flexibility of custom over law;
the values of honor, chivalry and mercy. Having solid rules
and laws undermines the individual responsibility of honor,
and thus undermine the sense of shame and guilt. In gaining
the disciplined soldier of Gower, we have lost the educated
and honorable warrior of Fluellen.

The New Yorker article led me to Meron’s first book on
Shakespeare, Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws (1993),
which led me back to Deeds of Arms because of the
discussion of the laws of war arising from the historical
Henry V’s French campaigns. Meron’s 1998 work, Bloody
Constraint: war and Chivalry in Shakespeare again
reconnected Christine and Shakespeare. Meron, while not
overtly suggesting that there was an influence of Christine
on Shakespeare’s conception of just war, uses Deeds of Arms

as a constant illustration of what Shakespeare had to know

 

undermine the shocking nature of Henry’s acts to the medieval mind,
losing the horror within the numbing atrocities seen during Vietnam.

226

in order to include correctly this vital issue in his
plays.

It is not certain which contemporary treatises
Shakespeare used, but these treatises were based on older
ones, which were based on yet older ones, and so on.“’The
issues contained in Deeds of Arms were vital to the time,
and it is reasonable to conclude that the popularity and
authority of Christine’s work would have made it an
appealing source of information in the 15903. It is also
reasonable to suggest that Christine’s humanism made her
works more palatable to the Renaissance mind.

Deeds of Arms’ place on the list of ‘probable’ or
‘indirect’ influences on Shakespeare is secure. However,
the close parallels between Christine's original chapters
and the first act of Henry V does ask us to consider that

Shakespeare’s connection with Christine may be more direct

 

2° Campbell, in her chapter on Henry V, points out a dozen or so
of the treatises of war, ranging in origin from 1549 to 1599, but they
all made (to one degree or another) similar statements that Christine’s
Deeds of Arms made for English readers in 1490. Ornstein, too,
connects Shakespeare’s formulation of his ideas with the playwright’s
fascination with the literature of the historical past: “If
Shakespeare's interest in history had been shallow and opportunistic,
if he had turned to the Chronicles merely to find plot materials and
had been willing to accept without question the judgments of his
sources, he would have found all he needed to write his History Plays
in a single Chronicle as comprehensive as Holinshed’s. Yet he used
Hall as his primary source for the first tetralogy and, in addition to
Holinshed, read Stowe, Foxe, the Mirror for Magistrates, a host of
lesser Chronicles and historical accounts, plays and poems. One could
reasonably conclude that a man who consulted so many source materials
and who wrote nine or ten plays about English history and three about
Roman history had a very deep and serious interest in the past” (22).

227

than we might otherwise suppose. To support this
consideration, we must acknowledge that there was a
starting point for these treatises of war and that humanist
popularity, approval of the crown, and early printing and
translation of Deeds of Arms makes it a prime candidate for

the status of ‘direct influence.’

228

Chapter Six
Reading Christine de Pizan: What was the attraction?

Ideology, Poetics, or just plain Queerness?

...Christine’s works have historically been highly
unsettling to many readers. It was too easy for Lanson
to dismiss her as a blue-stocking, just as it was too
easy for Coupé and Walpole to romanticize her. Rather
than dismissing these reactions as eccentric, it is more
informative to see them as indicative of the fundament-
ally provocative nature of Christine’s works themselves.
Future research on Christine, I would suggest, should not
ignore the conventional features of her work, which are
undoubtedly present and important in showing Christine’s
close ties to the vernacular literary culture of her day,
but it might begin to redirect inquiry into Christine’s
profound and subtle provocations to the reader. - E.J.
Richards 1

What are Christine’s “profound and subtle provocations
to the reader”? Christine does provoke her readers into
responses which are very difficult to catalogue because her
text and subtext do not always coordinate with each other.
She wrote for a courtly reader, and yet she also wrote for
herself, weaving her own biography, questions and agendas
into the texts, provoking her readers to ask questions of
their own.

Most good books, however, ask the reader to involve

themselves. What did Christine do that was different? Why

 

1 This was Richard’s conclusion to his essay, “The Medieval ‘femme
auteur’ as a Provocation to Literary History: Eighteenth-Century
Readers of Christine de Pizan.”

229

read the writings of Christine de Pizan? Why bother? This
question has hopefully been answered by the previous
chapters: she was read because she was favored by the
aristocracy, and the aristocracy read her because she wrote
according to their needs, desires, and visions. She was
read because she offered a vast amount of knowledge on
history, politics, culture, philosophy, and military
information. She was read because she presented this
knowledge in an accessible and appealing manner, often with
interesting and educational illustrations, and her language
was plain and simple for her time. She was read because the
bourgeoisie wanted to emulate the aristocracy, and to do so
they needed to know what the aristocracy knew. Like many
popular authors, she was read for no other reason than
fortune favored her: she wrote the right book at the right
time with the right information, attitude, or philosophical
angle, and this combination appealed to her readers.
Christine was favored by fortune, and yet there is
more to this answer because we are still reading her today
and we still find that she speaks to us. Her knowledge
base is outdated and the true contextual basis of her
Middle French is inaccessible (for the most part). Yet her
“profound and subtle provocations” still prompt us to

question, translate, and enjoy her writing. Richards

230

presses scholars to ask just what these “profound and
subtle provocations” might be - to ask what makes
Christine’s complexity unsettling to her readers - and this
question can only be answered by a reader who is willing to
admit that he or she has been provoked, challenged,
exploited, subverted, threatened, cajoled, disrupted, or

whose desires have been tangled by reading Christine.

I. Reading in Broad Daylight

The politics of book ownership and the politics of
book readership are not that fundamentally different. I
began this inquiry by examining the evidence of provenance
to determine where Christine’s books had sprung from and
where they have ended up. Then, I took that information and
determined who within the fifteenth century we could prove
had read Christine in England, and then placed Christine’s
writings within the larger availability of chivalric
literature. After examining the chivalric treatise Deeds
of Arms as an individual work, I placed the work within a
larger arena, examining the influences of the work on the
culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This has
been a complicated path and one that has been focused on

the available materialist and historical evidence regarding

231

Christine’s influence. The reason why Christine is
provocative, however, is connected with the theories and
politics of identity, a point that can be illustrated by
two images: the first, one reader’s description of another
reader, the quasi-imaginary image of Sir John Paston
reading alone. The second is of Christine’s creation: it is
her persona, in bed, speaking to Honoré Bouvet in the
introduction to the third chapter of Deeds of Arms. The
image of Sir John I will discuss below, and the latter
image created by Christine herself I will discuss later in
this chapter.

