The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory by Robin Truth Goodman;

Author:Robin Truth Goodman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 17.3Circe and Ulysses’ Men. British Library Harley MS 4431 fol. 140. © British Library Board.

Just as the Cumaean Sibyl directed Aeneas’s journey through the underworld, Othea proposes to guide Hector in the beginning and a Sibyl presents Augustus with a vision of the Virgin and the Christ child at its conclusion, thus framing Othea, as I have already mentioned. The Sybil points out to Augustus that the pax romana was attributable not to him, but to God, “who had created everything … [and] who should be worshipped” (Gloss 100, p. 130). Here, at her work’s conclusion, Christine makes reference to the final canto of the Paradiso that concludes with the Godhead, “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (canto 33, l. 145).

The prominence of Othea and the Sybil exemplifies Christine’s authorial self-construction throughout many of her works as a political counselor. In addition, the figure of the Sybil—as an authoritative figure of prophecy that is closely associated with poetry—enables Christine to legitimate her own political and poetic authority. It is fitting, therefore, that Christine considered this work to be particularly suitable for rulers: in addition to dedicating it to Louis d’Orléans, she commissioned customized manuscripts for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria; Jean, duke of Berry; Philip, duke of Burgundy; and even the English king Henry IV, whose invitation to join his court she declined. Comparing herself to the Sibyl and the reader/ruler to Augustus,11 Christine claims and affirms her own authority by pointing to the Godhead as a being superior to the temporal ruler. Christine fittingly casts this work as an epic, the most elevated and prestigious literary form, although deploying the epic to practical, political ends. While the explicitly stated goal of the Aeneid and its successors in the epic tradition was praise—encomium—and its aim to instruct the ruler remained implicit or oblique, Christine forgoes praise to speak truth in providing guidance to the ruler. In doing so, Christine exemplifies the importance of the figure of counselor, whose truth-telling (parrhesia) Michel Foucault identified as the foundation of Western political thought (69–71 and passim).

In addition to the City of Ladies and Othea that most directly derive from and that she places most explicitly in the epic tradition, Christine includes in her other works references to epic form and aspects of previous epics. For example, she begins the Life of Charles V (1404)—which Natalie Zemon Davis considered to be one of the earliest works by a female historian (157–60)—with a prominent epic invocation to God. Milton is considered to have been the first to repurpose the classical epic by invoking the Holy Ghost instead of the Muse at the beginning of Paradise Lost; Christine precedes Milton by more than two centuries in invoking the Christian God as her Muse.

In The Book of the Mutability of Fortune, Christine recounts her transformation into a man upon the death of her husband, whom she likens to the pilot of a ship (45–6). She thereby casts her husband as Palinurus, the pilot in the Aeneid whose death marked the arrival at his destination of the epic’s hero, Aeneas.

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