UNIVERSDITATEA DE VEST DIN TIMIŞOARA

FACULTATEA DE LITERE, ISTORIE ŞI TEOLOGIE

MASTERAT: STUDII BRITANICE ŞI AMERICANE.
SPECIALIZAREA TRADUCTOLOGIE

DISERTAŢIE DE MASTERAT

CULTURAL STRATEGIES
IN EARL JEFFREY RICHARDS’ TRANSLATION
OF CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S CITE DES DAMES

MASTERAND: Liana ROCHNEAN

COORDONATOR: Conf. dr. Reghina DASCAL

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 LUCRARE DE DISERTAŢIE

CULTURAL STRATEGIES
IN EARL JEFFREY RICHARDS’ TRANSLATION
OF CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S CITE DES DAMES

Timişoara, iulie 2010

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 CONTENTS

Argument…………………………………………………………………..page 4
Introduction……………………………………………………....…………….. 5

First Chapter.
1. How does the linguistic context of the translated text serve best
Christine de Pizan’s fictional purposes in her City of Ladies?......................... 7

1.1. Ways in which different discourse types constitute the basis for
a fictional work of literature…………………………….………………9
1.2. Christine’s vision of the law proper projected in Lady Mary’s image…13
1.3. The influence of politics upon literature………………………………… 25

Second Chapter.
2. The power of language and the language empowered
both in Cité des Dames and The Book of the City of Ladies…………58

Third Chapter.
3. Symbolic representations in The Book of the City of Ladies…….. 68

Conclusions…………………………………………………………….78

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Argument

Why translate 15th century Christine de Pizan, now?

How come she has her own court of admirers and addicted translators, among
which Earl Jeffrey Richards reigns supreme?
For one thing, her topics are our own time’s literature, rather than hers;
e.g. she promoted feminist concepts, although many voices speak against such
identification in terms. However, other voices speak for such identification, as
Christine has a political vision with far-reaching implications: into feminism, as
well as anti-feminism, for that matter.
In fact Christine made her philosophy yoking the logic of ancient
political thinkers (e.g.Plato and Aristoteles) to her (almost) contemporary speakers
(e.g. St.Augustine and Thomas d’Aquino), so that her own pro-feminist arguments
can be scientifically supported, using whatever material she could have.
And Christine de Pizan is a hot potato for translators, in terms of
culturalism: which strategies best fit the aim of rendering the general meaning-in-
its-own-time to the reader-today? There are many variables. The non-unified
cultural fields, of the then-writer and of the now-reader, hint at a minimum of
knowledge common to the writer and the reader: here comes the translator,
supposed to meet both half way. Hence the translator’s strategies; such as
choosing 18th century English over Chaucer’s, so the reader could easily grasp all
factual meanings, without running to the dictionary; choosing 18th century French
for an equivalent of Christine de Pizan’s key-cultural concept character names,
e.g. Rectitude/Droiture; or freely and responsibly rendering contents, i.e
transposing, where the original may have hinted to things so long forgotten that
they need explaining; or working on insight and settling matters, where 15th
century French grammar depended on a contemporary ear for understanding.
Christine de Pizan is important, says Earl Jeffrey Richards, as she wrote
seeing herself somehow outside time: she wrote in the present about past things
which she thought immortal. She might just about have been right; as, when
speaking about women, besides being daughters, wives and (grand)mothers you
could always tell a great man by the grater woman behind him.
Some things never change.

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 INTRODUCTION

We deem professor Richards’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Cite des

Dames to be an excellent piece of work because its effect upon today’s reader is,
in our opinion, what it could have been upon the author’s contemporary readers:
for two reasons mainly, i.e. that the translation’s English is the 18th century’s, not
the more hermetic Chaucer’s 15th; and that the reader is ascertained in his
decoding by clearly taking over the novel’s function, as enhanced by the
translator, i.e. denotative.
The differences between 15th century French culture and linguistics and
the 18th century English culture and linguistics make it impossible for a formal
translation to be done; the translator would thus, rather, advance equivalences, to
the benefit of good semantics; which implies various kinds of rendering different
realms and cultures; as well as a developed faculty for adaptation.
In the case of the Cite des Dames translation, we think that professor
Richards places himself well on the side of the target culture and language, thus
assimilating to it the culture and the concepts of the source language text.
All of the above bring to attention the skopos theory of translation at the
core of the text under discussion, i.e. the focusing on the purpose of the
translation; it is a rather ethnocentric annexionist type of translation, which paves
the way of the target audience towards the source.
The semantic patterns of the translated text comes to the stage lights as
paradoxes: Christine de Pizan’s passages, subversive as they attack the
misogynists.
One more pertinent trait of the translation, which we think highly
relevant, is the preponderance of the signified, as opposed to the significant: the
signified energizes the language into a sort of meta-language, the object of the
discourse being also its own text signified.
Translation is no more gauged, now, to the origin text, but to the text’s
skopos, which purpose the translator has to decode and adapt best content-
rendering translation strategies for.
Exploration of the linguistic context, as best fit to fiction rendering
prerequisites, goes, with professor Richards, as it also does with Christine de

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Pizan, from the general to the minute. The key-words, in Christine’s fictional
world, formally translated as close as possible to the source language, aptly render
fictional and subversive images, under the cover of double meaning, slippery,
linguistic structures. Christine’s Provencal is adapted into English by formal
transposing, professor Richards observing the author’s Aristotelian concept
principle, i.e. the sign’s meaning is given by the concept.
The way words relate to the world and, respectively, to thought, is given
by the discourse analysis against the cultural context, i.e. the reference, a cluster
of extra-linguistic signs, such as irony and allusion.
Christine enhances her images, which the translator then attempts to take
over as such; it is symbolism that they both recourse to, in order to make the
reader grasp their subtle meanings.
The fictional reality of Cities of the Ladies is of the space and time at the
beginning of the world when rational knowledge was making its way into
existence. Christine proves that, by the topos she created, the actions of those
brave ladies, as well as the consequences they endorsed, are God’s work through
their hands.
Our research evidences professor Richards’s translation adequacy to a
text as intricate as it is challaging.

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 FIRST CHAPTER

1. How does the linguistic context of the translated text serves best Christine
de Pizan’s fictional purposes in her City of Ladies?

In our opinion, Christine’s discourse has important rhetoric elements,

because her fictional work is governed also by a political attitude towards
women’s status. Maybe this is why twentieth century authors perceived her as
being a feminist, a term that had appeared only later, in the nineteenth century, in
comparison with the Middle Ages period, in which appears her Book of the City
Ladies. The statement may seem overrated, that a female writer in Middle Ages
France expressed a political attitude in her literary creation. This is not the case
here; as Earl Jeffrey Richards, her most scholarly analyst, proves in his study,
Christine had juridical thought as a source of inspiration. She vehemently
disapproved women being prohibited to take part in the theological and justice
educational system, implicitly their exclusion from the institutional life of society.
Such topic is counted in Christine’s work, in Empress Nicaula’s story.
Christine’s life tells us about her close bonds with justice.
Se was familiar with both theology and jurisprudence owing to her
scholarly Italian father; to her husband who had been a notary at the Royal Court of
France; to Gilles Mallet, a librarian at the Louvre Palace; to Jean Gerson, her
sympathetic political thinker in the debate upon the Roman de la Rose. Her father
and the grandfather continued in the family’s string of graduates in Bologne
University, having a say in Venetian politics, as members of the Venetian
government. At the age of four or five, Christine’s father was commissioned as a
court physician to the King of France and her family went to live in Paris.
Another evidence of her involvement in practicing justice is the
instances and many years of juridical struggles for her to gain custody of her
belongings, after her father’s and husband’s death. As a widow, many of her
husband’s debtors claimed they had already paid their debt; and, as she claimed a
land her husband had bought, the ex-owner tried to prevent her tom get
repossession of the property which, normally, then belonged to her, a fact that
testifies to the low esteem in which women, in general, were held, by the male

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world. Christine’s legal position is a consequence of the legal system of justice
meant to exclude women from civil society, having as a basis property ownership.
Thus we can easily understand why she promoted the image of cities, a
fact implicitly leading us to think of a republic under which cities could function,
as opposed to monarchy, where they were malfunctioning.Which is as much to say
as she hoped that in republican societies the laws establishing women’s rights
were to be seriously modified.
There was a possibility of free marriage for women, which allowed
them to continued under their fathers’ authority and thus possess property leased
by their fathers. The legal term regulating these possessions was dowry,and
women could, should the husband die, recover their property brought by
themselves into the marriage, and also inherit their fathers. A woman could also
claim property for her children and divorce her husband.
Yet the French legal system was still ruled by the misogynist Roman
Law, whereby an heir was the person belonging to the father’s side and not to the
mother’s; in addition she had the right to bequeath property to her children, but
could not establish a line of succession in so doing.
Women could not play a public role. They were not allowed to hold a
public office, or represent anyone in a legal case, or witness a will. Their
functionality in society was restricted to a private, not public, life. The total
political disability of women is an effect of the Roman Law, adopted by the
medieval communities of western Europe; even if attempts were made to adapt
Roman Laws to local Customary Law, results may have been even worse.
In L’Avision, Christine literally declares that she was involved in four
legal suits at the same time. This is a plus of information for her readers to
acknowledge both her judiciary persona, after she had a direct contact with her
lawyer, whom she also helped always reminding him to interpret the law by using
arguments to show her enemies’ hidden intentions.
With a source of inspiration such as Corpus iuris civilis, which
represented the age’s customary legal principles upon which judges took a
decision with regard to the succession of goods that were to be received by
women, we can see why Christine disagreed with the misogynists of the Church.
She evokes many of them in the Cité des Dames, as examples of abuse of power,
disguised under theological discourse.

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 To give an example of the great influence of Corpus iuris civilis upon
Cité des Dames and her political pre-feminist attitude, as we perceive it, let us
quote a syntagm in quoted novel’s Second Book: the reproach often heard by
Christine que femmes par nature sont escharcées.
With extraordinary rhetoric insight, Christine argues that women’s acts
should be judged within a juridical context; for which she employs the symbolical
image of Droiture; she would never construct a case based on a lie, which is
intended to privilege men over women:
m’est bien avis que assez avez prouvé estre faulx les mesdis que tant d’ommes
dient sur femmes. Et mesmement n’appiert pas ce que ilz tesmoignent tant
communement que entre les vices femenins, avarice leur soit chose si naturelle.
(Contexts and Continuities, p.762)
The above quotation also bespeaks of other political attitude towards
women, by ce que ilz tesmoignent tant communement, i.e. traditionally mulierum
genus est avarissimum; and its legal counterpart, l’avarice ce n’est point plus
naturelle es femmes ne que es homes. For such very long and precise campaign
against women, in which there took part many philosophers, writers and
theologians of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages, Christine advances a scientific
research, evoking historical women whom she sees as her precursors, having had
their say even in the legal field.
In comparison with Christine’s contemporaries had even less liberty
than such ancient queens as Isis, to institute the appropriate law, either by being
lawyers or judging the cases in a court of law. And Christine, being also a
political thinker, spoke about the exclusion of women from all levels justice, i.e.
exclusion from political power. Isis is a:
donna et ordonna certaines lois bonnes et droiturieures, apprist aux gens d’
Egipte, qui vivoient rudiment et sans loy, justice n’ordenance, a vivre par ordre de
droiture; (L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, p.311)

In Richards’s translation, the same queen handed down and instituted several
good and upright laws; she instructed the people of Egypt, who had, until then,
lived like savages without law, justice, or order, to live according to the rule of the
law.

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10
1.1. Ways in which different discourse types constitute the basis for a
fictional work of literature.
Context as a cultural support for a bilingual translation.

As obvious from the arguments above, Christine de Pizan was unsatisfied

with women’s roles in politics; and, as a consequence, her intention was to create
for herself a voice within the body politic.
In order to legitimize such an intention, she spoke about the well-being of
the emergent republican state of France. In so doing, she managed to establish
such an authority as to counsel the governing power, so that both impediments
(i.e. those of being a woman and a foreigner) to be forsaken. She developed her
political attitude inside the doctrinal writings established as canonical by clerics,
and imposed to the civil society.
Her reference to St.Augustine’s City of God, his glorified scriptures,
prove Christine’s intention to walk on the footsteps of the saint and to demonstrate
the transcendence of life over eternity, thus beyond the limitations of the human
body. The key concept in St. Augustine’s work is the will of God which has to
become the will of humans, too.
And as in the past the will of God was expressed by women, their image
should be taintless, implies Christine. Her intellectual formation permitted her to
understand the malevolent political intentions and lust for power of women’s
detractors; and she found the most powerful weapon of the early fifteenth century:
Virgin Mary.
Mary is the Patron of the Cité des Dames, as she then started the trend of
having a human side of the Church: the woman who gave birth to Christianity, by
permitting her body to carry the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Christine proves her
theological erudition by writing in the first person, an association of her literary
persona with Mary’s addressing the Annunciation. In other words, Christine, as a
literary voice, is empowered by the imitation of Mary’s model of conduct and
grace.
Moreover, she identifies with Mary, in her struggle for the Resurrection
of women’s blasphemous detractors. The word of God, which, in a female womb,

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once served to give birth to our Savior, now serves as an instrument of destruction
pointed against women. In the same order of ideas, the female that gave birth to
Christ was considered, by the Church, to be a Theotokos: she is looked upon as
more than a woman: a woman upon whom descended the revelation transmitted
through direct connection between the Mother and the Son, during pregnancy.
Thus, the Theotokos is associated with the Person of Christ. Probably that
is why de Pizan explains the etymology of her second name, Christine: coming
from Christ. The writer portrays herself as being a Savior of women on a smaller
scale, in comparison with the universal God. Her value doesn’t consist only in her
virtues and chastity as a woman, but mostly in the creationist product of her
literary work. For such reason, mainly, we do not inquire why some critics say
that she is a feminist writer: she is the first to defend women’s cause, founding her
discourse on scientific grounds.
Referring to the Annunciation, the author implicitly suggests the
message intended in her work, because Annunciation actually means good and
message. As its original counterpart, the message of the City of Ladies is also
good. Christine identifies her incarnation of words into this book towards a means
of salvation of women’s reputation, thoroughly respecting the truth descended
from the Supreme Master.
The First Book of the City of Ladies contains a passage describing a
ray of light fall on the writer’s lap. In the original:

En celle dolente pensee aini que je estoie, la teste baissee comme/

personne honteuse, les yeulx plains larmes, tenant ma main soubz ma/ joe
accoudee sus le pommel de la chayere, soubdainement sus mon giron vi/
dessendre un ray de lumiere si comme se le souleil fust, et je, qui en lieu/ obscure
estoie ou quell, a celle heure, souleil royer ne peust, tressailli.(Cahiers de
recherches médiévales, p. 2, 4)

It is a metaphor for the theological term theosis. In a larger sense,

theosis is a revelation of the trinitarian illumination, to those people who are
worthy of this revelation. Her tripartite narrative voices are characteristic for such
association to the theosis.

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 The three ladies appear out of the blue, like the Archangel Gabriel,
with the intention to correct past events, the way it happened in the Annunciation.
In the Paradise of Eden a woman had taken the blame for the original sin, so, with
a woman named Mary, all good things began; and, by analogy, another woman,
named Christine, wants to be, through Christ, the new Eve, standing upright in
The Field of Letters and facing the evil. Such Field of Letters is also a linguistic
device, referring to the modality in which Virgin Mary reached theosis even
before she received the visitation of the Archangel.
Mary realized a perfect communion with God, as made known by St.
Gregory Palamas, through the intellect and not by reasoning, nor by the senses,
neither by imagination, nor by human glory, as all that came from the senses was
rejected. De Pizan projects, for herself and by association with the Virgin, such an
ascetic mode of living; and describes her life as entirely dedicated to study.
One more similitude, between the original and the translated text, can
be found in Christine’s engagement to defend women’s defiled image. Her reply is
almost literally similar to Mary’s words in the Annunciation, so Richards was
right translating the fragment by considering the excerpt from Luke, 1:38:

Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be to me according to thy

word.
Si loe Dieu de toute ma puissance et vous, mes dames, qui tant
honorees/ m’avez qu’establie suis a si noble commission, laquelle reçoi par tres
grant leece./ Et voycy vostre chamberiere preste d’obeir: or commandez, je
obeiray, soit fait de moy selon voz paroles.( Cité, 1,7)
Thus, with all my strength, I praise God and you, my ladies, who have
so honored me by assigning me such a noble commission, which I most happily
accept. Behold your handmaiden ready to serve. Command and I will obey, and
may it be unto me according to your words. (City of Ladies, I.7)

In all three variants the message is the same; and so is the key word in
all of them, handmaiden, which signifies how strange it must have been for the
Virgin to understand why she had been chosen to carry God’s infant; and, at the
same time, the joy she must had felt. This historical event transcends human logic
and she could only submit to the will of God.

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 An analogous imaginary image is realized between the Magnificat, in
which Luke describes the happiness of Mary hearing that she would be the mother
of Christ, that the promise of Abraham would finally be accomplished in her
conception of Christ; and one passage from Luke:
My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from
henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; and holy is his name.
And his mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear him. He hath
shewed might in his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. He
hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of his mercy:
As he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed forever. (Cahiers de
recherches médiévales, p. 3, 7)

From The Book of the City of Ladies:

Therefore you are right, my ladies, to rejoice greatly in God and in honest mores
upon seeing this new City completed, which can be not only the refuge for you all,
that is, for virtuous women, but also the defense and guard against your enemies
and assailants, if you guard it well. For you can see that the substance with which
it is made is entirely of virtue, so resplendent that you may see yourselves
mirrored in it, especially in the roofs built in the last part as well as in the other
parts which concern you. And my dear ladies, do not misuse this new inheritance
like the arrogant who turn proud when their prosperity grows and their wealth
multiplies, but rather follow the example of your Queen, the sovereign Virgin,
who, after the extraordinary honor of being chosen Mother of the Son of God was
announced to her, humbled all the more by calling herself the handmaiden of God(
City of Ladies, III, 19, 1).
The above given quotation is an easily identifiable reference to
Saint Augustine’s Cité de Dieu too, mentioning in her book Livre de Policie the
following:

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Augustine dit que la felicité humaine est en estre vertueux. ((Cahiers de recherches
médiévales, p. 4, 14)
Augustine said that that the human happiness consists in being virtuous. Her
political voice becomes more pregnant under Augustine’s authority. The key
concept and, alongside with it, its sign, virtuosity is a means towards reaching an
ideal earthly state.