Virginia Woolf’s vision is of Sir John Paston reading
in broad daylight, his responsibilities supposedly
forgotten, caught up in the reveries of Chaucer, wasting
his time. This study has shown that Sir John was not at
all wasting his time, but ‘reading profitably,’ and yet
this image is a useful one because it functions as a
metaphor for the reading interests and activities of the
entire Woodville group and beyond. Reading in public is
educational and entertaining, and was quite common for a
culture that for the most part read out loud. Reading
alone, however, suggests introspection. When one reads in
public, one is caught by the timely flow of the material,

and it is not expected that the reader should stop and make

232

comments. Reading alone, however, one may stop and
comment, muse, re-read, comment, and re-read again to one’s
own satisfaction. Reading alone makes memorization easier.
Reading alone allows the reader to muse over a particular
turn of phrase, or turn back to an earlier passage, skip
passages or chapters entirely, or jump to the end of the
tale. The introspection afforded by reading alone may lead
to many situations of personal development ranging from

simple daydreaming to complex “self-fashioning:”2 the act

 

2In using the term “self-fashioning,” I am consciously aware of
using it within the bounds of two criteria: the first is the
pronouncement by historian K.B. McFarlane, “The truth is that the
conception of the Renaissance as a dividing line between medieval and
modern is an unscientific anachronism and should be discarded
forthwith” (287-88). Modernity and premodernity are not binary states,
and while I must agree with most scholars and historians that that
there was a major change in Europe between 1300 and 1600, I cannot
ascribe to the idea of a different sense (usually described as “a
lack”) of historicity existing prior to the Renaissance. This leads to
the second, a rebuttal of Greenblatt’s idea, “that there is in the
early modern period a change in the intellectual, social, psycho-
logical, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of
identities”(1). When I use “self-fashioning,” I see it as a term that
applies to both scholastic and humanist thought, especially in terms of
courtly and chivalric literature and ‘mirror for princes’ texts. In
other words, the court and its environs functioned as a mirror,
enforcing self-consciousness, display, performance, and a dialogue
between the inner and outer voice. This View, which extends the maxim
“that we are actors as well as acted upon” to the Middle Ages, follows
Louis Montrose's definition of "subject," written (he confessed) to be
intentionally and purposefully ambiguous: “a process of subjectifi-
cation that, on the one hand, shapes individuals as a loci of
consciousness and initiators of action, endows them with subjectivity;
and that, on the other hand, positions, motivates, and constrains them
within -- subjects them to -- social networks and cultural codes that
exceed their comprehension or control" (9). Contra Greenblatt, the
writings of Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer are examples of
advanced and introspective subjectivity and self-fashioning, as we see
them use their personae to manipulate their audience into thought and
action, revealing a full and complex inner self. (The ambiguity of
Montrose’s definition lends itself very easily to the critical

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of reading (whether the book read offers a list of facts or
is a window into another’s mind) creates an opportunity for
identification because it allows the mind to connect ideas
and facts in ways that are not always socially prescribed.
A reader may read and memorize, or he may read and
interpret, but either way he is taking the information into
himself, and such growth leads to the development of
desire. Whether the desire is to avoid the experience or
repeat the experience of the text, idea, or memory, it
still impacts on the reader’s identity.

Christine begins the Book of the City of Ladies by
describing herself in her study, reading alone, reacting
with sadness to what she is reading, and then dreaming of a
solution. Virginia Woolf, known well for advocating the
necessity of “a room of one’s own” for writing and reading,
follows this image when she projects her fantasy of John
Paston “in broad daylight, reading, and seeing him as a
dreamer. Christine reads, dreams, and builds, Woolf does
the same in her own books, and envisions John Paston doing

the same reading, dreaming, and building.3 Both Christine

 

indeterminability of queer studies, whether that was his intention or
not.)

3 Joel Blanchard advocates the connection between reading,
compilation, and building, because the act of reading leads to the flow
of mental correspondences. He states, “compilation in Christine is a
matter of temperament and a game of the imagination. This vocation is

234

and Woolf build alternate realities for themselves, and
from their dreams they refashion themselves in other
images. Their actions and re3ponses to their desires
brought about by reading are not unusual.4

Earlier in this study, I examined Sir John’s library
and reading patterns. His habits were, for lack of another
word, ‘ordinary,’ in that they followed the trends of the
Burgundian court and his social superiors. On the other
hand, that Sir John made his own book suggests that he had
an exceptional and creative mind, one that enjoyed
education and ‘profitable reading.’ Following Richard’s
'question, I must ask what might John Paston have imagined
when he read the ‘mirror for princes’ literature written by
Christine de Pizan? What “profound and subtle provocations”
might have caught Sir John’s attention? Did he perceive

anything unusual about what he read in Christine’s Deeds of

 

abundantly clear in the illustrations found in Christine’s manuscripts:
the image of a school girl, une fille d’escole, sitting in her recet,
surrounded by books. This representation itself of the privileged
female reader has contributed to establishing its permanence in her
work. The act of reading for her is a veritable labor of humanist
investment, an illumination of the universe, a manner of refining both
her research and her mind (s'asoutiler)”(229). This ‘humanist
investment’ suggests ‘self—fashioning’ from Christine’s mind, outward
to her recet, and the universe beyond.

‘ Examples of people being influenced by books are too many to
list here, as they range from the simplest impulse for change such as
Augustine’s “tolle lege, tolle lege” to the complex reorganization of
personality and identity, even language and dress seen in the
fictional/ metaphorical crowd of roaming book-savers and memorizers in
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

235

Arms?S It was a book of chivalry, written in plain
language, by a woman - and the book was not considered odd
but cherished and celebrated by the Burgundian and English
courts. Christine's innovative approach to chivalry,
knighthood, and masculinity, too, was accepted and
appreciated. But why read Deeds of Arms when there were
other treatises on chivalry available, indeed, when the
very military works that Christine used as her sources were
available? The answer is that besides the military and
chivalric information Christine offered something
different, something more than just a new and appealing
approach to waging a just war. It was a combination of the
above factors, plus Christine’s individuality that made her
appealing: a combination of ideology, poetics, and for lack
of a better word — “queerness” - that made her provoc-

atively desirable to a reader’s identity.

