Poetic Debate
The elite of Paris around the turn of the fifteenth century enjoyed literary debate. Two major types of debate, associated with separate spaces, can be discerned. The first space is the court, royal and princely. In 1358, Charles V, distressed by the murder of several of his counselors in his rooms in the Palais de la Cité, part of the complex on the Ile de la Cité that today houses the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice, sought a new residence safe from urban turbulence. He chose a group of buildings between the Seine and the modern rue Saint Antoine, north to south, and the rue Saint Paul and the rue de Petit-Musc, east to west. Connecting the buildings with a series of corridors and courtyards, he created an enormous complex, which he protected by extending a wall originally constructed by Philip Augustus along the Seine.77 Known as the Hotel Saint Pol, the complex dominated the right side of the Seine, forming the center of court society, along with other great hotels, like Louis of Orleans’s Hotel de Boheme, on the site of the current Bourse.78 Poetic competition, through formal and informal contests, was part of courtly cultural life. But this poetic activity was not uniquely oral: studies of the manuscript as a performative space suggest that much of what exists today only on the page was theatrical, part of a “hybrid” culture “in which various oral performances . . . co-existed with exuberantly literate productions.”79 Within such an environment, poets worked “competitively (but in collusion with one another) to acquire forms of symbolic capital” through the composition of interactive poetic anthologies, as Emma Cayley writes.80 Christine’s sometime evocation of “Prince” in the envois of her lyrics, recalling the arbitrating prince of the puy (although it probably refers literally to the princes at court), attests to her consciousness of poetry as a form of competition, regardless of whether hers was “performed” before an audience.81
The other circle was associated with the Royal Chancery, which had remained on the Ile de la Cité when Charles V moved to the Hotel Saint Pol. Several literary quarrels were waged during the last years of the fourteenth century and the first years of the fifteenth by secretaries or notaries in chanceries, men committed to diffusing humanistic learning. Through her father or husband, Christine would have known of the debate between Petrarch, scornful of French Latin literary practice, and Jean de Hesdin, defender of the French. Angered and demoralized by Petrarch’s attack on their outdated Latin in 1367, French orators had responded by developing their style to accord with Italian humanistic practice.82 The silver lining in the cloud of the Schism was the French papacy’s contribution to the spread of Italian humanism in Parisian chanceries through networks of men associated with Avignon: Jean Muret, Nicolas de Clamanges, Laurent de Premierfait, and Galeatto Pietramala.83 By 1394, a letter by Clamanges, then secretary at the University of Paris, to the Avignon cardinals, warning them not to elect another pope to replace the recently deceased Clement VI, was praised for its Latin by Pietramala, an Italian cardinal at Avignon, who was astonished that a Frenchman could write so impressively. Pietramala’s letter provoked further debate in 1395–96. Joining Pietramala was Laurent de Premierfait; the opponents were led by Clamanges and Jean de Montreuil, objecting that there was nothing surprising about a Frenchman’s lovely Latin.84 Ezio Ornato has described a friendly debate between Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col as motivated primarily by the desire for stylistic practice. Jean composed several letters refuting Gontier’s contention that as a married man he had less time to devote to humanistic studies than his single friends. In the voice of Gontier’s wife, Marguerite, Jean teased Gontier by claiming that the real reason for his lack of production was his love of taverns, games, and women.85 Grover Furr sees in this debate a continuation of the defense of the intrinsic value of classical learning that characterized much epistolary exchange among these humanists: they shared a common interest “in the spread of a classical Latin style and its acceptability and admiration for it, as thoroughly bound up with the advancement of their careers.”86 When Ambrogio Migli intervened in the quarrel between Jean and Gontier, however, the tone turned hostile. Ornato professes confusion at this turn; Furr sees the apparent anger of the participants as motivated by Migli’s transgression of what judges of the debates, as opposed to participants, were permitted. The quarrel over the Roman de la rose, in which Christine was involved, is another example of a literary debate, as we will see.
The debates that took place within the circles of the court and chancery were different in theme, style, and purpose, yet both “fed on earlier intellectual, legal, and literary structures,” and both participated in an “economy of exchange,” as Cayley notes, drawing on the terminology of Bourdieu.87 In addition to this intellectual commonality, interaction between the two fields sometimes took place through individuals who functioned in both. At least since the time of Guillaume de Machaut, the roles of secretary, court functionary, and poet could overlap. Eustache Deschamps and Guillaume de Tignonville were poet-administrators associated with both the royal court and that of Louis of Orleans. Various interactions among figures like Gontier Col, Jean Lebègue, Jacques de Nouvion, Ambrogio Migli, Jean de Montreuil, and Nicolas de Clamanges, some of them diplomats, some court functionaries, some theologians, but all involved with the chancery at some point, indicate fluid networks. Carla Bozzolo and Monique Ornato have described how the cour amoureuse, or Love Court, of Charles VI, which I discuss later in this chapter, brought together members of the different circles. The officers of the cour amoureuse were members of the nobility. However, the ministers of the court represented a socially mixed group: great lords rubbed shoulders with royal secretaries, assigned the job of organizing poetic competitions.88
Of course, those who participated in both circles were male, or at least this was the case until Christine worked her way in. It is surprising but not unimaginable that Christine would have found entry into the circle of courtly debate, arousing wonder and admiration, because the crowds that gathered at the Hotel Saint Pol and the Hotel de Boheme contained men and women. At the same time, it is quite amazing that she enjoyed some access, however marginal, to the chancery circle, slipping into a field theoretically closed to women by taking part in a quarrel over the merits of the Roman de la rose with Jean de Montreuil and the Col brothers, all associated with the chanceries. This skillful move opened up opportunities for exhibiting her erudition to a different public than would have been possible otherwise. As I noted above, recent scholars have emphasized that the court and chancery represented two different fields within which cultural capital circulated and prestige was gained. Developing a reputation in these two fields allowed Christine to increase her influence in the groups whose support was important to Louis of Orleans.
The Cent balades
The Livre de Christine begins with a cycle, the Cent balades (not to be confused with Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades). Through this meditation on the duties of subjects in a kingdom whose king is afflicted by inexplicable bouts of madness (see poem 95, on page 95, for the lamentation of the king’s disorder), Christine works to arouse a loving sense of obligation toward authority and anger at those who disrupt social hierarchies through jealous quarreling.89
But the first thing to stress about the Cent balades is that the cycle is a protreptic, a consolation, encouraging identification with the narrator as she undergoes consolation, so that the same effect will occur in the reader. After a long iteration of traumas relieved by some moments of joy in verse, the cycle culminates in poem 97, where the narrator evokes Boethius. Available in various French versions from the late thirteenth century onward, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy was widely read.90 However, Sarah Kay suggests that the prose sections of this prosimetrum, propounding the austere vision of Lady Philosophy, offered little comfort to later medieval readers. Rather, they found comfort