Throughout her lifetime, CHRISTINE DE PIZAN (ca.
1364–ca. 1431) composed hundreds of BALLADES
and other short poems, especially between 1393
and 1412. A major collection, her Cent Ballades
(One hundred ballades), written between 1399 and
1402, appeared in 1402 as part of her Livre de
Christine, perhaps under the influence of the admired and publicly highly esteemed poet Eustache
DESCHAMPS, who had also written a collection of
Cent Ballades. Another collection with the same
title by the poet Jean le Sénéchal seems to have provided an additional model. Christine focused on
specific themes such as widowhood, the development of a love relationship as seen from a woman’s
perspective, debates between man and woman,
moral and ethical instruction through the utilization of ancient mythology, accusation of false
lovers, criticism of current political events, or
praise of patrons. In ballade no. 50, in which the
purpose of her poetry is identified as esbatement
(“entertainment”), Christine explicitly distances
herself from the poetic “I” in her other poems, emphasizing the fictional nature of this pronoun and
the literary sources from which she drew her material for her love poetry.
By contrast, the opposite seems to be the case in
many of her other ballades. In her various poems
on widowhood, for example, the autobiographical
element emerges quite clearly because she strongly
foregrounds her personal suffering resulting from
a great loss in her life, the death of her husband,
Etienne de Castel, in 1389. This finds additional
confirmation in her L’Avision-Christine (Vision of
Christine, 1405), where she reflects upon her life
and emphasizes that she used her poetry to console
herself in her early widowhood. In many other ballades Christine deals with the unfortunate ending
of love relationships, either because the man
proves to be unfaithful, or because of his death.
Fortune itself, as a force of nature, plays a major
role in Christine’s work, obviously as a result of her
close study of BOETHIUS’s CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY (ca. 523). In a number of her poems Christine indicates her intellectual interests, especially
her reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the history of the Trojan War in one of the many medieval renderings.
Christine’s later fame heavily rests on her active
participation in the acclaimed intellectual debate
about the role of women within courtly society, in
which she sharply defends women’s individuality
and innocence against the vicious misogyny formulated in JEAN DE MEUN’s continuation of GUILLAUME DE LORRIS’s ROMAN DE LA ROSE (ca. 1370–80).
This interest in women’s rights is already noticeable in her early ballades.
In one poem Christine appeals to the duke of
Orleans to find a place in his household for one of
her sons, Jean. In another case, the poet laments
the April 1404 death of Philip the Bold, duke of
Burgundy, who had commissioned her to write his
brother’s biography, Faits et Bonnes Meurs du Sage
Roi Charles V (The deeds and good character of
King Charles V). In other poems Christine experiments with formal elements, such as in her Ballades d’Estrange Façon (Ballades in a curious form),
varying verse and stanza structures. At other times
Christine allows her humor to come through, such
as in Jeux a vendre (Songs for sale), or she reflects
on moral teachings, as in Enseignements (Instructions). In her later ballades, Christine experiments
with traditional love relationships involving figures such as a wooing young man, a jealous husband, and the lady herself. In these poems,
although the wife wants to grant the lover his
wishes, eventually gossip forces the man to depart
from the court and to leave his lady behind, which
makes him complain bitterly about his loneliness.
Christine also reflects her solid education in the
classics, as documented by her reference to Ovid
(no. XLII). In her final ballade, no. 100, Christine
underscores her authorship of all of these poems
and incorporates an anagram of her name in the
refrain.
Bibliography
Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame. Edited by Jacqueline Cerquiglini. Paris: Union générale d’ éditions,
1982.
Laidlaw, James C. “The Cent ballades: The Marriage
of Content and Form.” In Christine de Pizan and
Medieval French Lyric, edited by Earl Jeffrey
Richards, 53–82, Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1998.
The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan. Translated
by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin
Brownlee. Edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski.
New York: Norton, 1997.
Albrecht Classen