Appearing Virtuous: Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre des trois vertus and Anne de France’s Les Enseignements d’Anne de France

Adams, Tracy

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-0529-6_8

Tracy Adams³

Part of the book series: The New Synthese Historical Library ((SYNL,volume 69))

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Abstract

Medieval and early modern French courtesy books for females, even those written by women, seem to place a monotonous emphasis upon the importance of conforming to traditionally feminine ideals of comportment. In Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnais et d’Auvergne, à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon (ca. 1505), the work’s narrator, presumably Anne de France, Duchess of Bourbon, advises the work’s presumed reader, Anne’s daughter Suzanne:

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Notes

1.
Anne de France (also known as Anne of Beaujou or Bourbon), Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnais et d’Auvergne, à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon, ed. A.-M. Chazaud (Moulins: Desroziers, 1878), p. 11. Translations from Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, trans. Sharon L. Jansen (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p. 31.
2.
Pierre de Bourdeilles Brantôme, Œuvres complètes de Pierre de Bourdeilles, abbé et seigneur de Branthôme, ed. Prosper Mérimée and Louis La Cour de la Pijardière, 13 vol. (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858–1895; Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus reprint, 1977), vol. 10, p. 230. My translation.
3.
Dallas G. Denery II, “Christine de Pizan Against the Theologians: The Virtue of Lies in The Book of the Three Virtues,” Viator 39, 1 (2008), pp. 229–247, here p. 240.
4.
On Anne’s probable knowledge of the Trois vertus, see Charity Cannon Willard, “Anne de France, Reader of Christine de Pizan,” The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries: Visitors to the City, ed. Glenda K. McLeod (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 59–70; and, also by the same author, “The Manuscript Tradition of the Livre des trois vertus and Christine de Pizan’s Audience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966), pp. 433–444. The inventory of the library at Moulins is printed in Chazaud’s edition of the Enseignements. Not only does the Enseignements bear striking similarities to Christine’s Trois vertus, but several copies of the latter figure in the inventory of Anne’s library at Moulins. For Christine’s use of the term juste ypocrisie see Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des trois vertus, ed. Charity C. Willard (Paris: Champion, 1989), p. 67. The term arises in a section called “Ci devise le .Ve. enseignement de Prudence, qui est comment la saige princepce mettra peine comment elle soit en la grace et benevolence de tous les estaz de ses subgiez” (“Here the fifth teaching of Prudence is given, which is how the wise princess will attend to maintaining the grace and benevolence of her subjects of all social levels”), and refers to the fact that the princess must consciously perform good acts before a crowd so that she can be used as a good example. As Christine explains, such posturing might be taken for hypocrisy, but it is in fact “just hypocrisy” because it serves a greater good. Anne does not use the expression, but develops a model of behaviour very similar to Christine’s, as I will demonstrate here.
5.
Denery, p. 246. C. Stephen Jaeger locates the origin of the ideal courtier in the vitae of courtly bishops; The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
6.
As Jaeger notes, most courtiers were clerics. The Policraticus, translated into French around 1370 by Denis Foulechat, as Denery points out, and therefore available to Christine, was interested in male courtiers.
7.
As Gayle Rubin posited in a seminal study, kinship systems, both blood-based and artificial, are the very locus of female oppression; “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210.
8.
Christine explains that alms were normally to be given secretly to avoid vainglory. However, if the donor “n’en avoit nulle eslevacion en son cuer” (“had no pride in her heart”) they might be given publicly because of the good example the donor would set. See Trois vertus, p. 67.
9.
See their Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Hassocks, England: Harvester Press; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978). “Cunning intelligence” is the English translation of “intelligence de la ruse”, which is Vernant and Detienne’s translation into French of metis. See also Jeffrey Barnouw, Odysseus, Hero of Practical Intelligence: Deliberation and Signs in Homer’s Odyssey (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), pp. 53–64.
10.
Vernant and Detienne, p. 5.
11.
Loc. cit.
12.
Although he was not always despised. See Jaeger, pp. 95–96.
13.
See Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 55. On the Facetus see Peter Dronke, “Pseudo-Ovid, Facetus, and the Arts of Love,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 11 (1976), pp. 126–131.
14.
“The Facetus: or, The Art of Courtly Living,” ed. and trans. Alison Goddard Elliott, Allegorica 2, 2 (1977), pp. 27–57, here p. 33.
15.
“The Facetus,” pp. 34–37.
16.
See Jaeger, p. 62.
17.
Quoted in Jaeger, p. 63.
18.
Barry Collett, “The Three Mirrors of Christine de Pizan,” in Healing the Body Politic: Christine de Pizan’s Political Thought, ed. Karen Green and Constant J. Mews (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 1–18, here p. 4.
19.
Claude Gauvard discusses the flurry of political writings in French dedicated to practical governance of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century: “Christine de Pizan et ses contemporains: L’engagement politique des écrivains dans le royaume de France aux XIV^e et XV^e siècles,” in Une femme de lettres au moyen âge: Études autour de Christine de Pizan, ed. Liliane Dulac and Bernard Ribémont (Orleans: Paradigme, 1995), pp. 105–128. See also Joël Blanchard, “L’Entrée du poète dans le champ politique au XV^e siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 41 (1986), pp. 43–61.
