2—
PROLIFERATING RESPONSES

4—
Contrary to What Is Said:
The Response au Bestiaire d'amour and the Case for a Woman's Response

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich

I should not seem to, be teaching Minerva herself.
Héloïse

As the medieval clergy conceived of it, the "response" (responsio ) was pivotal to the workings of intellectual mastery.^[1] In the structure of disputation, it provided a way for the disciple to assume an authoritative role and argue the master's knowledge in his stead.^[2] It was the occasion for establishing his position. This process reveals a paradox inherent to the response, and examining its paradoxical character brings us straight to the problem posed by a woman's response. On the one hand, the numerous works designated responses appear repetitive, reiterating the terms established by the master's work. Precisely because the response follows that lead, it is caught in the circuit of the always already said. While it may elaborate upon the masterly prototype, the response serves to reproduce that type, with the result that the respondent is a mimic, cast in the role of yes-man. On the other hand, the response represents a virtual space for difference. Rather than conforming to the contours of the master's earlier work, the response can diverge from its dictates. Point for point, the response can answer in opposition and thereby create a type of counterbalancing resistance. Far from confirming a redundant structure, the response jeopardizes it. Dissembling and combative, in this sense it breaks ranks.

True to its disputational spirit, clerical writing during the high Middle Ages cultivated the paradoxical response form because it could vent various agonistic impulses and in the end resolve them. This is particularly evident in the didactic narratives called enseignements that we studied in chapter 1.

As we saw, the master/disciple rapport was highly charged: both figures were drawn together and polarized by a drive for intellectual control that worked itself out within the framework of their disputation. In fact, it was the very process of working this drive through—of responding in contestatory and iterative fashion—that prepared certain disciples to become master. Far from countermanding each other, the affirming and the oppositional aspects of the response served to secure the same end: the master's dominance and the disciple's eventual graduation to that position.

The thirteenth-century Dialogues de Salemon et Marcoul offers a case in point. In the exchanges between an exemplary wise man and his protégé, Marcoul represents an implicit challenge to Salemon's wisdom.^[3] Yet the fact that the lesser Marcoul comes each time to reformulate that wisdom insures the continuity of Salemon's authority:

Dame otroie a ami
Cors et cuers autresi,
Ce dit Salemons;
Fax amanz sanz merci
On meint beax cors trahi,
Marcol li respont.
(stanza 12)

When a lady pledges herself to her lover, she pledges him heart and body; so says Salemon. False lovers are without mercy and have betrayed many beautiful bodies, Marcoul responds to him.

In this kernel of debate between master and student over women, Marcoul's response makes him complicitous with the system of mastery. While it qualifies the master's definition of women, the response still commits Marcoul to the system. So it is with many contemporaneous sapiential narratives; their staging of debates between magister figures such as Aristotle and the inscribed audience of initiates revolves around the dual quality of the initiate's response.^[4] By responding to the master's pronouncements, the inscribed audience also undergoes the rite of passage of disputation. Their paradoxical response seals the legitimacy of both the knowledge they are disputing and the system in which it functions. The mechanism of responses works not only to reinforce the complementary positions of dominance and subordination, as Hans-Robert Jauss has argued, but also to authenticate the master's authoritative knowledge by means of the respondent.^[5] Rising to respond thus involves participating in the ongoing consolidation of the hierarchical order of mastery.^[6]

This reinforcing function is so powerful that it even informs narratives structured only implicitly as responses. Take the example of the Livre

7. Responding in writing.  La Response au Bestiaire d'amour .
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 2609, fol. 32.
Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

d'Enanchet or the contemporaneous Chastoiement d'un père à son fils . They present their sententious material within the framework of a father/son or elder/disciple debate. Through the animated give-and-take of both parties, the father/elder's teachings are finally imparted. The disciple's responsiveness is similarly pivotal insofar as it supplies some obstacle internal to the system of mastery while upholding its logic. Combining a deep-seated sense of respect with a measure of insubordination, these implicit responses constitute the site where the master figure confirms the operations and apparatus of clerical learning.

By delineating the paradoxical aspects of the clerical response form, we can begin to see the problem posed by a woman's response (Figure 7). If the facets of contentiousness and iteration that define a response apply

easily to texts attributed to women, their net result does not. While we have little trouble cataloguing myriad representations in vernacular narrative of women replying oppositionally or iteratively to their male interlocutors, rarely does such narrative yield the profile of a woman master. While the two sides of the response are the veritable prerequisites for the male student entering the system of mastery, in the case of the woman respondent they suggest the limits of her access. They seem to furnish the reasons for her exclusion and progressive objectification by that same system. According to the Ovidian and Aristotelian orders of mastery, the paradoxical response generates, in the case of women, a non sequitur: a female disciple cannot enter the ranks of magistri .

This inquiry into responses attributed to women enables us to break through to the other side of this clerical model of representation. To begin with, doing so involves recognizing the pervasiveness of the tenacious clerical topoi about women during the Middle Ages. It also means reckoning with the tenacious influence they exert over critical discourse today. Across the range of didactic literature, it was the figure of women saying "Yes" and "No," of women responding both iteratively and antagonistically, that pointed to their disqualification from any type of intellectual mastery. The conventional scholastic analysis of feminine responsiveness justified taking women in hand. Indeed the recommendation became an integral element of vernacular clerical learning. In the case of the Bestiaire d'amour , the choice of merging the master and lover personae intensifies the clerical desire to formulate a woman's response as a tacit invitation to ravishment. The Bestiaire narrator's mastery is bound up with the assumption that she would be his yes-woman or that, prevaricating as ever, her contestatory response would signal her eventual capitulation—a far cry from her ever joining his ranks.

Both these designs for the woman's response dramatize the most widely held patriarchal presumptions about female speech. In the case of the iterative response, as we have seen, the issue of redundancy is particularly exaggerated with women interlocutors. Because the medieval clergy interpreted the figure of Eve in such a way as to assert the "natural" repetitiveness of female speech, the woman's response was logically deemed excessive and derivative. Even when this redundancy is cast pejoratively, and Eve is represented as overeager in her responsiveness to the devil, her aptitude for being a yes-woman is underscored. "Original sin" is a consequence of the first woman being too quick to answer. With the oppositional response as well, we find corroborating evidence of a longstanding clerical attempt to conceptualize negativity as feminine. The Ovidian pattern of representing women interlocutors as obstreperous enables the narrators to exacerbate antagonism usefully so as to validate the operations of mastery.

From a clerical perspective, characterizing a response as adversarial and as the work of women amounts to much the same thing; they offer similar ploys in securing the master's authority. This is a ploy that can be used by critics today. When Alexandre Leupin describes the Bestiaire respondent as "a lady who functions as the text's point of refraction, abstention, opposition," he restates a postulate perfectly consonant with those of medieval masterly personae.^[7] The woman's response is understood to be negative insofar as it provides the tension necessary to the functioning of mastery. This it does without ever seriously menacing such mastery and without ever including women. In critiquing clerical compositions of the feminine, the danger lies, then, in duplicating or assimilating them to a significant degree.

That the woman's response exemplifies the paradoxical character of the clerical genre, that it accommodates the putative conundrum of women's language: all these signs should alert us to the task of rethinking this category. Further, given the tendency of modern critics to recapitulate the medieval terms of the woman's response in their own work, it is all the more pressing to envisage different models. Are there different ways to contemplate the response inflected as feminine? How do we approach the woman's response in a way that acknowledges the determining influence of its clerical frame without discounting other valences? Such questions call for another critical point of departure. At the very least, they suggest the possibility that the woman's response can be conceptualized differently by modern-day critics. To do so opens up debate over the monolithic character of medieval clerical culture in the vernacular and its central claim of reproducing intellectual mastery unerringly. And these questions chart territory cut by fault lines in the monopoly of magisterial learning—fault lines that betray the disturbances caused by women's involvement uncovered in chapter 1.

The category of the woman's response thus becomes a key site for interrogating the structures of intellectual mastery and critiquing its symbolic domination. This critique builds on the disciple's discourse, which already brings to the surface some of the inherent weaknesses of mastery. The inscribed woman respondent occupies a disputational position similar to the disciple's. But because its critique focuses on the effects of mastery, the woman's response goes beyond the disciple's to contest the problem of the symbolic domination of masterly writing. This contesting, let me emphasize, does not involve women alone. I use the term "woman's response" to describe an attribution. The woman's response can refer to clerical forms within the world of mastery that are merely voiced by women. But the fact that such attributions were made helped create the occasion for actual women to rise to the challenge of responding. With the

advances in lay literacy during the later Middle Ages, the clerical version of a woman's response inside the masterly domain invited women outside to forge their own.

I wish to broaden the issue of the woman's response considerably—beyond that of the speech act. The response also represents a genre of text in action. As such, it is linked progressively with a variety of textual registers, with philosophical as well as amorous discourse. Such an inquiry leads to pondering the implications of individual response texts, for they signal reactions to the predominant textual practices of the clerisy. By working outward through concentric interpretative circles, my exploration of the woman's response will then move in turn from discursive strategies to specific episodes of public debate over clerical textual practices. As I suggested in the introduction, the largest, most ambitious interpretative circle will thus examine the woman's response as a social movement that calls to account clerical conceptions and figurations of women.

Because the notion of woman's response is relatively unfamiliar, I shall begin with the simplest concerns: how to respond? why respond? who is responding? The Response au Bestiaire d'amour serves as a test case for exploring these questions.^[8] Not only does this late-thirteenth-century narrative constitute one of the earliest replies to a master's text already in circulation, but it responds with remarkable erudition to the style and substance of that text. Engaging with the master, the Response begins by commenting on the creation of women. It takes up the master's eroticized exegesis of bestiary exempla point for point so as to question his interpretations and their underlying intentions. This questioning results in a meditation on the public force of language. For these reasons, the Response au Bestiaire will also serve as a fulcrum text: as I hope will become clear over the next four chapters, it structures my thought on the phenomenon of the woman's response per se.

How to Respond?

The woman answering the Bestiaire master grounds her response in what I shall call a principle of contrariety:

Tout autel vous puis je dire que puis que je seroie contraire a vostre volenté et vous a le moie, et que nous nous descorderiens d'abit et de volenté, je ne me porroie acorder a vostre volenté comment que vous vous acordissiés a moi.
(Segre, 113)^[9]

8. In the heat of debate.  La Response au Bestiaire
d'amour .
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Cod. 2609, fol. 34.
Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Likewise, I could tell you that since I would be contrary to your will and you to mine, and we would disagree both in habit and in will, I could not agree with your will however much you might agree with me.

This is no mere disagreement (Figure 8). From the outset, the respondent introduces a logical structure that establishes a principle of contrariety and sets it in relation to contradiction. Whereas contradictory objects are mutually exclusive, thus canceling each other out logically, contraries constitute coexisting differences. That is, they are defined oppositionally to each other in a way that admits the separate distinctiveness of each other. Contrary pairs can stand side by side despite their evident opposite properties.