1.2. Christine’s vision of law-proper, projected in Lady Mary’s image

The key word dames, and its correspondent variant in English, ladies, is
related, etymologically, to de Pizan’s concept of justice.
Yet the author perceives justice in a close relation with theology, from
which all descend, being the source of divine knowledge and therefore it
transcends human reason. In this respect she develops her own tripartite allegory
of the virtues Raison, Droiture and Justice as a parallel literary image of Thomas
Aquinas description of those virtues and of others in his masterpiece work
Summa. The conceptual similitude between Summa and Cité des Dames denotes
that Christine adheres to the principles of ethics promoted by the influential
Middle Ages Aquinas, with an ardent passion for order, an order having its roots
in the divine order.
Once more she gives proof of her intellectual upbringing, in an age
when only the fathers of the Church used this book, as a manual of instruction.
Not only did she have knowledge of those concepts and alongside with them the
words, in theology they are one and the same, but she also introduced a new term
Droiture in order make clear, as professor Richards suggests, the distinction
established by Thomas Aquinas between justitia particularis and justitia legalis.
Droiture may belong to justitia legalis, taking into consideration de
Pizan’s own struggles for the law to be applied in her own experience with justice.
In this sense we say imitation by analogy and metaphor is considered divine in
the City of Ladies, because the notion, (as it were in those times) of good claimed
by God, could not be compared with that of the people: people did not deign to
reach the capabilities of God.

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 The principle of goodness was expressed in the original and the
translated text through the voices of Droiture and Justice, when they describe their
offices, both defining the concept in terms of rendering to each person their proper
due.
About her task, Droiture says:

Je suis appelé Droitture qui ou ciel plus qu’en terre ay ma

demeure, mais comme ray et resplandeur de Dieu et messagiere de sa bonté je
frequente entre les justes personnes et leur admonneste tout bien a faire, render a
chacun ce qui est sien selon leur pouvoir, dire et soustenir verité, porter le droit
des povres et des ignocens, ne grever autrui par exurpacion, soustenir la
renommee des accusez sanz cause. (L’Analisi Linguistica e Lettereria, p. 313)

Justice, also, in a metaphorical way, explains her extended

functions over the earth, heaven and hell:

Cristine amie, je suis Justice la tres singuliere fille de Dieu, et mon

essence procede de sa personne purement. Ma demeure si est ou ciel, en terre et
en enfer: ou ciel pour la gloire des sains et des ames beneurees; en terre pour
departir et donner la porcion a un chacun du bien ou du mal qu’il a desservi; en
enfer pour la pugnicion des mauvais. Mon office seulement est de jugier, departir
et faire la paye, selon la droicte desserte d’un chacun. (Christine de Pizan, Une
femme de science,/ une femme de lettres, p.104)

There is total concord between the writer and the translator in the
representation of the thomist theological belief about the divine virtues.
In the original it says:
Justice, la tres amee de mon Filz, tres voulentiers je abiteray et
demoureray entre mes seurs et amies, les femmes, et avecques ells, car Raison,
Droiture, toy, et aussi Nature m’i encline. Elles me servent, loent et honneurent
sanz cesser. (Christine de Pizan, Une femme de science,/ une femme de lettres,
p.104)

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 …from which we infer that that Justice descends directly from God, therefore in
the legal system we must follow God’s will.
The central theme represented by the Christian virtues in the names
of Nature, Raison, Droiture and Justice are a step further from their antecedents
in the experiences of pagan Old Testament women. In this sense history, allegory
and morality are linked and are instrumental in de Pizan women’s history. The
virtues and their character representations are allegorical figures for Marian
patristic tradition.
In Christianity, reasoning was dependent on religion. God is the
supreme intelligence from which all is created, hence in a process of imitation
we also use our intellect, which is called reason. In this respect, Christine
imagines Droiture in a hypostasis of what Thomas Aquinas revealed as being a
positive law, placing it between Reason and Justice.
A further etymological discussion is implied in the Cité, that in the
process of reasoning people should only choose those acts that are beneficial for
them and the society, and here intervenes the concept of justice.
In translation, Droiture is called Rectitude, and from both variants we
may conclude that the figure of analogy is transparent, between Rectitude and the
Virgin. Droiture, or Rectitude, says:

Je suis escu et deffence des sers de Dieu…Je suis leur advocate ou

ciel.
(Christine de Pizan, Une femme de science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 106)
It refers to the late medieval prayer Salve Regina, in which Mary was
defined as advocata nostra. This associated image may, in turn, have been a result
of Mary’s own exemplary image and mirror of all justice, as it is described by
Matthew. (Matth. III, 15)
Summa is a model of inspiration for Christine, to the extent to
which she sees in all people the reflexive spiritual being of God. Taking account
of this principle, as thinking and willing are the two major constants determined
by God, we are to understand from The book of the City of Ladies that women
should also possess such faculties. Knowledge was considered to be existent
through God because he knows himself and by his knowledge he created the

17
world. So, by knowledge, being attempt to find out what happens to them in the
end, which presupposes that will, is implied in knowing.
In the mirrored image of God, the ruler of the universe and logically
having a plan of the order of things, Christine, also, has a plan at a smaller scale,
for the universe from above. Hence predestination is a theme, present in Cité des
Dames, since Christine analogically substitutes to Mary, and because being
mirrored as providence for the defense of women. God’s providence and governing
powers were associated, in de Pizan’s age, with what conditions, as cause,
everything existing in the world. So predestination is determined by God.
It seems that Christine was predestined to eternal life:
Dear daughter […] we have come to bring you out of the ignorance
which so blinds your own intellect that you shun what you know for a certainty
and believe what you do not know or see or recognize except by virtue of many
strange opinions. You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women’s
clothes while he slept; because those who were making fun of him repeatedly told
him he was a woman, he believed their false testimony more readily than the
certainty of his own identity. (City of Ladies, p. 6)

The idea of predestination, taken from Aquinas ideology, can be

met with in the following excerpt:

Now, as to this particular question, dear friend, one could judge as

well ask why God did not ordain that men fulfill the offices of women, and women
the offices of men. So I must answer this question by saying that just as a wise and
well ordered lord organizes his domain so that one servant accomplishes one task
and another servant another task, and that what the one does the other does not
do, God has similarly ordained man and woman to serve Him in different offices
and also to aid, comfort, and accompany one another, each in their ordained task,
and to each sex has given a fitting and appropriate nature and inclination to fulfill
their offices. (City of Ladies, p. 31)
The idea of predestination is realized here by the expressive verb to
ordain. It is obvious that the system of Aquinas is deeply rooted in determinism.
Following this complex of meanings one after another, we may as well that from

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the Cité des Dames is made clear through rhetoric devices the fact that, since God
is the first cause of everything, he is the cause of even the free acts of men,
through predestination, meaning that nothing in the world is accidental or free,
although it may seem like it in reference to the proximate cause.
An example, relevant for our earlier statement, is as follows:

But just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority,
made me wonder how it happened that so many different men-and learned men
among them-have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in
their treatises and writings so many devilish and wicked thoughts about women
and their behavior. (The Book of the City of Ladies, p. 3, 4)
In her prose, the author gives expression to the metaphor of the Trinity
inspired by Aquinas’ doctrine on this subject, who, in turn, took St. Augustine’s
system as a basis. The most suitable example which the author could have chosen
is a weapon against evil speakers, a rhetoric linguistic device: the Trinity concept
and its etymology, the research of its fundamental principles, which speaks of the
cultured men who were not interested in finding the revealed truth of history’s
new Eve. In this case their arguments do not come on a real basis.
On the opposite side reference is made in the book to the Blessed
Virgin. The Angel Gabriel gives account of Mary and her closeness to God: The
Lord is with thee – as if to say: I reverence thee because thou art nearer to God
than I, because the Lord is with thee. The Lord is a summa of the Father with the
Son and the Holy Spirit, the totality of hypostases are not with any other spirit,
since: The Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. [21]
God, the Son, was in her womb:
Rejoice and praise, O thou habitation of Sion; for great is He that
is in the midst of thee, the Holy One of Israel.” (The Hail Mary, p. 2)

From these fragments the manner can be noticed in which the Lord
approaches the Virgin, which is not the same the Angel’s. The distinction is
spoken of by the Angel’s words, for with her He is as a Son, and with the Angel
He is the Lord.

19
 De Pizan uses metaphors in describing the theological miracles,
being a very knowledgeable with the language of those texts. The Angel refers to
the Virgin as being a temple, because she conceived by the Holy Ghost:

The temple of the Lord, the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee. (The Hail Mary, p.2)

The Virgin stands near God and by His side, because with her are
the Lord the Father, the Lord the Son, and the Lord the Holy Ghost – reaching the
Holy Trinity. De Pizan further implies that, since God enabled and established for
this to happen, and since He is the creator and the most powerful in knowledge, no
one should dare to question his decision in choosing a woman. If for God a
woman was virtuous enough to carry His Son, why wouldn’t she be for a man?
In the Third Book of the translated version, the feminist defense is eloquent,
Christine making reference to the Biblical salutation of Mary: We greet you,
Queen of Heaven, with the greeting which the Angel brought you, when he said,
Hail Mary. The first part of the salutation is preferred by the author namely:

Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women.
(The Hail Mary, p. 1)

She was a good Christian and what gives her away is the usage of the canonic
expression established by the Church: Hail, Mary.
The value of words coincides in ancient times with the qualities defined by
them. This comes to demonstrate that this form of address from the part of an
Angel was no small event. It was the first time for an Angel to show reverence to a
man, but it was not a man it was a woman. The first time in history, this is because
Angels are considered greater than men in dignity, another reason is because an
Angel is of a spiritual nature and an incorruptible nature. Thirdly, the Angels
exceed men in the fullness of the splendor of divine grace. Christine also wants to
be part of those enlightened by the grace of God and participate in the highest
degree in the divine light as Angels do: Is there any numbering of His soldiers?
And upon whom shall not His light arise? using the metaphorical expression the
ray of light in which she portrays herself standing.

20
 De Pizan creates her own political identity on religious basis, being,
like Mary, humble and at the same time gives proof of her consensus with what
Saint Thomas himself tells us in the Prologue of the Summa.
To paraphrase him, his Summa was written for the special benefit of
students. By analogy, she thinks of herself mirrored in this image:

[…] Your Highnesses that you have deigned to come down from your
pontifical seats and shining thrones to visit the troubled and dark tabernacle of
this simple and ignorant student?(City of Ladies, p. 15)

Law is treated, in the vision of the writer, as a science

undifferentiated from theology. Law is a representation of theology in every day
life of the community. We think her convictions upon law are related to what
Thomas Aquinas says in the Question 90, Article Four of the Second Part of the
Summa: law: is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good,
made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.
In the Second Part of the Summa it is claimed that all law comes from
the eternal law of Divine Reason that governs the universe to which all humans
adhere and which is named the natural law. The principle of natural law was also
sustained by Aristotle. For the purpose of deconstructing the philosopher’s theory,
Christine uses the device of irony:

[…] But though such is the case as far as women’s minds are
concerned, it is a proven fact that women have weak bodies, tender and feeble in
deeds of strength, and are cowards by nature. These things, in men’s judgment,
substantially reduce the degree and authority of the feminine sex, for men contend
that the more imperfect a body, the lesser is its virtue, consequently, the less
praiseworthy. (The Book of the City of Ladies, p. 36)

The answer of Reason is:

My dear daughter, such a deduction is totally invalid and unsupported,

for invariably one often sees that when Nature does not give to one body which
she has formed as much perfection as she has given to another and thereby makes

21
some things imperfect, whether in shape or beauty or with some impotence or
weakness of limbs, she makes up the difference with an even greater boon than
she has taken away. For example, just as is said, the great philosopher Aristotle
had a very ugly body, with one eye lower than the other and with a strange face,
but although he had some physical deformity, truly Nature made this up to him
spectacularly by giving him a retentive mind and great sense, just as he appears
in his authentic writings. (The Book of the City of Ladies, p. 36)

The association of Mary and Justice in the Third Book of the Cité des
Dames is revelatory for the legal and theological context and their mutual
determination in medieval age, as Christine didn’t fail to notice. In the author’s
system of justice could be found the natural law codified and promulgated,
dictated by reason and the Divine law dictated through revelation, in view of the
last end. This determination and pre-established order in the juridical framework
is presented in the translated text by the words of the Virgin herself:

Oh, Justice, greatly beloved by my Son, I will live and abide most
happily among my sisters and friends, for Reason, rectitude, and you, as well as
Nature, urge me to do so. They serve, praise, and honor me unceasingly, for I am
and will always be the head of the feminine sex. This arrangement was present in
the mind of God the Father from the start, revealed and ordained previously in the
council of the Trinity. (City of ladies, p. 218)

The Virgin’s female authority is created in Cité des Dames precisely

within this context. Her authority over the feminine sex is seen by Christine in
connection with the Mother of Christ theological background.
The writer asks rhetorically: My Lady, what man is so brazen to
dare think or say that the feminine sex is vile in beholding your dignity?
Maybe the source of inspiration for this excerpt was St. Augustine
who says: If we could bring together all the Saints and ask them if they were
entirely without sin, all of them, with the exception of the Blessed Virgin, would
say with one voice: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the
truth is not in us.’ I except, however, this holy Virgin of whom, because of the
honor of God, I wish to omit all mention of sin. (The Hail Mary, p.1)

22
 The comparison of Mary with the Saints in her favor creates for her
an image of authority and alludes to her as being an authority of the feminine sex.
It is well known that she was granted grace to overcome every sin by Him whom
she was worthy enough to conceive and bring forth, and because He was without
sin he transmitted this quality to His mother too.
In conclusion, the Blessed Virgin exceeds the Angels in purity,
which makes her not only pure, but only capable to obtain purity for others, from
what the author mentions.
Another source for Christine might have been St. Thomas’s
sayings: In the Angelic Salutation is shown forth the worthiness of the Blessed
virgin for this conception when it says, ‘Full of grace; it expresses the Conception
itself in the words, ‘The Lord is with thee’; and it foretells the honor which will
follow with the words, ‘Blessed art thou among women’ “(“Summa Theol., III, Q.
xxx, art. 4).

And from what he continues to say, we understand Christine’s point

of view: The Blessed Virgin Mary obtained such a plenitude of grace that she was
closest of all creatures to the Author of Grace; and thus she received in her womb
Him who is full of grace and by giving Him birth she is in a certain manner the
source of grace for all men. (Summa Theol., III, Q. xxvii, art. 5)

In the like manner St. Bernard also says: It is God’s will that we
should receive all graces through Mary (Serm. De aquaeductu, n.vii).
From the above mentioned arguments it can be seen why de Pizan
was perceived by many critics to be a feminist, on the other hand we, following
professor Richards’s beliefs, perceive her feminism coming from the treatment
applied by theology to this subject.
The influential role played by Aquinas’s natural law theory in Cité
and in de Pizan’s intellectual activity is obvious. In the first, natural law is viewed
in the light of divine providence. The construction of her city begins with
Semiramis, the incestuous queen. For her defense, Christine resorts to the most
pertinent scientific and theological source, the Thomist explanation of natural law.

23
 Thus Christine portrays Semiramis as a non-rational human and
therefore she has a share in the eternal law only by being determined by it;
henceforth her action non-freely results from her determinate nature, nature the
existence of which results from God’s will in accordance with God’s eternal plan.
To support such idea we will give the original fragment in Aquinas:
[…] rationalis creatura excellentiori quodam modo divinae providentiae subiacet,
inquantum et ipsa fit providentiae particeps, sibi ipsi et aliis provisens. Unde et in
ipsa participatur ratio aeterna, per quam habet naturalem inclinationem ad
debitum actum et finem. Et talis participatio legis aeternae inrationali creatura
lex naturalis dicitur…unde patet quod lex naturalis nihil aliud est quam
participation legis aeternae in rationali creatura” (Christine de Pizan, Une femme
de science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 99).

Yet, de Pizan is not fully satisfied with this ideology and finds an
even more appropriate justification for Semiramis and her incestuous relation with
her son, by citing the same gloss from Peter Lombard. In the original work the
author excuses Semiramis, for the error was committed by that noble lady when
there were no written laws, in times when people conducted themselves after the
law of Nature and did what their hearts told them to do:

[…] de ceste erreur qui trop fu grande, ycelle noble dame fait
aucunement a excuser pour ce que adonc n’estoit ancores point de loy escripte,
ains vivoient les gens a loy de Nature ou il loisoit a chacun de faire sans
mesprendre tout ce que le cuer lui apportoit. (Christine de Pizan, Une femme de
science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 99).

Christine must have chosen the story of queen Semiramis mirroring

the Virgin, taking into consideration the political principle of the division of
power, having in the background the theological, legal, institutional and literary
context. Earl Jeffrey points out the commentary of Jean Gerson on the Magnificat:

Magnificata est ita hodie beata Virgo ut regina coeli, immo et

mundi, jure vocetur, habens praeeminentiam et virtutem influxivam super omnes.

24
Principatum habet dimidii regni Dei, si sic dici potest, sub typo Esther et Assueri.
Regnum quipped Dei consistit in potestate et misericordia… Potestate Domino
remanente, cessit quodam modo misericordiae pars ipsi Matri sponsaeque
regnant. Hinc ab Ecclesia tota Regina misericordiae salutatur. (Christine de
Pizan, Une femme de science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 109).

Such image of Mary as the Queen of Heaven started from the

Council of Ephesus and resulted in various representations of Mary as Regina
throughout the ages. The title of Queen was made explicit by the Catholic
doctrine. Her contribution consists not only in being the mother of Jesus Christ,
but also in the exceptional role played in the work of the eternal salvation of
humanity. The papal encyclical Ad coeli reginam brings forth the idea of Christ as
being the Lord and king of humanity for its redemption, but at the same extent
places Mary as Queen for her own consent to the salvation of mankind.

