Epistre Othéa –Christine de Pizan

An epistle to Hector on Chivalry, ca. 1400-1401

Issue 01 — Fall 2019 — Session 07 — Microliteratures: In the Margins of the Law
By Jesús R. Velasco | Published on October 28, 2019

At the turn of the century --the fifteenth century, of course-- Christine de Pizan, then 37 or 38 years old, wrote this "Letter from the goddess of Prudence, Othéa, to Hector of Troy", in which he experimented not just with political language, but also with manuscript multimedia production. Divided in one hundred trojan stories, the text combines the narratives with glosses and allegories, all of them in dialogue with an iconographic program, also designed (although not painted) by Christine de Pizan herself. The manuscript plays with all those textual and visual elements on the page, provoking that the reader engages with the many challenges of the manuscripts politics of reading.

Keywords

Forty seven extant manuscripts of the Epistre Othéa bear witness to the importance of the work itself, and to the ways in which Christine became the first professional female author from the Middle Ages. Among the most important manuscripts of the work, we want to highlight the one preserved at the British Library:

Christine de Pizan. The Book of the Queen [contains most of Christine de Pizan’s works]. British Library. Harley, 4431.

The book, created under the supervision of Christine de Pizan herself, was dedicated to Isabeau of Bavaria (d. 1435), the Queen of France, married to Charles VI (r. 1380–1422). Because of Charles’s psychotic condition, from 1393 onwards the Queen Isabeau was the legal regent of the kingdom. Christine’s interactions with Isabeau go far and beyond literary undertakings, and both become involved in political discussion through Christine’s works on political theory.

This Episte Othéa is particularly interesting because of the invention of the Queen of Prudence, considering that the virtue of prudence, according to Aristotelian political and ethical commentators, can be conceptualized as the central political virtue –and, of the four ethical virtues described by Aristotle, prudence is the only one that he considers dianoetic, or eminently intellectual. With this political and theoretical base, Christine retakes a central theme of medieval masculinity, chivalry, and theorizes it for one of the models of knighthood, Hector, from the perspective of the goddess.

Epistre Othéa –Christine de Pizan

Links

Keywords

Share