This logical distinction between contrariety and contradiction is often muddled today. The result is that they are conflated, understood to signify a single, amorphous type of negation. But in their original Aristotelian formulation in the square of oppositions, the distinction was rigorously maintained.^[10] If we recall the preponderant Aristotelian substratum for

most high-medieval masterly works, especially for Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire , the woman respondent's choice of this logic is noteworthy. On one level, this contrary logic places her writing on a par with her interlocutor's: she is represented as his intellectual match. On another, her use of the terms of contrariety sets her at complete odds with several of the Master Philosopher's most formidable theories. It transforms the notion of contrariety to women's advantage.^[11] In effect, the Bestiaire respondent works a contrario so as to argue against the Aristotelian postulate of the incomplete woman and its corollary of her irrationality. That the respondent retrieves one element of Aristotle's thought in order to contest another means turning the entire corpus of Aristotelian learning against itself. This iconoclastic brand of argumentation undergirds her contrary choice of how to respond.

Questions of knowledge offer the first arena in which the issue of contrariety is tested in the Response . In the prologue, the respondent acknowledges that any transaction in knowledge operates differently according to gender. Furthermore, given the relations established by the Bestiaire , a woman recipient of the master's teaching risks being adversely affected. But here this sort of scholastic discrimination prompts her to espouse a knowledge specific to women:

Et pour che, biaus maistres, vous proi je que selonc che que vous m'avés dit ne tenés mie a vilenie se je m'aïe de vostre sens, selonc che que je en ai retenu. Car encore ne puisse je savoir tout che que vous savés, si sai je aucune chose que vous ne savés mie. Dont il m'est bien mestiers que je m'en aïe selonc che que li besoins en est grans a moi, qui feme sui.
(Segre, 106)

Dear master, I ask you in accordance with what you have told me, not to take it badly if I avail myself of your meaning insofar as I have understood it. For although I cannot know all that you know, I do know something which you do not know at all. So it behooves me to take advantage of it, since I, as a woman, have great need of it.

This respondent maps out her own intellectual province. The Bestiaire master's erudition notwithstanding, she reserves for herself something inaccessible to him. Her distinct and separate knowledge is fundamentally allied with the subjective enunciation: "je . . . qui feme sui." Not only does she recognize gender's part in the production of knowledge, but she asserts her intellectual power on that basis. The claim to her epistemological field is made on the strength of her subjective identity: one gesture follows from the other. Together they suggest this respondent's very different approach to learning. Instead of meeting the master's erudition

head-on, in the habitual agonistic stance, the woman respondent defers rhetorically. She bows and scrapes in a familiar posture of humility. Yet this self-deprecating manner, which Hélène Cixous has dubbed wittily the rhetoric of sexecuser , is the very means whereby she can move past the stark, mutually reinforcing confrontations between antagonists.^[12] A semblance of acquiescence can point the way out of a magisterial system of controlling conflict. By configuring difference in nonexclusive, nonadversarial terms, the Bestiaire response posits a woman's knowledge that is not defined in contradiction to the master's. It advances an oppositional epistemology. From the very beginning, this respondent argues for a specifically feminized relation of contrariety with the world of clerical learning.

In this context, she sets into play an alternate account of female generation. Having distinguished the particular terms of her knowledge, the respondent proposes a different model of creation. Her version recoups the theory of dual creation from Genesis 2, a theory discounted by orthodox Christianity and yet widely circulating in apocryphal form in Talmudic exegesis and elsewhere.^[13] In other words, the female persona deploys a reading at complete odds with the canonical account of Adam's rib. Its deviance is twofold; for not only does it describe the woman's birth as simultaneous and independent of the man's, but it relates how he murders her:

Dont il avint que quant dex eut doune lun et lautre vie et cascun forme et doune a cascun sens naturel, il lor conmanda sa volente a faire. Et ne demora mie longues apries quant adans ochist sa feme pot aucun courouc dont ie ne doi ci faire mention. Dont saparut nostre sires a adan et li demanda pour coi il avoit ce fait. Il respondi ele ne m'estoit rien, et pour cou ne la poole iou amer.
(Vienna 2609, fol. 32 verso; Segre, 107)

Then it happened that when God had given to one and the other life, form, and natural intelligence, He commanded them to do his will. And it was not long after that Adam killed his woman out of anger, which I shall not discuss here. Our Lord then appeared to Adam and asked him why he had done this, and Adam replied, "She meant nothing to me and so I could not love her."

Through such a scene of murderous violence, the woman's response develops its contrariety in two further ways. First of all, it confronts the preeminent topos of a nefarious woman apt to kill the lover. If the Bestiaire lover complains of the siren's lure, here, the respondent points out, the first woman is killed without provocation. Her answer to the master's symbolic death is to match it and deflect it with her own. Moreover, her

rendition of Adam's crime offers a parable of man's enormous difficulty in entertaining any contrary element, for he is represented killing out of sheer ambivalence toward Eve's existence: "ele ne m'estoit rien." His reflexive reaction is to strike out her being; even in Eden, man's antipathy toward a potential female rival generates violence against her.

Despite its violent and misogynistic terms, the lesson of this parable is far from grim. By reviving an alternative account of woman's genesis, the respondent comes to argue for a superior female composition. This is an argument concerning matter well known by the late thirteenth century: "Adam was made from the mud of the earth while Eve was made from Adam's rib" (de materia qui Adam factus de limo terre, Eva de costa Ade).^[14] The respondent bolsters this argument with the language of Aristotelian materialism and contends that the first woman's murder occasions a new female creation of more suitable material, "de mains soufissant matere."^[15] Made from peerless ingredients and still further refined, the species of woman is a handiwork apart. Since God continues to work over the matter of the first man, he produces in the woman a better artifact—"une matiere amendee" (fol. 34). The second, female object builds on the original, enhancing it. No mere pejorative sign of derivation, the respondent's Eve exemplifies a perfectible human being. Such an account is confounding insofar as Eve's origin in the male body does not prove her inferiority, as Aristotelian wisdom and countless medieval commentaries would have it. On the contrary, it proves her greater integrity.^[16] While the respondent retains the shell of this well-known scholastic argument, she changes its very matter to discomfiting effect.

I play with this pun on "matter" here because it is in perfect keeping with the respondent's tactics. Her experiment with the term "matter" salvages it from its usual disenfranchising Aristotelian context and casts it anew. This she accomplishes by parodying the concept of sufficient matter (souffisant matieres ), usually reserved for the concept "man" to the detriment of "insufficient woman." By forging the notion of "improved matter," the respondent can place a woman in a category apart. Her recuperation of Aristotelian formulae turns the criterion of matter to women's advantage, for it refers to both the raw materials of creation and those of writing. The two "matters" are often combined so that the respondent's text reads like a multilevel commentary on this primordial issue. Again and again she returns to it, developing the links between the creation of the first woman and the fashioning of her text. What matter makes up her writing? In the wake of her anti-Aristotelian meditation on matter, the respondent envisages a female matter relatively free of disabling connotations.^[17]

This notion of matter as writing material sets up her exploration of the master's characteristic figurative language. In exegetical style, she approaches tropes as the building blocks of clerical composition. And the figure singled out epitomizes the clerical project to render women figuratively. In the respondent's terms, it is "the castle that is woman." This figure of the female body as military fortification is so endemic that most medieval works assess it from the outside alone—as a facade to scale, a construction to besiege and overwhelm. The only perspective is that of the aggressor. Remarkably, this woman's response places us within the castle wall:

Et por cou qe chastiaus de feme si est souent pourement porueus solonc cou que dex sine douna mie si ferme pooir a la feme come il fist al home: mest il roestiers de meillor garde auoir qe il ne feroit uous qi hom estes solonc cou que deuant est traitie. Et uoel uenir a cou que corn il soit ensi que dex uous ait done plus ferme pooir: ne fu il pas si uileins que il ne nos donast noble entendement de nous garder tant come nous nos uorrons metre a deffense. Et por cou que iou ai oi dire que il nest plus de faintisses que de soi recroire rant come force puist durer. Iou ai mestier que ie gietie de mes engiens au deuant et face drecier perieres et mangouniaus ars atour et arbalestres a cest chastel deffendre que iou uoi que uous auez asailli.
(Segre, 105)

The castle that is woman is so poorly protected because God gave much less firm power to woman than he did to man. It is necessary for me to be on close guard against you who are a man as was mentioned before. And so I wish to come to this point: since God gave to you this greater power, it would have been wicked if God had not given us noble intelligence so that we can protect and defend ourselves properly. And so I have heard it said that it is hardly cowardly to renounce the fight so long as force prevails. It is crucial that I employ my shrewdness, that I know how to deploy my weaponry in order to defend this castle, which I see you have already assailed.

The response makes over the castle so that the audience can observe the trope working from a contrary position—from inside the female body. There is no impetus to dismantle the predominant figurative structure. Rather, the move is to open it up and examine it ironically from the inside out. The castle still stands, but in disarming fashion it is represented subjectively, as feminine. From this rarely adopted vantage point the respondent converts the standard elements of the erotic trope according to an explicitly defensive vision.

Central to this problem of defense in the Bestiaire Response is a conception of power that contrasts the physical force of man with the

intelligence of woman. Such a conception redresses the usual balance of power whereby the cognitive belongs exclusively to a man on the attack. Here, by contrast, the woman is credited with rational faculties and her putative physical vulnerability acts as a cover for them. As Elizabeth Janeway has elucidated, the patriarchal presumption of feminine weakness can translate for women into a show of improbable strength.^[18] By protesting her limitations, the respondent, in fact, musters her own intellectual resources. What's more, she exercises them in her defense. The flourish of naming weaponry, "perieres et mangouniaus ars atour et arbalestres," identifies a woman's resources in the very figurative idiom that is, as a rule, marked off-limits to her. Unlike the women in Capellanus's De amore , this respondent is adept at allegorical discourse and uses it to construct her rhetorical defense. Not only does the Response disclose the destructive motives behind a hallmark clerical symbol such as the castle, but it represents a woman wielding the master's figurative language to her own ends.

Such a strategy is conceived in terms of the recurring issue of matter:

Premierement iou uoel qe uous sacies de qoi iou me uoel deffendre contre le premier assaut de cest arriere ban que uous auez amene sor mi. Iou qui principaus sui de la guerre ameintenir vous fac sauoir qe se uous fussies auises dune chose dont iou me sent forte et garnie que molt le doit on tenir a merueilleuse folie. Et ne tenes mie a mencoigne la raisson tele come ie le uous dirai solonc cou qe iou lai oie. Il est uoirs qe souent auient que li fors sil ceurt sus le foible por ce que il ne salt pooir de deffendre. Et por cou que uos cuidies que ie meusse pooir de deffendre mauez uos del premier enuaie. Or uous semble qe uous ne seres ia recreus, tant come alaine uous dure. Et iou mestres si me deffenc de ce que iou daussi soffissant matere sui engenree et fake come uous iestes qui seure me coures et le uous uoel prouuer ensi.
(Segre, 105–6)

First of all, I want you to know, I can defend myself against the first assault that your writing has directed toward me. I, who am the principal defender in the war, must advise you that I feel strong and well guarded, so much so that some might take it as wild folly. Don't take lightly the reasons that I am telling you according to what I have heard. True, there are those who secure their strength on the weak since they do not know how to defend themselves; so you may think that I do not have the power to defend myself and that you have me at the first shot. It may seem to you that you will never be vanquished so long as you have breath. But I, master, defend myself because I was engendered from just such sufficient matter as you who are secure, and I want to prove it to you in this manner.

