Furthermore, I hope to show that Christine intended her interventions in the conflict to produce effects. Studies by scholars like Larry Scanlon and Alan Cottrell on auctoritas and potestas offer useful terms for conceptualizing Christine’s method. Two of Charles VI’s relatives, both of them powerful, claimed regency during the king’s periods of madness. The question was which one possessed the authority necessary to realize his claim. Had clear laws existed for dealing with the emergency of Charles VI’s madness, the regent would have possessed both power and the authority necessary to govern.22 But not only did no widely accepted regency plan exist; the very notion of kingship was still sufficiently vague to allow both Philip and Louis plausibly to press their claims. To paraphrase Scanlon, for Christine and contemporary political writers, kingship (and by extension regency) was not a fully formed institution but rather a “dynamic political structure” attempting to define itself ideologically.23 In rallying support behind Louis, I argue, Christine participated in fixing the definition of kingship. As the situation between the dukes worsened, Christine sought for a time to augment the queen’s authority, promoting Isabeau as the face of the regency while continuing to create authority for Louis as its force. Thus Christine also profoundly affected female regency as it developed in France from the fifteenth through the early seventeenth century. After Louis’s assassination, she continued to legitimize the Orleanists. She was always cautious: the Burgundians were not only important patrons but, particularly after Jean’s seizure of power in late 1409, extremely dangerous enemies. Only when Jean was temporarily disgraced and fled Paris after the Cabochian revolt did Christine openly throw her influence behind the dauphin, Louis of Guyenne.
In each of the six chapters of this study, I first summarize what was happening between the Orleanists and Burgundians and then trace Christine’s engagement with the events in her texts. The historico-political sections of the chapters are based on contemporary chronicles and documents, many easily accessible today online, along with the excellent studies of the period that have appeared since the 1980s.24 As for the relationship between the historical material and Christine’s works, it is sometimes straightforward. The poet often refers directly to the immediate situation. She has a clear notion of her different publics, appealing to them variously through courtly poetry, relatively simple verse allegory, complex, obscure prose allegory, and prose treatises. However, it is equally instructive, I argue, to trace the “political unconscious” of her writings. To fully grasp the political work that Christine carries out, that is, we must examine the competing ideologies that animate her writings and consider how she resolves, or fails to resolve, their internal contradictions.
In chapter 1, I make the case for reexamining Christine’s political attitudes. Historians disagree over the extent to which the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy represented discordant visions of monarchy. I do not enter this debate, arguing rather that whatever the dukes and their satellites may have believed, Christine herself promoted the Valois monarch as a single figure aided by a diverse group of counselors, a system that she believed was threatened by the Burgundians. For her, Charles V had been the guarantor of an ideally ordered society, protecting the throne against challenges from Charles of Navarre and Edward III of England while consolidating power in ongoing negotiations with the great lords of the kingdom. For counsel, he had relied on a close group of minor or even nonnoble advisors, and he had kept his brothers, the dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Burgundy, under control by assigning them appanages over which he retained ultimate control, as Françoise Autrand has shown. Embedded in this experience, Christine would have seen Louis of Orleans—who as son of the previous king and brother of the present outranked his uncle—as the only possible regent during the absences of Charles VI. Philip demanded rule by a council headed by himself, a form of kingship with a long history, associated by the Burgundians with rule by the three estates. I argue that Christine rejected this vision.
This discussion of Charles V’s conception of kingship and Christine’s reaction to it lays the groundwork for the second chapter. Although Charles V left a blueprint for regency when he died in 1380, leaving a minor son on the throne, Philip of Burgundy seized power. In 1392, after Charles VI’s first episode of madness, Philip struck again. This time, the adult Louis resisted. Many historians believe that the dukes’ quarrel did not become serious until about 1398; I argue that although it did not become a feud until about 1400, the quarrel arose almost immediately after the king’s initial frenzy, evidenced by Philip’s accusations that the Duke and Duchess of Orleans were bewitching the king. The conviction that the king was divinely ordained, coupled with the fiction that he was in control when he appeared lucid, maintained through a series of royal ordinances that treated his mental illness as temporary “absences,” prevented his deposition and the installation of a permanent regent. This is the setting for Christine’s first interventions, lyric poetry mourning the great absence at the center of things. Like Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart, Christine encodes the relationship between self-mastery and effective government in love poetry, containing her poetic dramas of amorous intrigue within a framework of Boethian consolation. There is no easy solution to the disorder at court, as her indecisive love debates suggest. Still, virtue, acceptance of hierarchies, and unstinting love—in other words, Boethian resignation—are the best solution.
Chapter 3 picks up the conflict between the dukes as it worsens after a narrowly missed showdown in October 1401. As the dukes fought to control policy regarding the Great Western Schism and the war with the English, royal ordinances designated the queen, first, mediator between the dukes, and then effective although unofficial regent. During this period, Christine developed a wide set of images and methods for guiding her readers’ understanding of the quarrel. In the Epistre d’Othea a Hector, dedicated to Louis, she develops his auctoritas by declaring his position in the kingdom second after the king alone, as well as her own, by showcasing her erudition and prudence for the first time. Christine solicits another readership for her work with her participation in the debate over the literary merits of the Roman de la rose. Attacking Jean de Meun through an argument made earlier by members of the French chanceries defending their Latin against Italian attack, she bolsters her reputation among some members of the chancery circles. At the same time, she unites courtiers eager to soothe tensions between the dukes around the common ideal of honoring women, which she concretizes by presenting the queen with a copy of the debate. In her rhymed allegories, Christine ventures into new territory by situating the ducal conflict historically, assigning blame by showing similarities to earlier political struggles. In the Chemin de longue étude, she promotes Louis as the only remedy for the chaos into which the kingdom has descended. With the Cumaean Sibyl as her guide, she draws on the Second Charlemagne prophecy, which predicted that Charles VI would become Holy Roman Emperor, and promotes Louis as king of the world in the mad king’s place. Although in her courtly lyrics she had figured the king’s malady as the work of perverse Fortune, she mourns the absence at the center of things yet more profoundly in the pessimistic Livre de la mutacion de fortune. The narrator’s gender transformation in response to the loss of her ship’s captain echoes the position of Isabeau.
The conflict took a deadly turn when Jean of Burgundy succeeded his father. Chapter 4 begins with the succession of the new Duke of Burgundy in 1404. Although popular with some Parisians and, for a time, the university, he made demands that, to Christine’s mind, amounted to attempts at usurpation: a cousin of the king, he was not equal in rank to his father, let alone to Louis. He attempted to gain authority by discrediting his cousin, continuing his father’s strategy of demanding money from the royal treasury even as he publicly denounced mismanagement and called for reform of the realm. Once again, the Orleanist-Burgundian strife narrowly missed breaking into open war in 1405. It is characteristic of Christine’s responses to Jean’s attempts to control the government that she begins to write primarily in prose rather than verse, completing the transformation into female cleric that she