 

5 The assumption that a manuscript of Le Livre de Fais D’Armes et
de Chevalerie circulated in the Woodville circle comes from fact that
either Scrope or Worcester managed to get a hold of a copy in order to
write the Boke of Nbblesse. This suggests that a manuscript must have
been passed around the Fastolf/Paston family and the Woodville circle,
and it stands to reason that if a clerk like Worcester or an ill-
favored nephew like Scrope had access to the manuscript, then a knight
like Paston would have had equal or greater access. (See Ch. 2, n.15)

236

II. Identifying the Queer in Queer

Christine’s political and social ideology and poetics
have been well discussed, although I believe there is room
for more clarification. But her “queerness” has been
examined by only a few scholars, a point that is surprising
since queer studies and Christine de Pizan studies have
been flourishing in parallel since the late 19803.6 The
lack of examination may be due to the challenge of
terminology: one scholar’s “queer” is not necessarily

another scholar’s “queer.” Or, as Jonathan Dollimore wryly

 

5 One study, “Queering Ovidian Myth: Bestiality and Desire in
Christine de Pizan’s Epitre d’Othéa” by Marilynn Desmond and Pamela
Sheingorn, was placed as the first chapter in Queering the Middle Ages.
The essay follows the idea of “outlaw theory,” a term invented by Sally
O’Driscoll, which “follows the original impetus of queer theory — a
liberating deconstruction of sexual ideology and categories - without
the problematic terminology confusion that negates the insistence on
the material reality of specific sexual practices and their
consequences.” The essay argues that “Christine queers the Ovidian
obsession with metamorphosis and explores trans-species sexuality as a
way of revising received notions of female sexuality and envisioning
female desire” (3). The authors suggest that Christine’s approach
towards female sexuality and desire does not reflect mainstream
attitudes towards women, and they argue that Christine uses the imagery
of beast myths to reveal cultural ideas about female desire and agency
“outside the hetero-normative paradigm” (21). I must point out,
however, that Christine herself admitted that her views were
“unpopular” and outside the mainstream, a fact which made them more
provocative (in the Querelle de la Rose she reminds Gontier Col that
the tiny point of a knife can pierce the largest and mightiest sack,
indicating that she herself is the little knife) and cannot be
considered as a revelation by today’s scholarship. Beast myths, too,
have been used as metaphors for much longer than Christine wrote, and
these myths are not exclusive to western culture, nor limited to just
female sexuality. Granted, the images in Epistre d’Othéa offer many
opportunities for new insights, but this reading lends itself more to
feminist “reformist” theory than to queer theory, although perhaps this
was the authors’ intent in order to avoid the challenging “terminology”
which marks many queer theory discourses.

237

comments:

Although queer theory has been very influential in
academic and metropolitan circles in the last few
years, it’s difficult to define exactly. After
heroically struggling through the language of the
major queer texts, the most famous of which, Judith
Butler’s Gender Trouble, [Richard Goldstein, a writer
for the Village Vbice] finds ‘as dense as a black
hole,’ the only radical agenda he can derive from them
is that - wait for it - nothing is really fixed and we
are or should be free to be and do what we want. And
Goldstein is a sympathetic commentator. (7)

Dollimore's search for definition is humorous but
nonetheless an excellent indicator of the chaotic state of
queer theory. Indeed, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick remarks, “what
seems least settled is any predetermined idea about what
makes the queerness of a queer reading” (2). The Middle
Ages are eSpecially problematic for queer theory, as Karma
Lochrie explains:
Refracted through the Middle Ages...the question as to
what constitutes heterosexual sex could never have
puzzled medieval theologians, much less laypeople, for
the simple fact that the category as a norm did not
exist in the same way that it currently does...
because all sex was included under the Deadly Sin of
Lechery in the first place. The Middle Ages had a much
more broad, diverse, and pluralized notion of sexual
activity than we do, and...the binary opposition that
governs contemporary identity cultures does not seem
to have governed medieval sexual acts. (92)
Celibacy and virginity are the only two clearly defined

sexual identities that appear to have the same meaning in

the modern sense, perhaps because these two are absolute.

238

While the binary oppositions in the Middle Ages appear
to not have existed, twenty-first century scholars’ ability
to interpret the notion of sexual activity and identity has
settled into an oppositional stance between history and
literature. The November, 1998, Queer Middle Ages
conference, for example, announced in the call for papers
that it was dedicated to “the pursuit of methodologies of
interpretation and documentation of the same-sex choices of
woman and men who resisted hetero-normativity in their
sexual and affective bonds during the period we have come
to call the Middle Ages.” 7 The conference was a success,
but the participants in the conference itself voiced a
general problem with the issue of academic approach. Paul
Halsall noted:

Repeatedly participants commented on the contrast

between the approach of literature scholars, on one

hand, and historians on the other. It would be crude,
but not entirely inaccurate, to say that the

historians found the fact that you could "read" a

medieval text in a "queer" way uninteresting, whereas,

as far as I could make out, this was indeed the major
approach of literature scholars.8

The suspicion behind the historian’s reproach comes from

the need for historical scholarship to be supported by

 

7 (http;//www.engli3h.upenn.edu/CFP/archive/l997-11/0044.html)
Accessed 12.29.2002. Unfortunately, there has not been a QMA Conference
since this date.

8 (http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu:8080/hyper-lists/lt-
antiq/98-12-01/0011.html) Accessed 12.29.2002.

239

concrete evidence in the investigation, while literature
can ride on hermeneutic practices, as long as they are
defensible. Halsall notes the same problem with “queer”
that was faced by Dollimore and Sedgwick:
Although the conference adopted the name "queer," this
word rapidly seemed to collapse. On the one hand many
paper-givers took a positivistic approach to the word:
"queer" was taken as a synonym for "homosexuality," or
for "homosexuality and other non-normative sexual
practices”; on the other hand, with those who adopted
a "queer studies" approach to texts, it was often hard
to distinguish between "queering" and "deconstruction"
-- or rather "queering" a text seemed often to involve
deconstructing it with a sexual edge.9
Deconstruction (a la Derrida) involves a focus on philo-
sophical statements, or theoretical concerns, and queer
theory comes out of the opposite spectrum of feminism and
gender theory’s labors, but one could ask, based on the
Derridean challenge to the concept of “correct
interpretation” and suspicion regarding hermeneutics, if
deconstruction (when applied) might work in reverse: Does
deconstructing a text queer it? Does queering a text
deconstruct it? I would have to say that queer theory owes
more to Bakhtin’s dialogism, where the multiple contextual
layers of meaning within the individual voice is

fundamental for all interpretation, and therefore a wittier

question might be: Does queering a text reveal the

 

9 Ibid.

240

heteroglossia in it? When we “out” the heteroglossia from
monologic texts, do we queer it? Polyphony or ‘double-
voicing,’ too, can be usurped by queer theory because it
reflects the multiple verbal positioning of queer street
language, a vocabulary which is only now beginning to
emerge in academic language. Or perhaps, because there is
no codified definition of queer theory, this is all a
matter of semantics; instead, I offer a series of
suggestions which make the study of sexuality in the Middle
Ages more accessible, especially in the study of Christine
Ade Pizan.