The feminized trope of the castle constitutes an inviolable defense because of its makeup. Since the first woman is distinguished from Adam on the basis of her material, so too are the respondent's figures. The bedrock of a contrary female substance transforms the significance of her symbolic structures. Engendered from a different, yet equally suitable matter, she is depicted as one who takes the initiative in conceptualizing her body anew and defending it rhetorically. Thereby she is shown to gain a masterful position. This last point may appear dubious. The epithet, maistres , slips in subtly, like so many gestures of respect. We are accustomed to read it in terms of the clerkly interlocutor. But the phrasing is unlike any other in the text. It can qualify her subjective stance. This possibility of it referring to the female subject—iou mestres —inflects it otherwise. For the woman respondent to articulate her subjective power in a reformed symbolic language implies a mode of mastery.

The chance of her assuming this title calls into question the relations governing the Bestiaire and its Response . The figure of a female master reverses the conventional dynamic between an irreproachable magister and his pusillanimous female pupil. This reversal is all the more apparent in a woman's response that puts on the mantle of scholastic authority with such ease. Her text reads as a scholastic set piece comparable to the Bestiaire and far surpassing most contemporaneous Old French texts. Small wonder then that the Response pushes still further the connection between female matter and symbolic language.

The respondent's next argumentative move is paradoxical, for it reaffirms the orthodox hierarchy "in which the woman should obey the man, and man the earth, and the earth the Lord Creator who rules over all creatures" (dont doit la feme obeir al home et li hom a la terre et la terre a diu ki creeres fu et souverains de toute creature; fol. 34). The respondent can afford to reiterate the quintessential scholastic view of world order because a woman's domain has already been staked out. At the heart of this divinely ordained system there is a designated material site at complete odds with it. Yet situating womankind in this different matrix does not necessitate destroying the superstructure. Beyond any mere iconoclasm, the respondent's debate with the master bespeaks the desire to design a rhetorical and epistemological space for women. This is a space both contiguous with and outside the bounds of man's dominion. While located within the conventional superstructure, it is also disengaged from it. At the very moment of taking on the master, the narrative lays out this contrary space as a legitimizing ground for a woman's response.

I have teased out the prologue of the Response au Bestiaire line by line because it clearly articulates the axiom of woman's contrariety. Beginning

with beginnings, this narrative posits a distinctive female matter, and with it a different epistemology. On these twin bases, the respondent can answer the master efficaciously. For she is positioned right away in a contrary relation to the master's erudition and can thus dispute his propositions. Having forged a way to respond, the narrative moves on to confront the problem of a dominant figurative language. It tackles the question: why? If the prologue lays the groundwork for a woman's response, then the main narrative shows why it is crucial for her to answer the master. The Response builds on the incipit alluding to the potential damage of linguistic constructions: "Nothing should be said or done to hurt a person" (a cose nule dire ne faire par coi nus ne nule soit empiries; Segre, 105). The focus is on gauging the effects of clerical composition.

Why Respond?

Faced with the master's bestiary figures, the respondent makes the following observation:

Car je sai vraiement qu'il n'est beste qui tant fache a douter comme douche parole qui vient en dechevant. . . . Car vos paroles ont mains et piés, et sanle vraiement que nule raison ne doi avoir de vous escondire cose que vous voeilliés.
(Segre, 118)

For truly I know that there is no beast who should be feared like a gentle word that comes deceiving. . . . For your words have hands and feet, and it truly seems that I can have no reason to refuse you anything that you want.

In her hands, the habitual figurative equation breaks down. The bestiary metaphor no longer refers to an aspect of human erotics but to language, specifically the master's "gentle deceptive word."^[19] The respondent's analysis goes on to demonstrate the treacherous character of his bestiary formula. It is not the woman who is dangerous like a siren or vulture, but rather the master's discourse, which transforms her symbolically into such a creature. The "beasts" to watch out for are those figures describing women in consistently noxious terms.

The respondent's metaphorical equation is doubly ironic. Rending the veil of the master's metaphors, it unmasks the manipulative design behind the prevailing symbolic language. Since her metaphor identifies the master's "soft word" as an instrument of deception, it implies that all those sinister, threatening, female personae in the master's Bestiaire are a form of

9. Further disputation.  La Response au Bestiaire
d'amour .
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Cod. 2609, fol. 44.
Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

displaced animus, an expression of the misogyny informing medieval vernacular writing. This ironic finding is itself cast metaphorically. The respondent does not relinquish the privilege of figuration even in the act of criticizing its conventional uses. As in the prologue, her dispute with the master's language is played out on the same level (Figure 9). It works through a recuperated and transformed figurative idiom. But of what kind? Presented as a subjective truth claim (car je sai vraiement), the respondent can appraise magisterial symbolic language differently, in a language particular to a woman. Anchored in this "I" (je . . . qui feme sui ), her critique deploys a figurative register that is by definition contrary to the master's.

We come here to a crux in the Bestiaire Response . If this narrative breaks down the magisterial symbolic language, why does the female persona persist in analyzing the various bestiary exempla? Part of an answer involves the principle of gender contrariety undergirding this narrative. With each new bestiary metaphor, the Response pushes the difference further between a woman's analysis of the symbolic and the master's. Her explications de texte operate according to a different logic that necessitates a distinct language. Precisely because the respondent is represented

contesting the master's entire repertory of bestiary images, the principle of feminine contrariety is systematically developed—linguistically, as well as epistemologically and materially.

The reason for developing it systematically (and here we get to the other part of the answer) is the respondent's thesis that the master's discourse is deceitful. If the Response is to demonstrate "what she knows to be true" (line 1), that is, the profound deceitfulness of such language toward its intended female audience, then it must do so on a comprehensive scale. For anything less would serve only to reinforce the master's discourse. In order to prove how it works to the detriment of its female public, the Response mounts an exemplum-by-exemplum critique.

Consider, à titre d'exemple , the Response's undoing of the wolf exemplum:

Je doi bien dire que je fui premierement veüe de vous, que je doi par cesti raison apeler leu. Car je puis mauvaisement dire cose qui puist contrester a vous. Et pour che puis je bien dire que je de vous ai esté veüe premiers: dont je me doi bien warder, se je sui sage.
(Segre, 110–11)

I must well say that I was seen first by you, who I must for this reason call the wolf. For I can only poorly say anything that could counter you. And for this reason I can well say that I was first seen by you, and I must be on guard if I am prudent/wise [sage ].

We remember the master's ploy of feminizing the wolf and taking it upon himself; here the respondent is quick to thwart the maneuver. She catches the master acting the helpless woman. Her analysis reveals the transfer mechanism of his feminine figures and their potentially detrimental effect. In turn, the respondent reverses the transfer. She makes the wolf signify again a predatory animal, and by inference, the master. This reversal is couched in the self-deprecating terms typical of the prologue: the sexecuser rhetoric prevails. But as we have seen, this rhetoric can belie an improbable flourish of knowledge, in this instance a pun on sagesse . Referring to both prudence and wisdom, this play of words highlights the fundamental connection between wisdom and self-protection. Whereas the master's sagesse suggests an outward, aggressive motion, the woman respondent's, by contrast, entails an inner consolidation. In this sense, her interpretation of the master's predatory figure does not launch a comparably predatory language.

Using the master's tropes for seduction, the Response extends its exposé of their harmful effects. Take her reading of the tiger:

Car je voi bien et sai que tout aussi que on giete les miroirs devant le tigre pour lui aherdre, tout aussi faites vous pour mi vos beles paroles qui plus delitaules sont a oïr que tigres a veoir, si comme deseure est dit. Et bien sai queil ne vous caurroit qui i perdrist, mais que vo volentés lust faite.
(Segre, 117)

For I clearly see and know that just as one casts mirrors in front of the tiger to catch it, so you make for me your beautiful words. They are more delectable to hear than the tiger is to see, as has been said above, and I know well that it would not concern you who perished by them as long as your will be done.

The Response returns to the traditional bestiary typing of the female tiger—a revision that, at first glance, appears to reinforce the clerical commonplace of the narcissistic woman. Yet if we look closer, the comparison between the beauty of the tiger and the more beautiful words of the master shifts attention away from the putative issue of female narcissism and toward the damaging function of the mirror. The problem is less one of a woman enthralled by her self-image than of the mesmerizing quality of the master's words. The respondent's contrary metaphorical formula equates the master's comely discourse with the fatal attractions of the mirror. It also makes explicit the dialectical terms of power so characteristic of the master's reasoning: "And I know well that it would not concern you who perished as long as your will be done" (Et bien sai que il ne vous caurroit qui i perdrist, mais que vo volentés lust faite). Uncovering the master's show of will (vo volentés) gives the respondent more reasons why she should argue against him.

If the Response exposes the malicious tropes for seduction, it also challenges their various symbolic associations with death. Hence the elimination of all the master's figures for resuscitation and resurrection. In the woman's schema, there is no place for the pelican, lion, and beaver exempla for the simple reason that once seduction is interpreted as a form of death for a woman, it is absolute. As the respondent describes it: "For who loses his honor is truly dead. Indisputably it is true: who-ever is dead is unlikely to recover" (Car qui s'onneur pert, il est bien mors. Certes c'est volts; qui mots est, pau i puet avoir de recouvrier; Segre, 121).

A figure unique to the Response equates such "death" with a threat of sexual violence:

Tout aussi comme li cas qui a ore mout simple chiere, et du poil au defors est il mout soues et mout dous. Mais estraingniés li le keue: il getera ses ongles fors de ses .iiij. piés, et vous desquirra les mains se

vous tost ne le laissiés aler. Par Dieu, je cuit aussi que teus se fait ore mout dous, et dist paroles de coi il vauroit estre creüs et avoir se volenté, que seil en estoit au deseure et on neli faisoit du tout se volenté, qui pis feroit que li cas ne puist faire.
(Segre, 123)

Just like the cat who has the straightest face, and the softest, gentlest fur outside, is very sweet and gentle. But were you to pull its tail, then it will stick out its claws on all four paws and rip your hands to pieces until you let go. By God, I believe there is that type of man who is all gentleness and who speaks words to convince you and to get his way, and yet he is capable of far worse, were he on top and not getting his way.

The cat exemplum dramatizes the nexus in the master's amorous discourse of elegance, malicious intent, and force. The effects are graphically portrayed: what passes for love talk is a language of physical blows. There is little mistaking the image of the cat on top for the type of sexual force described in the Aristotelian didactic treatises considered in chapter 1. The respondent's original trope underscores the link between the master's exquisite figurative language and its domineering impetus expressed in sexual terms.

At these junctures, where the Response supplants the master's figures with its own, the full import of its contrariety comes into focus. Dismantling the Bestiaire 's metaphors, stroke for stroke, exposes the detrimental power of the master's language. It shows the harmful aftereffects of that language on the public of women. In short, the Response formulates the problem of verbal injury. There is no quibbling or self-belittling rhetoric here: it disputes the amorous discourse of the Bestiaire on the grounds of its mjunousness.

