Christine de Pizan Research Papers (original) (raw)

published in:
in: Mondes animaliers au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance / Tierische Welten im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. D. Buschinger et al., Amiens, Presses du "Centre d'Études Médiévales de Picardie, 2016, pp. 327-337.
Christine de Pizan refers to animals less frequently than do her Middle French contemporaries, many of whom she knew personally such as Évrart de Conty and Jean Gerson. For example, in a corpus of over 600,000 words, Gerson refers to dogs 86 times, Christine in a corpus of over a million words only 49 times. Her prose writings are, in general, political treatises dealing with issues of female regency, peace theory or military tactics, so that one would not immediately expect to find many animal images here. Most of the animals she refers to show up either in her lyrical works or in the Epistre Othea. Nonetheless, animal imagery holds a key for understanding how she creates referentiality for her writings. In order to how she creates referentiality, it is necessary first to establish benchmarks for literary fauna in medieval French. These benchmarks reveal a lexical superstructure inherent in medieval French because writers in all genres tend to refer to the same eleven animals (lions, horses, dogs, serpents, sheep, and so on) with more or less the same frequency. Second, one needs to move from the omnipresence of these eleven animals to the fortune of the lonely nightingale; here we will witness the instability of linguistic referentiality in animal images. Third, it is useful to compare how Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson treat the meaning of serpent in their works: Christine follows a rigid hierarchy in assigning meaning, whereas Jean Gerson avoids polyvalence by immediately supplying a cultural context that supplies meaning in the first place. Benchmarks for Literary Fauna and Lexical Frequency of Animal Names in Évrart de Conty, Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson In order to understand Christine's use of animal imagery, we first need to establish a rough norm for what could be termed the medieval French " animal imaginary. " In order to create rough benchmarks for " literary fauna, " I analyze examples taken from Godefroy, Tobler-Lommatzsch, the online Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (now over seven million words) and examples found in a private (because of copyright issues) searchable database created over the last five years by myself and David Wrisley (now NYU/Abu Dhabi).