Christine De Pizan Essay

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For this scholarship review I have picked two articles with which I’d like to create a dialogue between. The first is “Compilation, Commentary, and Conversation in Christine de Pizan” by Julia Simms Holderness. The second is “Christine de Pizan: The Poetess as Historian” by Nadia Margolis. Both discuss the writing of Christine de Pizan. Holderness argues, ultimately, that Christine was more conscious with her writing decisions than she may be given credit for, while Margolis’ article can be interpreted as saying almost the same thing. In Holderness’ article, she starts out by addressing how Medieval writings often drew inspiration from other sources and referenced other people’s writings. Holderness argues that Christine de Pizan’s method …show more content…
However, both these forms of writing were dominated by men- they were being written by men about men. Women were able to write history, though, if they were not part of the royal court. “In Christine’s history, even when dealing with male subjects, the woman is more than the object, more than the subject- she is the perceiver and narrator.” (Morgalis, 365) Christine wrote Epitre d’Othea, in which she pulled one hundred different historical moments, each written out and then followed by both a gloss and an allegory, so that readers would not miss the story’s moral lesson. In Mutacion de Fortune, Christine draws on the classic Greek myth of Tiresia. Fictionalized Christine is left to guide a ship on her own, likely symbolic of her feeling abandoned by her husband and then father who died, prompting her to start her writing career to be able support herself and her family. During her journey sailing the ship, she undergoes a gender metamorphosis in which she changes from female to male. Morgali argues that this moment in Christine’s book symbolizes Christine’s metamorphosis from a writer of feminine poetry to a writer of masculine history. She moves from passive to active, from writing about love and fluff in poetry to actually documenting real live events and enacting change through the way that they were

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