The linchpin of this indictment occurs in a mock dialogue between lovers:

Mais che seroit bien parlers a rebours se je disoie a aucun cose dont il me vausist traire en cause et mener maistrie seur moi. Car mout se moustrent bien amours ou eles sont, si queli parlers et li descouvrirs amie a son ami, ne ami a s'amie, n'est fors parlers a rebours. Jou ne di mie que bien n'ait raisson de dire amie a son ami: "Il me plaist bien que toute li honneurs et li biens que vous poés faire soit en mon non"; et chil a l'autre lés dira: "Dame, ou damoisele, je sui du tout sans contrefaire a vostre volenté." Mais dire: "Amie, je me doeil, ou muir, pour vous; se vous ne me secourés je sui traïs et me morrai," ja, par Dieu, puis qu'il se descouverra ensi, je n'i arai point de fianche; anchois me sanle que teus paroles sont mengiers a rebours.
(Segre, 129–30)

But that would be "speaking at cross purposes" if I were to say something that he could use against me and thereby master me. For love truly shows that talk and secrets shared between lovers, whether woman to man or man to woman, is nothing more than "speaking at cross purposes." I am not saying that it is not right for a woman to say to her lover: "It is pleasing to me that all the honor and good that you accomplish is done in my name" or that a man says to her: "Lady, I am completely at your service." But to say: "Lady, I'm tormented, I'm dying for you; if you do not save me, I am betrayed and shall die." My Lord, whosoever reveals himself in that manner is not trustworthy. Such a talk, it seems to me, is "eating [speaking] at cross purposes."

All the key elements of the respondent's analysis converge in the term "parlers a rebours" (speaking at cross purposes). First: the issue of figurative language. The risk of speaking at cross purposes arises from the metaphors specific to amorous discourse. This is especially the case with the paradigmatic figure of lovesickness, li maux d'amour . By resorting to such metaphors, both men and women run this risk. Second: the drive to dominate. At the core of such a figurative parlers a rebours is the desire for domination, flagged by the vocabulary of will (volenté ) and mastery (maistrie ). Once we recognize the connection between figuration and domination, the differences between so-called masculine and feminine rebours are patent, and those differences are bound up with the desired effect on the interlocutor. Whereas the respondent evaluates a man's speech act—the infamous death threat—as manipulative, she introduces no female analogue. In fact, the woman's speech act may result in her being mastered herself (se je disoie a aucun chose dont il me vausist traire en cause et mener maistrie seur moi). This scene is set up hypothetically (che seroit . . . se je disoie). As if for argument's sake, the respondent considers the possibility of a woman speaking a rebours , but it remains pure conjecture. On two scores, then, the Response argues that it is virtually impossible for a woman to speak in this manner. Since her own figurative language reveals no dominating impulse, it does not impose the respondent's will on her audience. And since her male interlocutor is incapable of understanding the recourse to figurative language otherwise, he is likely to exploit hers as an opportunity for his own mastery (et mener maistrie seur moi).

Through this notion of parlers a rebours , the Response brings pressure to bear on that proposition linking figurative language to domination. It calls to account the process whereby the figurative speech act inflicts harm, a process so utterly conventionalized through the configurations of

vernacular writing that it appears unremarkable—except, according to the Response , in the case of women speakers. Precisely because their language shows no signs of injuriousness, because the male interlocutor interprets it instead as an invitation to overpower, that proposition breaks down. What is rebours , then, is not a woman's negativity, as the master's paradigm would have it, but rather the potential destructiveness of the reigning figurative language. Parlers a rebours exemplifies the system of mastery operative in vernacular love narratives insofar as it reveals how its founding theorem—using the figurative ® achieving dominance—is invalid for a woman. She is represented as neither able to achieve a dominant position through the figurative nor desirous of it. For a female persona, such a proposition does not hold.

Having explicated the domineering function of men's parlers a rebours , the Response pins it explicitly on the clerical caste:

[C]he sont chil clerc qui si s'afaitent en courtoisie et en leur beles paroles, qu'il n'est dame ne demoisele qui devant aus puist durer qu'il ne veullent prendre. Et sans faille bien m'i acort, car en eus est route courtoisie, si que j'ai entendu. Et en aprés sont li plus bel, de coi on fait clers, et sont li plus soutil en malisse, et sousprendent les non sachans. Pour che les apele je oisiaus de proie, et bon feroit estre garnie contre aus.
(Segre, 133)

These are clerks so expert in courtesy and fine talk that if they are after women, there is no one, neither lady nor young girl, who can withstand them. And I can well understand, for these men are impeccably courteous, according to what I've heard. And moreover they are among the most handsome which is why they are made clerics, and most subtle in their malice, and they outwit the untrained. For this reason, I call them birds of prey, and it would do well to guard oneself against them.

This is no standard outburst of anticlericalism. Instead of attacking clerks for what they are lacking, as in the long line of clerc/chevalier debates, the Response focuses on their outstanding talents. The clerical skill in formulating intellectual problems, subtilitas , transmutes into a form of malice. It signals a perverse desire to use those skills to the detriment of others. Whence the relevance of the birds of prey exemplum: the nefarious "beles paroles" of the clergy resemble so many snares for the unsuspecting. Rather than use this exemplum to describe the animalistic quality of erotic relations, the respondent works it back the other way, portraying how bestial the clerical representations of those relations are, which she describes elsewhere as "wounding, beautiful talk" (si trenchans cose n'est comme de bel parler; Segre, 118).

Just as the respondent disputes clerical figuration per se, she defends

women in general. Increasingly, she speaks on behalf of "all those women who need persevere in love" (toutes celles qui enamor vauront perseverer; fol. 33). These inclusive gestures function both negatively and positively. Negatively, they function as a caveat, because the respondent depicts those gullible women who "thrill to hear the clerks' words" as an antitype (celes qui s'aerdent a escouter leur paroles; Segre, 134–35). She uses them to designate the female type targeted by clerkly amorous discourse. In fact, the Response goes so far as to show the way deceived women often reproduce their own deception among other women (Segre, 132–33). At the same time, the Response projects a positive female type, an image around which women can rally so as to avoid complicitous self-deception.

Tout aussi vaurroie je vraiement que toutes se vardassent . . . que quant .j. venroit qui si feroit le destravé, et puis si li deïst on une cose que il feroit le plus a envis et dont mains de damages seroit.
(Segre, 130–31)

I would truly like all women to watch out for themselves . . . so that when a man comes along and acts desperately, he would then be told something that he would do most begrudgingly, and from which the least damage would ensue.

In a gesture of solidarity, the respondent envisages those women who could deflect the advances of a feigning male interlocutor. She hypothesizes a general guardedness in women. What is most striking about this projection is the aim of avoiding all destructiveness. In this scenario, the woman's response to the feigning male speaker incurs little or no damage (dont mains de damages seroit). Unlike clerkly amorous discourse, a woman's speech act has no backlash on its intended audience. The destructive character of a man's requeste is not met in kind.

To the question why respond? then, the Bestiaire Response replies not only "Because," as the response form dictates, or "Because a woman should," as the gendered logic of contrariety has it, but most importantly, "Because clerical discourse should answer to a woman's charge of injuriousness." Herein lies the innovation of this text. Rarely did French narrative of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries represent the act of bringing an accusation against a discourse. However self-conscious this culture was about literary composition, it was preoccupied for the most part with the process of writing. Even when it broached the problem of a writing's effect on its audiences, this did not implicate its own practices. At the time of the Bestiaire Response , Old French literary culture seldom pursued the possibility that it could commit acts of verbal injury so abundantly in evidence in other contexts. Like the clerical catalogues detailing

various verbal infractions, narratives in the line of the Roman de la rose addressed the problem only to locate elsewhere. To be sure, this culture was concerned with slander and calumny and all malicious language meant to harm. Such are the habitual complaints about mesdisants (gossips, slanderers).^[20] Yet the concern over mesdisance involves a threat coming from outside the domain of amorous discourse. Never is mesdisance associated with or deemed representative of a normative discourse.

Bringing the charge of verbal injury against the prevailing masterly discourse makes the Bestiaire Response singular in another way. It locates all problems of textual representation in the social domain. Its attention to the effects of figuration places that figuration in relation to a community. In turn, the Response suggests that group's chance of regulating it. The case of one respondent does not constitute a community, especially when she is part of the intricate configurations of erotic/didactic narrative. Yet the fact that the Bestiaire respondent evaluates the ways textual representation can injure a public raises in a powerful manner the idea of social controls. The fact that a female persona raises the idea of verbal injury in terms of a female public bespeaks a critical connection in late medieval culture between women and the social accountability of clerical discourse. I shall return to this point again and again.

Naming Names

Surprisingly, in one instance we are able to see how the Response 's charge against clerical discourse resonated for some of its audiences. In one manuscript, the Bestiaire and Response are followed by yet another woman's response (hereafter referred to as Response 2).^[21] Someone saw fit to extend the exchange between master and respondent and to pursue the problem of injurious language. At the center of this second Response is the question of fame or reputation.

By taking up the topic of reputation, this text builds on the question of a discourse's effects posed in the first. It considers the object of such discursive damage: women's names. To broach this topic represents another effort to dispute the masterly discourses. In the largest scheme of things, it suggests other ways of naming women.

Response 2 introduces the notion of a name as a symbolic value established publicly. In contrast to proper names such as Marie or Blanchefleur, the name it considers refers to the sum of properties that a person/ persona represents for a particular community.^[22] As the woman respondent stresses, it is constituted primarily by those discourses in public circulation:

Et dautre part sens et valours si sunt ausi comme ensamble quant il sunt sans loenge, ne mis ne doit savoir quil soit larges et boins sil na autre tiesmoingnage que lui li quel lensiucent et sacent que cou soit voirs par le conversation quil ait entre eaus.
(Vienna 2609, fol. 46)

And on the other hand, if the intelligence and reputation [of a person] are also together when they are without praise, it is impossible to know, and indeed one should not know, whether they are widespread and good unless there are other witnesses that follow from it and know it to be true from the conversation that there was between them.

Everything hinges on the ways a person is represented before the public. However deserving an individual, his or her good name depends on the witness of others. Reputation is contingent on the prevailing public discourse. It follows, then, that the process of gaining a reputable name is necessarily subject to what the respondent calls "conversation . . . between them" (le conversation quil ait entre eaus; fol. 46). Caught in the web of such discourses, a name cannot escape their terms. On the one hand, there is the model of panegyric (loenge , fol. 46), an excessive, idealizing discourse that Leo Braudy has associated with the "frenzy of renown." And on the other, there are multiple negative forms—damning praise (fausse loenge , fol. 46), "name-calling," outright denunciation. Common to both these discursive modes is the threat of falsehood. In the public domain where the recourse to witnesses and the criterion of verifiability do not hold uniformly, the status of names becomes increasingly difficult to evaluate. How to account for the discursive involvement of others in shaping a name? If a person/persona can exist publicly in name only, how exactly is that name created and regulated?^[23]

The Response reformulates these questions subjectively: "Oh God, what is it to me that the witness of others attest to my intelligence and reputation since I know it to be true that he would be openly lying?" (Ha! Dex, que me vaut tiesmoignage de gens a moi essaucier pour quel raison iaie sens et valor puis que ie sai de voir quil mentiroit tout a plain; Vienna 2609, fol. 46). We have here the nub of the problem of reputation making: the difference between a subjective articulation of a "good name" and a public construction of it. By comparing the two, the respondent accentuates the process of making a name and the dominant discourses governing that process. She questions the legitimacy of reputations based solely on the "tiesmoignage de gens" (the witness of others). In her own case, the discursive constructions of others are exposed as patently fraudulent: "ie sai de voir quil mentiroit tout a plain." Yet the respondent's critique still takes the form of a question: how much is the witness of others worth?—a rhetorical question, perhaps, but one that conveys the importance of

reckoning with that tiesmoignage . The fact remains that a person's reputation, such as the respondent's, hangs invariably in the balance of the predominant public discourses.