Moreover, in holy writings we may read about the Son of God:

He shall be called the Son of the most High, and the Lord god shall
give unto him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign in the house of
Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. (Queen of Heaven, p.3)

Mary was called Mother of Lord, which implies, in the ancient

Catholic teaching, her queenship. By analogy, the sacrificial Semiramis also
earned her title as a queen and a Reigning Spouse.
In the opening of the Third Book of both the Cité and The Book of
the City of Ladies, Christine proves, once more, her vast theological opinions.
Mary is co-regent with her Son because she has earned this right, possessing all
virtues, giving birth to Jesus and above all, being humble.
In the original it says:
Or viengnent doncques princesses, dames et toutes femmes au
devant recevoir a grant honneur et reverence celle qui est non pas seulément leur
royne, mais qui a administracion et seigneurie sur toutes puissances creés apres
un seul filz que elle porta et conceut du Saint Esperit qui est Filz de Dieu le Pere.
(Christine de Pizan, Une femme de science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 110).

25
 Professor Richards states that in the original third book of the Cité ,
besides standard Marian epithets, such as Estoille, there are also used rare, semi-
erudite borrowings from patristic writings on Mary: Abitacle de la Trinité refers to
habitaculum, found only in Hugh of St. Victor’s Explanatio in Canticum B.
Mariae and in Bernard of Clairvaux’s In assumption Beatae Mariae Virginis.
As per the author’s source, the translator chooses to translate the
epithets of the lady Justice, as follows:

Now come to us, Heavenly Queen, Temple of God, Cell and

Cloister of the Holy Spirit, Vessel of the Trinity, Joy of the Angels, Star and Guide
to those who have gone astray, Hope of True Believers. (City of Ladies, p. 218)

The translator attributes the phrase temple de Dieu as coming from

the prayer Hours of the Virgin:

O Intemerata, et in aeternum benedicta, singularis atque

incomparabilis virgo Dei genitrix Maria, gratissimum Dei templum. (Christine de
Pizan, Une femme de science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 111).

An ad literam translation is also: […] for I am and will always be the head of the
feminine sex, in comparison with the original: Si suis et seray a tousjours chief du
sexe femenin. It is the proper translation, since Christine, as the translator writes,
is quoting Isidore, saying that Christ is the head of all male virgins and Mary the
head of all female virgins. The suggestion of such a statement is that the two
Divinities share the power equally.
A mode of translation, which professor Richards explains, is the
literal translation of the word mansions. He notices the six times exploitation of
this word in the Cité, and suggests that this semi-learned word in Middle French is
not only an allusion to John 2.14: […] in domo Patris mei mansions multae sunt,
but also refers to the aim of using such word; mansions becomes thus an
expression for a place where the Heavenly Powers reside, and for their equitable
distribution between Mother and Son.

26
 The determinative terms coming with mansions are, in the original
work: souveraines, haultes and nobles, to reinforce what the translator declared.
A further implication of the term mansion in Christine’s literary
construction of the Cité is that of an allegory of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The
translator opinions that her mansions textually allude to the phrase in aethereis
mansionibus as an expressive means for describing the Assumption of the Virgin,
of the place Christ had prepared for her, in the context of her sharing Christ’s
reign, as the regina justitiae and not just as advocata nostra. Professor Richards
sees here a phrase in St. Clara’s biography: cupit in aethereis mansionibus
Virginem videre regnantem, meaning Christie’s wish to see Mary ruling in the
celestial mansions.
In the same topic, of the legality of acts, the writer refers to pagan
women of the Old Testament, to whom she attribute greater merits in humanities’
history. Their legal actions are enabled and eased by the power of divine law to
which they were subservient. For their merits and services done to humanity they
became figures of the Church. But in the Christian theology, Mary is also
imagined as a figura of the Church. Due to these correspondences, the allegorical
implication in Cité is that all women from the Old Testament are pre-figurations or
faint images of the Virgin Mary.
The stories of Nicaula or Queen of Sheba (Nicaula in City of Ladies
I.11, also in II.4), Judith, (City of ladies, II.31), Rebecca (City of Ladies,II.39),
Esther (City of ladies, II.32), Sarah (City of ladies, II.38) and Ruth (City of
Ladies, II.40), all participate to render the earlier said image.
We will give some explanation for the examples chosen by de
Pizan: e.g. there is a reference to Ruth. In Ruth’s book, the central message is that
humans should conform to law. In the case of Ruth, her law is redemption and
conformity to the habitual custom and preservation of her family lineage. Which
further links to the Son of Ruth, who is considered to be the grandfather of David,
a king ruling in the law of God.
Another proof of the Mariology tradition is the story of Judith,
whose etymology of name symbolizes the Jewish woman, so it represents God’s
cause. The story tells about the salvation of faith by a woman. In her story, the
determinism principle is present when God causes the very weakness of his people

27
to produce strength, in the form of a woman, who in this instance will be the
instrument of his justice. (Judith and Esther, p. 2)
The concept of natural law is present here as well, because in those
ancient times, in a war everything was permitted, and by this Ruth, in the eyes of
her people is not a deceiver, but a heroine saver of her people from the evil power.
She acts without being affected by the promptings of the temper, crushes the head
of the infernal serpent. Esther is a woman saver of the people of Israel and the
whole book is impregnated with a sense of divine providence.
We further quote the last but not the least example of the most
debated subject in biblical literature, appropriated by de Pizan too, respectively:
the Queen of Sheba, Christine’s Nicaula, perceived in a feminist light by
contemporary critics, being distinctive from the other Queens in that she was the
only woman ruler who never shared power with a man.
In patristic tradition of Mariology, in our opinion, she may be a
hypostasis of Mary because of the love for her people. The queen’s vocation, as
Mary’s, is sacrificial; and she bears her child in her country, away from his father,
in order to inaugurate the tradition of the Ethyopian dynasty, as the heirs and
successors of the royal house of David.
In De laudibus Beatae Mariae Virginis, professor Richard describes
the entry into Jerusalem of the Queen of Sheba (2 Chron 9.12) and prefigures the
Virgin’s entry into the Heavenly Jerusalem. So, the association of the queen’s
arrival in Jerusalem with the Assumption of Mary, shows the literary
predisposition for allegory.
We can also notice transposition in a more elaborated manner that
abounds in artistic devices of Plato’s dialogues, through the three narrative voices
by the help of which Christine justify her ideas. At Christine’s innocent rhetorical
questions ( If it is so, fair Lord God, that in fact so many abominations abound in
the female sex, for You Yourself say that the testimony of two or three witnesses
lends credence, why shall I not doubt that this is true?) Ladies Rectitude, Reason
and Justice have obvious rhetorical outbursts in which they provide firm
arguments in favor of women in philosophy or religion, but also scientifically
proven true, in historical documents.
Professor Richards felt compelled to cover all such ideas, improving
the original text enhancing key-words meaning, in order to update it with the

28
translator’s chosen 18th century, as against to the meaning these might have had in
Christine`s age.
Such undertaking is relative, in as much as the meaning expressed by
professor Richards in the translated text may, or not, be the one designated by its
female author. Thus, understanding Christine’s work, the reader should consider
both the historical-social context and the individual, as, obviously, in it biography
data are found.
In contrast to our opinion mentioned in the above paragraph, professor
Richards argues as follows, in order to clarify his translation choices:

“The weakness of any translation into modern English is the

impossibility of rendering asymmetric discourse (i.e, thou/you) as found in the
original. Christine’s use of singular and plural and of gender is not unstable, but
simply difficult to reproduce in English. Christine’s syntax is complex and
Ciceronian, and imitates the style found in legal documents and in chancery
documents of the royal court. Its use of rhetorical cadence is extremely nuanced.
Yes, grammar per se was not standardized, but Christine, given her proximity to
the Court, follows the kind of French used at court (Froissart by comparison is
very simple whereas Christine’s French resembles the French employed by
Oresme in the 1380s to translate Aristotle for the royal court). I would avoid
speaking about intuition in translating Christine. Her syntax is complex and her
vocabulary extremely rich (she introduced many neologisms into French). She is
always challenging our contemporary notions of what a medieval woman could
write. I always tried to reproduce the provocative nature of her complex syntax
and her very erudite vocabulary. My only “intuition” regarding Christine was
never, never to underestimate her intelligence and the profundity of her thought.”
(interview, on translation, professor Richards)
The words study and estude have the same sense and lead us towards the
same implications in English as well as in French – a place intended for learning,
suggesting intimacy of the creation act and study. It is in the first scene in the City
of Ladies when the three ladies or dames appear, words that belong to the same
family of meaning: women with a distinct status, due to their exemplary conduct
and deeds in the two languages, both in Christine’s text and in the translation.

29
 1.3. The influence of politics upon literature

The field to which Christine alludes by dame is a political, as well an

artistic; according to humanism, the concept looses touch with the sense given by
the Middle Ages feudalism to this term as woman of noble birth but rather as lady,
with respect to the worthy actions of a woman; it is a term that brings Christine
closer to the eighteenth century concept.
Moreover the designation of ladies, meaning the names they bear, give
hint to the concepts’ determinism which exists between the concepts and their
reference. If substitution were to be operated, raison could express the written
law, while justice and droiture, derived etymologically from right, could function,
in consequence, as equivalents of justice.
Only through the action of these three, law is applied in a society. The
characters: Lady Reason and Lady Justice are singular expressions of juridical
thought on the literary scene, contemporaneous to Christine. The strict interwoven
relation between the two, the translator mentions, can be found in Corpus iuris
civilis.
Ernst Kantorowicz claims that the close bond existing between Reason and
Justice is a locus communis in juridical commentaries, starting with XII-th age.
The two legal concepts were of great interest among the people preoccupied with
law. The true value of what I have already mentioned lies in a deeper research of
the medieval political theory and its sources, consisting mainly in the
jurisprudence of the Roman Empire and the political principles exposed in the
writings of the Christian Fathers, from the first century to the sixth.
Starting with the ninth century political writers, they appropriated from the
ancient world the theory of human equality, of the naturally and divine organized
communities and of the necessity in ruling and impose authority. In accordance
with an organized society, the principle of justice comes in his right place to
define what authority presupposes. It is also true that what influenced Medieval
Europe was adapted to the needs of people.
The Canonists studied and showed great interest for ancient jurisprudence,
adapting it to their conditions, and in general the politics and legal system had the

30
imprint of the great political thinkers of Greece, and especially of Aristotle. To be
exact, I am referring to the middle of the thirteenth century when these ideas were
present in Middle Ages literature. Legal texts, Roman law and Canon law are
representative writings for the reasoned and considered judgments of political
thought; i.e. because in them is reflected an important part of the ancient world.
What I want to demonstrate is that there are close ties between the
political principles of Medieval Age and those political references Christine
alludes to. One principle is to be found within the theory of law, if we think to the
connection between reason and justice and professor Richards specified the
interest this subject had presented for the people dealing with law.
We can imagine why Christine was keen on presenting in her book the
principles of Roman Law, as for the people in Southern France were governed, in
most part, by adaptations of it, and in Italy the same case was encountere;, not to
mention Christine’s genealogy and her adopted country.
It was by the law mentioned in this chapter, that the barbarian races
became civilized in the patriarchal society, starting with the ninth century. There
existed a continuum of Roman Law for centuries in Western Europe.
The aspects of Christine’s political theory are: the nature of law, her own
theory of equality, inspired from Aristotle in its positive parts, the Civil law, the
Canon Law and to what extent should the Church have a contribution in civilian’s
life. Her expression of law, coincide with what people in her times considered it to
be, taking into consideration the ancient ideology of law- as a general statement
of the principle of justice; also the concept of positive law as Aristotle had
portrayed, that is: an application of law, under certain circumstances proper to the
author’s society.
For further understanding Christine and the cultural background within
which she created a literary world with laws appropriate not only for men, but also
for women, she also finds means of expression for her contemporary women by
the help of legal prerogatives, naming famous women. Thus she uses Droiture to
distinguish her political voice from the former male adepts of this principle. First
it is best to present the genealogy of this term.
The allegorical term Droiture, corresponds, after professor Richards to
the juridical term aequitas. Aequitas was a juridical concept, stated by many
political thinkers, the most noteworthy were: father Thomas of Aquinas,

31
Placentius,, Dante, but before them had been Aristotle. Probably de Pizan, like
many other medieval civilians inspired herself from a phrase of Cicero:

“Valeat aequitas quae paribus in causis paria jura desiderat” which is an

expression likewise of practical jurisprudence (Cicero, “Topica,” 23).

In the “l’Epistre Othea” Christine explains better the Ciceronian concept

by: la vertu de justice or c’est a savoir tenir droicturiere justice. This combination
of words can be understood only in the context of the writer’s work. From the
context we see them as referential for what Cicero defined to be the practice of
justice, taking into account the positivity implied in the act, named aequitas.
In the Cité, this concept signifies a distinction between the general law
of medieval civilians and its applicability to particular circumstances. Justice for
Christine is only an abstract notion of law and her work is concerned to its
practical mise on the scène in her society, given the fact that her contemporary
women have suffered from this lack of practice. The sphere of allusion is to legal
cases, in which the judges don’t take into consideration all the pragmatic aspects
and to the lawyers which misrepresents their clients, by merely citing from
irrelevant sources for their cases. Hence she assimilates the legal conceptions to
God, because these have, in her opinion, stemmed or originated from the Divinity,
bearing within, the truth of God Himself. In the translated version, like in the
original, the reason for which the personified Droiture is compared to aequitas,
lies in the implication that in her turn, Droiture is also a product of God:

ray et resplandeur de Dieu, making the readers think to Jean of Salisbury’s “

Policraticus” (IV. 2-7).

The Prague fragment from De Justitia, is expressive for Christine’s hints

on this subject: It is the Divine will which we properly call justice, it is that will
which gives to every man his <jus>, for it is the good and beneficent Creator who
grants to men to seek, to hold, and to use what they need, and it is He who
commands men to give such things to each other, and forbids men to hinder their
fellows from enjoying them. (A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West,
p. 9)

32
 The system of justice in medieval French society had both political
implications and Christine was, in fact, influenced by it. Her image is of a seulete,
and many may understand by this word, the notion of a detached writer. This is
actually not the case here, because her biography comes to reveal her assignment
as biographer of the king Charles V and her description, within this context is:

[…] me transportay avec mes gens[…] ou chastel du Louvre. (Maistresse of My

Wit, Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, p. 107)
Meaning on the one side that she had a research corporation with whom she
worked in the Louvre castle, and she may also had been politically influenced, and
on the other, that her voice is singular in defending women. An example of the
influence exercised upon de Pizan is given by one passage written by her, from
Charles V biography:
[…] et voult le roy que la simplece du Juif fust vainquerresse de la malice du
crestien; et, comme il feist droit aux Juifs, n’est mie doubte qu’à toute personne
vouloit que il {i.e, le droit} fust entirement tenus (Contexts and Continuities, p.
750). In a France where Jews were not so much appreciated, the exercise of justice
was in favor of them.

In the Cité des Dames,(I. 36), the author expresses the practice of law in
the same way as was the common knowledge of it in medieval society, when
referring to the queen Ysys of Egypt:
donna et ordonna certaines lois bonnes et droiturieures, apprist aux gens d’
Egipte, qui vivoient rudiment et sanz loy, justice n’ordenance, a vivre par ordre de
droiture. Christine wants to demonstrate that, like in many legal writings of her
time, this practice of the law was to be found even in the Ancient age, and thus,
she gives the example of Ysys, who rules her people by using droiture, the
principle Christine had already defined.
De Pizan was such knowledgeable in legal matters, that she comments
on Jehan de Meung’s errors in the Roman de la Rose, detecting the ignorance in
his work for the evident report between the concepts reason and justice, followed
by her hint to glosses d’ Orliens in her letter to Pierre Col:

33
“si as tres bien prouvey que maistre Jehan de Meung, quant il tant perloit de
excerciter l’oeuvre de Nature, que il entendoit en marriage!/ Dieux, comment est
ce bien prouvé ! Voire, come dist le proverb commun des gloses d’Orliens, qui
destruisent le texte,” (Débat, éd. Hicks, p. 144, lines 950-54)

Taking into consideration that the French language was lingua franca,
from the Middle Ages, and continued being so until eighteenth century including,
we consider it, a way of explanation for the overlapping concepts on semantic
level. The cité used by de Pizan has as an underground significance the patriarchal
city-states in the femme de lettre`s native Italy. As a note of protest against these
cité, she chooses to write in French, an allegorical city of women, starting with
Antiquity until the author`s contemporaneous period; it has the same sense in the
translated text. Christine`s genius seems to anticipate, through the usage of this
term, its future reverberations in an allegorical world (as in Thomas Moore`s
Utopia, Francis Bacon`s New Atlantis).
We distinguish major parallels between Aristotle’s Book I, Politics and
the major theme of the city in the Cité. Her cité is to be seen, going back to its
etymology by the Greek word polis. The author embraces the Aristotelian
philosophy on the concept, we opinion, in Christian terms of cause and effect.
Christine is not far from Aristotle’s political view, that the city is a
partnership, thinking that the word polis or city, is the linguistic basis for the
derivative terms in English: politics or policy. Starting from the premises that all
partnerships have a good scope, in both works can be seen that Christine attributes
to this notion of good, Christian values, and believes in a coagulant society within
this institutionalized frame, in order to achieve a civilized mode of living.
An additional common characteristic of the cities to which the authors
refers, is a certain independence of them. In Aristotle’s time, the important
political entities, as in Christine’s, were cities, controlling nearby farmed
territories. Such was the case for de the cities in medieval society, they had certain
administrative powers that permitted their independence from the state.
Similar translations of the word city, are to be seen in both periods, and
they express the city-states. The two writers envisage the city as a means towards
reaching the virtue of happiness, people’s supreme goal in life, but what differs is
that happiness for Christine is a Christian virtue and the summa of other virtues,