First, we cannot assume that there is a trans-
historical queer identity, in that we cannot “out” authors,
and we must use tact and caution when facing human
sexuality. Even the most autobiographical sexual
revelations (such as Christine’s L'Avision and MUtacion de
Fortune) must be treated with circumspection. Second, we
cannot fall into the guilty anachronism of calling an
author a lesbian or homosexual, since the terms did not
exist in the Middle Ages. If the term must be used, it is
better to put it into quotes so that readers are aware of
the historic differences. Third, sexuality in the Middle
Ages cannot be taken as a mark of identity, the core of a

person’s self, nor can the involvement in heterosexual

241

activity prove that the identity of the author (or the
authorial persona, or a character) is heterosexual.
Dollimore suggests,
...we all aspire to a sexual identity of some kind.
But it is wrong to suggest that we do this as a
relatively straightforward expression of our
orientation or desires. Identity (as single
orientation) can be as much a defense against, as an
expression of, desire. (24)
Christine’s claim of celibacy within widowhood, therefore,
cannot be taken as an indication of her identity as a
sexually inactive heterosexual. A mark of queer theory is
that “acts” do not indicate “identity”: no longer does gay
or lesbian scholarship aim at identifying gay individuals
or identities, because scholars have found that desire is
much more complicated than the sexual act, as it shifts
along with culture, history, politics, ideology, and
homoerotic availability. Because of the shifting nature of
desire, queer theory does not equate identification and

desire any more than feminist theory equates gender and

sexuality.10

 

m See Butler, Hunt, Holsinger, Dollimore, and Lochrie. Butler
argues, “In psychoanalytic terms, the relations between gender and
sexuality is in part negotiated through the question of the
relationship between identification and desire. And here it becomes
clear why refusing to draw lines of causal implication between these
two domains is as important as keeping open an investigation of their
complex interimplication. For, if to identify as a woman is not
necessarily to desire a man, and if to desire a woman does not
necessarily signal the constituting presence of a masculine identi-
fication, whatever that is, then the heterosexual matrix proves to be
an imaginary logic that insistently issues forth its own unmanage—

242

This leads to the fourth point, the commitment of
queer theory to historicity - the position of a text or
author within (or on the margin) of historical narrative.
Fradenberg and Freccero state that queer theory is “devoted
to dismantling the universals, essences and natures that
have for centuries been used to define and persecute
‘others,’ including those others understood by dominant
ideologies to be excessively fond of the pleasures of
sameness” (xvii). The argument of historicity is that we
cannot deny the connection between pleasure, desire, and
their role in the production of historical discourse. The
“territorial identifications” of both the authors in the
'Middle Ages and scholars in the contemporary academy affect
the writing of history, politics, and the articulations of
sexual practices. Christine began her career by being asked
to write the biography of Charles V, and in her history she
is not ashamed to reveal that she identifies with the
king’s humanism and education, a point that she emphasizes
in her narrative, which in turn colors the reader’s
identification with Charles V, the subject of the

biography.

 

ability...The vocabulary for describing the difficult play, crossing,
and destabilization of masculine and feminine identifications within
homosexuality has only begun to emerge within theoretical language: the
non-academic language historically embedded in gay communities is here
much more instructive” (“Bodies” 239-40).

243

The fifth point rounds out this list. Queer theory has
had a rich controversy regarding the dangers and pleasures
of identification: how heterosexuality can be “performed”
by gay and lesbian-identified subjects, making gender into
a role or an “image.” Dollimore proposes, “we need a double
distinction here: between identity and identification, and
between desire and identification. Do we ever simply
desire the person we love, or is our desire not also partly
an identification with him or her? Simply put, the ‘I want
you’ of desire is complicated by the ‘I want to be you’ of
identification” (27). Christine‘s rehabilitation of
Semiramis, Dido, and Medea in the City of Ladies reveals
Christine’s identification with these strong women in that
she sees them as wronged by misogynistic speech, as
Christine herself was in the Querelle de la Rose, and she
seeks to rewrite their false biographies, emphasizing their
courage, wisdom, and authority. In Deeds of Arms she calls
upon Minerva, the goddess of arms and chivalry, saying at
the end of her first chapter “like you I am an Italian
woman” (13). Dollimore insists that desire is complicated,
a point well taken, but fortunately, Christine is very open
and free with her identifications and desires, which
facilitates discussing her work using the ideas of queer

theory.

244

III. Queering Christine

From the very beginning of her writing career,
Christine was open about her identification with the
opposite sex. Her first biography within the MUtacion de
Fortune, written c. 1400, describes how Fortune turned her
into a man in order to help her face the problems of her
life. It is written as an allegory, and many scholars
accept it as a metaphor for her change into an independent,
public person.11 A scholar who looks at the MUtacion
through the eyes of queer theory, however, sees an entirely
different tale because Christine is open with her cross-
gender identification: it is not required for a reader to
decode or deconstruct the text, as the moment of queer
recognition is exposed for anyone to see. That the moment
is so exposed suggests that it marks a moment for
Christine’s queer self-recognition - a point of mental
awakening - where, to use an analogy, the author realizes

that he or she is no longer walking with the crowd, but

 

“ Claire Nouvet, for example, argues that Christine’s “sexual

metamorphosis involves above all a mutation of her voice into a
masculine voice. The change of voice confirms that which we could
already suspect; that Christine’s sexual metamorphosis is not to be
understood as a literal but a metaphorical metamorphosis. Christine
does not become a man; she becomes like a man... in order to find a
narrative voice” (302).

245

instead is crossing the street.

Christine tells her history, “How I, a woman, became a
man / By the flick of Fortune’s hand / How she changed my
body’s form / To the perfect masculine norm” (142-5). The
tone is light but sincere. She describes her father, whose
wealth was in his knowledge, and her mother, who is

m Her father wanted a son who could inherit his

Nature.
wealth (wisdom) but Nature gave him a girl, “For instead of
male, the other / Sex was I born, though otherwise / I had
my father’s looks: his eyes, / His hair, his build” (395-
8). Christine grew up, and was married to a “perfect young
man” who cherished her, but during the allegorical voyage
of their marriage he is swept overboard during a storm,
leaving her alone. She cries out to Fortune piteously, and
one afternoon just before dinner Fortune changes Christine
into a man. She experiences a literally queer awakening,
“I felt all strange: / My body undergoing change / All over
I felt transmutated: / No longer weak and subjugated”
(1334-7). Christine begins to touch her new body, “All over

I felt myself afresh, / As I touched muscle — a man’s

flesh! / And my voice took on assurance / As my body gained

 

u Christine does not mention her natural mother very often in her
writings, admitting in her biographies that her mother did not support
Christine’s literary interests and aptitude.

246

endurance” (1347-50).13 Full of muscle, she repairs the
ship, learns to sail and command a crew.14

Christine ends Part I with regret: “Now see, / Like a
real man; I have to be. / Fortune kindly taught me the way
/ To do manly deeds, to this day. / As you can tell, men
are my peers / As they have been for thirteen years. /
Though ‘twould please me more than a third, / To return as
woman and be heard” (1390-7). A feminist reading would
interpret Christine’s words as a desire to return to
womanhood (Ferrante 207), but to a womanhood that is
respected and whose voice is listened to.15 A queer reading
is more pragmatic and committed to historicity: Christine
knows that women will not be listened to, unless they do

something to attract attention. She is on the forefront,

 

B What “muscle” is Christine touching? What would be the primary
body part a human would touch to determine the sex of the body? Male
sexuality is constructed on the phallus, and in a culture where men and
women both wore unisex garments (Burns, 112), determining the sex of
the body would be difficult without actually examining the body part in
question.