This balance is all the more precarious when it comes to women's names. As the first Response argues, they are a frequent target of an injurious clerical amorous discourse. For the second Response , this circumstance underscores the importance of reclaiming their names. Where one text identifies the problem of verbal injury, the other attempts to alleviate such injury by taking over the function of making a woman's name. Early on in the text, the respondent states:

Pour coi ie di que dex et nature a bien moustre que li hom est la plus dingne coze que il onques feist. Et quant ie noume home, jou entent a noumer home et feme ausi cornroe il avient.
(Vienna 2609, fol. 44 verso)

For this I say that both God and nature well demonstrate that man is the most noble thing that he ever made. And when I name man, I mean to name man and woman as it is fitting.

The respondent returns to the Genesis scene. In so doing, she assumes nothing less than the divine prerogative of naming. She denominates woman along with man, thereby guaranteeing the distinct and particular existence of both parties.^[24] By adopting the Genesis formula to create woman herself, the respondent claims responsibility for the female name. From the determining space of Eden, she attempts to secure women's reputations for a wider social domain.

As a result, the second Response challenges implicitly the public construction of women's names.^[25] The respondent's gesture throws into question the multiple arbitrary versions of women's reputations fashioned by the predominant discourses. By calling forth the name of woman, this narrative disputes the validity of the existing ones. And it does so not only by echoing the irreproachable divine voice, but by speaking through it subjectively: "I mean to name man and woman" (iou entent a noumer home et feme). If only in the discrete space of the second Response , a woman's name is also ordained by a woman subject. Having transformed the process of naming into a divinely inspired, female, subjective affair, the second Response impeaches the public and conventional standard of women's reputations.

This problem of women's names pushes still further the first Response 's concern with injurious language. Together the two responses specify the circumstances whereby a woman's name is held hostage by the predominant discourses and made vulnerable to their vagaries. A woman's name

is both authorized product of such discourses and its most common casualty. As both respondents intimate, if a woman does not participate in the normative discursive system, she cannot exercise control over her public name. Such a person is subject to existing in name only—a name as malleable as putty. To quote a contemporaneous poem, the villein can have thirty different names, each more abusive than the last.^[26] A woman may leave a similarly long trail of misshapen, distorted reputations.

Nevertheless, the second woman's response does represent a woman who articulates women's names anew. It signals some attempt to break up the discursive stronghold. The effort is admittedly small-scale, the opening little more than a crack. But the very fact that the respondent dwells on the question posed by women's names foregrounds the cardinal issue of verbal injury. Both Responses focus attention on how clerical discourse on women can operate damagingly, and how to reckon with that pattern. Their dispute involves making it a public issue—a strategy that would be exploited dramatically several generations later.

Who Is Responding?

Who is responsible for such a critique of masterly figuration? This final question concerning the phenomenon of the woman's response has elicited conflicting views. Insofar as the two Responses are cast in a subjective voice, the issue of the respondent's identity rears its head tantalizingly (Figure 10). Or should 1 say heads? With the pair of narratives, the initial respondent transmutes into another, multiplying progressively by dint of "variant authors and scribal variance."^[27] In the plural or singular, the respondent figure nonetheless spurs critics to pin her down. There are those who attempt to identify her personally: her full name, her whereabouts, her biography.^[28] Their detective work endeavors to link the Bestiaire respondent with a distinct individual, akin to Héloïse or, a century earlier, Constance, the learned respondent to the clerical writer from the school of the Loire, Baudri de Bourgueil.^[29] There are others who, espousing the ludic character of medieval narrative, regard the subjective profile of the Bestiaire respondent as fundamentally and delightfully suspect.^[30] Far from providing a lead to a historical personage, her subjectivity functions parodically, its very fictiveness mocking the critic's desire to secure provenance. As Alexandre Leupin puts it, "she" involves nothing more than a figure of speech (165–66). In fact, that a scholarly woman respondent emerges as a subject corroborates the wide range of personae in medieval vernacular narrative.

10. Another rejoinder.  La Response au Bestiaire d'amour .
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, f.fr. 412, fol. 236.
Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Caught between these two poles—individual mystery woman and textual ruse—analysis of the Bestiaire respondent's identity runs quickly aground. Reading "her" is restricted either to an indefinite search for one learned woman, now as ever unidentified, or an exercise in deciphering textual conundrums. The Response thus appears an isolated, extraordinary example of opposition voiced by a woman or, at the other extreme, a quintessential game-playing narrative that confirms Ovid's ploy of using feminine and masculine pronouns interchangeably to fool the public.

Are these the only possibilities? By way of proposing a different answer, I suggest listening to Christine de Pizan, who several generations later ruminated on the conventions of creating female personae. In the course of the early-fifteenth-century Querelle over the Roman de la rose , she asked:

Qui sont fames? Qui sont elles? Sont ce serpens, loups, lyons, dragons, guievres ou bestes ravissables devourans et ennemies a nature humainne, qu'il conviengne fere art ales decepvoir et prandre? Lisés donc l'Art : aprenés a fere engins! Prenés les fort! Decevés les! Vituperés les! Assallés ce chastel! Gardés que nulles n'eschappent entre vous, hommes, et que tout soit livré a honte! Et par Dieu, si sont elles vos meres, vos suers, vos filles, vos fammes et vos amies; elles sont vous mesmes et vous meesmes elles.
(Hicks, 139)

Who are women? Who are they? Are they serpents, wolves, lions, dragons, vipers, or ravenous predatory beasts and enemies of human nature whom one must plot against to deceive and capture? Read the Art of Love then: learn how to be ruseful! Take them by force! Trick them! Malign them! Assault the castle! Take care that none of the women escape from you men, and that all is accomplished shamefully! And by God, if they are your mothers, sisters, and daughters, your wives and friends, they are you, and you yourselves are these women.

As Christine reminds us, the question of identity in complex figurative texts like the Rose is ultimately a misleading one. Whether it involves depictions of women characters, the bestiary/bestial portrait, or in our case, the profile of a female subject, identity looks problematical. For when it comes to figuration in such texts, no relation of equivalence pertains, no one-way correspondence between character and author. Instead these texts involve a chiasmus: "if they are your mothers . . . they are you, and you yourselves are these women." A crossover occurs, one that in the wake of Ovidian models operates easily across gender lines. Through the mechanisms of subjective figuration and personification, a poet assumes a variety of personae that at the same time display characteristics of that poet's writing culture.^[31] Not only does a poet use the subjective figure as a mask, but that mask relays cardinal features of conventional textual composition.

This distinction of chiasmus is all the more crucial when it comes to the creation of female personae. The pressure to identify those personae with the values of a male author and audience is enormous. And presuming that a female subject can only be their projection serves to obliterate her female character. In this sense, Christine's phrase "if . . . they are you, and you yourselves are these women" recalls hauntingly the Houneurs des dames formula, "femme/lui meismes ," that we considered in chapter 1. Yet there is one significant difference. The Houneurs phrase bridges the chiasmus, merging femme with lui meismes in order to extinguish the difference between them. The result is to see them in identical terms. By contrast, Christine's phrase maintains the chiasmus in order to underline the correspondences between the bestiary/bestial femme and lui meismes .

It thus emphasizes the discrepancies between mothers, sisters, daughters, and lui meismes . Christine recognizes the way clerical figuration of women reveals more about the writers and their views than it does about the women they claim to depict. Taking stock of the chiasmus enables Christine to separate out persona, person, and poet. As a consequence, it points to the social circumstances shaping all three.

This chiasmic character of female subjective identity thus leads us to consider it in relation to specific social situations. Rather than limit analysis to the fact that certain female figures constitute masks—an idée fixe for many critics—I wish to investigate how such figures are disposed. In Christine's example, associating the female personae of dragons and predatory beasts with "you men," that is, with her masterly interlocutors, marks only the first step. The critique widens to include evaluating how the masters' social situation supports such a "beastly" portraiture of women. The crossover works both ways. To answer questions like "who are women?" or "who is this woman?" means exploring the degree to which a woman's identity could be imputed to a particular social group. It involves turning the female figure around so as to gauge its social matrix. Just as Christine links the animalistic female personae to works such as Capellanus's De amore and their clerkly milieu, we can hypothesize a connection between the Bestiaire respondent and a particular setting. As Toril Moi has argued, what matters is not so much whether a particular work is formulated by a woman or a man, but whether its effects can be characterized as sexist or feminist in a given situation.^[32] Even if we could attribute the Response to an individual woman, the respondent figure's social context remains crucially important. Conversely, even if we deem her identity a textual cipher, it is still embedded in a specific social matrix. Our interpretative challenge lies in assessing that context. My aim, then, is to study the respondent herself as a constituent part of a certain social logic.^[33]

The Bestiaire responses afford us an unusual chance to pursue the question of a female persona's social circumstances. Because the first Response occurs in a small number of manuscripts, each with localizable features, and Response 2 in only one, these narratives can be more precisely situated in a particular milieu than many Old French works.^[34] The consensus has long been that these various texts belong to the Artois and Hainaut in the north of France and in the Brabant in modern-day Belgium.^[35] Compared with the Bestiaire that circulated widely in Europe in several vernaculars, the Responses seem principally linked to this northern Francophone setting.^[36] What has not been acknowledged, however, is the link between the one manuscript containing both Bestiaire responses (Vienna 2609) and the mid-fourteenth-century gathering containing the Consaus

d'amours (Vienna 2621).^[37] As we mentioned in chapter 1, this manuscript's provenance can be established by its dedicatory address to the duke and duchess of Brabant. Identified explicitly as Brabantine property, it was likely commissioned by the circle of Jean III and Marie d'Evreux and read first in the major Brabantine centers of Brussels and Louvain. If we consider these two manuscripts together, we find striking similarities. Layout, scribal hand, dialect, iconography, thematic coherence: their many common features suggest not only a homogeneous pattern of poetic composition but the stamp of similar circumstances of production. Both manuscripts can be associated with the same workshop. They appear to share the same context. Without claiming that the Response and the Consaus were grouped together in a single codex, we can posit a Brabantine court setting for both.