34
cultivated in a civilized place, the one that helps for such a virtue to develop in
humans.
Politics represented for de Pizan and Aristotle, a sphere of action in
which all virtues were engaged for the well-being of people. From what we have
mentioned, is clear that Aristotle and Christine projected an ideal image of the
city. Aristotle says about the ideal city:
[A] city is excellent, at any rate, by its citizens - those sharing in the regime –
being excellent; and in our case all the citizens share in the regime” ( Politics,
Book I, p. 4).
In the Cité, the implied philosophy, likewise in the Politics, is that, if
people perform good actions, they are likely to become law-abiding citizens. This
is referential to men respecting the rights of women, and not proliferating
untruthful things, in order to make the latter less powerful in the city. The author
states that in the Christian and human law, everybody should be treated according
to each merits and not otherwise.
We comprehend the allegorical character Reason as a one more
expression of Aristotle’s political concept, for the reason people ought to apply
when performing an action. I quote from Aristotle:
For just as man is the best of the animals when completed, when separated from
law and adjudication he is the worst of all.(Politics, How the City Comes Into
Being, p. 5).
The only difference in Christine’s thought is that reasoning comes from
God. The philosopher shows the indispensable relation between ethics and politics
in a city. The figurative sense of the word city has a historical meaning in the
secondary level of perception, described by Aristotle:
Every city, therefore, exists by nature, if such also are the first partnerships. For
the city is their end….[T]he city belongs among the things that exist by nature,
and…man is by nature a political animal (Politics, p. 5). In this passage, the
philosopher claims that nature has a plan for the well-being of humans and for this
reason enables them the construction of cities, whereas in the Cité, things ordained
by nature are only manifestations of God’s will. Human capacity for speech is
another feature that comes to strengthen the idea of man’s superiority to animals.
In this respect, Aristotle states:

35
[S]peech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the
just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he
alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things of
this sort; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.
(Politics, Man, the Political Animal, p. 5). Indeed, we think that Christine favored
this expression of speech, which supports her idea that people should speak only
true things and proper, not like the misogynists to which she makes reference in
her literary work.
In the same logic of conceptualization, the historical etymology of
speech is the Greek word logos. Aristotle explains that logos, means not only
speech, but also reason. Further on, he arrives at the purpose of speech, as was
customary of him, and sees a purpose assigned by nature to men in order to utter
what is advantageous and harmful, and what is good and bad, just and unjust. It is
an irreplaceable tool, he believes, for the instauration of justice, thus for
civilization. Christine accepts this philosophy partially, and gives the Christian
explanation of logos, as the first word God used in the creation of the world.
And since with the primordial logos, only good things were born in the
world, humans don’t have the right to use words for wrong purposes, and for that
to happen, they need to use their reasoning. In other words, what the author of the
Cité proposes, is that men and women should live together through the use of
reason and speech, under a better system of justice, by applying laws which
enable human beings to live together, and at the same time, making possible to
pursue justice as part of the virtuous lives we are meant to live, in the law of Jesus
Christ. In her figurative representation, only the community which does it, is
called a city.
Her vision is a Christian adaptation of the following Aristotelian
judgment:
[The virtue of] justice is a thing belonging to the city. For adjudication, is an
arrangement of the political partnership, and adjudication is judgment as to what
is just (Politics, p. 5). In it lies the message of de Pizan’s city, seen as a political
partnership in which should reside only noble citizens, like the noble ladies from
her Cité; nobility is conceptual for noble actions performed by each individual,
inside a society established by law of justice.

36
 We have already mentioned in this chapter the history of the Ciceronian
philosophical legal concept aequitas. What de Pizan does, is to substitute this
concept with droiture, a term that implies an additional meaning, being a
specialized word for contractual right or privilege, and the translator was aware of
his legal significance, translating it as rectitude, in the way other writers had
translated it, at the end of the eighteenth century.
Professor Richards, in his study, renders the lexical field of droiture in
medieval French from Tobler-Lommatzsch: the literal meaning is of direction- a
droiture, extensively, droiture means: justice, right, prerogative, obligation,
tribute, legally defined offering, or accessory. In literature, a counterpart of the
term, is Dante’s drittura in his lyric poetry and in Paradiso XX. In the poem CIV,
by the: Tre donne al cor mi son venute, (three ladies appeared before my eyes), as
in Christine’s Cité, this is a representative image for human justice.
So far, we have presented some of the traits which characterize Christine’s
political articulate voice. Also, with references to glossa Aurelianensis, her
particular utilization of the concept of droiture, as an evident expression of a
proficient Roman law method in jurisprudence, other than aequitas; what seems
more spectacular is the manner in which she proposes Roman law over customary
law in medieval literature. Her approach, in the following example, prefigures the
journalistic style. The author chooses the striking case of Lucretia, from imperial
Rome.
The translator opinions that de Pizan’s legal assessment in this case, owes
to Bartolo de Sassoferrato’s treatment of capital punishment for rape. In The Book
of the City of Ladies, appears like this:
[…] Then, as her husband and relatives, who saw that she was overwhelmed with
grief, were comforting her, she drew a knife from under her robe and said, ‘This is
how I absolve myself of sin and show my innocence. Yet I cannot free myself from
the torment nor extricate myself from the pain. From now on no woman will ever
live shamed and disgraced by Lucretia’s example.’ Having said this, she forcibly
plunged the knife into her breast and collapsed dead before her husband and
friends. They rushed like madmen to attack Tarquin. All Rome was moved to this
cause, and they drove out the king and would have killed his son if they had found
him. Never again was there a king in Rome. And because of this outrage
perpetrated on Lucretia, so some claim, a law was enacted whereby a man would

37
be executed for raping a woman, a law which is fitting, just, and holy. (City of
Ladies, p.160, 161) The author, implicitly pleads for the governmental
organization of states into Republics, rather than for an Empire, mentioning earlier
in the same story that this lady was of a noble family, and in consequence, justice
in this sense is preferential. If it had been a common woman, nobody would have
cared.
Christine’s society was indifferent towards women’s feelings. The
translator mentions that in the: legal compilations of customary law for northern
France, such as the so-called ‘Grand Coutumier,’ dated traditionally from early in
the reign of Charles VI, but in fact containing decrees from much earlier in the
fourteenth century, there is no mention of rape. In the Corpus juris civilis, the
translator sees the same treatment of rape, the chapter De raptu virginum, in
contradiction with calling rape a tam detestable crimen or in a literal translation, a
detestable crime, rape, is nothing but an offense brought to other men. From this
perspective, a woman is an exchange object between men, and by deflowering, it
looses its value.
De Pizan opts for the power of exemplum rendered by a married woman,
because in her Christian conception about family, the act of rape could severely
influence a family’s life, and at the same time to make allusion to the lack of
jurisprudence in such cases. On a mental level, she associates monarchy and its
tyrannical ruling with rape, a violent image of the king’s power. All the while as
Bartolo comes to reassure his readers, there were laws in the Corpus juris civilis
for the protection of women from men, namely:
quaero, dicit lex vel statutum, quod rapiens mulierem puniatur: modo vir rapuit
mulierem, vel sponsam, vel mulierem de lupanari?, meaning that men had no right
to force women into sexual intercourse, even though they were the husbands of
the women, or if the women were prostitutes. Illustrating these, in the excerpt
concerning Lucretia, there are strong accents about human rights, especially in the
formula: fitting, just and holy. (Contexts and Continuities, p.761)
De Pizan reveals another political instrument used by men to preserve
their privileges over women in society, by influencing the legal linguistics. There
had circulated many proverbs in the legal jurisprudence. The original Latin
proverb after Hans Walther was: Fallere, flere, nere / statuit Deus in muliere, and
in a perfect correspondence of meaning by Chaucer:

38
Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng God hath yive /To women kyndely, whil that they may
lyve (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, vv.401-02).
Christine in the Cité des Dames, renders her own adaptation of this common
proverb for the time: homes me font un grant harnois d’un proverb en latin que ilz
tant reprochent aux femmes qui dit: ‘plourer, parler, filer mist Dieux en femme. It
continues with Raison saying: Certes, doulce amie, ceste parole est vraye,
combien que qui le cuide ou die, ce ne leur soit point de reprouche. Et de bonne
heure pour celles qui par parler, plourer, filer ont esté sauvees, mist Dieux en elles
ycelles condicions. […] Quant est du filler, voirement a Dieu voulu que ce leur
soit naturel, car c’este office necessaire au service divin et a l’ayde de toute
creature raisonnable, sans lequel ouvrage les offices du monde seroient
maintenus en grant ordure. (
The political appanage, that spinning is a divinely ordered office for
women, comes, as the translator assures us, from Corpus juris civilis in a gloss
containing regulations devoted to commerce. So, the phrase: que ce leur soit
naturel, is also an expression for the political and social male thought: proprium
mulierum, which restricted women’s roles within the society by not giving them
access to economic power.
Livre and cité or book and city, is an association of words that places
Christine within the literature`s sphere, the latter was traditionally understood as
belonging exclusively to men. In doing so, Christine becomes an exemplum for
women who have to become learned, and to learn from some other ladies, how to
find authority in themselves, if they conducted according with the principles of
reason, rectitude and justice. De Pizan states in the Epistre au Dieu d’Amours: if
women had written the books we read, they would have handled things differently,
for women know they have been falsely accused. In this sense, it is revelatory what
Amaryta Sen and Martha Nussbaum have said, to paraphrase: education is
important not only for human capital but also to human capability, permitting
women to exercise their legal rights, so to empower their political and civic role.
Between higher education and the institutions of a state there is a very tight
connection.
Christine describes herself in the Cité des dames as a femme naturelle, a
phrase meant to equilibrate the image of women in the Orthodox religion.We see
in her words, a great rupture from the past misconception about women, when she

39
says: je pris a examiner moy mesmes et mes meurs comme femme naturelle (I
began to examine myself and my behavior as a natural woman). For further proof,
she shows her similarity to her father and explains the natural etymology of her
name. The provenience of her name includes that of the most perfect man, Jesus
Christ. Then she claims her mother was more potent than her father, because even
though her father had wished for a son, her gender was due to her mother, and in
this logic she contradicts the argumentation of Thomas and Aristotle’s by which a
woman was the product of the weakness in the sperm. The author speaks about the
power of a mother’s will and not of a father’s defective sperm when a female child
is born:
M’engendrerent en celle attente/Mais il failli a son entente./Car ma mere, quoi ot
pouir/Trop plus que lui si voult avoir/Femelle a elle ressemblable,/Si fus nee fille”
(They engendered me in this expectation [of having a son], but his intention was
lacking, for my mother who had much greater power than he, so much wanted to
have a female like her that I was born a girl) (Mutacion, II.386-91).

The cultural term naturelle, used for females, comes in contra party
with the Thomist belief, inherited from Aristotle’s philosophy. De Pizan probably
alludes to the Aristotelian slogan:
it takes a man to generate a man (for example, Physics. 194 b 13; Metaphysics
1032 a 25, 1033 b 32, 1049 b 25, 1070 a 8, 1092 a 16). According to Aristotle’s
four causes: that out of which, in our case the man; the account of what-it-is-to-be,
or the shape of the man; the primary source of the change or rest, the man’s desire
to have a male child, and the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done, the
suggested idea is of a perfect creature, the only thing that matters in this world is
counted for its materiality, as for the other causes, nothing is being said.
Christine on the other hand, with her orthodox knowledge, gives a
resolution to this causality problem. From religion she finds out that it takes not
only a man, but also a woman and a spirit for the conception of a child. If things
are presented in this manner, I understand from the Cité that the perfection of a
human being, resides in his/her virtues, a quality all the more important than the
gender; this process is natural enough, taking into consideration that it descends
from God. I quote from the original:

40
cellui ou celle en qui plus a vertus est le plus hault./ ne la haulteur ou
abbaissement des gens ne gist mie es corps selon le sexe mais en la perfeccion des
meurs et des vertus (Cité, p. 81) (he or she in whom there is more virtue is the
higher, nor does the height or depth of people lie in the body according to sex but
in the perfection of deeds and virtues).

Lady Reason, Rectitude and Justice in City of Ladies embody a

figurative, personified language, by which the three allegorical characters convey
the message of pro-feminism, taking into account three essential precepts: reason,
rectitude and justice both in Middle Ages civilization and also in the eighteenth
century one. Also, in the original text and in translation too, the impact which
these three virtues have, embodied and spelled in capital letters, creates a
pictographic-symbolical effect, and makes possible for the reader to reach to an
unmediated message. The ladies’ names are metaphors translated as such, given
that they present certain instability of the terms, double meaning according to
literary context. For example, justice may be a derivative of human rights political
regulation that Christine had knowledge of, through her father, who had studied at
the University of Bologna (a University with wide opening for this issue), rights
which were extrapolated to concepts on women`s rights. Therefore, the term
underlined can`t find the very same correspondence in the cultural context of
professor Richards.
De Pizan offers historic male writing of the so-called
untrustworthiness of women which contains countless lexical elements. And by
the agency of the complex syntactic system, makes the reader realize that even if
it is disguised in the shape of a dialogue, in fact it is but a pretext serving an
argumentative rhetoric. Under the form of dialogue the author presents a discourse
which, though comprises esoteric themes regarding philosophy and religion, it is
an easily readable discourse and professor Richards as well, follows this principle
regardless of the themes. Words have the power to express the character`s actions-
their intensified strength functions as speech-acts and the translator, by different
words, mainly adjectives like great, frivolous s.o., render it as best as he can to
express their meanings:

41
 let all writers be silent[…] let them lower their eyes[…], willful and
unreasonable, for although they do what they are supposed to do, they
nevertheless acquire great merits for their souls, refute the comments of these men
who have called women so weak.. (Pizan, 1998 : 42, 31, 54, 60).

The lexis and the syntax of the translated text are indispensable and go
deep, however they are only vehicles. The translator`s objective is to establish,
apart from the linguistic conventions, the intentional disposition of the dialogue
within the framework of literary creation, and in the extended context of the
Middle Ages.
To envisage a woman which carries out male affairs is a corrupted
image, her evil nature becomes a locus comunis in many authors` work,
contemporaneous with Christine, and the latter ventures to demonstrate how
Fredegund, queen of Franks, who may, at first, appear unnaturally cruel, although
she was to rule over her subjects with great skill, after the death of her husband
and king, Kilpernic. Out of translation, we clearly find Christine`s intent to
overlap this event and Fredegund, over her own experience, as a model of
example- advocating for other type of women, that precedent authors failed to
recognize, and the translator successfully complies to it. The original fragment
also employs the term and concept of natural law: En France fu la royne
Fredegonde, laquelle fu femme du roy Chilpernic. Celle dame, nonobstant fust
elle cruelle oultre loy naturelle de femme, toutevoyes après la mort de son mari
gouverna le royaume de France par grant savoir. Another mother and Son close
relation, and the regent mother for her son is an analogy to the first sacrificial
woman; in the second chapter added by Christine about Fredegund ( Cité, I.23)
she says:
elle fust denouree vesve du roy Chilperich, son mari, ayant Clotaire son filz a
mamelle. In this way Christine expresses political power made legitimate by the
legal and theological context of Mariology.
I perceive de Pizan as being a classical writer as she seems to be
sympathetic with the receiver of her message, if though she would give away her
literary creation`s sense. Yet like many other classics, de Pizan too, even if it
seems to facilitate the understanding of her text, she just obstructs even more, the
comprehension of it. At a shallow examination, it looks as if she counsels women

42
to be servile, to be humble, passives, it is in fact only a subversive method to
make those learned women and with power of discernment, realize that in order to
make themselves heard, they have to assimilate traditional knowledge originated
from men, as a first step in their becoming. The translator becomes aware of that,
and, in turn expresses these, taking into account de Pizan’ historical and religious
period of creation, obstacles without which it wouldn`t be a fiction any more. It
goes without saying that de Pizan wanted the reader to have access to the
informational basis, rather than to the linguistic camouflage, that`s the reason why
she chose to write in vernacular French, meant for all women to be able to read it,
in a time when they were deprived of learning, in an institutional framework. I
believe the translator has the same duty, to exceed the bounds of language or the
difference between the two languages, and to transmit, as coherent as can be, the
content.
The content is expressed by tonality, by the cumulative effect of the
key words and idiomatic locution, which may be supported, and so to say,
underneath their surface is a complex domain of semantic-philosophic- religious-
ethic values .Even though many of these values have their origin in philosophical
systems, religious doxastic in Middle Ages, numerous find their equivalents in the
eighteenth century and even in the present days. They have the value of
universality. Like worthy classics of literature do, using universal concepts, with
the possibility to discern which are those having a universal significance, she
chose those that helped her found a fictional oeuvre.
So much the worse is the translator`s imposition to discern the
uttermost important value as opposed to the others (others meaning the pretext for
writing a literary creation).
Nature, Reason, Justice and Rectitude, belong at the same time to the
current vocabulary and to the philosophical vocabulary. The implications of these
terms, become a model of thinking and behavior promoted by Christine at a
metaphorical level, and they are legitimated existentially by historical deeds of
diverse women.
Christine, as she herself says, raises her constructing discourse on these
universal Christian and philosophical concepts, in support of the work’s meaning,
for the message to reach her reader more clearly, and it is translated on the same
principle. The double dealing of sense, makes us realize her anticipation of the

43
literary voices. It can be understood, by extrapolation that she is expressing herself
indirectly, through her persona voice, but even by the one of her characters. For
example, by Nature, we see the law of nature or ius naturale. Her rhetorical
question posit to Droiture, whether the love between a man and a woman, while
founded on the law of nature is influenced by reason, finds its response in
Thomas’ Summa:
[…] ius sive iustum natural est quod ex sui natura est adaequatum vel
commensuratum alteri.Hoc autem potest contingere dupliciter. Uno modo,
secundum absolutam sui considerationem, sicut masculus ex sui ratione habet
commensurationem ad feminam ut ex ea generet, et parens ad filium ut eum
nutria….Et ideo hoc quidem est natural homini secundum rationem naturalem,
quae hoc dictatv (Summa, II, ii, 57, art. 3.). Christine points out indirectly to the
usage of the thomist apanage, by which the good of the community can only be
known by its men. Christine asks Droiture: Dame, or passons oultre ycestes
questions, et yssant un petit hors des termez, continuez jusques ycy. Moult
voulentiers vous feroie aucunes demandes, se ja savoie que ennuyer ne vous en
deust, pour ce que la matiere sur quoy je parleroie, quoique la chose soit fondee
sur loy de nature, yst aucunement hors de l’atrempement de raison. / Et celle a
moy respondi: Amie, dis ce que il te plaira, car le disciple qui pour apprendre
demande au maistre ne doit estre repris se il enquiert de toutes choses. / Dame, il
cuert au monde une loy naturelle des homes aux femmes et des femmes aux
homes, non mie loy faicte par establissement de gens, mais par inclination
charnelle, par laquelle ilz s’entreaiment de tres grant et enforciee amour par une
fole plaisance, et si ne scevent a quelle cause ne pourquoi tele amour l’un de
l’autre en eulx se fiche.( Christine de Pizan, une femme de science,/une femme de
lettres, p. 102) The correspondent passage, in the English version preserves the
meaning intended by de Pizan.
The Thomist principle of common good is nothing else than a pretext, in
the author’s contemporaneous society, for a male political domination. And to
strengthen their cause, by bringing arguments, they often cited from misogynistic
literature. Such a work is Ars amatoria by Ovid. The translator doesn’t intrude in
the original fragment, and renders its intended sense. The original is as follows:
Mais sur le point que tu m’as touchié que ilz dient que pour le bien commun le
firent, je monstreray que pour ce ne fust ce mie, et voycy la raison: autre chose

