| Although much has been said about Christine de Pizan's political views, which are evident in her allegorical works Le Chemin de long estude (1402-3), Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune (1403), La Cite des dames (1404-5) and L'Avision (1405), her political treatise Le livre du corps de policie (1406-07) finds itself overshadowed by these texts and has been for the most part ignored by scholars. Even though some have felt that it lacks originality and merely presents a compilation of the political and philosophical ideas of Christine's predecessors, I argue that she manipulates her sources, most crucially, the Facta et dicta memorabilia of Valerius Maximus, in such a manner as to create a text that is quite distinct from the received tradition. I argue that in Le livre du corps de policie, Christine de Pizan succeeds in adapting Roman models of civic ethics into the vernacular, in an attempt to better define the sovereign nation as a bounded collective organism and to contain the state and its people within a fixed set of differences. In this respect her goals are similar to those of John of Salisbury. The originality of Christine de Pizan's treatise lies in creating a text, imbued with political force that stands autonomously, especially with regard to the social, political, and intellectual roles of women. I argue that Christine ultimately privileges Valerius Maximus as her primary source because she is able to appropriate from him a strategy of narrative history, in which the facta et dicta (things done and things said) are not as important as the ethical values that are transmitted through the reporting of those things. Also, in discussing Christine's corporeal theories of the polity, I demonstrate how she establishes her own political position and specifically her role as a female political theorist. As has often been noted, there is a tension in Christine's writing between a conservative politics (sometimes even a conservative gender politics) that seeks to solidify order and a feminist politics that seeks to challenge it. Hence, in choosing Valerius Maximus as her auctor, Christine is paradoxically able to adhere to the idea of the body politic as well as to an essentialist social and political order, all the while violating the essentialist vision of woman and thus, paradoxically undermining its structure by violating the very social norms she is articulating. At a certain point, she may even appear to undermine her own political theory by foregrounding her authority as a political theorist. She has become the adjudicator of public welfare, daring to offer, however humbly, guidelines to the head of state. For Christine it is important not only to define social roles as fixed properties that are innate, necessary and inescapable for the health of the body politic, but also to place herself in the ranks of those learned clerks who have the wisdom and learning required to articulate a theory of the body politic in the first place. |