To situate the Responses in mid-fourteenth-century Brabant involves placing the respondent persona in a notoriously charged social landscape. Virtually every account of medieval Brabantine culture begins by underscoring the perennial strife that troubled its social relations.^[38] "The Brabant has as many quarrels as France has vineyards."^[39] This thirteenth-century proverb sums up multiple conflicts. The local nobility was struggling with an encroaching royal Capetian power. But they were also at loggerheads with their own citizens over the government of the towns. Clerical communities were deeply divided as well. They were caught between their longstanding alliance with the seigneurial caste and their growing involvement in bourgeois affairs. Their aristocratic loyalties conflicted with their support for the class of nouveau fiche. This turmoil has been interpreted largely in economic terms, the result of the ascending bourgeoisie in cities across Brabant and neighboring Flanders, Hainaut, and Artois.^[40] In these terms, the story of the Brabantine Communes is one of urban emancipation based on the growing mercantile influence and autonomy of the middle classes.^[41] Yet another aspect of this characteristic climate of contention in the Brabant became discernible in the arena of what we might call cultural politics. While the balance of power in matters economic and political was being sharply contested between the local duchy and the bourgeoisie, such fractiousness also impinged on intellectual life. It affected the commerce and use of texts. The authority over learning was no longer exclusively regulated by the nobility and clergy. As the bourgeoisie fought for greater municipal control, they also sought greater involvement in the world of letters and learning.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the issue of schooling.^[42] In Brussels, Ghent, Cambrai, and across Picardy, the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed an important social struggle over lay education.^[43] Custom granted the privilege of establishing schools and selecting

schoolmasters to the local nobility—one that, in practice, depended upon the close collaboration with the clergy. Yet there is much evidence that many municipalities across the north agitated for the right to administer their own schools independently of the nobility. Such a struggle often gave way to an outright split between the bourgeoisie and the court, between the city and the Cité —the ducal residence. Local ordinances drawn up during this period confirm the common maneuver among the urban bourgeoisie of abandoning the schools designated by the court and founding their own with clerks and masters of their own choosing.^[44] Action was taken to wrest control over education from the nobility and thereby to intervene strategically in the arena themselves. At the time of the Brabantine Responses , the bourgeois was challenging the clerk and the duke for the management of rudimentary lay literacy. Behind their representations of a laywoman debating with a master, then, we might well divine a controversy between these various factions arising from the bourgeoisie's mounting activism in the world of letters.^[45]

Where does the woman respondent figure in this picture? In most surveys of lay literacy, the claim has been repeated ritually that the spread of Aristotelianism and scholastic culture proved disadvantageous for women.^[46] Put another way, the high-medieval practices of intellectual mastery and women's learning were not easily compatible. In the case of Brabant, where Aristotelian treatises were in vogue at the ducal court, the climate seemed hardly favorable to the development of women's intellectual life.^[47] We have only to recall the miniature from the Consaus manuscript depicting the duchess of Brabant (Figure 4). Side by side with the duke, she is still not portrayed as an equal participant in the dialogue with the master. While the duke holds a book, the marker of his involvement in the master's erudition, the duchess has a scroll inscribed with a love song (amour amoureces ). Associated with amorous refrains alone, she has limited access to their debate. She is effectively left out of the duke and master's rarefied academic discourse.

Yet let us not forget that out of the same milieu comes the image of the respondent equipped with the tools of textual culture (Figure 7). Not only do we find the commonplace repressive image of the woman who approaches the master only in a diversionary way, but also the surprising one of the actively engaged literate woman. The fact that these manuscripts present both images is telling. Indeed, the fact that their Brabantine communities could accommodate them together leads me to suggest that our respondent persona exemplifies the tensions concerning lay learning in general and the training of laywomen in particular. Far from confirming an existing situation or intensifying a fantasy, the respondent persona galvanizes the

conflicting attitudes prevailing in fourteenth-century Brabant. She recapitulates the differences—promising and limiting—that made up the dispute over the regulation of lay instruction and the laity's access to texts.

What has often been overlooked is the way the controversy over education—itself the consequence of considerable social turbulence—changed the prospects of laywomen's training. Bourgeois militancy tested the established categories that reserved the practices of writing and debating for the clerisy and the male nobility. The campaign to diversify pedagogical opportunities across social lines could also translate into changed opportunities for women across classes. With the laicization allied to the rise of urban culture, a space opened up for noble and bourgeois women that was not as tightly surveyed as the hermetic enclosure of courtly society.^[48] And the moral necessity to discipline women's reading to pietistic works was conspicuously absent in the heady context of fourteenth-century Brabant. We find no prescription comparable to those issued in the Capetian court.^[49]

Several points are in order here. If we take a cross section of the urban landscape in northern France and Brabant at the time of the Bestiaire Response , we find that a primary school for girls was commonly established at the same time as one for boys. In Brussels, one seat of the Brabantine duchy, a statute survives that details the foundation of a girl's school (Stallaert, 101). This school made provisions for upper-level instruction. Not only could laywomen learn to read and write, but they were able to pursue studies beyond the rudiments of Donatus's ABCs, notably in ars dictaminis (the art of composition). Whereas these skills hardly point to the sophisticated labor of scholastic commentary, they nonetheless do associate a wider group of laywomen with a textual practice beyond that of mere passive reading and recitation.

That such an opportunity existed is borne out by the incidence of city women who owned books. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are cases of those who possessed a basic collection of romances and religious works—a pattern that surely contributes to the early-modern reputation of Flemish bourgeoises as linguists and bibliophiles.^[50] One exemplary case, several generations earlier than the Response , involves a certain Maroie Payene of Tournai who in 1246 willed to her children grammar books, a Marian devotional manual, and a copy of the Roman du chevalier du cygne .^[51] Her testament makes clear the range of texts in her possession and their importance to her. The fact that she transmitted them legally, together with her property and jewelry, emphasizes just how committed she was to her personal library.

If we can account for laywomen as students and as bookworms, it is hardly surprising to discover that in this context they were also emerging

as teachers. Side by side with clerici , we find laywomen who instructed children in basic skills.^[52] Whereas it could be argued that they assumed this responsibility as part of their domestic work of overseeing the young, it is well worth noting that they were identified publicly in this capacity. In censuses and other city rolls during the fourteenth century, their names are often inscribed as schoolmistresses (Derville, 771). Paris provides an analogous case, for in proceedings of the city council dated 1380, the names of twenty-two magistrae are listed on the rolls.^[53] The epithet, magistra , resonates strongly. By no means does it convey the same status or authority as the magister . Nonetheless, the woman teacher was recognized officially as a member of a profession. As such, she took her place in the ranks that descend from magister in artibus (master of arts), dominus (lord), baccalareus (bachelor), to the lay magistra .

These glimpses of a magistra should remind us of the beguines, those contemporaneous communities of religious laywomen. Of all the signs of changing pedagogical opportunities for laywomen in northern Europe during the high Middle Ages, the most influential by far was the beguinage.^[54] These residences, located in the midst of numerous Brabantine, Flemish, and French towns, functioned as nerve centers for women's training and study.^[55] Beguines occupied themselves with the schooling of the laity, particularly young girls. But their tutelage did not stop there. They created a milieu in which the exegesis of canonical Latin texts was pursued together with the reading of contemporary vernacular literature. The beguines were conversant with and equally disposed toward the two traditions, as a Francophone beguine rule entitled "La rigle des fins amans" demonstrates well.^[56] And their commitment to a culture of women's learning ushered in a notable phase of women's writing—as notable for its sophistication as for its bulk. Late-medieval Church history bears this out amply. The fact that the beguines so systematically cultivated women's intellectual talents outside clerical jurisdiction branded them as suspect if not heretical communities.

Beguinage, magistrae , girls' elementary training: such are the social features that work chiasmically through the Bestiaire respondent. This persona is richly traced with the controversies that mobilized so many groups in Brabant over lay instruction. And the disputational dynamic of her text is animated by the disputes over learning in general. However strong the correspondences between diversifying pedagogical/intellectual opportunities for laywomen and our woman respondent, I do not want to claim they make for a causal argument. I do not claim that the occurrence of this persona is a result of advances in northern European lay literacy, nor do I wish to draw a direct connection between one distinct textual community and the respondent figure. That critical tack would lead into

the tangled skein of noble/bourgeois relations—a question that the Response manuscript as such cannot substantiate. Whether the respondent is labeled noble or even bourgeoise would always remain a moot point. Instead, I am outlining the principal controversies polarizing Brabantine literate communities that the respondent figure recapitulates. In this manner, the reciprocal influence between the Brabantine quarrels over intellectual life and the master/woman respondent disputation comes to the fore.^[57]

Several key features of the "woman's response" phenomenon emerge from the case of the Bestiaire . First of all, against all odds, there is indeed a logic of the woman's response. The gendered principle of contrariety provides a means whereby the woman respondent can enter into debate with the master figure on her own terms without being caught in a vicious disputational circle. In this respect, she is fundamentally distinguished from the disciple figure. She escapes his characteristic quandary of never being good enough. Since her language is conjugated as separate and distinct from the master's language, she can exit the trap of reiterating or quibbling with his. Furthermore, the different material ground of her language substantiates another mode of argumentation. Her mode dispenses with the tit-for-tat exchanges that define the master's dealings with his disciples. As the second respondent puts it, "and expressly the one who respects himself must take care not to dispute with anyone. For . . . one who disputes with either wise or foolish resembles the one who fights with his shadow; that is to say, who fights with somebody who doesn't exist."^[58] The woman's response breaks with the disputational dynamic that prolongs indefinitely the volleys of contradictory charges and countercharges. "Fighting with his shadow": the respondent's image gets right to the heart of the master's tactics that assimilate his interlocutor to the point of obliterating their differences. As the humanist Vivès would repeat centuries later, the magisterial disputation amounts to little more than shadowboxing. By working in a contrary manner, however, the woman's response avoids the danger of absorption and obliteration. It thereby insures its coexistence with the master's writing. Even within a disputational framework, it does not entail a shadowy projection of the master's text, for it possesses its own epistemological and linguistic density.

It is the response's logic of contrariety that creates the conditions for its critique of the clerical figuration of women. As we have seen, this critique evolves in very specific reference to Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour . Every metaphor is picked apart in order to expose its general malicious design and damaging effect. The respondent's analysis thus conceptualizes a link in clerical discourse between textual figures and the will to

dominate. It foregrounds the way that figuring women in certain "bestial," sexualized ways can prove deleterious to its audiences. In its largest terms, the two responses pose the key question of verbal injury.

For this reason alone, the Bestiaire Response invites us to extrapolate from its critique of one particular example of clerical writing. Such a critique can be generalized to implicate a vein of discourse running across various genres from the late thirteenth century onward. What we discovered in the specific case history of these Brabantine texts raises the issue of other cases. The pitch of these responses' critique deepens significantly in an environment where access to and regulation of textual practices were hotly debated. Are there signs of analogous cases ? If we consider the Bestiaire responses retrospectively, its reflection on verbal injury appears anomalous. Yet if we read it in relation to various literary quarrels in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it contributes a crucial, formative piece to an ongoing critique of the clerical figuration of women.

5—
Defamation and the Livre de leesce :
The Problem of a Sycophantic Response

I strayed abhorrent, blazing with my Self.
John Berryman, Delusions, Etc.

Running through much of later medieval literature written for and against women is the couplet feme/diffame (woman/defamation). It appears like a refrain in the paradigmatic misogynistic treatise, the Lamentations of Matheolus , and recurs persistently in the many works written in women's defense. At first glance, feme/diffame entails a damning slogan that harangues women as garrulous and contentious: women as defamers. This is one of the central claims advanced by the Lamentations and perpetuated by much clerical learning. By casting women as slanderous speakers, such texts slander them. Their representations turn women into objects of defamatory discourse, making them the target. So widespread is this pattern that it has given rise to an axiom of much current criticism; medieval writing is animated by a calumny of women. Consider in this light Howard Bloch's recent definition of misogyny as a speech act.^[1]

But what happens if we turn this refrain around and begin with the concept of defamation? In another way, feme/diffame suggests the peculiar link between women and a language that proves damaging to its public. It underscores the way so much medieval literature is concerned with the harmful power of words directed toward women. In fact, it heightens the concept of verbal injury that we have been exploring thus far in the context of the woman's response.

