The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's "Cite des Dames."

Widely hailed in literary histories as the first woman to be a professional writer, Christine de Pizan has until recently attracted relatively few editors and inspired relatively few critical projects. Her Cite des Dames (1405), a long allegorical defense of women's merits that could be considered the capstone of her career, was virtually unknown to modern readers until the publication in 1982 of Earl Jeffrey Richards' English translation of British Library ms. Harley 4431. Currently only Maureen Curnow's dissertation publishes Christine's French text (based on Bibliotheque Nationale, fonds francais 607). Richards' collection, dedicated to Charity Cannon Willard in recognition of her many publications on Christine, marks both a generational shift and an expanded interest in Christine studies. Quilligan's critical study exemplifies the theoretical sophistication and sustained analysis that Christine's works now attract. To borrow the figure of her Cite, work on Christine has moved beyond the surveying and the spadework to extensive interpretations built on innovative theoretical foundations.

Reinterpreting Christine de Pisan incorporates seventeen essays, a few of which were previously published in French and appear here in the editors' English translations. The essays cover three major areas of interest: Christine's place in feminist thought, her use of and innovations in French literature, and her relations to theological and humanist writing. For these essayists Christine's revisions of her sources most frequently illuminate her feminist positions. "Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cite des Dames: The Reconstruction of Myth," by Eleni Stecopoulos with Karl D. Uitti, makes the valuable point that Christine historicizes myth as part of her rewriting of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus. Not simply reversing Boccaccio's interpretations of female figures but further affirming their historical status, Christine "declares women to be authentic subjects of historiography" (50), with far-reaching implications for the status of women, the tenor of debate over their social place, and the science of history. Other essays throughout the volume find feminist implications in Christine's literary responses to Eustache Deschamps (Lori Wlaters), Jean de Meun (Nadia Margolis), and further French and Italian contemporaries.

Essays under the rubric of Christine's relations to French literature continue to attend primarily to ways in which Christine uses her feminine sex to characterize herself in contrast to her male contemporaries. Jeanette M. A. Beer's "Stylistic Conventions in Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune" uses Christine's claim "I am a man, I am not lying" as a provocative starting point for discussing the nature of truth in this work. Christine's "allegorical truth" (125) seeks to delineate the impact of Fortune in human history and to generate a work of self-consolation in which Christine's husband's death challenges her gender as well as her faith in a benevolent providence. Allison Kelly's "Christine de Pizan and Antoine de la Sale: The Dangers of Love in Theory and Fiction" looks at Christine's influence on Jehan de Saintre. If Jehan's Dame des Belles Cousines is a positive representation of Christine's positions on extramarital love, Antoine undermines Christine's teaching at the end of the work when Belles Cousines enters into an illicit affair with an abbot. For Antoine as in Christine's own works, her bodily identity as a woman seems to be inextricably identified with her claim to moral authority. In Jehan de Saintre, however, Christine's incarnation of authority leads to the drama of her fall, perhaps arguing that women suffer from an underlying moral vacuousness no matter how chaste they appear.

The third group of essays, on Christine's relations to Church fathers and humanists, is least overtly engaged with gender. Indeed Joel Blanchard's "Compilation and Legitimation in the Fifteenth Century: Le Livre de la Cite des Dames," while making the valuable point that Christine assembles and defines a canon of misogynist writing in the course of arguing for the merits of women, goes so far as to deny her topic's substantiality altogether in order to emphasize her concern with establishing her own authority as a compiler: "A literary theme--antifeminism--which, to be precise, lacked any real historical or sociological reference, served as her alibi to speak more freely of something else: the book as such" (230). Richards' "Christine de Pizan, the Conventions of Courtly Diction, and Italian Humanism" and Patricia Stablein-Harris' "Orleans, the Epic Tradition, and the Sacred Texts of Christine de Pizan" contribute more nuanced readings of Christine's poetic resources in the context of her literary and historical moment.

The collection also contains a bibliography of Christine scholarship for 1980-87 by Angus J. Kennedy and two previously unedited texts, an antifeminist diatribe from Denis Foulechat's 1372 French version of John of Salisbury's Policraticus, edited by Eric Hicks, and a preface to the Avision-Christine that translates its allegorical figures, edited from ex-Phillipps 128 and helpfully analyzed by Christine Reno. This last is a valuable addition to Christine's published works that will be of interest to scholars working on allegory in general as on the Avision-Christine. All in all, the collection Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan is a worthy testament to Charity Cannon Willard's influence and a valuable introduction to the state of Christine studies today.

