Patriarchy, Politics, and Christine de Pizan's Influence on English Literature, 1400-1478

FAIN: FEL-273163-21

Misty Y. Schieberle
University of Kansas, Lawrence (Lawrence, KS 66045-7505)

Research and writing leading to a book on the reception of French author Christine de Pizan’s writing in late medieval English Literature.

This monograph recovers French author Christine de Pizan's substantial influence on late medieval English literature, an influence obscured by male writers' failure to cite her properly or at all, due to a combination of misogyny and political rivalries. Using a methodology that attends to gender, translators' practices, and political tensions between England and France, I reorient fifteenth-century English literary culture around Christine as the central figure whose inventive perspectives on authority, gender, war, and politics provided a rich opportunity for English writers to translate, adapt, and react to her ideas. New manuscript evidence reveals that writers such as Hoccleve and Lydgate knew Christine’s works better than their poems disclose, demonstrating that although they prefer to place themselves in the masculine English lineage of Chaucer, they owe many innovations in the form, content, and quality of their writings to the prominent French woman author instead.

Associated Products

Christine de Pizan’s Influence in England: Thomas Hoccleve, Harley 219, and Beyond (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Christine de Pizan’s Influence in England: Thomas Hoccleve, Harley 219, and Beyond
Author: Misty Schieberle
Abstract: James Laidlaw’s 1982 article on Christine de Pizan’s gifts of her poetry to the Earl of Salisbury and Henry IV of England first asserted that the Epistre Othea in British Library Harley Manuscript 219 was dedicated to Henry, not Charles VI of France. My own recent investigation of Harley 219 is indebted to Laidlaw’s work and complements his conclusion from a paleographical angle: Harley 219 was copied by Thomas Hoccleve, clerk of the Royal Office of the Privy Seal. Hoccleve translated Christine’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours into The Letter of Cupid in 1402, likely gaining access through the manuscripts Henry confiscated from Salisbury (Laidlaw 1982). Laidlaw’s theory that Christine’s work was transmitted from Henry through Hoccleve explains how the sole witness of the royal dedication survives in a rather lackluster manuscript. In this presentation, I reexamine Christine’s influence on Hoccleve, arguing that she – through the Epistre au dieu d’Amours, Epistre Othea, and the figure of authorship that she represented – was a chief figure to whom Hoccleve responds throughout his career, from his first effort in Cupid to his last compositions in the Series (1420s). Hoccleve repeatedly presents himself as following in the footsteps of “father Chaucer,” but I argue that he owes a much greater debt to Christine than has been acknowledged by scholars thus far.
Date: 05/13/2022
Conference Name: 57th International Medieval Congress (Kalamazoo, MI)

The May Poems of Thomas Hoccleve: Gender and the Letter of Cupid (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The May Poems of Thomas Hoccleve: Gender and the Letter of Cupid
Author: Misty Schieberle
Abstract: This contribution to the roundtable demonstrates how we can teach students to analyze Hoccleve's sources and manuscript contexts to evaluate how the Letter of Cupid engages with misogynist tropes and literary texts. The first half shows how Hoccleve's adaptation can productively be read against Christine de Pizan's original French poem to highlight the vivid, coarse, and misogynist language introduced by Hoccleve. The second half offers examples of manuscripts that show that the Letter was transmitted with a range of poems that seem designed to engage gender debates. These include both Hoccleve's own autograph/holograph manuscripts and scribal collections that may include misogynist poems by Lydgate and poems sympathetic to women by Chaucer. My presentation underscores how Hoccleve provocatively turns Christine's pro-woman poem into an ambiguous declaration by Cupid and that even medieval contemporaries were divided on whether Hoccleve's poem should be categorized among pro-woman or antifeminist works.
Date: 05/12/2022
Conference Name: 57th International Medieval Congress (Kalamazoo, MI)

New Source Evidence for Robert Wyer’s .C. Hystoryes of Troye (Article)
Title: New Source Evidence for Robert Wyer’s .C. Hystoryes of Troye
Author: Misty Schieberle
Abstract: This article identifies Robert Wyer’s source for his translation .C. Hystoryes of Troye as Philippe Pigouchet’s Cent Histoires edition of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (c. 1500), and not Philippe Le Noir’s 1522 printing that was modeled on Pigouchet and uses many of his original woodblocks. It also identifies other French and English printers as sources and influences for woodcuts that Wyer uses when he does not rely on Pigouchet’s image program; some of these are identified for the first time, and most are images that Wyer used elsewhere in his other printings. On the whole, this evidence sheds new light on Wyer’s sources, revises conclusions from previous studies, and suggests the potential for reconsidering the chronology of Wyer’s printing of .C. Hystoryes. An appendix provides data on the images and their sources.
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the Early Book Society (to be published in 2023/24)
Publisher: Journal of the Early Book Society (to be published in 2023/24)

