Conclusion: What About Christine?

Abstract

Over what by now amounts to many years of talking about this project with colleagues, one of the most common reactions that I have encountered has been: “What about Christine de Pizan? Does she use figures of poet heroines? Does she react to their voices in any of her works?” While I attempt to address that question here, I believe that any answer to it is tied up with the related question of why we ask it in the first place. What would be the meaning of any potential links between inscribed fictional figures of woman poets, and the only woman writer within the medieval French vernacular tradition to whose successful career we can point with certainty? Would finding such links confirm something, reinstate some connection between female biology and textual femininity—would a stamp of approval by an actual woman validate what a range of anonymous and masculine-authored texts already tell us about their views of gendered writing? On the other hand, would an absence of such links indicate something through omission—some sort of rejection of fictional woman writers by a real one? If we assign a different value to inscribed women poets when they appear in works signed by a woman, aren’t we once again reading through the author’s signature? Won’t we very quickly find ourselves back where we started, caught between the death of the author and a biologically based feminist criticism that insists on resurrecting her?