This heightening is first apparent within the sphere of masterly writing. In Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose , the master narrator ponders the problem of defamatory language:

Si vos pri toutes, vaillanz fames,
soiez damoiseles ou dames,
amoureuses ou sanz amis,
que se moz i trouvez ja mis
qui samblent mordant et chenins
ancontre les meurs femenins,
que ne m'an voilliez pas blamer
ne m'escriture diffamer,
qui toute est por anseignement;
(lines 15165–73)

So I beg all upstanding women, whether they be ladies or young girls, in love or without lovers, that if you find words placed here [in this book] that seem biting and offensive to feminine behavior, that you would not wish to blame me, or defame my writing, that is throughout a form of teaching.

The clerical learning relayed by the Rose risks injuring the very female public inscribed in the text. Much as the allegorical figure Reason had suggested, the master figure has to admit the injurious potential of his words. Yet the form that admission takes deflects any responsibility for defamation away from the master. It shifts the responsibility onto the women themselves. By warning them against defaming the master's writing, the Rose displaces the problem of defamation and brings us straight back to the stereotype of contentious women. This displacement reveals the narrator's complicity with the world of magisterial learning. Because he is so invested in maintaining and reproducing its learning about women, any criticism he offers of it is necessarily compromised. The insider's concern over verbal injury thus comes out as an excuse. Such a denial is perfectly consonant with the well-known claim of de Meun's narrator that he is only reciting the words of earlier masters, "je n'i faz riens fors reciter" (line 15204). In one of its earliest vernacular formulations, the issue of defaming women is bound up with the masterly writing that is under dispute.

Nowhere is this complicity more evident than in the late-fourteenth-century Livre de leesce attributed to Jean LeFèvre.^[2] The Leesce is, first of all, a response to the Lamentations . As its common alternate titles make clear, Le Rebours de Matheole or Le Contraire de Matheole was conceived as a direct riposte to that paragon of medieval misogynistic reasoning. Like so many gynocentric treatises of the later Middle Ages, the Leesce attempts to nullify all Matheolus's defamatory premises.^[3] But consider carefully its circumstances: LeFèvre is also identified as the principal vernacular translator of the Lamentations .^[4] He is largely responsible for its popularization during the later Middle Ages. At the same time, he is the

11. The master in his book-lined cell.  Le Champion des dames .
Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, BM Rés. 352, fol. 355.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de Grenoble, France.

first clerkly critic to dispute the Lamentations systematically. Furthermore, LeFèvre's work as a lawyer at the Parlement de Paris may offer additional evidence of his reaction against misogynistic thinking. If we put any stock in the fact that he pleaded most of his cases on behalf of female clients, his involvement in representing women emerges all the more

clearly.^[5] Here is an exemplary complicitous respondent. Having implicitly promoted the founding misogynistic text for vernacular culture, Maître LeFèvre turns against it, responding with a profoundly conflicted "advocacy" of women.^[6] The Leesce thus comprises a response twice over: to the original Latin text and to his own translation and investment in it.

LeFèvre's complicity is manifest in his translation of the expression "defamation." LeFèvre was faced with the problem of rendering the Latin word diffamare recurring throughout Matheolus's text. The vernacular equivalent, diffamer , thus similarly patterns his French version. Yet in the Leesce, diffamer takes on the character of a verbal tic. Repeated ever more frequently, it vibrates with anxiety, especially when it appears in the refrain that has no Latin equivalent—feme/diffame .^[7] LeFèvre's rhyme hints at his growing sense of responsibility for the ongoing defamation of women. The fact that he speaks feme/diffame over and over again suggests the degree to which he is torn over his own discourse. Is the translator fatally committed to relaying a defamatory language?

This dilemma is accentuated further by two intermediary roles that LeFèvre's narrator plays in the Leesce . He begins by mediating between the master figure, Matheolus, and the clergy in general. At the outset of the Leesce he adopts the role of the faithful translator. Yet this posture traps him, and he appears unable to shake free from absolute allegiance to his confreres. By dint of summarizing sections of the Lamentations so as to better dispute them, he shows just how deeply enmeshed he is in their learning. He too emerges as a first-class defamer of women. Yet the narrator experiences a turnaround that aligns him increasingly with virtuous women. This orientation places him in a second configuration. In this he moves back and forth between Leesce, a female deity representing joy, and the "dames de Paris," his inscribed audience. Throughout the latter part of the text, his mediation between these women is intended to supplant his earlier alignment with magistri . Furthermore, it is allied with a progressive transformation in his language. The translator-narrator claims to purge from his work all that is defamatory toward women, expressing something joyful about them instead.

But is the masterly habit of defamation so easy to shed? If we take account of the overall shape of the narrative, there is something fundamentally erratic about it. The Leesce charts the shift in language away from men, whom the narrator calls initially "nous, hommes" (line 517), and toward women, with whom he tries to say, "vous, masles" (line 3648). It traces a change in the translator that begins with his complicity and proceeds toward his defense of women. This movement gives us a glimpse into the disturbance internal to the advocacy of women in late-medieval masterly writing. The very pattern of vacillation is symptomatic of the

unease coloring many gynocentric works attributed to clerkly figures such as LeFèvre. It is an unease akin to that voiced by certain male critics who grapple with feminist issues today.^[8] That unease has everything to do with recognizing deficiencies within the reigning system of discourse they have espoused. Indeed as one feminist critic has suggested, it can become a defense against the imperfections of that system.^[9] The swing toward defending "good" women marks the concerted effort to avoid reckoning with the limitations of masterly writing as a whole. With LeFèvre's Leesce , this swing brings out the further concern over the damaging or defamatory character of that writing.

What could the Leesce 's anxiety over defamation contribute to the critique of medieval masterly writing about women? As a text planted squarely in the clerkly domain, this narrative seems an unlikely candidate for disputing its conventions of representing women. The Leesce narrator's "defense" of women appears more like a self-defense. In much the same way as the contemporaneous clerkly narrator of the Champion des dames , he offers a model of utter self-absorption that commits the clerk ever more deeply to the world of his masters (see Figure 11). His work seems hopelessly caught up with the discursive standards it claims to indict. Moreover, this clerkly text is not voiced by a woman. What could it add to the category of the woman's response and its particular dispute with the symbolic domination of so much of masterly medieval writing? Let me emphasize again that I do not reserve the term "woman's response" for one gender. The category is available to men and women alike, anyone who seeks an oppositional position from which to dispute the dominant representation of women. My purpose in reading this clerkly woman's response involves investigating the effects of the Leesce 's concern with defamation. As we discovered in studying the Bestiaire response, much is to be learned by examining the way a response registers in a particular environment. I wish to track the aftereffects of this translator's response to defamatory language on those controversies called the Querelle des femmes .

Pre-curseher

LeFèvre's sense of complicity with masterly misogynistic writing breaks through first in his translation of the Lamentations . The initial sign is, paradoxically, silence. Before disputing the conventions of representing women, the translator withdraws quietly:

Combien que Mahieu, en son livre,
En ait assés versifié,

Et leurs meurs diversifié.
Si fist maistre Jehan de Meun;
Tous les reproucha un et un,
Ou chapitre de Faulx Semblant.
Je m'en tais, si m'en vois amblant
Le chemin que j'ay commencié.
Je pourray bien estre tencié
Ou mauldit par inadvertence.
Je n'en puis mais se l'on me tence;
C'est pour bien quanque j'en diray;
Cy après m'en escondiray.
(book 2, lines 1794–1806)

Just as Mahieu [Matheolus] composed sufficient verses about them [women] in his book and made diverse comments about their habits, so did Master Jean de Meun; one by one he reproached them all in his chapter on Faulx Semblant . I'll shut up, for if I continue on down the road I've started, I'll get into a quarrel or be bad-mouthed inadvertently. If someone picks a fight with me, I don't want any part of it; it will be on account of what I shall say. Hereafter I shall refuse all this.

This retreat into reticence betrays a double misgiving. The narrator is anxious not only about the matter he is translating but about the fact that he is now the mouthpiece for it. There is no apparent safety in numbers; neither Matheolus's authority nor Jean de Meun's masterly stature allays his fears. On the contrary, Jean de Meun's rationale of recitation is called implicitly into question.^[10] It can no longer easily clear the translator as an accomplice. The risk lies in his translations provoking tencons . LeFèvre's translation of Cato's proverbial wisdom highlights this: "After disagreements, do not pass by litigation: always stay away when people quarrel, for the quarrel [tencon ] is the enemy of peace. It falls to evildoers to slander, and those who are moved by anger speak lies."^[11] In the case of the Lamentations , then, if the translator continues to represent women as slanderers and quarrelmongers according to the letter of Matheolus's text, he could be the butt of slander himself. At first sight, such a qualm seems to justify the stereotype of contentious women. Were the Leesce narrator bad-mouthed, named a poète maudit , the message of his translation would be confirmed. Why then desist? By withdrawing into silence, he tries to break out of the circuit that defines women's language as "naturally" slanderous. He attempts to abdicate from the ongoing repetition of misogynistic clichés. And such a gesture implies that verbal malice is not purely a women's problem.^[12]

These scruples pave the way for a show of remorse:

Excuser me vueil en mes dis
Que des bonnes point ne mesdis

Ne n'ay voulenté de mesdire.
J'ameroye mieulx moy desdire
Qu'estre haä pour fol langage. . . .

Se je ment, je vueil qu'en me bate.
Il convient, puis que je translate,
Que je die ou que je me taise.
Pour ce suppli qu'il ne desplaise,
S'en cest dittié suy recordans
Aucuns mos qui soient mordans.
Car de moy ne procede mie.
(book 2, lines 1541–45, 1559–65)

I wish to apologize for my verse, for I am in no way slandering any good women, nor do I have any wish to do so. I would much prefer to denounce myself than to be despised for outrageous language. . . .

If I am lying, I wish to be beaten. When I am translating, it is appropriate that I speak up or shut up. For this reason I pray it not be displeasing to anyone when I recall in this tract any word that might be biting. For it never comes from me.

The narrator moves through apology and denial to self-repudiation. It is a sequence that leads, finally, to a form of violence. His desire to be beaten represents the most extreme version of his musing on the problem of mesdire (slander). He takes on the conventional position of the beaten wife. And because the move functions subjectively, it suggests a self-inflicted beating. In his reflection on verbal harm, the narrator goes so far as to embrace this harm himself—to internalize it.

The problem of mesdire is nothing new to a discourse on women or to medieval amorous discourse in general. As we have already seen, the fear over mesdisants/lauzengiers pervades numerous lyrics and romances. It is a paradigmatic fear, for the status of the lover and his lady is established in opposition to it. What distinguishes the translator's reflection on mesdire is its internal quality. Whereas the threat of slander is exported from most lyrics and romances, and is seen to lie somewhere outside their bounds, in LeFèvre's translation of the Lamentations it is beginning to be conceptualized as a constituent element of the discourse. The suspicion is that the narrator's language, like the writing he is translating, is intrinsically slanderous. Furthermore, there is a hint this inherent slander is directed toward one particular group. The class of women appears a special target, hence the narrator's urgent claim that it is better to repudiate his work and take a beating himself than be implicated in such mesdisance .