Thomas Hoccleve of London: New Evidence of Hoccleve’s Family and Finances (Article)
Title: Thomas Hoccleve of London: New Evidence of Hoccleve’s Family and Finances
Author: Misty Schieberle
Abstract: Building on the 2014 identification by Estelle Stubbs and Linne Mooney of Thomas Hoccleve’s father as the London draper “William Occlyf” this article presents more records that connect William Hoccleve to the prominent Londoners William and Maud Holbech. These real estate documents and wills reveal that William Hoccleve was operating as a draper in London as early as 1365, before Thomas’s birth; they record his property dealings with Maud Holbech and suggest that William Hoccleve died between 1381 and 1383; and they identify Thomas as being on a clerical career path, lending credence to the claims that these men are indeed the poet and his father, and that Thomas Hoccleve was born a Londoner. This essay places the documents within the context of Hoccleve’s marriage and frustrations at the benefice system; examines the care with which Maud Holbech sought to provide for Hoccleve and others in her will; and suggests that Maud Holbech may have been William Hoccleve’s sister and Thomas Hoccleve’s aunt. These documents establish a previously unrecognized professional and likely familial network for the Hoccleves in London.
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Studies in the Age of Chaucer (to be published in 2023/24)
Publisher: Studies in the Age of Chaucer (to be published in 2023/24)

Introduction (Book Section)
Title: Introduction
Author: Misty Schieberle, ed., transl., and introduction
Editor: Jane Taylor, series editor
Abstract: This critical edition presents the trilingual glossary in London, British Library, Manuscript Harley 219, a newly discovered text compiled and produced by Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1367-1426). Harley 219 contains four major literary texts and a glossary that were copied or corrected by Hoccleve in conjunction with fellow scribes at the Royal Office of the Privy Seal. A final, practical text added in the hand of a later Privy Seal clerk indicates that the volume remained in the hands of Hoccleve’s colleagues after his death. There are modern editions of most of the literary texts: Odo of Cheriton’s Fables, the Anglo-Latin Gesta Romanorum, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and a French Secretum Secretorum (and, indeed, Harley 219 has been consulted in some of them). However, the trilingual glossary has largely been overlooked until its connection to Hoccleve became apparent: it is a wordlist of French terms glossed in Latin, and less frequently, Middle English, and followed by a very short series of phrases in French and Middle English. This trilingual production offers evidence of how Hoccleve and fellow clerks approached French language and language learning, and it contains playful linguistic arrangements and at least one reference to Hoccleve’s poetic works that are essential for understanding his audience and their engagement with French beyond their professional capacities as clerks. Throughout the introduction and notes of my edition, I argue that the glossary uniquely combines a variety of sources and demonstrates Hoccleve’s own innovations in glossary structure and experimental language. The introduction contextualises the work within several relevant contexts from broad to narrow: late medieval glossaries and language-learning texts, Hoccleve’s clerical career at the Royal Office of the Privy Seal, and the French and Latin works within the same codex.
Year: 2021
Access Model: subscription
Publisher: Medium Aevum Monograph Series, to be published 2024
Book Title: Hoccleve’s Trilingual Glossary: A Critical Edition from London, British Library, Harley Manuscript 219

Chapter 1: Hoccleve’s Career Misogyny; Chapter 2: Hoccleve’s Reactions to Christine in the Regiment of Princes and Other Works (Book Section)
Title: Chapter 1: Hoccleve’s Career Misogyny; Chapter 2: Hoccleve’s Reactions to Christine in the Regiment of Princes and Other Works
Author: Misty Schieberle
Abstract: These two chapters lay the foundation for my book's argument about the depth and breadth of Christine de Pizan's influence on Thomas Hoccleve, one of the most prominent poets after Chaucer. Chapter 1 traces the misogynist perspective Hoccleve brings to his translation of the Letter of Cupid to his position as a secular clerk, which causes him to identify paradoxically with the literary tradition Christine criticized yet also with Christine as writing outside traditional centers of authority. Chapter 2 demonstrates Hoccleve reacting to Christine's works through processes of further imitation, borrowing of her material, and negative depictions of women authorities as a means to defend his own status as a writer.
Year: 2022
Publisher: TBD
Book Title: Christine de Pizan and English Literary History (in progress)

Chapter 3: Lydgate and the Epistre Othea Reconsidered; Chapter 4: Lydgate and the Litel Bibell of Knyghthod (both in draft/in progress) (Book Section)
Title: Chapter 3: Lydgate and the Epistre Othea Reconsidered; Chapter 4: Lydgate and the Litel Bibell of Knyghthod (both in draft/in progress)
Author: Misty Schieberle
Abstract: Chapter 3 reconsiders the evidence of the Epistre Othea's influence on John Lydgate's Troy Book, Mummings, and Fall of Princes - tracing his views of Fortune, seen as "innovative" within the English tradition, to Christine's Othea, which he knew and used for Troy Book. Scholars have noted use of her content but not her overarching fiction of intervening in a classical hero's life to forestall his death or her view of men's misfortunes as the result of their own life choices, not a capricious goddess alone. Chapter 4 will amass the evidence to argue that Lydgate plausibly translated the version of the English Epistre Othea known as the Litel Bibell of Knyghthod and that it allowed for the intense, formative influence of Christine's ideas on the Fall of Princes. The Bibell has been called "Lydgatian" but never before analyzed for evidence that Lydgate authored it, because the single manuscript was produced outside his lifetime, but my work has shown that manuscript to be a copy of an earlier original, leaving open the possibility that the translation itself was made much earlier and contemporary with Lydgate.
Year: 2022
Book Title: Christine de Pizan and English Literary History (in progress)

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