Maureen Quilligan's fascinating book on the Cite des Dames is a contribution of great importance to those studies. As its title encapsulates, The Allegory of Female Authority proposes that Christine's major preoccupation in the Cite is with whether and how women may claim authority within written traditions. Quilligan reveals a constellation of strategies by which Christine constructs herself in relation to textual authorities as a voice with her own contrasting authority. For example, interrupting the opening scene in which she reads Matheolus with her mother's call to dinner insists on the domestic connotations of womanhood and prepares for the persistent claim that women's familial and marital experience is one source of authoritative knowledge about women's merits. Christine breaks through misogynist intertextuality in admitting contemporary women of all classes to the City alongside the exemplary women of literary tradition: "The present is continuous with the past, the textual fuses with a nontextual tradition, the dead and the living cohabit easily" (187). In addition to thus bringing feminine experience into textuality, Christine continually reshapes her source narratives, shaking their normative positions by writing positive versions of the lives of Semiramis and Hippolyta, for example, and consistently presenting Rome as a hallmark of imperial legitimacy that women warriors and saints resist. A leitmotif of Christine's self-constructed counter tradition is her informants' reproaches along the lines of "A short while ago, like a fool, you considered yourself unlucky to be a member of the sex of such creatures, thinking that God held this sex in reprobation" (116). Quilligan points out that this shift in perception, staged as if occurring in the narrator's consciousness, not only urges a similar shift in the reader's consciousness but also dramatizes a pressure on literary tradition and on the authority conventionally linked to the masculine writer.

Quilligan retraces the Cite's narrative, repeating its order of events in her analysis. "All allegories demand commentaries," she notes, not only by asking readers to decode the meaning of figures and their relations but also by building allusive connections among disparate allegorical encounters: "Sequence in allegory is analytic; it is part of the means by which the text offers a commentary on itself" (1-2, 156). One strength of Quilligan's approach is manifest in the numerous revelations it facilitates concerning small details and single episodes in the Cite des Dames. A further strength that becomes evident on continued reading is that such local perceptions contribute their specificity to a few major, recurring arguments concerning the Cite's significance. Quilligan's study would reward the hasty partial reader as kindly as the more respectful diligent reader were it not for the absence of a bibliography and the condensed, sometimes mislocated notes (Curnow's edition of the Cite, for example, makes its appearance on page 22, n. 23, although quotations from it begin to appear in the text on pages 15-16).

Quilligan's analyses work consistently to illuminate particular passages as well as to contribute to the larger investigation of "the allegory of female authority." Semiramis, warrior queen of the Assyrians who committed incest with her son, is a curious foundational story for a city of virtuous women, yet Quilligan argues compellingly for its appropriateness. Christine meets Boccaccio's condemnation of Semiramis' incest with a counter defense that her incest preceded written law, implying that female authority will rest "on alternative grounds to a merely scripted textual tradition" (79). Semiramis is a city builder and a leader; Christine proposes that only by marrying her son could Semiramis preserve her supremacy and take a husband of her own rank. Quilligan finds in Christine's explications not only a disinterest in the castration complex that seems to drive the story's other versions, but further a resistance to the fundamental exchange by which, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, men founded cultures on giving women in marriage across kin groups, thereby making incest taboo. Semiramis, scandalous in the literary tradition, represents for Christine a feminine potential "unbounded by law at its most radical, originary foundation"; her story "unmoors motherhood, and the power of procreation, from its engagement in the traffic in women" (84). Quilligan's proposals are the more persuasive for their resonance with subsequent readings of other figures who wield power in oppositional spaces (such as Dido and the Amazon queens), whose authoritative spoken word contrasts with written authority (such as the ten sibyls), and who stand against the exchange of women in some way (such as Camilla, Cloelia, and the virgin martyrs). Of many further analyses that have important implications for Christine's entire project, I will only mention the splendid discussion of Saint Christine's martyrdom, which in Christine de Pizan's account becomes an allegory of selfauthorization as St. Christine links her name to Christ's, resists the dynamic of torture by continuing to speak cogently and effectively in interrogation, and disturbs the specular relation characteristic of martyrdom by spitting her excised tongue into the emperor's eye. Quilligan returns at various points to this pivotal account to consider its implications for Christine de Pizan's claim to a marginalized oral voice as well as an instructive textual authority in the Cite.

Quilligan's book is impressive in every way. Her range of allusion to Christine's French and English contemporaries, her consistent reference from the Cite out to Christine's preceding and subsequent works, and her provocative theoretical frameworks for analysis generate stimulating insights that will be highly influential with scholars and students of allegory, late medieval literature, and feminist and gender studies.

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY