by Adams, Max;
In the opening years of the fifteenth century she produced a number of substantial works of allegory: Le Livre de la mutacion de fortune (‘The Book of Mutability of Fortune’), Le Livre du Chemin de longue estude (‘The Book of the Path of Long Study’) and L’Avision de Christine (‘Christine’s vision’) – each of which contains important autobiographical passages – and a biography of Charles V (Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V) commissioned by his brother, which won her considerable praise and the rewards of royal patronage.
Christine’s most famous work, the epic fantasy called Le Livre de la cité des dames, (The Book of the City of Ladies) (1405), is distinguished not so much by its scholarly merits as by its confidence and sense of moral authority. In it, she rejects the misogynist rhetoric of both classical and contemporary literature, aiming her darts at the so-called chivalric romances and, in particular, at the hugely popular Roman de la Rose, which fictionalised the affair between Héloïse and Peter Abélard and created of the former a weak, passive, foolish victim. To Jean de Montreuil, secretary to Charles VI (1380–1422), Christine had already written, during a notorious public argument:
…I wish to hold, proclaim, and sustain publicly that, with all due respect, you are entirely in error and without justification in giving such accomplished praise to the aforesaid work, which were better called utter frivolity than any profitable book, in my opinion.15
Another member of the royal circle, Gontier Sol, also weighed in against her; she gave him short shrift:
You insult me still further because I am a woman, which according to you makes me fickle, mad, and pretentious, for daring to correct and reprimand such a reputable scholar as you claim this author to be…16
Christine began to realise that the debate she had sparked required a more substantial response, no less than a defence of womanhood. She decided to fight rhetoric with polemical allegory, and imagined herself constructing, from the biographical bricks and mortar of the great women of history, a city (a beguinage, if you will) defended by Reason, Rectitude and Justice, within which women might realise their potential. The City of Ladies would become a mirror into which both women and men might look to see reflections of their true selves, their faults and virtues, and find examples to help them make a better world.
In the introduction to Le Livre de la cité des dames, Christine wrote of her despair at reading Matheolus’s thirteenth-century Lamentations, a diatribe against women and marriage, which forced her into a lifelong confrontation with the courtly literati of Paris:
No matter which way I looked at it and no matter how much I turned the matter over in my mind, I could find no evidence from my own experience to bear out such a negative view of female nature and habits. Even so, given that I could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn’t devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex, I had to accept their unfavourable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions… Thus I preferred to give more weight to what others said than to trust my own judgement and experience.17
The misguided Christine of the narrative dream that frames her allegory is corrected by the beatific appearance before her of a female personification of the shining light of Reason, who tells her that…
Our wish is to prevent others from falling into the same error as you and to ensure that, in future, all worthy ladies and valiant women are protected from those who have attacked them. The female sex has been left defenceless for a long time now, like an orchard without a wall, and bereft of a champion to take up arms in order to protect it… Now, however, it is time to be delivered out of the hands of Pharaoh.18
It is as if she is responding directly to the travails of the walled-in bonded weavers of Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain;## and perhaps she is. She may have visited a beguinage and been inspired by its citizens. But Christine was a woman of her time: she did not believe that society would benefit from having women judges, or heads of state, or professors. What she saw clearly was that men and women sinned equally and were capable of equal virtue; and that in educational and social opportunity lay the fulfilment of women’s and humanity’s creative potential. She employed an argument that might just as easily have been made in the 1920s as the 1400s:
Reason: ‘Do you know why it is that women know less than me?’
‘No, my lady, you’ll have to enlighten me.’
‘It’s because they are less exposed to a wide variety of experiences since they have to stay at home all day to look after the household. There’s nothing like a whole range of different experiences for expanding the mind of any rational creature.’19
In later years, as France descended into civil war, became prey to the overseas ambitions of Henry V of England and suffered humiliation at Agincourt in 1415, Christine was socially and politically marginalised, retiring in 1418 behind the reclusive walls of a convent, in a sense admitting defeat in her hopes for a more enlightened era.
It is one of history’s choicer ironies that, in the person of Jeanne d’Arc (1412–31), a female champion should emerge for all France, celebrated in Christine’s 1429 Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (‘Song of Jeanne d’Arc’); that she should be an uneducated peasant visionary; that she should be vilified as a sorceress and martyred at the age of nineteen after a show trial by an English military court at Rouen; and that she should become both a symbol of French womanhood and an icon of the far right. Christine wrote of this extraordinary young woman at the height of her fame. Her Song of Jeanne, in more than sixty verses each of eight lines, is the only popular contemporary portrayal of the Maid of Orléans, before her tragic betrayal and martyrdom…
XXIV
Contemplate your person now,
You are virgin, very young,
To whom God grants the strength and power
To be both woman and champion,
Who offers France the gentle breast,
The food of peace and will correct
The wicked folk who would rebel.
’Tis more than Nature could effect!
XXXIV
Aha!! What honor for the female
Sex! God shows how he loves it,
When the nobles—great, but wretched—
Who earlier the realm had quit,
By one woman were fortified,
No men could do this deed, but more:
The traitors were repaid in kind!
No one would credit this before.
XLIV
Forget, then, all heroic men,
For she alone should take the crown,
Her deeds suffice to show that God
Has handed her more valor down
Than all those who are often named,
And she has not yet finished here!
I think God granted her all this,
So through her deeds peace will appear!20
Hailed by some as the first European feminist, Christine is one of the earliest women we know of to have supported herself by writing. For some years she had earned her living as a copyist, and among her circle were other professional women, notably a gifted illustrator called Artemisia, whose work she praised and whom she employed to decorate many of her surviving manuscripts. These – each one meticulously copied, illuminated and bound with a personal dedication – survive in such large numbers that the Duc de Berry∫∫ was able to leave his daughter Mary no fewer than forty-one volumes of Christine’s works; and Le Livre de la cité des dames still exists in at least twenty-seven contemporary manuscripts. Christine was nothing less than an industry in her own right. Each copy embodies both the written testimony of her thoughts and feelings and the art and craft, equally authored, of this unquiet voice.
Neglected in France after her death in about 1430, Christine was championed in England by the printer William Caxton, who published several of her works and ensured her popularity with
collections including The Morale Proverbes of Cristyne, printed in 1478:
Of these sayynges Cristyne was auctoresse
Which in makyng hadde such inteligence
That thereof she was mirreur and maistresse
Here werkes testifie the experience…
EMPRINTED BY CAXTON IN
FEVERER THE COLDE SEASON21
Christine was fearless, witty, uncompromising and impressively self-critical. Out of pain and adversity she wove a new sort of narrative and, after centuries of neglect, she takes her place among the elite of European women writers and thinkers.ΩΩ
A tale of three marriages
The Paston family, arrivistes among the landed gentry of Norfolk during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, are celebrated for the survival of huge numbers of their letters. The collected correspondence, with its tantalising lacunae and what-happened-nexts, is a long-running soap opera of domestic and regional intrigue, of family troubles, petty accounting and estate management. I am fascinated by the letters of two Paston matriarchs, which reveal how much energy was spent protecting and nurturing the family’s social, material and political interests and how their daughters – and prospective daughters-in-law – were shamelessly deployed as pawns in their plans.
Margaret (died 1484), the wife of John Paston I (1421–66), first speaks of her troublesome daughter Margery (c.1449–79) in a letter of 3 April 1469. Among other business, she urges her eldest son, John II, to help find a place for the girl – a formal fostering, in effect – with either Lady Oxford or Lady Bedford, ‘for we be either of us wary of [an]other’.22 The ‘other’ in question was the Paston family’s steward, one Richard Calle: a man of far too modest standing to be seen to conduct any sort of relationship with a Paston girl. Matters, it seems, had already got out of hand. Although none of Margery’s own letters survives – they may have been deliberately destroyed – one of Richard’s to her does exist, dating from some time that same year. It is obvious that he and Margery had undergone a form of marriage, using words that neither of them would gainsay; evident too that they were in love and that agents of the family were in cahoots to separate them. I have retained Richard’s idiosyncratic spelling to give the full flavour of the Middle English.
…we that ought of very ryght to be moost to gether ar moost asondre; me semyth it is a mll [1000] yere agoo [ago] son [since] that I speke with you… Alas, alas! Goode lady, full litell remembre they what they doo that kepe us thus asunder.23
In the same letter, Richard reveals that a plot to intercept his letters to Margery, by means of showing his ‘ladde’ as a token a ring supposedly belonging to his lover, had not fooled him – in it he read the designs of his antagonistic mother-in-law and her chaplain, Sir James Gloys.
That May, Margery’s immediately older brother, John III, had written furiously to their elder brother, Sir John, denying any complicity in the liaison:
I conceyve, by your lettyr whyche that ye sent me by Jwde, that ye have herd of R.C. [Richard Calle’s] labor whyche he makyth by our ungracyous sustrs assent; but wher as they wryet [write] that they have my good wyll ther in, savyng your reverence, they falsely lye of it.24
In the same letter, John foretold that his sister would end up selling ‘mustard and candles’ – a pejorative reference to the fact that the Calles were in the grocery trade. His mother took more direct action. She, like the parents of Christina of Markyate, appealed to a bishop, who summoned Margery and warned her of the shame that she would bring upon her family. He carefully questioned her to be sure that she and Richard had exchanged a binding form of words. They had, and she stood by them; and there was little the bishop could do. Frustrated in her plans, Margaret imposed the severest sanctions on her daughter: she was expelled from the household, denied her dowry and disinherited – although Margery’s children were remembered in Margaret’s will. What may strike the modern reader, alongside their feelings of distaste for such social snobbery and a natural empathy for the heartache caused by the rift between mother and daughter, is the fact that Calle continued to be employed by the family. Their daughter may have been the ‘wretch’ described by her mother; but a good steward was hard to replace.