44
n’est bien commun ou publique en une cité ou pays ou communité de people fors
un prouffit et bien general, ouquel chacun, tant femmes comme homes,
particippent ou ont part. Mais la chose qui seroit faicte en cuidant proffiter aux
uns et non aux autres, seroit appellé bien privé ou proper, et non mie publique. Et
ancore moins le seroit le bien que on touldroit aux uns pour donner aux autres et
tele chose doit estre appellee non mie seulement bien propre ou privé mais droicte
extorcion faite a autrui en faveur de partie et a son grief pour soustenir l’aurte. .
(Christine de Pizan, une femme de science,/ une femme de lettres, p. 102)
Christine’s neo-Thomist contemporary adepts, change the patristic message for
achieving their own political scope, from which derives wealth. So the great
fortunes of females’ inheritances come to be administrated by men, because they
have no legal power.
We perceive the employment of the present tense, with continuous
function in translation, as a means of representing images that belong to a fictional
reality, whereby world`s women actions constitutes into actual documents, with
value, even in our present times, and come to be a proof against those who tried to
disrepute women. It is a translation strategy that gave course to de Pizan’ s
intention, of bringing into existence a history that belongs to women, in the sense
of history repeating itself. It is intended for those who want to comprehend the
respects which concern women, in their relationship towards men. I have asked a
question concerning the above mentioned and professor Richards’ reply was:

An interesting query. As I remember, I translated Christine’s tenses as they appear

in the original (with of course an exception for the English present perfect). The
difficulty in the translation lay with preserving as much as possible Christine’s
syntactic complexity. / Now, to come to the central point you raise: is women’s
history repeating itself? I think it is more that Christine is trying to establish an
historical continuity in the history of women’s struggles. This may mean that
history is repeating itself, but it means more, I think, that history simply hasn’t
changed. This question is terrifically difficult because it asks the fundamental
question of Christine’s philosophy of history. (interview, professor Richards)

When we take into consideration the informative function (on women

competence) of the source text and the translated one, and also the receiver

45
standpoint, which consolidates itself depending on its impact upon him/her, it
seems to us, that the translator chooses not to make valid his linguistic statement,
through the agency of an attempt to convince authentically and directly. But in a
paradoxical way, uses the same linguistic structures like those of Matheolus or
Ovid. So that the vocabulary remains authentic, by what the moderns call
intertextuality, by the context of intertextuality. The verbal expressions, which
makes sense in:
But she was drawn so strongly to the maiden and to her son that she could not
leave and she carefully took note of their beauty which she greatly praised” (de
Pizan, 1998, p.175,) is not just a simple paraphrase subsequent to Cité des Dames,
but it would have been impossible this passage to be translated as such, unless the
translator had confined to the universal context of maternity and to the author`s
biography. This little bit of a fragment make us think about the taking over into
the target culture and internalization, which is the case, by interpreting the
Christian maternal concept, which Christine perceived in Middle Ages French. If
we are to cite Ricoeur: The text central element is the text world. Or, by analogy,
the meaning of the text, has its own language. The form suggested by professor
Richards, which however, doesn`t betray its content. He chooses this mode of
rendering and does not strive to find archaic terms to adapt it to his age, but opts
for a linguistics configuration, that is appropriate to the cultural civilization in
which he lives. And which enable a human reaction out of correlating a
formulation, which finds its correspondents in the vivid imagination of the people.
The language does not become an impediment in the way of
cognition. The fact that in translation, the dialogue is being preserved in the same
manner as in the original, the dialogue (as a source of inspiration for intellectual
disputes from Antiquity rhetoric), proves that the writer`s preference is an inspired
one, even in the future and different linguistics culture and development, since it
increases the dramatic character of human conflict with which are dealt problems
regarding the ignorance of the qualities women are gifted with. And the translator
acts well for de Pizan uses those apparently naive statements with subversive hints
because they are contrary to the explanations given by the three virtues.
Consequently, out of dialectics or, later on out of polemic, we can see better the
real sense. By what we call today intertextuality, Christine justifies her words
taking into consideration what she read. So she suggests a model of comparison,

46
the possibility to discern on the basis of a double knowledge, both a male view as
well as women about women.
When there is a dictatorial authority in literature on social grounds, the
reader cannot have a correct perception over the reality for the intellectual
knowledge does not have to be restricted on social basis. It has to provide variants
of discernment. That is one of the messages given by de Pizan.
In this situation I am following an approach of translation by which the
significance from the source language passes to a receiving language through a
transformational process. The obstacle constitutes the obvious fact that a language
differs by another, that an interpreting transfer described sometimes in a deceiving
way as being of codification and decodification must occur so that the message
can be conveyed. In our case the difference between the source and the receiver is
the source language linguistics context with its taboos, its encodings different
from the English one. The cultural context is different from that of the receiver,
different times, time barrier, different historical context. Words do not betray the
change of meaning at the exterior, it embodies the history only in a well-
established context. And given the fact that I am dealing with a translation in a
standardized linguistics structure, as opposed to the Provençal language that every
Middle Ages man would understand, so much the more criptica are the semantic
dating signs. Accordingly, I and the translator understand out of Christine, through
inertia, what is left from what is lost regarding our power of comprehension in
certain historical circumstances.
I go through a diachronic translation channel from two languages of
distinct origin. Having knowledge of such a work is important for women in
general and the verbal structure is the only means of handing down to posterity the
pro-feminist message. Christine`s intention is one of creating a history of women
as she chooses exemplary women characters beginning with Antiquity until her
time, for the same reasons mentioned above, to be left as a testimony for future
generations. History is a speech-act, a selective employment of the past tense.
Those misogynists (Matheolus, Ovid and so on) who write wicked things
about women make true certain realities that they consider to be or which they
want them to be as far as it does not exist a history to certify the exemplary
material deeds of Amazon fighing martyres, the devoted wives and so forth. When
centuries sets us apart from those achievements, we have no other method of

47
knowledge given that the men`s courageous deeds are written in history treatises.
So what lasts out of this translation process on women`s actions history, even if at
a formal level the connection cannot be restored. This history makes that the ideas
expressed by Christine, as related to women, for example the one of Antiquity
period, seem to Earl Richard or I such as being abstract, but maybe this was a way
for the author to transform the work into an allegory dedicated to femininity.
These acts performed by women become archetypes for a certain manner of
conduct and virtues which would suit every woman since it transcends the reality
with the help of time imprint. And both I and the translator have to translate them
according to the above mentioned considerations.
If I am to consider the two syntactic systems, that of vernacular French and
that of modern English, I can strongly affirm that the receiving of the text in those
times is done mainly in an intuitive manner, that I consider it to approach like
period to the mythological culture, the beginnings of Christianity compared to the
receiving discourse of the eighteenth century. And at a time when the syntax was
unstable from the point of view of singular/plural endings and the ones related to
masculine/feminine genders, of a lack of structure in constructing the subject and
the object of the sentence as opposed to the coagulated phraseology formal
structure of English modern society which makes the receiving to be a scientific
one in which the terms concerned are established formally. In other words it is
ascertained a partial understanding for the translators of a world related to
spirituality, to sense perception such as it is the case in “The City of Ladies”.
Yet in these stories is also used the past tense, that make us think of the
fact that the readers do not have to forget a thing of what it is said in the work and
not to give the impression of an allegorical work being a pretext for fiction. The
past tense expresses equally death. The death of a human being is the only
certainty in a man/woman life and leads us implicitly to that person existence. In
this case allegory is considered etymological and not as a literary creation. The
translator is aware of that because if he had taken into account the second variant
he would have probably used the present tense. This belief is getting more
stronger given that the usage of the past comes in contra mundum with the
eighteenth century tendencies –to rally to the present, the only one capable to
transcend the real space, an attempt to re-initiate non-temporal Eden.

48
 I perceive this text as being a women`s history monograph and
consequently the text integrates as a special genre in a whole class of informative
texts together with the treaties, the specialized one that constitutes the field of
social sciences. The attributes of these texts destined to transmit pre-eminently a
content. Earl Jeffrey Richards` resolution was dictated by the imperative to
convey the above said integrally: the invariable content, the denotative is
privileged and is of priority according to differentiate translation. The possibility
of translation requires operations that dissociate conceptual religious or
philosophical signs from the philosophical source-language value in order to
ensure the reincarnation into other meanings in the future, foreign significance of
the target language in which the text is translated. The scandal would be even a
double one, on the one hand this discourse that aims the expression of a
generalized reason can not avoid the historical and cultural of national tradition
characteristic and on the other hand it seems to be obliged to reincarnate into the
accidence with good reason named idiomatic of natural languages. It is exactly
about those texts centered on the sign and which distinguishes by intensifying the
capacity of language to obtain the status of metalanguage. In other words the
reference of the discourse is its own sign.
In the case of this text, endowed with a rigorous semantic fitting,
indetermination is emphasized under the form of paradox. Such a vision over
translation entails, however its risks: the ideology by which it originate from
priviledges the meaning to the detriment of the texts` poeticity, of the method in
which it constructs and draw a sum of distortions of the target text, explanatory
distortions, paraphrase , adding that destroy the primary configuration.
I perceive this text as being a women`s history monograph and
consequently the text integrate as a special genre in a whole class of informative
texts together with the treaties, the specialized one that constitutes the field of
social sciences. The attributes of these texts destined to transmit pre-eminently a
content. Earl Jeffrey Richards` resolution was dictated by the imperative to
convey that integrally: the invariable content, the privilege of denotation is
prioritized, according to differentiate translation.
The possibility of translation requires operations that separate conceptual
religious signs or philosophical signs from the source-language religious,
philosophical so on significants in order to ensure the reincarnation into other

49
significants in the future, foreign significants of the target language in which is
translated the text. The scandal would be even a double one, on the one hand this
discourse that aims the expression of a generalized reason can not avoid the
historical and cultural of national tradition characteristic and on the other hand it
seems to be obliged to reincarnate into the accidence with good reason named
idiomatic of natural languages. It is exactly about the literary texts ensamble,
meaning those texts centered on the sign and which distinguishes by intensifying
the capacity of language to obtain the status of metalanguage. In other words the
reference of the discourse is its own sign.
In the case of our text endowed with a rigorous semantic fitting,
indetermination is emphasized under the form of paradox. Such a vision over
translation entails, however its risks: the ideology by which it originate from
privileges the meaning to the detriment of the texts` poeticity, of the method in
which it constructs and draw a sum of distortions of the target-text, explanatory
distortions, peri and paraphrase adding that destroy the primary configuration.
The translator`s task is not only to translate the original text rhetoric, but
also its poetics. The translator`s duty is to recognize its poetics.
The thought creation generates a poetics if it transforms the language
values into discourse ones, proper only to its discourse. But when language
categories continue to be language categories, the translator just confront with the
rhetoric play. Earl Richards opts for a philological reconstruction of the past,
which actually means studying the text, analyzing its language, and this leads, as I
have proven in this chapter, to a return back to history, biography, ideology,
experience, law and theology for a proper understanding of the text. This choice
may be connected with his perception that Christine transformed the literary scene
by making use of different types of discourses.
The general lexis is transposed through idiomatic proceedings, the
translation of the terminology takes place rather through imitative channels that
resorts to literal translation, to borrowings, or to the usage of some cognate terms
in the translated language: the imitative proceedings can in this way contribute to
lay stress on the usual disposition with a greater visibility than in the original text.
The specialized vocabulary is preserved in its exact original preponderance
and translated mainly through correspondence in the spirit of a strictly adequate
terms while the general vocabulary permits and even claims the idiomatic

50
translation through equivalence. The given methodology conceals a double
ideology of the translation act- the translation by strict correspondence of the
specialized vocabulary expresses finally, both confusion between concept and
word due to the fact that the pledge for a success translation is determined by the
conviction that sense expression depends on the possibility to keep this one in
every occurrence from the source text.
Because the original text is written in vernacular French, the obligation of
the translator is to guide the foreign text towards its own public. And not to fall
into the aporia trap of translatable/ untranslatable which is derived from
prolonging a substantialist metaphisics of language that tends to sacralize the
source-language, to overevaluate its expressive possibilities. Each term occurrence
indicates a specific issue of translation, in the contextual way : sometimes through
the syntagm natural and incontrollable, or through capitalist and other time by
natural and archaic. Earl Richards made possible this translation after he had
completed the critical acceptance process of equivalence paradox without having
to resort to adequation.
Each language has its own means to organize and interpret the world and
neither its semantic structures overlap from a language to another, nor are its
syntax equivalents. A felicitous translation is realized in my opinion by presenting
a third text in order to judge a text correctly. Or a tertium comparationes is better
in this situation.
What Earl Richards did in his translation and with good reason, was to
avert the original letter to the only benefit of meaning and of what is called
beautiful form.

To ennoble- by this virtue the translation of the text becomes felicitous, a

kind of stylistic exercise, a great re-writing of the source-text and as a
consequence this prose is translated through the enforcement of rhetoric. The
abstraction makes double the ennoblement of register, stylizing the discourse
weaving. Given to this it appears that the semantics is not so hard to decipher as in
the original text. despre stylistic in earl
The translator is the mediator not only between two languages but also
between two completely opposite cultures. As Paul Ricoeur says: the “other`s

51
hospitality”, meaning fascination to assume the other`s language is balanced by
the fascination to host in the own space the foreigner`s language.
If I were to talk about a model of translation which Earl Richards follows,
I would say that it entails a complex world of ethical and spiritual humans` life
and peoples. The existence of speech is nowhere to be found except for languages.
The latter does not achieve its universal potentiality that is done just in
differentiated systems, at the level of phonology, lexis, syntax and style.
However, languages are not closed systems to exclude the communication.
The fact that exists only one human species give me the opportunity to extrapolate
to the sense transfers which are possible from one language to another, in other
words that we come to translate. The ability to translate is postulated at a
fundamental level as an a priori condition for communication. Starting from the
principle of universal translation I will talk about this translation I am confronted
with. They differ in that the first is a state of fact representing the case regarding
the field of translation and the translatability represent certain stated truths which
leaves no way for changes in the process.
On a truly spiritual level, the extension of spiritual translation over the
relation between the cultures itself, namely on the sense contents rendered by
translation. The work in question is in need of translators from culture to culture,
of cultural bilinguals, capable to accompany this process of transfer in the other
culture mental universe, in the full regard for the customs, ground faiths, its major
convictions, in short the ensamble of its sense reference. In this regard we can talk
about a translation ethos which scope would be to reiterate on a cultural and
spiritual basis the gesture of linguistic hospitality above evoked. Also related to de
Pizans` oeuvre- to translate her work means even to assume imaginative and with
benevolence the other one`s history. It is about a memory exchange on a narrative
plan in which these values offer themselves to be understood. The identity of a
group, of a culture, of a nation is neither of an immutable substance, nor of a set
structure, but that of a narrated history. In this respect it may be said that culture is
closely related to the transmission of meanings in time and translation
accompanied by narration is also connected to meanings transfers over time. The
only certain linguistic basis which readers can rely on in this case is that one
entailed by historical, social, political and biographical context, since Old French
as a lingua franca extended over vast territories giving birth to Provençal that

52
represented a great task even in those times for French speakers to decipher not to
mention for an eighteenth century English translator. So in the Middle Ages as in
the modern period it is required a translation that would follow some directions as
close as possible to the interlingual transfer.
It is also possible that under the formal level of polemic, actually Christine to
disguise a polemic function of language within her social surroundings
(social, political and economic differences that the author perceived) that is
prevalent over the authentic communication functions. De Pizan has a clear view
about the protocol and the way in which someone had to behave in high society.
And perhaps she also was aware that in such a society people would rather speak
of each other than to each other. So, there may also be a deep rooted polemic
encoded in the deep structure. The translator renders a certain mode of expression
between Christine on the one hand and the ones she calls “ladies”. If I think of
register, the translator chooses it and may be as well a code of identity that
establishes between the ladies belonging to the same high society. But as it is
known from the writer’s biography regarding her principles, her formal and
humble attitude towards the three virtues results from her sincere admiration and
respect for those ladies’ wisdom and knowledge. On a linguistic level, register
here may be a pretext for parody of De Pizan’s contemporary society mode of
addressing, which was based only on clichés and on conventions and not on moral
or sincere one. Only this substance of meaning is not useless here, it is a
functional stylistic device that expresses through subtle allusion the position of
Christine towards social statue and the true values that she believed in. In my
opinion is a double focus on the aristocratic semantics. In other words the
aristocratic silly way of speech, alongside with their hard to understand attitude,
founded on lies. Christine’s discourse is at the same time exact and obscure. She
establishes successfully an accomplice relationship with those who come into
obscurity. This obscurity may also be the effect created by false or misleading
information that the writer uses as a linguistic means, called parody, the splendid
device adorning common language. The syntax contribute to the same message,
the author using complex clauses, syllables and phrases, like the ones the
privileged people often make use of as a resultant fact of their economic wealth.
About her biography