” Christine’s wedding ring also falls off: “But there from my
once fragile hand / From my finger, my own wedding band / Had fallen”
(1351-53) presumably because of her new strength, but also because as a
man, she cannot be married to a man.

” Susan Schibanoff resists the idea that Christine became a man
in order to write, arguing that in City of Ladies, Christine survives
reading the misogyny of Matheolus’s text by resisting the convention
that all readers must read “as a man,” and instead supports her right
to read “as a woman,” thus “emasculat[ing] herself as a reader”(225).
This term is in reference to Judith Fetterly’s discussion of literary
stereotypes, “though one of the most persistent of literary stereotypes
is the castrating bitch, the cultural reality is not the emasculation
of men by women but the immasculation of women by men” (xx).

247

if not the first, of professional women writers, and her
chances of being listened to “as woman” are slim. She may
be able to convince her readers that women are equal to men
in morality and intelligence, but they are not the social

or political equals of men.116

Therefore, despite her
regrets, she enjoys being a man and does such a good job at
it (supporting the idea of gender being a performance) that
men have been her peers for thirteen years.17

In later works, Christine does drop the female-to—male

metamorphosis imagery on an allegorical level, but retains

 

“ Rosalind Brown-Grant‘s central argument: “Whether writing
didactic manuals for knights and princes or offering pragmatic advice
to ladies and princesses, Christine was unwavering in her desire to
convince her readers of the equality of the two sexes in moral, if not
social, terms” (6) falls apart under the scrutiny of queer theory. The
very idea of the ‘equality of the sexes’ is absurd because of queer
theory’s recognition of the social, cultural, and psychological plural-
ity of gender identification. If any equality does exist, it can only
flourish as a part of the equal subversion of the status quo, in the
hope that “the binary opposition which maintains the status quo [of
binary sexuality] will become so overloaded with cultural diversity
that it will short-circuit and eventually self-destruct” (Dollimore
30).

” Claire Nouvet’s feminist reading goes out of its way in order
to avoid “queering” Christine: “The masculine voice with which
Christine speaks is the product of this translatio of fear into speech.
What is here called “masculine” is not opposed to feminine: the
“masculinity” of her newly gained voice simply signals the process of
translatio that the feminine fear must undergo in order to find a
voice...The apparent change of gender does not represent a renunciation
of one’s gender but instead the very condition for a gendered speech.
Speaking like a man, Christine does not speak as a man. On the
contrary, she must speak like a man in order to speak as a woman”
(303). Nouvet’s extended qualifying to re-gender Christine as feminine
suggests a deliberate anti-reading of Christine’s biographical
metaphor. A metaphor is supposed to reveal to the reader a meaning that
is closer to the truth, and not the opposite of the truth. Without the
anti-reading, the feminist scholar would have to read Christine’s
metaphor as “gender betrayal”, a heinous crime in feminist studies.

248

it on a metaphorical level. Her grief in City of Ladies
comes from being torn between being male in spirit and
female in body. In L’Avision Christine she again expresses
her gender dysphoria: she sees in a dream vision the
figures of male Chaos and female Nature, where Nature takes
matter from Chaos, mixes it into humans, puts the mixture
into little molds, and cooks it in Chaos’s mouth. When the
figures are baked enough, Nature decants the bodies, and
Chaos eats them in order to raise and educate them.
Christine’s spirit is put into a little mold and she is
baked until she has a body; however, the result is not what
she expected: “But according to the wishes of her who had
made the mixture I received the female sex - because of her
and not because of the mold” (Mais comme le voulsist ainsi
celle qui la destrempe avoit faitte a la quel cause ce
tient et non au moulle iaportay sexe femenin.)18 In a
reversal of the sex roles, Nature makes the child out of
Chaos, who incubates it. “For Christine, Nature implies, it
is as natural to write books as to have babies” suggests
Ferrante, following feminist theory (208). Queer theory
looks instead at the violation of Christine's wishes: the

implication that her spirit is male, and therefore her body

 

m (http://erc.lib.umn.edu/dynaweb/french/pizalavi/@Generic__
BookView) Accessed 12.30.2002.

249

should have been male also, except for Nature’s perverse
wish. Christine’s specification “not because of the mold”
(et non au moulle) gives another layer to the perversity of
Nature’s overruling - the queer reader could get the
bizarre image that the mold which Christine received was
indeed male, but her womanhood has been clumsily grafted on
like gumdrops adhered with frosting to the chest of a
gingerbread man.

Many scholars see Christine’s change of gender as a
point of regret, but the Mhtacion and L’Avision are very
clear that the loss of her husband, while grievously
painful, gave her an opportunity for growth that few other
women of her time were offered. Christine did not have to
portray herself as a person who experienced this change of
gender, or offer her readers her view of her “queer self—
recognition,” but she realized that this self-recognition
permitted her to frustrate the limitations the French
society usually imposed on women. In Mhtacion, she uses
the myth of Tiresias, the man who spent seven years as a
woman, to illustrate that Christine has seen both sides of
gender. By correlation, Christine has the power to give
advice to royal figures since she has seen both sides of
political and social arguments, making her ‘mirror for

princes’ texts all the more valuable to her contemporary

250

readers. Christine had to become a man in order to write,
and she was happy to stay that way.19

Christine was able to claim a new self-identity and
self-confidence by learning how to read authoritatively,
that is, trusting her own personal experiences to interpret
what she was reading. This skill, Schibanoff suggests,
comes from Christine being the only female participant in
the Querelle de la Rose, as Christine “learned from the
debate the art of deconstructing a text, of recognizing and
examining the means by which readers construct the variable
meanings of a text. It appears she never convinced her
opponents that readers inevitably recreate the texts they
read in their own images, even though she herself was
charged with reading in precisely that way” (235).
Schibanoff suggests that Christine herself, however,
learned well the lesson regarding the discrepancy between
text and reader. Texts were not “fixed”: she knew that her
readers would identify with the subjects they read, that no
reader would ever come to the same conclusion as another,
that it was useless to argue with a reader who saw a work

differently, and that one’s gender affected one’s

 

” Thelma Fenster believes that Christine’s decision to “go male”
is indeed a self-conscious action. “Much more than a mere trope, this
claim reflected a social and cognitive reality. Thus the learned
Italian women trained in Latin by students of famous humanist teachers
like Guarino of Verona were advised to become men if they wished to
write” (101-2).

251

interpretation.