20.
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 129. See also Frymer-Kensky’s Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002).
21.
“[I]neffabilem misericordiam tuam supplices exoramus, ut sicut Hester reginam Israelis causa salutis de captivitatis sue compede solutam ad Regis Assueri thalamum regnique sui consortium transire fecisti. Ita hanc famulam tuam N. humilitatis nostre benedictione christiane plebis gracia salutis ad dignam, sublimemque copulam Regis nostri misericorditer transire concedas” (“We humbly beseech your ineffable mercy, as you made queen Esther go towards the bed of the King Ahasuerus and partnership of his reign in order to loosen the chains of the Israelites for the sake of their salvation from captivity, in your mercy let this little woman of yours, with the blessing of our humility and the grace of salvation of the Christian people, enter into worthy and sublime union with our king”); Richard Jackson, Ordines coronationis Franciae: Texts and Ordines for the Coronation of Frankish and French Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages, vol. 2, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), vol. 2, p. 511. My translation.
22.
Christian de Mérindol, “La Femme et la paix dans la symbolique des décors à la fin de l’époque médiévale,” in Regards croisés sur l’œuvre de Georges Duby: Femmes et féodalité (Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000), pp. 197–211, here p. 204.
23.
Lois L. Huneycutt, “Intercession and the High-Medieval Queen: The Esther Topos,” in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 126–46, here p. 130.
24.
Livre des trois vertus, p. 53. My translation.
25.
Trois vertus, p. 9.
26.
Trois vertus, p. 20.
27.
Trois vertus, p. 64.
28.
Trois vertus, p. 134.
29.
Trois vertus, p. 142.
30.
Trois vertus, p. 26.
31.
Trois vertus, p. 26.
32.
Trois vertus, p. 35.
33.
Trois vertus, pp. 34–35.
34.
Trois vertus, p. 29.
35.
Trois vertus, p. 34.
36.
Trois vertus, p. 35.
37.
Trois vertus, p. 55.
38.
See Willard, “Anne de France, Reader of Christine de Pizan,” op. cit. 1991.
39.
On the circulation of the Trois vertus see Willard, “The Manuscript Tradition of the Livre des trois vertus and Christine de Pizan’s Audience.”
40.
Enseignements, pp. 12–13; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, p. 32.
41.
Enseignements, pp. 13–14; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, p. 33.
42.
Enseignements, pp. 16–17.
43.
Enseignements, pp. 16–17; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, p. 33.
44.
Enseignements, p. 20; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, p. 34.
45.
Enseignements, pp. 110–111; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, p. 62.
46.
Paul Pélicier, Essai sur le gouvernement de la Dame de Beaujeu, 1483–1491 (Chartres: Imprimerie Edouard Garnier, 1882), p. 198. See also Pauline Matarasso, Queen’s Mate: Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance (Aldershot, Hampshire; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 15–21.
47.
Cited in Jehanne d’Orliac, Anne de Beaujeu, Roi de France (Paris: Plon, 1926), p. 105.
48.
Brantôme, vol. 10, p. 230.
49.
Trois vertus, p. 9.
50.
Trois vertus, pp. 14–20.
51.
Enseignements, p. 2.
52.
Trois vertus, p. 44.
53.
Enseignements, pp. 11–12.
54.
Trois vertus, p. 41.
55.
See Karen Green, “On Translating Christine de Pizan as a Philosopher,” in Healing the Body Politic, pp. 117–137. On prudence mondaine, see p. 121.
56.
Trois vertus, p. 72.
57.
Trois vertus, p. 61.
58.
Trois vertus, p. 51.
59.
Enseignements, p. 82; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, p. 54.
60.
See Enseignements, pp. 82–84; Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter, pp. 54–55.
61.
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 (1985), pp. 813–836, here p. 813.
62.
See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001).
63.
The subject has been well explored. Some studies of medieval programs of gesture as means of modulating emotion includes Dom Louis Gougaud, Dévotions et pratiques ascétiques du moyen âge (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1925); Richard Trexler, The Christian at Prayer: An Illustrated Prayer Manual Attributed to Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987); and, most recently, Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). I deal with this subject in “Performing the Medieval Art of Love: Medieval Theories of the Emotions and the Social Logic of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris,” Viator 38 (2007), pp. 55–74.
64.
Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda, PL 40, col. 597; the passage is cited by Gougaud, p. 31.
65.
PL 176, col. 935 B. I deal with this subject in detail in “Performing the Medieval Art of Love: Medieval Theories of the Emotions and the Social Logic of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris,” Viator 38 (2007), pp. 55–74.
66.
Ann Rosalind Jones, “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics,” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 39–72, here p. 42.
67.
See Green, “On Translating Christine de Pizan as a Philosopher,” p. 119.
68.
Matthew 10:16. I owe the citation to the discussion that followed my initial presentation of this essay at the ANZAMEMS conference in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, 2–6 December, 2008.

References

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University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Tracy Adams

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Karen Green
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Constant Mews

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Adams, T. (2011). Appearing Virtuous: Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre des trois vertus and Anne de France’s Les Enseignements d’Anne de France . In: Green, K., Mews, C. (eds) Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0529-6_8

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