53
 On a psychological level, the linguistic strategy of encoding demonstrates
a rebellion from the part of the author, by this I mean that Christine refuses to
write as openly as her predecessor male colleagues did, when some of them
criticized women in general bringing forth untrue proofs to sustain their critique.
The only way to defend her point of view is a linguistic detachment from the
previous writings which attack women systematically and I believe they did it in
order to maintain their intellectual authority. If that was the case or not they
thought wrong, because of those writings’ lack for artistic value.
Another problem the translator of this prose may encounter is that related
to tonality. The innocent questions of Christine and the responses she receive in
the form of outbursts from the Virtues may lead the receiver to opposite
directions. In fact, Christine’s inquiries are just a formal layer for the rhetoric
device and the answers she receives represents in fact explanatory information
with documents taken from reality.
De Pizan is conscious of the social constraints that women undergo in her
contemporary society, for instance the latter suffer exploitation of various kinds-
from sexual to juridical and economical one and I believe that is one of the
reasons why she opts for internal codes of communication as a linguistic
psychological means of a defensive attitude together with the religious appanage.
There is a close dependence between sexuality and the act of speech at the
semantic level and this is more visible in the Middle Ages “City of Ladies” both
acts having in common mainly social regulations. Communication is achieved by
a writer, in this case we are dealing with a female one and is also determined by
her social status. Christine was a privileged writer who wrote under the protection
of the Court of France and in my opinion this is another reason for which she
didn’t write in her native language.din earl Jeffrey cu Charles al v si protectoratul
lui
The translator encountered another difficulty in translating this prose,
namely he as a male had to resort to a cross over from what the ethnolinguists call
male language to an understanding of female language. The huge difference
between male and female language is dictated by a relation quality existing within
the limits of language and sex. In the tanslated text there are many explicitations
derived probably from Christine’s nominal descriptions in the French language,

54
also from the translation I understand more than it is expressed, so characteristic a
feature for women’s language.
De Pizan anticipated what future linguists through scientific research
discovered. The way in which she deliberately resorted to disinformation makes
me think of the later unreliable authors. This is the result of language’s double
structure. The formal language of De Pizan covers its correspondent meanings.
To quote Ortega y Gasset: “Al converser vivimos en sociedad, al pensar nos
quedamos solos”
My conviction is that the 15-th century female author strongly believes in
the power of logos as it derives from God and its capacity to reveal real facts
which otherwise could remain unknown. More generally there is a dependence
between humans’ experiences and language. To express the mysterious ways in
which functions the language in peoples’ lives and its midway positioning among
the two variables, that of uncreated matter reaching towards literary creation,
Christine utilize what we call today the metaphor of a stable building. However
the building may also be symbolic for the primordial language of Paradise in
which the sign and his correspondent reality were ideally compatible. The author
of “The City of Ladies” is driven by this above mentioned principle, under the
authority of the Queen of Heaven. The translator Earl Richards does not let
himself to be tricked by the mistake of overinterpretation. He does not interfere in
the original message and gives the reader the opportunity of decision. So the
author’s gnostic reveries are to be found in the translated text under models and
metaphors. I may paraphrase, under these considerations Lucian Blaga, the
philosopher who sustained that those who try to decipher the mysteries of the
world by explaining them, loose for the most part their essential sense. That is, I
believe, the case of translation too. I give the following excerpts from the
translated prose to support what I have already stated : Thus, fair daughter, the
prerogative among women has been bestowed on you to establish and build the
City of Ladies. For the foundation and completion of this City you will draw fresh
waters from us as from clear fountains, and we will bring you sufficient building
stone, stronger and more durable than any marble with cement could be. Thus
your City will be extremely beautiful, without equal, and of perpetual duration in
the world. (The Book of the City of Ladies, p. 11)

55
 In other words the translation operated by Richards is accordingly with the
fundamental principle of philology which actually defines it- the love for logos.
His main concern is in preserving the meanings of the original text by using
structures that are not similar with its original. Ceea ce spune jeff despre continut,
mesaj
Another paragraph mentions: We greet you, Queen of Heaven, with the
greeting which the Angel brought you, when he said, Hail Mary, which pleased
you more than all other greetings. May all the devout sex of women humbly
beseech you that it please you well to reside among them with grace and mercy, as
their defender, protector, and guard against all assaults of enemies and of the
world, that they may drink from the fountain of virtues which flows from you and
be so satisfied that every sin and vice be abominable to them.. (The Book of the
City of Ladies, p. 218)
An interpretation of the above paragraph content would be the sine qua non (in
Christine’s conservative view- from a religious perspective) relationship existing
between language and human beings on the one hand and the decisive role played
by Divinity in this equation. Ce spunea paul
The word city is rendered by a literal translation of the French cité and the
action of constructing this edifice both as a physical and fictional endeavor is
originates from a superior human intelligence and determination. “City” includes
a double meaning: the mundane conventional system in which a social hierarchy
was the dominant criteria that regulated the social relations (with the habitual
custom of gift giving) in opposition to the allegorical city projected by Christine,
where only those citizens women who did acts of courage or have beautiful
character are invited to reside inside its walls. Many critics talk about the writer in
terms of how integrated part she made within her contemporaneous society. In
fact, the only way of knowing a writer’s principles is through his writings.
What signified history for a 15-th century author is not comparable to a
contemporaneous one. If in the period of De Pizan history was held in high
esteem, among the main sciences, she structured her narration in a succession of
events resembling with those in history books. I am confident that she thought this
would give once more true value to her related facts, due to the fact that she
herself says about the existence of the manuscripts where these facts can be
verified. What Earl Richards could have done was just to preserve this

56
configuration for the sake of meaning. This repetition in the translated text of this
method of writing demonstrates that Richards had examined this text in detail and
its author before he translated it. From a psychological analysis of translation
applied to the text in question I may conclude that the translator sees in the
evolution of his contemporary language the development of the human thinking.
And he has to provide an adequate mode of representing the reality for the
readers. In support to this belief he translates literally all the aspects of language
and especially metaphors which constitute universal realities and universal ways
of living. Even if he has to translate from Old French into modern English, the
two linguistic systems being at distant poles one from the other, what they have in
common is that both evolved on the same axis of linguistic usage, from the
sensitive to the abstract. The difference between French and English reveals at the
formal level that these languages have infinite particularities of expressing their
own perception of reality in concordance with period of time, social and cultural
constraints or liberties. These particularities constitute the multitude of lexical,
morphological and syntactic corpus.
Another type of interpretation of the late quotation in this new light is that
every language is a figurative representation of a specific civilization, that every
language is under strict and direct protection of the divine powers, in our case
given the fact that the civilization Christine proposes is formed basically by
female, she appeals to the Queen of Heaven for linguistic support in her literary
creation.
Translating from Provençal into English is also a matter of cultural exchange
and this is demonstrated by the form in which Christine employs rhetoric and
naturalness of language in favor of illustrating as propitiously as she could the
vices and virtues of the French nation. The target text tries to compensate this loss
and abounds in verbal expressions so characteristic to English language, while in
the source language there are many nouns and descriptions. The content in the
eighteenth century English text is rendered in the flux of communicating it to the
reader and this presupposes understandable linguistic formula.

57
 SECOND CHAPTER

The power of language and the language empowered both

in “Cité des Dames” and “The Book of the City of Ladies”.

I strongly believe that the need of expression throughout translation not only
what the author wants to convey in the source- text makes the translator adapt in
such a way as to render the cultural context in which such a text appears. Earl
Richards perceives the message of Christine’s work in its totality by knowing all
the “facts” that make up the world of that work. For this purpose his aim as a
translator is to make the reader understand the message by adapting-even if this
means to intrude into the purity of the target language. And by this I mean loan
words as a means towards a better understanding between different cultures. I
consider it to be a natural evolution of languages since we do not have all the
correspondent words in the target language for all the source-language terms.
Resorting to loan words was a means to render the message of the text in the best
way possible and also represented a political attitude since English in the had
been a language of influence in the world due to Great Britain’s political and
economic power in the world.
Besides the fact that the translator provides useful information from a
language to another he also has access to different cultures in order to establish a
more successful code of communication. I as a translator support the idea to use
loan words only when we do not have equivalents for those words in target texts
or when from a stylistic point of view an abstract idea can’t be expressed
otherwise. Mainly loan words depend on the context in which they appear and to
the extent to which one culture adheres to the principles of another. I am certain of
Christine’s intentions in her work. Her objective is to express as clear as possible
the content and for this reason only she made use of international terms, of
Romance origin and not set expressions in the source text. This means that she
addresses to a large target of readers.

58
 On the other hand the translator may interpret the text from his own
perspective of a certain culture. It also depends on his political convictions, his
background, social status.
The fact that “The City of Ladies” was translated into English which is a
globalised language nowadays has its beneficial parts in the sense that this work is
made now available to everyone who master English. This phenomenon of
globalization presupposes different historical epochs and is a relative one since is
in strict relation with the economical power exercised by one country or another.
We are given examples as: the Greek people, the Romance one, the French as
major powers and languages over the history. They all represented for their times
the lingua franca such as it later became English. It all started in the British
Empire colonial period when each part of the world conquered was obliged to
speak the Empire’s language. This represented a passport to each citizen for the
institutional frame of each colony. Due to this immense power that represented the
British Empire and continued to be under the name of United Kingdom, English
evolved into a globalized language.
Translation in this case depends on the situational and cultural contexts,
discourse elements and belong to certain people. I believe that the translator took
into account as much as he could this state of affairs and tried to transfer them into
the target-language, even if this meant the employment of loan words for an
accurate rendering of the original text. Such type of translation brings different
cultures together and make its people understand better each other’s code of
communication. I support his attitude as a translator towards Christine’s work
because if I want to communicate something to a reader by means of translation I
should be able at least to permit that reader to make his own choices of
interpreting the text and not to read a reformulated variant of the original text. And
Earl Jeffrey understood that translators are not substitutable to authors. Sometimes
are preferred omissions or lexical gaps or additional information in the target texts
if it serves best to the original creation.
This translation might have been issued according with various reasons
alongside with those of it being a work of art. Also the complex phenomenon of
intermingling of cultures emerges from fear of difference and from the non-
acceptance of the other’s power. Each state wants to have a distinct identity, a
homogenous common culture, with common values, sharing understandings,

59
loyalties expressed through language. However I think this is not the case here,
since the nations are formed by individuals having multiple identities at the time
when the translation was realized. It is even more absurd not to recognize the
contribution of French culture and language in the construction of English culture.
I am sure that the fundamental values and cultural icons of each state have their
intrinsic potentiality of preservation and to the same extent the other’s culture is
important for exchange of information to the benefit of each state.
An example for our present translator might had been Shakespeare, an
institution in himself for Englishness, who understood the need to search in other
cultures for important values and adapt them to his own culture. The inspiration
for Shakespeare’s plays came in Hamlet from a Latin history of Danmark and a
story from a French collection of Histoires Tragiques.
Another argument that comes to my mind is the linguistic invasions that
are encountered in the English vocabulary (multilingual heterogeneity) which
overshadows any legitimatization to linguistic imperialism. It is almost impossible
to find other languages with an origin so heavy charged with exotic linguistic
elements. These are Old Norse, Danish, Dutch, German, Old French, and later on
until nowadays Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Australian, Hindi, Mexican, Chinese
and so on.
While the Brits were conquering the world and fighting their enemies, they
generally adopted from them what they considered to be proper to their culture.
No wonder they’ve got so far by comparison to their old opponents, the French.
Going back to France’s history and to its unity as a state I can perceive a
direct connection between language and its construction until the sixteenth century
(the period Christine wrote “Cité des Dames”), France was a multilingual nation
and continued to be so when 1789 Revolution established otherwise. From all
these variants Christine chose to utilize a closely related Romance one.
Another characteristic of the French language in general is a “more rational qua
symbolic system” than other languages and that is present both in the original and
is represented accurately in the translated text. Since I serve to demonstrate
clearly and to show both in thought and deed to each man and woman his or her
own special qualities and faults, you see me holding this shiny mirror which I
carry in my right hand in place of a scepter. I would thus have you know truly that
no one can look into this mirror, no matter what kind of creature, without

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achieving clear self-knowledge. My mirror has such great dignity that not without
reason is it surrounded by rich and precious gems, so that you see, thanks to this
mirror, the essences, qualities, proportions, and measures of all things are known,
nor can anything be done well without it. (de Pizan, 1998, p.9).
Also a political implication is given by Christine’s usage of vernacular
French, which is a language different from the language of the majority that is
from a linguistic modern perspective a deviant device and is in strict relation to
the rights of a minority in political theory, in this case the rights of women. As
Christine by means of her father was politically aware of the French governmental
movement regarding the rights of every man to be treated equally and the rights of
citizens to be respected, she as a genial authoress seized the above mentioned
aspect at the linguistic level. Christine de Pizan realized that in order to promote
the rights of women it is important to speak out the language of her social group
and only in this way that right has a chance to become one. And for this reason she
constructed a fortress of language dedicated to femininity. The translator rendered
as such the assertion and explanations of the original text.
When I held it open [….] that like other books it discussed respect for women. I
thought I would browse through it to amuse myself […..]Because the subject
seemed to me not very pleasant for people who do not enjoy lies, and of no use in
developing virtue or manners, given its lack of integrity in diction and theme, and
after browsing here and there, I put it down[…..]But just the sight of this book,
even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so
many different men-and learned men among them-have been and are so inclined
to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many devilish
and wicked thoughts about women and their behavior. (De Pizan, 1998, p.3)
Because de Pizan was a profound political thinker she viewed the rights of
women as essentially individual and was probably a precursor for the domain of
the right to free expression. A linguistic means to achieve this was to make use of
intertextuality by referring to all those men who wrote bad things about women at
a time when women were not in a privileged position in society, the majority
having no right to education and had no weapons to defend themselves. …so that
from now on, ladies and all valiant women may have a refuge and defense against
the various assailants, those ladies who have been abandoned for so long,
exposed like a field without a surrounding hedge, without finding a champion to

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afford them an adequate defense, notwithstanding those noble men who are
required by order of law to protect them…It is no wonder then that their jealous
enemies, those outrageous villains who have assailed them with various weapons,
have been victorious in a war in which women have had no defense. Where is
there a city so strong which could not be taken immediately if no resistance were
forthcoming, or the law case, no matter how unjust, which was not won through
the obstinance of someone pleading without opposition? And the simple, noble
ladies, following the example of suffering which God commands, have cheerfully
suffered the great attacks which […] (The Book of the City of Ladies, p.10)
Since the authoress writes in Provençal she tries to make learning accessible
to women in general, the translator understands this state of affairs and in turn
makes it easier for the reader to follow the narration. It is an easy readable. For
this great loss that represents the reality of uneducated women in the sixteenth
century, the female writer tries to recompose the entire history in the form of a
monograph dedicated to femininity. I may interpret in this attitude a legitimation
of her sayings by creating a cultural background of reference. She gives account
of the good deeds realized by queens or simple women that existed in the world.
Christine recreates a cultural background and in my opinion rediscovers a cultural
identity for women.
I believe that political, economic, social and cultural aspects are transparent
in language. The authoress chooses the words and language, so she starts from
detail and from expressions, symbols, metaphors and proverbs and by this whole
accumulation of features arrives to affirm general issues concerning femininity.
In the first part of the prose there are many such elements I have already
mentioned and the translator preserved them in the English text. They are not
always what they seem to be. Christine herself initiates women in the art of
analysis of a text, referring to ancient writers that say one thing when they actually
mean the contrary. So he warns us about what we call later an unreliable narrator.
It also seems that you think that all the words of the philosophers are articles of
faith, that they could never be wrong. As far as the poets of whom you speak are
concerned, do you not know that they spoke on many subjects in a fictional way
and that often they mean the contrary of what their words openly say? One can
interpret them according to the figure of grammar called antiphrasis, which
means, as you know, that if you call something bad, in fact, it is good, and also

62
vice versa. Thus I advise you to profit from their works and to interpret them in
the manner in which they are intended in those passages where they attack
women. (De Pizan, 1998, p.7)
Nowadays language as communication in different fields of activity is very
important, but what is more interesting represents the fact that Christine also
expressed this notion in the sixteenth century. This confirms once again the
authors’ high encyclopedic culture and her correct linguistic understanding.
The writer is well aware of the force of language. And it is not just some
language or another, is the language of a female writer in the sixteenth century. In
our present days we judge such a language of an author and translator in terms of
“discourse”.
I.P. Pavlov studied in detail the existent report between the language system
and conscience, the first one signalizing the world around us through impressions
made by each and every excitation. The theoretician discovered that language is
even more important than our first sense of perception because due to the abstract
involvement a special word property that reach a high degree of generalization,
humans can perceive their contact with reality in the general forms of time, space,
causality.
I didn’t realize for the first time why Christine chose to utilize abstract terms
instead of common ones since she addressed to those uneducated women of her
time. But maybe an explanation would be that she thought of future female
readers and knew that the situation would change in this respect and wanted her
readers to perceive her circumstances and the entire mobiles which drove her to
write this prose. She must have thought that since she, in the Middle Ages had
been allowed the right to education, many more in the future would be also:
Thus you can understand, fair sweet friend, God has demonstrated that He has
truly placed language in women’s mouths so that He might be thereby served.
They should not be blamed for that from which issues so much good and so little
evil, for one rarely observes that great harm comes from their language.
(de Pizan, 1998, p. 30).
As I have already mentioned there are elements in de Pizan’s work that are
rendered in the translation as such. Christine “starts” from particular to general in
the sense that she reduces the particular to general. One example is: But, sweet
friend, don’t you see the overweening madness, the irrational blindness which

