Before Christine de Pizan embarked on her Book of the Cities of Ladies (1405), undoubtedly at present her best-known work, she composed two short poems that can be seen as thematic precursors: the God of Love's Letter (1399), a powerful manifesto in praise of women proclaimed by the God of Love, who lauds their character and intellectual abilities, and The Tale of the Rose (1402), which imagines a chivalric order, created and controlled by women, and tasked with protecting them from slander. In a time when a renewed “war on women” (xv) is being waged—as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out in her foreword—it is useful to be reminded that women had to fight the same battles again and again over the centuries. Christine was one of the foremost fighters in the battle for women being recognized as men's intellectual equals. Thelma S. Fenster and Christine Reno, two of the most accomplished Christine de Pizan scholars, banded together to produce this excellent volume in the equally excellent series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, which by now features hundreds of beautifully produced and affordable paperback editions.
The lengthy introduction offers a succinct biography of Christine de Pizan, contextualized presentations of the two poems, and an extremely useful lexicographic and semantic analysis of de Pizan's use of nuanced terms like condicions, inclinacions, and meurs. The authors also provide information on the historical background, such as the culture of translation at the court of the French king Charles V and the fashion of creating chivalric orders centered on love at the time of the composition of the Tale of the Rose. The section on versification, rhymes, and vocabulary is well designed for teaching purposes. Fenster and Reno wisely opted for a very readable translation in a kind of rhythmic prose rather than trying to reproduce de Pizan's syllable count and rhymes.
What makes this volume especially valuable is the editors’ choice of producing what they call a genetic edition by reproducing the earliest manuscript of each text (Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château 492 for the Letter and Bibliothéque nationale de France français 12779 for the Tale). Variants and rejected readings are appended to the texts. The variants allow readers to follow Christine de Pizan's revisions, which are especially marked for the Letter since they span about twelve years. Both the descriptions of the manuscripts (supplemented by ample bibliographies) and the notes are exemplary. For instance, the note to Letter, lines 547–48 (119) parses de Pizan's expression “une chose simplete / Une ignorant petite femmelette” (“a simple little thing / A simple little woman”) by tracing this topos back to Hildegard of Bingen and her theological use of it. Another exemplary note is the one for lines 574–92 (167) of the Tale that in a nutshell explains the history of parchment, gold leaf, patent letters, bulls, and seals. Both scholars and students will profit from the ample and meticulously researched information in such notes.
As a kind of counterpoint to de Pizan's protofeminism, the editors included “A Poem on Man and Woman” by Jean Gerson, translated from the Latin by Thomas O'Donnell. Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris at the time, was a noted theologian and prolific writer as well as an ally of Christine de Pizan in the acerbic debate about the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose, chronicled by de Pizan herself in a dossier of various documents produced by herself, Gerson, and their adversaries. Gerson's poem dwells on the harmony that should exist between man and woman, whose souls are equal, even if they are not equal in earthly reality, a conundrum already treated by Saint Augustine. All in all, this volume is a model of its kind and should find a wide readership.