In Christine’s works that deal with women’s issues,
especially her works prior to her biography of Charles V'in
1404, her confidence as a writer was not at its greatest.
The years 1404-5 were pivotal for Christine, as her belief
in her writing doubled along with her transition into the
status of a professional writer. L’Avision Christine (1405)
is a good example of Christine reflecting on her
transition, and after that date her trope of “reading as a
man” decreased as she was able to make her voice heard on
multiple subjects. By the time Deeds of Arms was written in
1410, Christine had moved into political science,
reflecting her self-assurance as a writer. In the
introduction to Deeds of Arms, Christine apologizes in a
typical humility trope, saying that her knowledge is not
equal to the subject matter - but she does not apologize
for being a woman writer - in fact, she celebrates it by
likening herself to Minerva, and says that it is “both
appropriate and poetic” (12) that she is writing a book on

chivalry for men.

252

IV. Queer bedfellows: Christine and Bouvet

Christine saw the advantage in the reader’s natural
reclaiming of a text, and used the changeable nature of
experience and knowledge to play with the reader’s
perception and construction of gender. “Play” is also
provocation because it asks for a response, especially when
aimed at the reader, asking them to speculate and respond,
and form an exchange as they reclaim a text. Deeds of Arms
offers many opportunities for the reader to respond, in
that Christine is very aware of the language level of her
audience and she uses wit, humor, and often sarcasm to get
her point across. The third book is a good example of
this: the chapter discusses the “droit d’armes” according
to written law using the fourth book of the L’Arbre des
Batailles by Honoré Bouvet, written c. 1390 and dedicated
to Charles VII20 Christine has an introductory section which
is entirely original, and she never identifies Bouvet by
name while engaging in a playful Socratic dialogue with the

“Master."

 

m This section discusses the precepts of the rights of arms and

how they connect to a king’s vassals; the rights the king may demand of
his vassals, and the rights the vassals may demand from the king. The
section has many strong echoes of Act IV of Henry V regarding good and
evil causes, “Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s
soul is his own” (IV.i.176-77).

253

Christine begins the chapter by placing herself in
bed, drowsy with the burden of her work, resting in order
to gather strength for her next chapters. While she is in
bed, she is visited by a creature appearing to be “a solemn
man in clerical garb,” who says:

Dear friend Christine...I have come here to lend a

hand in the composition of this present book of

knighthood... therefore, in conformity of your great
desire to give material to all knights...it is good
for you to gather from the Tree of Battles in my
garden some fruit that will be of use to you... In
order to build an edifice that reflects the writings
of Vegetius and of other authors who have been helpful
to you, you must cut some branches of this tree,
taking only the best, and with this timber you shall

set up the foundation of this edifice. (144)

Christine thanks him, but she never specifies that his
presence is part of the dream-vision topos that she
frequently used. Christine often portrayed herself as
receiving information from an Annunciation, but the sudden
arrival of Bouvet is a twist on the Annunciation
iconography: instead of the somber archangel Gabriel, she
is visited by a cheerful old man. In City of Ladies,
Christine admits that she may have been asleep and is
frightened that the three crowned ladies in her room may be
phantoms come to tempt her. In Deeds of Arms, however,

Christine does not react with any sort of fear but is

instead very happy to see him appear in her private, inner

254

 

space. Indeed, Christine is far more frightened by finding
three shining women in her study than by finding a musty
old man in her bedroom.

With Bouvet, she never separates the dream vision from
reality but instead insists on the authenticity of the odd
situation, as if she were recollecting an actual
conversation, noting dispassionately “it seemed to me I
said to him” (me sembloit adonc que ainsi lui disoye)u‘as
she begins her next speech. She tells him she has admired
him for a long time, but asks a question: “I pray you tell
me if my work can be reproached for your counseling me to
make use of the aforesaid fruit”(l44). He replies “the more
a work is seen and approved by people, the more authentic
it becomes” (de tant est une oeuvre tesmoingnee par plus de
gent, tant plus est autentique) (144). Her Master
continues by promoting the advantages and social benefits
of compilation, for it protects the compiler by showing
“the indication of having seen and read many books” (144).
She ends with him praising her work for being good, and
promising her, “I assure you that it shall be commended and
praised by many a wise man” (144).

The city-building imagery parallels Christine’s

 

a Translation is from the unpublished edition of B.N. MS. f. fr.
603 in the 1988 dissertation of Christine M. Laennec.

255

endeavors in City of Ladies, and emphasizes the aforesaid
connection between reading, compilation, and building. That
the man appears in clerical garb (homme d’abit) would
appear to emphasize the solemnity and formality of
Christine’s quest, and the tree and fruit metaphors for
gathering knowledge are traditional. That Christine
(supposedly) remains within the dream in order to question
and find support for her questions finds its roots in
Petrarch and Dante, as does the approval of her act of
compilation and the commendation of her “Master.” This
section, read outside of queer theory, seems commonplace.
To the queer eye, however, there are many elements
that provoke and tease the reader: Christine in bed is
following dream-vision behavior, but the fact that her
persona is female puts a twist on it that is queer - she is
in bed, so to speak, with Bouvet, but she is not engaging
in sexual acts, but instead is engaging in a meeting of
minds. The tease comes from the fact that she did not have
to place him in her bedroom but could have placed him in
her study as she did with her three female visitors in City
of Ladies. Why have the women appear in her study, and the
man appear in her bedroom? That is very suggestive. If this
is a form of sexual play, it is unprocreative in its lack

of physicality.

256

On the other hand, it plays into a very procreative
arena because this meeting of like minds is giving birth to
a new book. The dialogue between a Master and his student
would not be remarkable, but to have that dialogue exchange
exist between a male Master and his female student reminds
us of the passionate exchange between Abelard and Héloise -
with its disastrous conclusion. The chances here for
Christine’s virtue to be compromised are great. Christine,
however, keeps the distance between herself and her Master
by depicting him as a old man in clerical habit, but that
does not negate the queerness of the situation, because
clerics, while desexualized, were also the site of gender
equality, as nuns were considered “manly” because “in the
monastic order, they performed many of the same tasks as
men, sometimes in the same physical environment...shar[ing]
the educational opportunities available to monks,”
(McNamara 6) and producing women of impresssive learning
such as Hildegard of Bingen. Christine encourages the
development of a reader connecting these provocative ideas
by creating an Annunciatory situation and then subverting
it with elements of her own desire and identity.

Bouvet has penetrated Christine’s bedroom, and she
welcomes his presence and advice as she asks him questions

about chivalry. Could it be said that he is teaching

257

Christine “new tricks”? Or, to use street language, is
Christine “turning a trick”? At the end of her preface, she
writes him as commending her good work with praise, a form
of payment for her efforts. Like many who visit
prostitutes, her visitor has not given his name, nor does
she ask it. By not naming him, even though everyone reading
the text knew who he was, she creates the subtext of the
illicit affair. Is Christine’s persona engaging in literary
sodomy, that is, her persona and Bouvet are engaging in
non-procreative mingling for pleasure?22 Or is this the lust
of adultery which will bring forth the birth of a new
child-book, a bastard from an inappropriate mother who
should never have written on chivalry at all, and who had
to consort illicitly with men in order to get the
information for the book? Perhaps we could argue that since
she sees him as her “Master” there is a marriage of minds,
and that would make this child-book legitimate. Still,
Bouvet is not in bed with Christine and semantically
speaking their collaboration is that of non-procreation but

of lust for knowledge.

 

” Following the studies of Gregory Bredbeck, Bruce Smith, Bruce
Holsinger, and Steven F. Kruger, I am using the term “sodomy” not only
to mean perverse sexuality, particularly homosexual activity, but also
heterosexual sodomy (which does not lead to children), adultery (the
children of which are probable but not lawful) and even into metaphor:
the pursuit of knowledge which is sinful, illegal, barbaric, or
unfruitful.

258

Christine has the Bouvet character speak a maxim: “the
more a work is seen and approved by people, the more
authentic it becomes.” On one level, it appears commonplace
but it has additional subtexts: in Christine’s mind,
literary reality is formed by a flexible joint consensus
and not by any concrete outside laws. The more times people
read a book, the more they consider it to be a manifest-
ation of the truth. By extension, the more a writer’s
thoughts are embraced by his or her readers as the truth,
then the more acceptable the thoughts become. Who makes
literary reality then? The write, or the reader? In
exposing these subtexts to her readers, Christine may have
wanted them to reinforce the authenticity of her desires
and identity; a work that is, “tesmoingnee par plus de
gent” will allow her to scatter the seeds of her unique
rhetoric and viewpoint.

The ludic nature of Christine’s situation in
particular offers many transgressive and provocative
opportunities for examining medieval gender roles. Butler
suggests:

Gender is neither a purely psychic truth, conceived as
“internal” and “hidden,” nor is it reducible to a
surface appearance; on the contrary, its
undecidability is to be traced as the play between
psyche and appearance (where the latter domain
includes what appears in words). Further, this will
be a “play” regulated by heterosexist constraints

259

through not, for that reason, fully reducible to them.

(234)
Christine’s “play” with Bouvet condenses the slippage
between the internal gendering of the author and her
exterior. If Christine sees herself as gendered “masculine"
in her interior, then the bed—trick could either fall flat,
as her persona becomes a male student seeking advice from
his wise master, or it could expand into a homosocial and
homoerotic realm, making a boy and his master bedmates of
an intimate nature. As Butler suggests, the ambivalency of
the situation relies heavily on the words used to create
(and interpret) the effect. A heterosexist response would
reveal its weaknesses by insisting on reinforcing/
rebuilding the entire situation into “just a dream.” Such
balking and swerving comes from the heterosexist ability to
recoup any socially disrupted norm in order to reestablish
hegemony, but it is a constant battle because the queerness
of “play” provokes new challenges to established thought.
Karma Lochrie suggests that the entire grid of
“heteronormativity” needs to be questioned by queer
medievalists because of the way it “balks and swerves” when
it tries to delineate the queer:

The current absurdity of heterosexuality calls

attention to its recent “invention,” and should force
us to reconsider whether it is historically accurate

260

or even wise to assume a heteronormative grid for the

Middle Ages against which we define the queer. (95)
Christine offers those “profound and subtle provocations”
in places where a reader would not expect a challenge to
conceptions of reality. She is aware of her ability to
challenge conventions within society at large and within
her reader’s mind - asking them to reevaluate as inventions
what they consider to be privileged facts. Her readers come
to appreciate that, for Christine, truth has an “inside”
and an “outside,” as the psychic and the body often do not
“match” as heteronormality would have them. Christine
challenges those conventions -- and her readers -- by
violating the illusion of heteronormativity and queering

the core of medieval gender.

V. Queering the Question of Influence

Gender, as Judith Butler has theorized, is not a
“performance” but a “perfomative,” that is, it only exists
in the continuous series of acts, and the circulation of
those acts in order to reproduce the gender, and it
conceals any effort to prove that it is a repetition
(“Bodies” 12). Therefore, gender only exists as an

expression or result of the performativity, a “doing,” and

261

not as an identity or a “being.” Christine’s queer play in
the third chapter of Deeds of Arms, as well as her
construction of the perfect knight in the first chapter,
constitutes her way of “doing masculinity”. Her “doing”
assumes that men and boys in the fifteenth century were
willing to demonstrate to others that they were “manly” by
drawing on masculine resources available from within the
context of their culture. These practices, such as
bullying, fighting, engaging in sexuality, and acting like
a gentleman, allow them to reinforce the circulation of
gender currently accepted within the culture. This
reinforcement, or performativity, is also re-evaluated in
individual performances, or acts, which vary according to
the resources available which may function as proof.
Masculinity, then, only exists in a culture’s ability to
contrast it with femininity, and because its existence is
only linked to its opposite and not to any tangible part of
the culture itself, it must be reinforced, proven, and
scripted.

Sir John, reading Epistre d’Othéa, Proverbes Meraulx,
or more likely Fais d’Armes, would identify with
Christine’s performance - that is, her books exist unto
themselves as a single demonstration of “doing

masculinity.” How did he react to this performance? Would

262

he have absorbed Christine’s performance into his own
gender performativity? We cannot be sure as to Sir John’s
gender identity: the information we have in the Paston
Letters suggests that he participated in opposite-sex
liaisons in that he was content to be engaged to be married
and was known to have fathered a child. But as mentioned
above, sexual activity in the Middle Ages is not an
indicator of sexual identity. Sir John’s desires, in as so
far as we can extricate them from the textual limitations
of the Paston letters, were not his father’s desires for
wealth and battle: he preferred the social life ofthe
court and the pleasures of pageantry, the imaginative
-stories in his collection of romance books, and the
chivalric ideas of his military and heraldic treatises.
Christine’s Deeds of Arms, in that it combined all of
these pleasures together, may have been Sir John’s
inspiration to compile his “Grete Boke.” Today, we have a
fascination with conduct literature because it reveals to
us the relationships of power and culture in the Middle
Ages, but conduct literature would have been no less
fascinating to Sir John, because he, as a courtier by
inclination, would have understood the complex social dance
of the court. The delicate threading of subjectivity and

agency would have been apparent to him, as it has always

263

been necessary for a successful courtier to weave the path
between the court, himself, and his monarch. It is fairly
certain that Sir John was successful in his endeavors,
since he was able to get himself betrothed to the first
cousin of the queen, Anne Haute, and he was able to do this
despite the fact that he had constant financial troubles.
His family responsibilities called him home often, but
whenever he could, he would escape to the court (Gies 155).
In this, we may assume that Sir John felt more comfortable
within the social structures of courtly conduct and was at
ease in the performativity of his social self. Sir John
enjoyed the imagination within his books, and the
performances of the court, making him a man who understood
that there was no concrete correspondence between a man’s
inner and outer selves or lives, and that as a courtier he
was no less masculine than a rougher, iron-clad, and
battle-hardened knight such as Sir John Falstaff.

