Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-18T00:21:50.373Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

From Chrétien to Christine: Translating Twelfth-Century Literature to Reform the French Court during the Hundred Years War

from Part III - Shaping Women's Voices in Medieval France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

Nadia Margolis
Affiliation:
Mount Holyoke College
Daniel E. O'Sullivan
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
Laurie Shepard
Affiliation:
Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Throughout her entire œeuvre, comprising over forty titles, the Venetian-born poet and moralist Christine de Pizan (1364/5–ca. 1430) attempts to shape courtly ideals in some way or other as part of her larger program to enlighten her adoptive country of France during one of the darkest phases in its history. In attempting literally to educate her compatriots out of their crisis, her incorporation of classical-antique and Italian-humanistic wisdom – mostly through contemporary translations, including her own, from Latin or Italian into French – has benefited from abundant scholarly investigation in recent years. Such findings also confirm her ability to integrate authoritative texts quite ingeniously, rather than simply harvesting and inserting them into her own, often adding her feminine perspective, as essential aspects of her distinctive message. More specifically, scholars point to Christine's rediscovery and implementation of antique learning, in her native culture's civic-humanistic mode, toward improving France's moral-political situation as evidence of her own brand of vernacular humanism. In this pursuit she displays more prescience than her male colleagues supposedly privileged by their Latinity, since she, as supposedly Latin-deprived, would foresee and promote the triumph of the vernacular as France's literary and philosophical language.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France
Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
, pp. 213 - 226
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×