63
prompt such observations? Is Nature, the chambermaid of God, a greater mistress
than her master, almighty God from whom comes such authority, who, when He
willed, took the form of man and women from His thought when it came to His
holy will to form Adam from the mud of the ground in the field of Damascus and,
once created, brought him into the Terrestrial Paradise which was and is the most
worthy place in this world here below? There Adam slept, and God formed the
body of woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she should stand at his side as
a companion and never lie at his feet as a slave, and also that he should love her
as his own flesh. If the Supreme Craftsman was not ashamed to create and form
the feminine body, would Nature then have been ashamed? It is the height of folly
to say this! Indeed, how was she formed? I don’t know if you have already noted
this: she was created in the image of God. How can any mouth dare to slander the
vessel which bears such a noble imprint? But some men are foolish enough to
think, when they hear that God made man in His image, that this refers to the
material body. This was not the case, for God had not yet taken a human body.
The soul is meant, the intellectual spirit which lasts eternally just like the Deity.
God created the soul and placed wholly similar souls, equally good and noble in
the feminine and in the masculine bodies. Now, to turn to the question of the
creation of the body, woman was made by the Supreme Craftsman. In what place
was she created? In the Terrestrial Paradise. From what substance? Was it vile
matter? No, it was the noblest substance which had ever been created: it was from
the body of man from which God made woman.”
‘My lady, according to what I understand from you, woman is a most noble
creature. But even so….’
“The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither
the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex,
but in the perfection of conduct and virtues (de Pizan, 1998, p. 23, 24)pt a inlatura
gandirea thomista trupul e ca spiritul
Christine understood in her time that language is a system determined by
society, by established conventions and as a consequence literature represents a
cumulative of what other writers had written before her and it is found on
humanity social experience, it only exists if, in turn its phenomenon depends on
others. And besides all that language is also our weapon by which people operate
with notions taken from reality, but also it is a means to distort reality, like in the

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case of those men who tried to defame women. My lady, how does it happen that
Ovid, who is thought to be one of the best poets-although many learned men say,
and I would also judge it so, in any case thanks to your correcting me, that Vergil
is much more praiseworthy and his works seem to me far more important-that
Ovid attacks women so much and so frequently, as in the book he calls Ars
amatoria, as well as in the Remedia amoris and other of his volumes?”
“My lady, you are right, and I know a book by another Italian author, from the
Tuscan marches, I think, called Cecco d’Ascoli, who wrote in one chapter such
astounding abominations that a reasonable person ought not to repeat them.
She replied, “If Cecco d’Ascoli spoke badly about all women, my daughter,
do not be amazed, for he detested all women and held them in hatred and
disfavor; and similarly, on account of his horrible wickedness, he wanted all men
to hate and detest women.
“I know another small book in Latin, my lady, called the Secreta mulierum,
The Secrets of Women, which discusses the constitution of their natural bodies
and especially their great defects. (de Pizan, 1998, p. 21, 22).
To all those men above mentioned, she brings arguments in favor of women,
having as a basis of her argumentation “The Book” of all times- the Bible,
arguments from logic for example: Similarly, God endowed women with the
faculty of speech- may He be praised for it-for had He not done so, they would be
speechless. But in refutation of what this proverb says (which someone, I don’t
know who, invented deliberately to attack them), if women’s language had been so
blameworthy and of such small authority, as some men argue, our Lord Jesus
Christ would never have deigned to wish that so worthy a mystery as His most
gracious resurrection be first announced by a woman, just as He commanded the
blessed Magdalene, to whom He first appeared on Easter, to report and announce
it to His apostles and to Peter. Blessed God, may you be praise, who, among the
other infinite boons and favors which You have bestowed upon the feminine sex,
desired that woman carry such lofty and worthy news. (de Pizan, 1998, p.28).
What Christine actually does, she is using collective experience in the way she
uses elements and the linguistic system in which these elements function.
The female author realizes that outside the given system the elements
couldn’t exist, they cannot be objects of knowledge because in the world they
exist only in strict relation or in opposition.

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 A figure of speech which is preferred by Christine and which the
translator so clearly understands and transpose in the text is metaphor. Metaphor is
used in order to utilize semantic analogy and to create semantic difference. On the
basis of metaphor as I well know stands the lack of resemblance. Because de
Pizan is not just a prose writer but a complete one, who wrote poetry as well as
prose, she changes the common usage of a word, phrase or expression to the
benefit of what she wants to express, in this sense if I may add, semantics is
enriched. Later theories were able to discover these capacities of geniuses to play
with word constructions. A contemporary of her time, with the ability mentioned
so far, was Shakespeare. “You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in
women’s clothes while he slept; because those who were making fun of him
repeatedly told him he was a woman, he believed their false testimony more
readily than the certainty of his own identity. I think that metaphors can be
considered those proverbs with hidden messages that encapsulate collective
wisdom transmitted orally: Fair daughter, have you lost all sense? Have you
forgotten that when fine gold is tested in the furnace, it does not change or vary in
strength but becomes purer the more it is hammered and handled in different
ways? Do you not know that the best things are the most debated and the most
discussed? (De Pizan, 1998, p.6)
Get up, daughter! Without waiting any longer, let us go to the Field of Letters.
There the City of Ladies will be founded on a flat and fertile plain, where all fruits
and freshwater rivers are found and where the earth abounds in all good things.
Take the pick of your understanding and dig and clear out a great ditch wherever
you see the marks of my ruler, and I will help you carry away the earth on my
shoulders.”(de Pizan, 1998, p.16)
On a semantic ground what metaphors “do” is actually for a starting point,
they have the conscious sense, the common significance and then all those
common knowledge words are combined in such a dispersed way in which they
are de facto found in the surrounding world. Metaphor is a correction to the
current perception of an object, to the habitual disposition of the traits by which
we recognize the phenomenon. Christine realized its effect because she needed
such an impact upon her readers, a plus of intensity in its perception. Trying to
decipher the message of a metaphor, we reevaluate a thing or state we already
know.

66
 By not mentioning the direct object in question in the second citation,
Christine substitute a degrading image of women with a virtuous one, a method
which doesn’t dissolve the first image and not even makes it less clear, but on the
contrary, the fact that the object is not defined, presented in a metaphorical way as
if it wouldn’t be recognized brings to light, so to say, even more the degrading
image of women.
I think what defines Christine’s fictional work is what Bielinski said in the
article “The idea of art” from 1841 that thought is action and every action
necessarily presupposes movement, that art means an unmediated contemplation
of truth or thinking in images. Bielinski’s opinion that the unmediated
contemplation of truth is achieved in the image movement has its correspondence
in de Pizan’s literary strategy of construction. When the latter describes the image
of the construction of her city and the deeds of many women or still static images
like the thoughts written down by philosophers or literate men, everything must be
rendered in movement. It is what we call nowadays speech acts, by which the
verbs really “do” things. I can give you many examples:
Dear daughter, know that God’s providence, which leaves nothing void or empty,
has ordained that we, though celestial beings, remain and circulate among the
people of the world here below, in order to bring order and maintain in balance
those institutions we created according to the will of God in the fulfillment of
various offices, that God whose daughters we three all are and from whom we
were born. Thus it is my duty to straighten out men and women when they go
astray and to put them back on the right path.
Thus, fair daughter, the prerogative among women has been bestowed on you to
establish and build the City of Ladies. For the foundation and completion of this
City you will draw fresh waters from us as from clear fountains, and we will bring
you sufficient building stone, stronger and more durable than any marble with
cement could be.
I resist the power and might of evil doers. I give rest to workers and reward those
who act well. Through me, God reveals to His friends His secrets; I am their
advocate in Heaven. This shining ruler which you see me carry in my right hand
instead of a scepter is the straight ruler which separates right from wrong and
shows the difference between good and evil: who follows it does not go astray.

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My duty is only to judge, to decide, and to dispense according to each man’s just
deserts. I sustain all things in their condition, nothing could be stable without me.
I am God and God is me.
And of the three noble ladies whom you see here, we are as one and the same, we
could not exist without one another; and what the first disposes, the second orders
and initiates, and then I, the third, finish and terminate it. Thus I have been
appointed by the will of us three ladies to perfect and complete your City, and my
job will be to construct the high roofs of the towers and of the lofty mansions and
inns which will all be made of fine shining gold. Then I will populate the City for
you with worthy ladies and the mighty Queen whom I will bring to you.
-I threw myself at their feet, not just on my knees but completely prostrate because
of their great excellence. Kissing the earth around their feet, adoring them as
goddesses of glory, I began my prayer to them:
Most high and honored lady, your fair words amply satisfy my thinking. But tell
me still, if you please, why women do not plead law cases in the courts of justice,
are unfamiliar with legal disputes, and do not hand down judgements? For these
men say that it is because of some woman (who I don’t know) who governed
unwisely from the seat of justice. (De Pizan, 1998, p. 9, 11, 13, 14, 15)
When the ladies said the fact that they would help Christine build the
“city” and that she has to act in this way or that, those had in mind to elucidate the
essence of the given establishment, the nature of movement. For us to understand
the importance of her city as an image not in itself, but as a means towards a mode
of representation- which signifies the poetic structure of the language, being
related not only with the figure of speech and image representation but even with
an organized movement representation.
The image of the city presents different forms strictly related to the
dynamics in discovering the world. The city is a means of knowledge and not just
a simple reflection of the phenomenon. In Christine’s art the movement –
confrontation are essential principles. The contradiction constitute the usual spring
for subjects regarding Middle Ages’ history, mythology and culture:
[…]Secreta mulierum[…] Although some say that it was written by Aristotle, it is
not believable that such a philosopher could be charged with such contrived lies.
For since women can clearly know with proof that certain things which he treats

68
are not at all true, but pure fabrications, they can also conclude that the other
details which he handles are outright lies.(De Pizan, p.22)
But just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me
wonder how it happened that so many different men- and learned men among
them- have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their
treatises and writings so many devilish and wicked thoughts about women and
their behavior. (The Book of the City of Ladies, p. 3)
At the level of the sentence can be found another contradiction:
So occupied with these painful thoughts my head bowed in shame, my eyes filled
with tears, leaning my cheek on my hand, elbow propped on the pommel of my
chair’s armrest, I suddenly saw a ray of light fall on my lap, as though it were the
sun. I shuddered then, as if wakened from sleep, for I was sitting in a shadow
where the sun could not have shone at that hour. (The Book of the City of Ladies,
p.6)
The society within which lived de Pizan is an enclosure for women. As I
learned from her biography, because as a widow wanted to remain a respected
lady, left her house only accompanied by her relatives. So, it seems to me that for
her to escape a life like that with its strict rules, in which if someone wanted to
pay another a visit had to announce themselves she found refuge in literary
reveries.
The complex metaphor of the “City of Ladies” has various meanings, it
enables women in her time to find refuge in a less painful reality and at the same
time the author presents them another potential reality for them, given the fact that
women before them had been capable of so courageous deeds: A country called
Scythia lies along the borders of Europe near the great ocean which surrounds the
entire world. A long time ago it happened that this land lost all the important men
living there through war. When the women of the place saw that they had lost their
husbands and brothers and male relatives, and only old men and children were
left them, they courageously assembled and took consel among themselves and
decided finally that thenceforth they would maintain their dominion by
themselves.” “ [..] Empress Nicaula. For though there had been many kings of
great fame called pharaohs in the vast, wide, and varied lands which she
governed, and from whom she was descended, during her rule this lady was the
first to begin to live according to laws and coordinated policies, and she

69
destroyed and abolished the crude customs found in the territories over which she
was lord and reformed the rude manners of the savage Ethiopians. (De Pizan, p.
32)
And the examples continue.
If I am to draw a conclusion from what I have already mentioned, I may
say that de Pizan’s prose involves a scientific analysis and also one of the
differences existing in manifestation of her presented phenomenon.
Another means of prose realization in present work is by presenting
voyages in time, real or imaginary ones, describing some miracles or strange
deeds of women, their amazing lives. So, I am determined to include this novel in
the popular-scientific genre. For a European woman writer in the Middle Ages
France is peculiar that she also wrote about ancient peoples from Orient:
Semiramis was a woman of very great strength- in fact, of strong and powerful
courage in enterprises and undertakings in deeds of arms-and was do outstanding
that the people of that time who were pagans used to say […] This lady was the
wife of King Ninus, who named the city of Nineveh after his own name and who
was such a forceful conqueror that, with the help of his wife Semiramis (who, like
him, would campaign in arms), he subjugated mighty Babylon and all the strong
land of Assyria and many other countries. (de Pizan, 1998, p. 38) It is what we
call today exotics, de Pizan is preoccupied to decipher some meanings in what is
already known. This enterprise is not at all chaotic since the author makes
reference to Christianity and to the Apostles. Her voyages, like those of Apostles
are initiatory and of great importance for women of humanity. And I say all these
because de Pizan distinguishes between her real and imaginary stories when she
writes about the Greek Gods: Have you not read that King Tros founded the great
city of Troy with the aid of Apollo, Minerva and Neptune, whom the people of that
time considered gods, and also how Cadmus founded the city of Thebes with the
admonition of the Gods?” .And the other aspect of reality in: “Long ago the
Amazon kingdom was begun through the arrangement and enterprise of several
ladies of great courage who despised servitude, just as history books have
testified . (de Pizan, 1998, p.11)despre semiramis despre they care spun
I think that what I understand today by the “myth of Babel” inspired de
Pizan too. But she viewed the cooperation of various distinct cultures for one and

70
the same human right- to recognize the merits of women in general and in her
“tower” the author places the most meriting woman of all times: Virgin Mary.
And I believe another reason in the selection of her vocabulary, syntax and
morphology is due to the fact that she wanted to become a universal “translator”
of numerous cultures for all future constructors of feminine individuality. She
started building from foundation and succeeded to complete her great work
bringing examples from all over the world for women to follow and showing
those that women who succeeded are not exceptions from one part of the world or
another.
The “bricks” of experience and hard work made her come to some
understanding of the world surrounding her and she is sharing that experience
with her readers. De Pizan is also an ideology historian- a term by which it should
be understood here the ideology of politics, law, philosophy, theology, in a word
all that involves connection between individual and society. In this respect she
gives examples of women who managed well in these domains of activity that
men claim as their own: Nicaula[..] and varied lands which she governed, and
from whom she was descended, during her rule this lady was the first to begin to
live according to laws and coordinated policies, and she destroyed and abolished
the crude customs found in the territories over which she was lord and reformed
the rude manners of the savage Ethiopians. (De Pizan, 1998, p. 32) And since the
precedent was created, the author doesn’t want to understand why they shouldn’t
continue doing those activities performed in the past by their antecedents. In fact
she declares the opposite and deceives the reader saying that it is no use for
women to do men’s work because there are so many male and that women have to
be preoccupied with domestic tasks- the device employed here is irony.
In the dialogues with the three ladies, de Pizan always uses the first
person when she asks a question which indicates a conscious value attributed to
individuality. By this I understand a descriptive concept that doesn’t necessarily
imply a value judgment in her work, it doesn’t have a correspondent in egoism,
but it defines, above all, a certain reference to law that is untraditional for her
period of life- a reference that may all the while correspond, in form, to a certain
contesting collective actions. Christine has a particular style of writing, a creation
of a world in which she organizes everything, in which the reader is invited to

71
learn subtle things and if the readers have any doubts, Christine asks them to
search for themselves in history books.
As I will have discovered later on, what she defines by beautiful, making
use of the light-motif of flower is what Plato himself understood by the idea of
beautiful. Beauty for Plato was realized in the form of an order, in which had to
govern measure and proportion (Philebus). That is the reason why, when she
describes the Ancient queens and learned women, many of them were women
who, although held great power over vast territories or important ones, from a
moral point of view, their conduct was beyond reproach. Ceea ce spune despre
femeile virtuase
At the same time, in the construction of her epic, she arranges the stories in
such an order- starting with the Ancient queens and finishing with great women of
her time in order to offer the readers a complete picture with women from all
times in history, a history developing before our eyes in its natural cycle. As an
artist, her expression integrates in that of classic authors and makes an impression
upon her readers that she brings to light real unknown facts about women until her
writings and develops the capacities for different tasks that women possess as
human beings. If many women are simpleminded or occupy themselves only with
domestic activities, that doesn’t mean they belong exclusively to the domain of
housewives, but that society is restrictive with regard to their rights of choice. Din
aia cu legile
It is curious that in a fictional work, history has an important part
dedicated to it. And I asked myself what is its purpose. Now I begin to understand
that in an epoch like the authors’, so hard for women individuality, by
approaching to a past which- other contemporaneous female to Christine don’t
have knowledge of, but which makes them what they were and which proved to
be a constitutive part of their present, history, once again was meant for them to
regain their own self. History is far from being just a simple compilation of
events, and in this case is a reflexive subject by means of which women had and
maybe are still becoming autonomous individuals.
Not surprising at all that she dedicated all the second part of her prose to
the “queen” of disciplines in a context in which her contemporary women are
obliged to enlarge their sphere of self-consciousness. She anticipated that the
historico-political culture of states would be a dominant over centuries, no matter

72
in which direction would language evolve. The same attitude adopts towards
philosophy, but she transforms it into a historical one, according with her needs of
expression.
De Pizan constructs her plea for femininity having as a philosophical
mode, the world of Antiquity in which what prevails is the cosmic order of
tradition. The latter is the one that found the value legitimatization for people and
thus installs a space of communication between them. The author always refers to
philosopher’s works from Antiquity by way of tradition and constructs her own
work on a solid ground of historical philosophy. But a self-recovery (de Pizan sees
this in the very beginnings of Christianity) is not possible without being involved
God’s interference in “City of Ladies”. On the other hand it is mediated by the
philosophical reflection of the subject and in this respect dependent on it.
The translator was preoccupied in “The Book of the City of Ladies” with
concepts Christine deals with, which were and continue to be of common interest
in political philosophy configuring mainly in a philosophy of the right. So, those
concepts had been prefigured by the author, later were enlarged by the great
political thinkers in the classical epoch are very clear for the translator and thus
his capacity of an accurate translation can be seen very clear. And from this point
of view, I see in de Pizan’s work a rupture from traditional Antiquity theories
about power, meaning that political legitimate authority is not one which descends
from a natural or divine order, but that one which has a support in individuals’ will
or to use a contemporaneous philosophical term, in subjectivity. From all her
political allegiances I may add that from a politico- philosophic point of view, she
was in essence what we call today a democrat. She was a supporter of the
principle of self-determination regarding women. De Pizan gives the readers
numerous examples in which females accustomed with being wives and with
running a household, forced by exceptional circumstances became at once the
most feared warrior or, given to each case, wise rulers of their countries, or
excellent intellectuals. In fact the model of some women and their strength in the
face of evil-doers, finds, in her prose, the most complete expression, the largest
extension, because the model of individuality extends, without more difficulty
over the collectivity of women.
In the “City of Ladies” her female heroes are presented from the writer’s
perspective, as she perceived those powerful characters in history manuscripts.