Deeds of Arms, in its avocation of the construction of
masculinity and “doing masculinity," as we have shown,
potentially would have reflected what Sir John would have
understood as the difference between courtly discourse and
actual military practice. Deeds of Arms draws together the
pomp of chivalry and the mud of actual battle, along with a

subjective View of the individual self. Christine writes

264

with readers in mind who will not appreciate theory -- she
knows that they want facts, and now. In this she speaks for
her readers, voicing their questions for them, and not
treating them as objects to be preached at but as subjects
who are respected for their interior desires and questions.
Just as Sir John “did masculinity” at court, Christine
“did masculinity” in Deeds of Arms. Christine could not
control how her readers interpreted the text and subtext of
her writings, nor could she predict how the text would
influence others, or how her readers would influence other
readers. When Christine finished writing Deeds of Arms,
she ended that particular performance, but the
performativity of the text continued on. It gathered
meaning despite Christine’s intentions, and yet it was her
intention to be appropriated, discussed, borrowed, and
challenged -- again, she is deliberately provocative,
showing men like Sir John new ways to “do masculinity,”
with the intention that her voice, ideas, and vision would
be appropriated by her readers. The Woodville circle, in
turn, did fulfill her intentions by appropriating her,
giving her as a writer the rare chance to be seen as an
invaluable tool for readers to explore their own needs and

wishes.

265

Christine manages to excuse herself in her
introduction to Deeds of Arms, creating a space for her
performance that crosses the norms of gender as well as
chivalry. I am constantly surprised and appreciative that
she was able to cross these norms, because, as Barbara
Ehrenreich points out:

War is, in fact, one of the most rigidly “gendered”

activities known to humankind... many other roles and

occupations -- that of religious leader, healer,
farmer, fisher, pottery maker -- have been shared at
times or fought over by men and women. In the case of
war, history offers no such alternations between the
sexes... women who have wanted to become warriors have
had to first become “men.” Thus war-making is not
simply another occupation that men have monopolized.

It is an activity that has often served to define

manhood itself. (125-27)

That Christine could cross this line at all seems to be
highly under-appreciated by scholars. Not only does
Christine provide the beginning of modern humanitarian law
in Deeds of Arms, but she also gives her readers the sense
of the potential for de-gendering war. Two hints suggest
this de-gendering: the first, in her discussion of the
perils of cannon fire versus knights, and the second in her
discussion of the dangers and proper use of archers. Deeds
of Arms was the first chivalric treatise to discuss the
military tactics needed to use cannons in warfare, and her

information was based on her personal interviews of men who

knew the guns. Christine, who testified in Deeds of Arms

266

that she had witnessed the testing of the great cannons
Garite, Rose, Seneca, Maye, Montfort, and Artique, knew of
the use of the cannon during sieges (118). It is highly
probable that the development of the cannon and the use of
the longbow during the One Hundred Years War could have
suggested to Christine this “de-gendering” of war in the
same way the longbow “de-stationed” war. The longbow, first
appearing South Wales in the twelfth century, was used by
English peasants to great success, for example at Agincourt
in 1415, but it was still considered a “servile weapon”
earning knightly disdain (Barber 196). One does not have to
be noble born to use a longbow, and thus an archer becomes
equally dangerous as a knight, proven by Henry V’s
devastating use of yeomen (who were not bound by the
chivalric code) to kill the prisoners at the battle of
Agincourt. To see such carnage wrought by weapons which
needed little-to-no male muscle and certainly not used by
knights bound by the chivalric code may have suggested to
Christine that such weapons had the potential to de-gender
war. Ehrenreich reasons: “the de-gendering of war does not
mean that ‘masculinity’ will cease to be a desirable
attribute; only that it will be an attribute that women as
well as men can possess” (230). Christine’s inclusion of

female warriors in City of Ladies, her prayer to the

267

warrior goddess Minerva in Deeds of Arms, and her adoration
of Jeanne d’Arc, certainly supports the argument that
Christine’s presentation of “doing masculinity” was not to
be restricted to the realm of men.

Christine was influential because, on one hand, she
was aware of her position as a performer within her writing
and, on the other hand, she was aware that her writers were
also spectators, watchers at a court of performers, aware
of their own performativity. Rachel Adams defines
spectatorship as being “always queer, because the viewer
inevitably crosses genders as he or she identifies with
multiple characters and scenarios during the course of any
given...narrative” (474). Christine, as she violated the
“fourth wall” in speaking to her reader (as opposed to
speaking at her reader), created theatricality in her
writing. Therefore, if we expose the layers of (l) a woman
~ writing, (2) a book on chivalry, (3) using a manly female
persona, (4) which tells men how to perform in court and
battle, (5) while speaking to the men with a personal tone
that is outside of cultural norms, (6) and stating that she
was just as qualified to know this information as men were,
we can see the root of her provocation and influence.
Christine asked her readers to cross norms that they would

not normally cross, and she persuaded them to do so for

268

their own benefit. Christine’s readers, as spectators of
her queer layering of woman/man/knight, were exposed to her
ideas about the flexibility of gender, identity, and

desire.

VI. Provocative Christine

Christine’s queerness, that is, her ability to
acknowledge the binary masculine-feminine dynamic and yet
cross and confuse that social organization of desire, is a
celebration of difference. In many ways, however, it is
also an experiment, a test of society, and that experiment,
I believe, is the root of her “profound and subtle provo-
cations.” Christine is looking for something that does not
exist in her time, and therefore she is a visionary. Yet
she is also looking for something that she thought existed
in the past, and that existed in her memories, and
therefore she is a sentimentalist. Scholars who attempt to
find unity within Christine’s writings will always fail
because she is too complex and indeterminate. As a writer,
she did evolve, but that does not mean that there is unity
in her evolution. Because Christine was constantly
searching herself and her culture for knowledge -- a better

word would be “truth” or “authenticity” -- she was unfixed,

269

a person who encouraged and supported her culture and who
was supported and profited in turn, and a person who spent
her life surviving her culture despite its attempt to wreck
her grasp of authenticity.

Christine was provocative because she was imaginative.
She was comfortable making her desires known from the very
start of her career, and she resisted essentialization
whether as a woman or as a writer. When she saw an
opportunity to subvert courtly poetry, she took it, and the
success of her experiment opened the doors to greater
accomplishments. She was able to identify with other
successful writers, seeing them as peers and, being a
woman, she could not avoid seeing the social margin, the
wall of inclusion and exclusion. The only way around that
wall was to remake herself and again she was successful.
The result was a complex identity reflecting masculine and
feminine desires. It is said that our fantasy lives rarely
live up to our political ideals: Christine, however, proves

the exception to that rule.

270

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271

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