Chapter 5 turns to a yet more advanced state in the hostility between the dukes. A joint campaign to oust the English from France failed to build solidarity between them, and Jean continued to gather support for himself. Christine backs Louis and opposes Jean in a trio of works. In the Livre de prodomie de l’homme selon la diffinicion de Monseigneur d’Orleans, Christine warns her readers about the danger of the slander propagated by Louis’s enemies. With the strange Livre de l’advision Cristine, she recounts how Charles VI and Louis were persecuted by their uncle, and warns against the coming disaster through the bloodied figure of France, Libera. As in the Mutacion de fortune, in the Advision the narrator’s autobiography serves as a lens through which to focus the conflict. Because Christine, like Boethius, is consoled by philosophy, her vision unclouded by false opinion, she is in a position to act as the conscience of the kingdom. Finally, I suggest that the Livre du corps de policie makes a very precise argument against Jean of Burgundy in its unique configuration of the third part of the body politic. Christine’s inclusion of the university in the group and her division of merchants into two separate categories, a repartition that reflects the contemporary distinction between highly placed merchants and powerful butchers, suggests that if the university made common cause with the ruling burghers and well-placed merchants, they could subdue their more restless fellow Parisians, whom the Duke of Burgundy would incite in 1413 in the Cabochian revolt.
On November 23, 1407, Jean had Louis assassinated, the incident with which chapter 6 begins. After initially fleeing, Jean returned to Paris in March 1408 with the theologian Jean Petit, who proclaimed a justification for the murder. Jean sans Peur became master of Paris. But the feud did not end. After a lapse of a few years, Louis’s heir, Charles of Orleans, vowed to avenge his father’s murder, and the conflict reached new levels. Disasters accumulated: the Cabochian revolt; the Battle of Agincourt; the death of the dauphin Louis and that of his successor, leaving the dauphin Charles, raised in the Armagnac House of Anjou. I follow Christine’s engagement in four texts as she continues to promote peace but begins to support violence where justified.25 The Lamentacions sur les maux de la guerre civile backs the peace efforts of the autumn of 1410, lending authority to the Duke of Berry and the queen by presenting them as figures capable of brokering an accord. And yet the work also seems to urge the queen and the Duke of Berry to team up against Jean of Burgundy, should peace remain elusive. The Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie is interesting for its promotion of the Armagnac cause in its discussion of the just war. The Livre de paix is filled with optimism, as Christine presents the dauphin as the image of his grandfather, Charles V. True, the introduction to the work strikes an ominous chord, revealing that the peace that the dauphin has just mediated has been disrupted and that the Cabochian revolt has intervened. But peace returned, and Christine takes up where she left off, castigating Jean, who had been forced from Paris by the Armagnacs. Her optimism does not last, however, as the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, composed in the aftermath of Agincourt, in early 1418, makes clear.
The epilogue begins with Christine’s near silence between the Burgundian massacre of 1418 and the appearance of Joan of Arc in 1429. The Duke of Burgundy was himself slain by the dauphin Charles’s men at a moment when peace between the Armagnacs and Burgundians seemed possible. Teaming up with the English, the Burgundians facilitated the occupation of France and the Treaty of Troyes, which eventually placed the English kings Henry V and VI on the throne. The Heures de contemplation sur la passion de notre Seigneur of 1420 expresses Christine’s resigned sorrow, while the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, a triumphant and prophetic work championing the warrior-maid as the savior of Charles VII and the French, communicates her renewed joy at the reascendance of the Armagnacs and her heightened sense that peace might be achievable only through violence. One of the goals of Christine’s political intervention, to avoid bloodshed, has been dashed. Still, two others, to keep the monarchy in the hands of the Valois and to create a place for women in politics, would be realized. The Valois line continued until 1594; between 1483 and 1651, France saw five female regencies.
No single critical approach to Christine’s corpus is adequate, and I do not pretend that the one that I offer here does anything but supplement the many existing studies of the poet’s body of work. As Andrea Tarnowski has written so eloquently, for Christine, “the individual life, or moment, only means insofar as it represents. If the twentieth century called the literary genre of allegory ‘intolerable,’ it is because we no longer require a simultaneity of levels of meaning.” In this way, Tarnowksi concludes, “we perceive as an aesthetic mistake what for Christine was a moral necessity.”26 My study deals with just one of many levels of meaning present in Christine’s works. Still, it is a significant level, and in charting it the study fills a gap and focuses attention on features previously neglected. Two recent studies in French offer important historical information about the poet, but their readings of her works are summaries of the contents rather than analyses relating her literature to her political environment.27 Biographies of the poet in English, although offering much of interest, reproduce the caricature of Charles VI’s court that I have described above, treating the feud in the tones of farce: “the unscrupulous Louis and the questionable Isabeau had been garnering ill repute for massive debauchery and financial greed, both individually and, supposedly, as a couple.”28 A number of excellent studies document the sources for Christine’s political ideas, but how she used her sources to make sense of the feud has not been explored.29 I hope that the reexamination of the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict offered here, along with the reconsideration of the relationship between Christine and Louis of Orleans and, especially, Isabeau of Bavaria, opens new directions for study.
As with my previous work, this study seeks to rehistoricize by reexamining material long controlled by a particular narrative. All scholars of early periods confront the “text-context conundrum,” that is, the problem of how to create the social context against which to measure our interpretation of a given piece of writing.30 The problem is that the writings we want to check are often major sources for re-creating the social context, which means that the process easily becomes tautological. In the case of Christine, whose autobiographical details are known almost exclusively through her own writings, the problem is particularly acute. Still, I hope to show here that we can achieve a fuller and more accurate picture than has been the case when we begin not with Christine’s own writings but with documents that reflect the principal arguments of the warring factions. When we read Christine’s writings as part of a set of competing feud narratives, her arguments take on a new coherence. As with my previous work, the point is not to whitewash figures previously held to be debauched, ambitious, and greedy. It is still less to suggest that the historical Christine was never critical of Orleanists. But whatever she may have thought of Louis, she never ceased supporting his regency, certainly not in favor of a candidate whose claim she held to be illegitimate. Literary scholars deal with probabilities, not truths. However,