73
The French of all times had a cult for their country’s female brevity. Her
characters are ennobled with their adventures, but they are being commemorated
for they are memorable and are not presented “in action”. The subject moves from
one place to another already made heroes. Christine does not lay accent on the
emotions of her characters and I see in them pictures with a rather corporal
expression. The narration is realized by a succession of stories which time and
place does not succeed according to an order. Sometimes the characters are not
fully described, they appear sometimes superficially portrayed. As a particularity
encountered in other imaginary stories and in this, the character’s appearance is
usually presented as a contradiction between the heroes and events. In this one
beautiful women fight with the most powerful considered man, Hercules, and
makes peace with him.
What makes ‘The Book of the City of Ladies” a work of art is not
represented by the totality of characters and situations, but by the unity of her
original moral attitude towards her object of reference. Or, to put it differently,
women of discrepant origins, lands, cultures, religions and social statuses coexist
by a cooperative principle- Christine’s concept about how women should
construct their social lives.
In a general context of Middle Ages Europe, Christine disconnects
females from that society of limitations and strives to lay the grounds for the right
to oppose herself and women’s interests to the surrounding environment, and at
the same time, becoming self- aware by means of what bears the title of rhetoric.
This opposition in her work is splendidly realized by rhetoric means.
De Pizan implys in the usage of rhetoric a way to correct those wrongly
stated misconceptions that contradict all the natural laws of behavior and in the
last instance, of God. About rhetoricsBut in this sense the writer employs the
rhetoric in philosophical and logic argumentation for feminine defense. And it is
obvious that she knew very well the works of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle,
as translation was a quite developed in the French medieval court,and others since
she cites their writings and by that I may conclude that she inspired from her
antecedents in her perfect discourse argumentation. The old Greek masters are
used italienii ei. The usage of old names like Babylon, Athens, Rome, Amazon
demonstrate that on an ancient tradition is constructed a new moral, political and

74
truthful order. The new is presented as old and enters in conflict with “yesterday”
which did not die.

THIRD CHAPTER

Symbolic representations in
“The Book of the City of Ladies”

What I mean by symbolic representations is in direct connection with what

a symbol designates, that is- not a physical person, but an abstract entity, an idea,
a notion, a concept.
An important value for authors until the XIV-th century represents the
truth value of words when deciphering the truth regarding human beings and
objects. In other words, if one finds the history and origin of each word, one can
have access to the ontological truth of a person or object it designates. Christine
herself explains one cultural and historic symbol and its etymology: the
mausoleum comes from a proper name.
Also a verbal relationship of the same nature is to be seen in the case of
proper names employed by de Pizan for her three symbolic characters: Reason,
Rectitude and Justice ( each one names uncover the truth for each person. Their
names are symbols of authoritative voices and hold basic ideology in the Middle
Ages.

75
 Another characteristic for medieval people thinking is analogy that strives
to establish a link between something apparent and something hidden, more
explicitly between what is present in our world “below” as Christine names it and
the one that finds itself among the eternal truths of the superior world. A word, an
animal, a shape, a color, a vegetal, a matter, a number, a gestural and even a
person can be thus invested with a symbolic function and by this to evoke, to
represent or to signify another thing from what it pretends to be or show. My
exegesis proposes to capture this same relationship between material and
immaterial and is analytical in order to find out the hidden truths of human beings
and of things. De Pizan, in turn explains some of those, because as she herself
mentions, to learn presupposes first of all to research and to unfold the hidden
meanings. Christine’s work employs speculation in which almost every object,
every element, every creature is the representation of another thing, which
corresponds on a superior level and whose symbol is. This is also applied to the
sacred and to the mysteries of faith, which theology of those times sought to
explain and make intelligible.
As I mentioned above, in the first case de Pizan realizes some kind of
dialectics between the symbol and what this one signifies, while in the second she
renders the relation between word and object of significance rather mechanically
due to her scholastic upbringing influence. Having said these I understand the
truth within things to be always found on different levels and expressed in
different ways. So, the relation is direct, allusive, structural and imagistic. When I
had read for the first time Christine’s book I was tempted to give things other
connotative functions than they really expressed. Instead when I projected those
symbols into the society of Middle Ages and learned more about the latter I
realized that we cannot establish a strict frontier among real and imaginary. For
Middle Ages society, imaginary always is part of reality, imaginary is a reality.
Other means of symbolic representations are given by formulas that refer
to the distribution, association, or contrast of the different elements within the
same assemble.I observed the pars pro toto principle being applied. This one like
the procedures mentioned above is of sign type in its manifestation and structure.
This type of procedure is founded on more speculative notions that regard
the relations established between microcosm and macrocosm. For those scholastic
times, humans and everything existing in this world below form miniature

76
universes, constructed in the image of the Universe as a totality. The finite is
shaped by the image of non-finite,the part is used for the whole. And this image is
realized in de Pizan’s work in a passage presenting the creation of Adam from
clay: […] almighty God from whom comes such authority, who, when He willed,
took the form of man and women from His thought when it came to His holy will
to form Adam from the mud of the ground in the field of Damascus and, once
created, brought him into the Terrestrial Paradise […] There Adam slept, and
God formed the body of woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she should
stand at his side […] Supreme Craftsman was not ashamed to create and form the
feminine body, would Nature then have been ashamed?[..] I don’t know if you
have already noted this: she was created in the image of God. (1998: 23). The
following example is based on the same principle: They led Queen Penthesilea
there, who, as soon as the chapel was open and she saw the body, knelt down and
saluted him just as though he were alive. Then she approached and, looking him
intently in the face, began to speak these words, all the while in tears: “O, flower
and excellence of the world’s knighthood, summit, height, and consummation of
all valor […] (1998: 49). Here is encountered as well the symbol of the face, a
praiseworthy value for medieval concept of thinking. In the passage I have
presented the look in the face has a good connotation and presents Hector’s
immortal image.
This procedure of the whole substituted by the part, constitute, the first degree of
medieval symbolic.
The symbol is always more powerful and more true when compared with
the person or the real thing, it represents, because in Middle Ages the truth is
usually situated outside reality, to a superior level of it. The truth and real are not
one and the same as I already demonstrated in the examples given. It is a mistake
to judge all the facts of Christine’s work as independent from the medieval system
of values and correspondences. My dissertation is constructed in accordance with
the context. An idea, an image, a symbol, a metaphor, an analogy are not valid,
does not make sense except when they are associated to other homologous from
that period. To follow this idea I perceived that the significant elements like:
animals, colors so on doesn’t have, as words do, a meaning by themselves, but
only in connection to others. The sum of meanings which establish between
elements are richer than the meanings of each and isolated component.

77
 In the present work I think the powerful light entering Christine’s room
performs a revelatory act, the light means the “light of knowledge” and is in direct
connection with God from which all descends in the scholastic dogma. The writer
seems to grant a great deal to this ideology of civilization through learning, since
she makes a symbol out of light, using contradiction at the level of the sentence:
So occupied with these painful thoughts, my head bowed in shame, my eyes filled
with tears, leaning my cheek on my hand, elbow propped on the pommel of my
chair’s armrest, I suddenly saw a ray of light fall on my lap, as though it were the
sun. I shuddered then, as if wakened from sleep, for I was sitting in a shadow
where the sun could not have shone at that hour.
(1998: 6) din earl explicatie teologica.
It is false in the interpretation of a symbol to appeal to a trans-cultural
symbolic, which would reveal universal truths that have their archetypes. There is
no such symbolic. In the symbolic world everything is cultural and needs to be
researched in connection to the society which makes use of them at a certain
moment of its history, in a determined context.
Cultural symbols for her contemporaneous society are expressed in this
prose by those references to some authors and their work, which express the
ideology of her siècle. I will give some of the most important philosophers as
examples, who had influenced medieval French philosophy. From this perspective
Christine creates an interdisciplinary work, in which she turns all the unfavorable
writings in her advantage, giving a veritable arsenal of arguments, and being an
expert in employing rhetoric devices. She“ fights”, as the Amazons, with her
enemies’ weapons. She learned from Plato and Aristotle that the art of rhetoric
consists in bringing stronger arguments than the one you are debating with: Notice
how these same philosophers contradict and criticize one another, just as you
have seen in the Metaphysics where Aristotle takes their opinions to task and
speaks similarly of Plato and other philosophers. And note, moreover, how even
Saint Augustine and the Doctors of the Church have criticized Aristotle in certain
passages, although he is known as the prince of philosophers in whom both
natural and moral philosophy attained their highest level.” Later on she raises
the question of the veracity of their writings, but in a subtle way: “It also seems
that you think that all the words of the philosophers are articles of faith, that they
could never be wrong. As far as the poets of whom you speak are concerned, do

78
you not know that they spoke on many subjects in a fictional way and that often
they mean the contrary of what their words openly say? (1998: 7)
De Pizan lays stress upon the mode of symbol’s representation rather than
on the grammar repertoire of equivalents or on the meanings. This in turn
underlines the way in which for medieval societies is impossible to distinguish
symbolic practices of sensitive facts. It is commonly acknowledged that what
people widely understand by symbols is: those words which have a higher power
of suggestion and not those which designate objects openly, more important if we
want to know them is to feel them, to understand, to evoke than to demonstrate.
Numbers are the best example for designating symbols. They express qualities as
well as quantities. De Pizan utilizes the magic number three for the ladies who are
spiritual teachers for her. This number is to be found amidst primary, primordial
numbers from a symbolic point of view and signifies more than the qualities taken
apart of three. The last suggests the three basic principles upon which civilized
people conducted in medieval society and addressed to the reader’s imaginative
capacity rather than to rational thinking.
Furthermore, my opinion towards the author’s choice in using a symbol of
the serpent is that by it she establishes a barrier from Christian to pagan world. A
recurrent motif in medieval Christianity is that of the God which cursed the
serpent, which, at the beginning of Genesis served Satan as instrument. Instead
Pallas or Minerva enriches this animal with other symbols and connotations-
serpent is a means of protection for those who wears it.
An analogous image presented by de Pizan is through some animals that
symbolize power, both in the Middle Ages and the Antiquity.
In medieval Europe only the kings and some noblemen possessed or owned bears,
lions or leopards and other exotic animals brought from North Africa and Asia and
represented, like in Antiquity, living symbols or emblems for those who were
holding power. Referring to a king of France, a country to which Christine pays
tribute for her literary career and probably being influenced by the great
encyclopedias newly published in the XIII-th century, those of Thomas de
Cartimpré, Barthélemy the Englishman and Vincent de Beauvais. She associates
all the virtues with which was invested a lion: courage, good hearted and
willingness- qualities proper for kings. The association of the three animals, again
a number with symbolic value may be representative, as mythological legends

79
from the XIII-th century relate, for the king and his noble servant, which are
distinguished into good and bad.
I have demonstrated so far that what a symbol represents in the history of
faiths, sensibilities, social codes and practices of Middle Ages people implies the
research of diverse categories of documents, that are related not only with signs
and images, but also with the technical and material culture, with the feudal, legal
structures and also that have economic stakes.
Another symbol Christine deals with is wood. For pagan pre-Roman
civilization and for pagan pre-Christian Jerusalem as well as for medieval
Antiquity culture, the wood is above all a living matter. Wood is in a symbolical
configuration towards other materials, the most pure, most noble of all, closest to
the humans. And this is a correct perception from primitive association of
common traits of things. Indeed wood is a matter like no other; it lives and dies,
suffers from diseases and has defects and what is relevant for Christine and the
reason she chooses it, because of its strongly individualized meaning. De Pizan
gives two examples which best suits the symbol of wood. In the first example,
according to the context, the forest, a substitution for wood, protect the newly
born individual and in the second, the plank of wood is predestined to suffer the
same treatments as Jesus. And by analogy, like Jesus, the plank of wood also has
nerves, veins, can be hurt, injured or can rot. In the author’s medieval society
circulated more medieval Latin metaphors which compared the wood of trees to
human flesh, while some authors underline the anthropomorphic characteristic not
just of the trees, but even of the wood itself. The circulation of a big quantity of
water, a tree lives in the closest bond with the climate, with the places and
environment in the cycle of the days and of the seasons. In this respect de Pizan
develops a humanist discourse regarding wood, alongside with a remarkable
technical culture, the first dimension being revealed only by some authors in
Middle Ages. From these I can only deduce that this encyclopedic author was
perfectly aware of the superiority of the wood over stone, which is also in the
present work associated with sacred, but which represent an inert, brutal,
unchangeable matter. This is precisely the point of view towards which the writer
leads us when she constructs her “city of ladies” with stone. She wants to confer it
an eternal dimension. Stone is here ambivalent, because by it she transmits the
second message, since in Middle Ages cities are properly made out of stone and in

80
them started to function institutions specialized in education and cultural
activities. So, in this social context, stone is a symbol for civilization and a rupture
from an ignorant rural society. From what I have already mentioned it seems that
in the feudal culture, is generally impossible to separate what is material and what
is symbolic, what is technical and what is ideological. In this prose the
contradiction wood/stone aims at two valuable materials. It is not of such violence
as the opposition wood/metal, that establishes a relation between a pure and
sanctified material through the ideal image of the Cross and an anguishing,
perverse, almost diabolic as metal was perceived in that period. It is no wonder
that the writer made reference to wood when the established early tradition
pictured Jesus as the son of a carpenter, whilst the canonic documents vaguely
referred to the exact occupation of Joseph. In the light of her contemporaneous
society, a carpenter was perceived as a man who deals with nothing illicit, works
with a material full of life and honors the condition of the artisan. And her choice
for this symbol is proper since very many crafts in the Middle Ages were as
exemplary as this one.
The motif of the light is present in “The Book of the City of Ladies” as a
consequence, I believe, of the numerous scientific texts spread in the Middle Ages
societies. There was a huge interest in the physics and metaphysics of the light.
The XIII-th century, being representative for optics, in which eyeglasses were
invented, presented an interest for blinds, ennobled Christ as a God of Light.
Middle Ages people knew little about colors and Christine is one of them when
she describes the light entering her room. The controversy is mainly about the
facts of reflection, refraction or absorption of light rays, about their length and to
the measure of their angles. Numerous arguments, demonstrations and inherited
Antiquity culture or Arabic concerning this Middle Ages subject brings no
innovation and continue to dwell upon ancient theories. Some claim, as Pitagora
did six centuries before Christ, that rays spread from the eyes in search of the
substance and qualities involved in the perception of objects and among these
qualities is placed the color. Or, it was commonly considered, following Plato’s
theory that the perception of colors comes from the encountering of a visual fire
with the particles emitted by the seen objects. If the particles of this visual fire are
smaller or bigger than those which are component in the emitted rays, the eye
perceives either this or that color. With all the improvements brought by Aristotle

81
to this theory, about the perception of colors (the importance of environment, of
what the objects are made of, the viewer’s identity), additional information that
was meant to give course towards new reflections- and in spite of the scientific
discoveries about the structure of the eye, the nature of the different membranes
and “humores” (as they were called in Middle Ages) and the role of the optic
nerve, the predominant theory preserved in all Middle Ages would be that of the
Greek Antiquity.
In my opinion for de Pizan as for many clerics, the light doesn’t represent
a sensible field of knowledge, but a theological issue. In her book, light is a
metaphor and raises a fundamental question, related with the physics and
metaphysics of light and thus with the relation which human beings hold with the
divine power. For medieval theology, indeed, light is the sole part of the sensitive
world at the same time visible and immaterial. It constitutes the inevitable
visibility and as such, the emanation of God. For the medieval Church, God is
light. What Christine wants to transmit is that the creative inspiration derives from
God and also that the divine is present in her work- a word with double meanings.
In her society of people being exploited by others and even richer, in
which the constant is represented by feudal vices, light means the fading of the
first and in consequence, of God.
A stringent problem in the Middle Ages is the conciliation between the
revealed religion and rational argumentation. De Pizan tries to escape and at the
same time brings salvation for other women living in a society from her period in
which history was inexistent. Humans in those times were captive in a feudal
“chateau”. In an analogous image she creates women’s chateau for an intellectual
exile. She appropriates history for her present needs and establishes a connection
to other civilizations in an attempt of moral reconstruction of her society. In this
sense this great author understands to break off with some ideological doctrines,
in a time when the whole culture has an essentially theological nature and all her
revolutionary ideas about women’s status in society have to be theological
legitimate. In the context of her living period, the specificity of the ideology in an
epoch in which the Church is almighty and when Christianity is imposed by force,
Christine makes a “successful literary compromise”.

82
83
 Conclusions

Christine de Pizan is definitely deserving the huge bulk of translation

work and scholarly literature written about her: like so many enlightened spirits,
she was far ahead of most of the thinkers of her time, male and female.
It took the strenuous work of Earl Jeffrey Richards to make her not only
known but also cherished by the English speaking community: he first of all cared
to thoroughly understand her, as a human being; all the rest came along with
professionalism and expertise.
To be sure, professor Richards was lucky, too: what would all his toil
come to in world where feminism had not been installed yet, as a cultural fact?
But such good luck would not have counted for much, had professor Richards not
solved for himself the dilemma of the modern spirit still belonging to his/her own
age: capitalization of concept-character names does not make Emily Dickinson
mediaeval, writing in objects does not make the metaphysical poets imagist,
Christine’s feminism avant-la-lettre does not make her a potential suffragette at
any level. Having succeeded in achieving such refinement of innuendo makes
Professor Richards a translator not only great but also responsible and scholarly.
Of the strategies he chooses to employ, those pertaining to culturalism
seemed to us most pertinent: the translator is the mediator but also the Supreme
Master, sending into target-life what he deems is worth picking from the source;
thus, both reader and writer are served to their best interests, by being made to
cohabitate a new realm, the version. In his version of Christine de Pizan,
professor Richards privileges target language assets, adapting source cultural
terminology as best defines the author’s literary vision: lexis and grammar in the
service of scholarly and scientific knowledge, philosophical conceptualization,
antique feminine feeling and sensuousness, classical prose clarity, pictorial poetry,
dramatized male satire.
Should there be mentioned a so-called Richards brand, of translation, we
would quote perfectionist professor Richards’s art of semantic contents
equivalence, of source to target, cultural terminology.
To end with, let us just say that, if the choice were ours, we would
definitely choose professor Richards’s translation over any other’s: with reason.

84
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