Margaret seems to have been cut from the same cloth as her mother, Agnes Berry, who had married William Paston and borne him at least eight children. Agnes’s own matrimonial crisis concerned another of her daughters, Elizabeth (1429–88), whose independent spirit may in turn have inspired her niece Margery. Elizabeth was said by her mother to have acquiesced reluctantly in a betrothal to a family connection, the elderly and somewhat disfigured Sir Stephen Scrope, so long as he brought sufficient property to the partnership and so long as the marriage settlement was unencumbered by too many other claimants on him. But Elizabeth’s own voice, heard off-stage, is not in harmony with that of her mother.25
Negotiations seem to have been conducted during 1449, principally by another Elizabeth, Agnes’s cousin. Reporting to John Paston I on progress, the cousin’s assessment was that if Elizabeth could not find better, then Scrope would do. But the family should act quickly, for Elizabeth was in a state of great unhappiness. Agnes, according to her cousin, had confined her daughter, forbidden her to speak with anyone and beat her once or twice a week: her head was ‘broken in two or three places’.26
Elizabeth Paston did not, in the end, marry Scrope. Mother and daughter continued to seek a suitable match, continued to disagree and sustained a rather formal relationship, judging by later letters. In 1458, at the age of thirty, Elizabeth married Sir Robert Poynings (1419–61), after which she had to pursue her mother for her dowry. Elizabeth and Poynings had a son, Edward. But if Sir Robert was a trial to her, that trial did not last long: he died fighting on the Yorkist side in the second Battle of St Albans three years later. Elizabeth subsequently married a younger man, Sir George Browne, with whom she had two sons and a daughter called Mary. Browne, who joined Henry Stafford’s rebellion, had the misfortune to be executed on the orders of Richard III in 1483 and thus Elizabeth, in her last years, found herself both wealthy and unencumbered. In her will she left nothing to any of her Paston relatives.
John Paston III (1444–1504), whose sister Margery had been the cause of so much family grief, had his own conjugal travails. In his case, the prospective bride, distant cousin Margery Brews, was approved by all sides. But the Pastons and the Brewses could not agree terms. John wanted a larger dowry; Margery’s father, Sir Thomas Brews, insisted that his wealth must be spread between several daughters; that he could afford no more. His wife, Dame Elizabeth Brews, reinforcing the idea that family matriarchs were prepared to take executive action to achieve the desired result, bargained directly with the prospective groom, mincing no words. In a letter of 1477 she scolded John Paston for prematurely broaching the subject of marriage to her daughter, only half-joking that he had made Margery such an advocate for him that she would get no peace from her daughter until she had brought the said matter to effect. A resolution of the family crisis hung on the financial settlement; meanwhile, John should console himself with the idea that…
I schall gyffe youwe a grettere tresur, that is, a wytty gentylwoman, and if I sey it, both good and vertuos; for if I schuld take money for hyr, I wold not gyffe hyr for a mli [a thousand pounds].27
It is almost written in jest. Almost. At any rate, John and Margery did marry; and, for her own part, Margery Brews became posthumously famous for having penned≈≈ the first known Valentine’s note: ‘unto my ryght welebelovyd Voluntyn, John Paston’. And rather touching it is, too: her body and heart will suffer until she hears from him; she will never foresake him…
And yf ye commande me to kepe me true wherever I go,
I wyse I will do all my myght yowe to love and never no mo[re].
And yf my freends say, that I do amys,
Thei schal not let me so for to do,
Myne herte me bydds ever more to love yowe,
Truly over all erthely thing,
And yf thei be never so wroth,
I tryst it schall be better in tyme commyng.28
For all the politics, material greed and social snobbery of the middle-class English medieval family, sometimes love did conquer all.
In the Paston story, women are both oppressors and oppressed. The voices of the victims of parental machinations are not heard directly at all and yet their experiences seem to typify the lives of those restless middle-class women who, in later centuries, would provide the protagonists for hundreds of novels: Jane Eyre and Magdalen Vanstone, Helen Huntingdon – who shocked Victorian England by slamming the door against her husband – Elizabeth Bennet and the Schlegels; or those real-life heroines, like Caroline Norton, who actively fought to improve the lot of married women.∂∂
* Montaillou was the subject of a famous, eponymous study by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in the 1970s.
† From 1334 until his death he was Pope Benedict XII of Avignon.
‡ As recently as 2008, a Clergue was mayor of the commune of Montaillou.
§ Which still stands.
# See page 34.
∫ The name seems to derive from Middle French bègue, stammerer, apparently referring to the familiar sound of such women muttering psalms in the street.
Ω Eremitical: isolated, like a hermit.
≈ See page 130.
∂ See page 140.
π Founded in the 1170s in Lombardy, as a loose association of lay men and women devoted to a life of humble Christian piety.
∆ Founded by Margaret of Constantinople in about 1244.
** The single surviving manuscript, owned by William Butler-Bowdon, was recognised by the American scholar Hope Emily Allen (1883–1960). She began work on preparing a two-volume edition (the first of which was published in 1940) but the project fell foul of her collaborator’s apparent chauvinism. Her work underpins all modern scholarship on The Book of Margery Kempe.