There is a telling symmetry here between admitting the slanderous character of masterly writing on women and punishing the self. This

symmetry signals an important stage in the history of disputing the calumny of women. It leads to identifying the infraction of injurious language, "parole injurieuse" (I, 1572). The Leesce 's own term strengthens the notion of wounding, beautiful talk (trenchans bel parler) in the Bestiaire response with a more technical meaning. As a whole, the narrator's self-punishing reflection on mesdisance marks an important turn in that history of calumny because the problem is acknowledged within the sphere of clerical writing. Here is a clerkly persona who finds the problem of verbal injury critiqued by generations of scholastic commentaries lodged in his own work. Granted, his reflection is a minor lapse in an enormous tract. The narrator soldiers on to translate four thousand more lines. Further, his self-deprecating tone betrays a certain manipulative quality. Disparaging himself offers the narrator a means of displacing the problem he faces. Nevertheless, such a reflection makes possible the translator's ultimate response to the misogynistic Lamentations . It provides the mainspring. The impetus to respond negatively to the problem of mesdisance defines the Livre de leesce .

Cutting Off His Nose to Spite His Face

The makeup of the Leesce shows just how difficult it is for a clerical narrator like LeFèvre's persona to break with the masterly tradition of representing women. Over two-thirds of the text rehashes the first book of the Lamentations . It is a hodgepodge of the narrator's own translation of Matheolus. By rehearsing his version again, he attempts to exorcize from his writing the traces of his indebtedness to his masters. The Leesce reads like an exercise in purging the clerkly self. All those claims to repudiation made in the Lamentations are played out in the Leesce . This process has a decidedly painful side to it. Autocitation serves here as a goad of sorts. Far from authorizing the narrator's current writing, it functions instead to disparage it.^[13] With each subsequent quotation, he further condemns his part in the misogynistic fulminations of Matheolus. At the same time, this pattern of self-condemnation through rewriting is a painful process for his readers to endure. While it is supposed to show him suffering with the women targeted by the Lamentations , from the readers' perspective it confirms his ongoing complicity. The more the narrator repeats himself, the more he mires himself in the masters' slander. Ironically, the attempt of ridding himself of its most offensive elements underscores his connection to them.

This self-condemning / self-incriminating dynamic runs through the

Leesce . It is particularly exacerbated by the imbalance between those sections rehashing Matheolus's text and those responding negatively to it. At the places where the narrator could best demonstrate his opposition to the clichés of demonic women and so on, he holds back. While he presents the misogynistic position in detail, he gives his own critical response short shrift. One example will make the point. In treating the subject of women's insatiable curiosity, the narrator lifts whole passages from his translated Lamentations . He repeats all those anecdotes that dramatize the impossible trust between husband and wife (lines 1805–90). There follows "a rather brief response" of three sentences (la response en est assez brieve; line 1891). So brief is the narrator's rejoinder that it does little to contest the type of the "busybody" woman. In fact, by recommending that men learn not to share their secrets with women, the narrator actually reinforces the type. The balance between repeating and disputing Matheolus is thus skewed in Matheolus's favor: the misogynistic tradition of representing women is effectively valorized. What is more, the Leesce makes a mockery of the need to respond at all. As the narrator says aptly, "When the fart is out, it's too late to restrain oneself." (tart main a cul, quant pet est hors; line 161) With this unrestrained proverbial wisdom he admits that once misogynistic language is unleashed—language as objectionable and gratuitous as a fart—there is little point in protesting it after the fact. Put another way, if injurious language is rehearsed ad nauseam, any attempt to dispute it is seriously compromised.

To meet this risk, the Leesce deploys a strategy that is familiar to us from the Response au Bestiaire . Its argument against the verbal injury of the Lamentations is structured according to contrariety:

Il n'est riens qui n'ait son contraire,
Qui en voulroit les preuves traire
Et penser justement aux choses. . . .

Qu'ay fait cest livre, pour complaire
Par argument de sens contraire,
Pour vous excuser loyaument
Et monstrer especiaument
Que nul ne doit femmes blasmer;
(lines 21–23, 33–37)

There is nothing that does not have its contrary, for whoever wants to extract the proofs and think correctly of things. . . . I have done this book in order to complete the argument with a contrary sense, so as to apologize loyally to you and especially to show that no one should blame women.

If there is any way to exit from the vicious circle of complicity with masterly writing, it will depend on arguing through contraries. In its simplest terms, such argumentation begins by asserting the opposite of the various derogatory epithets for women. Rioteuse, noiseuse, jangleresse : each element is turned back on itself. The Leesce maintains that misogynistic writing is "riotous," "noiseuse ," and so on.^[14] Because the Lamentations ' propositions stand untested by the standard techniques of reversal and negation, they are vulnerable. The Leesce has only to apply these techniques to expose the faultiness of the Lamentations . Furthermore, the contrary propositions of the Leesce function to contradict those of the Lamentations .^[15] They cancel them out. Without any gesture toward the evidence of empirical reality, the Leesce refutes its chief tenets concerning women.

In its extended terms, such argumentation through contraries questions the logic of misogynistic thought.^[16] The Leesce tries to show the spurious reasoning of the Lamentations : "It doesn't follow truthfully; in logic, it is quite the opposite, provided that he speak the truth" (il ne s'ensuit pas vrayement; en logique est tout autrement, posé qu'il deïst verité; lines 803–5). As the Leesce analyzes the Lamentations , this illogic characterizes both the individual proposition and the work as a whole. By demonstrating the bad logic operative at the micro level, the Leesce thus seeks to expose the entire work as a set of faulty syllogisms—in short, as an exercise in sophism.

Yet given the outstanding problem of the narrator's self-incrimination, there is something insufficient about the claim of bad logic. Coming from a figure whose own writing is enmeshed in sophistic syllogisms, how could this claim offer an adequate explanation? This narrator is, by definition, complicitous. Because of his complicity, his argumentation through contraries diverges from that of the Response au Bestiaire . While the structure of the Leesce 's argument appears the same, it is put to a very different use. This narrator employs it in a way that still confirms the most orthodox of scholastic practices. Precisely because he is not a neutral party and his argument still functions like the masters', his response to the verbal injury of women in the Lamentations must go still further. It reaches beyond questions of logic to those of desires:

Il y a envie de bien
Et envie qui ne vault rien.
Homme ou femme qui estudie
A bien faire, c'est bonne envie;
Ainsi le doit on raconter.
Qui puet les autres surmonter,

Soit en armes ou en science
Et avoir bonne conscience,
C'est bonne envie, ce me semble,
De pouoir et savoir ensemble.
Mais qui d'autruy mal s'esleesce
Et qui d'autruy bien a tristesce,
C'est envie faulse et mauvaise.
Cuer envieus n'est pas a aise,
Car il prent tout en desplaisance
Et ne puet avoir souffisance.
C'est maufait d'autruy a tort mordre,
Car en toutes choses a ordre;
Le philosophe le tesmoingne.
(lines 2253–71)

There is good desire and desire that is worth nothing at all. A man or a woman who strives to do good, that is good desire. So one should talk about it. The one who surpasses others, whether in military or intellectual matters, who has a good conscience, that, it seems to me, is good desire, of power and knowledge together. But the one who takes pleasure in the misfortunes of others, who enjoys their sadness, that is false and bad desire. An envious heart is not at ease, for it takes everything disagreeably and can have no satisfaction. It is criminal to cruelly mistreat others, for in all things there is an order. So says the Philosopher.

This reflection on desire is an attempt to get at the root causes of a masterly misogynistic writing. Evoking a pseudo-Aristotelian theory, it describes a "bad desire" as one that throws off the balance between knowledge and power. The result is a destructive, even sadistic discourse. Were a "good desire" to maintain the balance, however, the occasions for slander would not arise. In the Leesce 's analysis, as long as the incipient impulse to dominate (seurmonter ) is grounded by this balance, the domineering language of mesdire cannot occur.

That the Leesce narrator analyzes "bad desire" in this manner does not discredit masterful misogynistic writing. It merely explains that writing, or I would say, explains it away. For all the distinctions made to promote "good desire" and the socially valuable knowledge associated with it, the narrator's explanation does not, finally, grapple with the "bad." While it may account for the mechanisms of bad desires, it does not dispute them. Grasping power at the level of desires does not necessarily lead to critiquing its many expressions.^[17] Furthermore, such an analysis overlooks the possibility that the practices of knowledge can be damaging. Since the Leesce concentrates on the disequilibrium of knowledge and power caused

by "bad desire," it does not reckon with the way such knowledge can constitute a symbolic practice of domination. In this respect, the Leesce avoids considering how bad desire and knowledge can be used injuriously against groups such as women.

What this paradigm of desire does provide is a clue to the dyad leesce/ire (joy/anger) governing this narrative. As an obvious expression of "good desire," leesce must be understood in opposition to the "bad," angry desire that rankles the Lamentations . The power of joy is to offset all those dark, corrosive emotions that can burst forth in the form of invective against women. That LeFèvre's text introduces the female figure Leesce as his mentor and names his work after her are the strongest signs that joy is to cure the injuriousness of misogynistic writing. It does not take much to see the gender coding of this dyad: wrathful and resentful emotions are allied with the masculine and delightful, calming ones with the feminine. What with the narrator's increasing allegiance to the cause of women, it is clear that any positive attribute is to be inflected as feminine. The Leesce is elaborating another pair of gendered contraries that operate, this time, at the primordial level of desire.

If we pursue the Leesce 's theory of gendered desires to its conclusion, we come to the source of the narrator's self-condemning / self-incriminating dynamic. As an embittered, masculine type, his translating is caught up in the cycle of slandering women. Animated by a "bad" desire, it is fated to attack them. His anger gives rise to a language that can inflict damage.^[18] Yet such preordained attacks—and here we reach the Leesce 's source—are nothing but an assault on the self:

Fols est qui soy meïsme blasme
Et le lieu dont il naist diffame.
Uns proverbes nous est donnés;
C'est que cil qui coupe son nés
Trop laidement sa face empire.
Aussi ne puet homme mesdire
De femme qu'il ne se mesface;
Fols est donc qui coupe sa face.
(lines 1029–36)

He is mad who blames himself and defames the place where he is born. A proverb is given to us: it is that he who cuts his nose, injures his face too hideously. No man can slander a woman without also disfiguring himself. So it is that he who cuts his face is mad.

The Leesce equates the desire to lash out against others with self-blame. Given the gendered contraries at play in this text, we need to read this formula as equating the desire to lash out against women as the Other with

the tendency to blame the self as masculine.^[19] Bad-mouthing women is a form of self-torture that can be understood only in terms of a masculine self. Blaming her damages him .

The comparison with the Lamentations is striking. In that text, any threatening difference found in the masculine self is isolated and ostracized in the character of women. The Leesce , by contrast, endeavors to draw woman's character back into the masculine self. It thus corrals her in a conception of ontological sameness. By interpreting any speech act slanderous to women as a byproduct of a man's bad blood, it subsumes women into a single homogeneous being. In this sense, the Leesce 's view that bad-mouthing women is ruinous to the self presupposes a uniform, unified body politic. The real threat of disfigurement, then, is that of an all-embracing masculine being.

In the Leesce 's view, we find another version of the Houneurs des dames expression femme/lui meismes discussed in chapter 1. This time it is cloaked in the terms of nature. As the Leesce narrator describes it, "sinners (slanderers) are estranged, for out of the womb they are changed and have erred against nature" (les pecheeurs sont estrangiés, Car hors du ventre sont changiés et ont erré contre nature; lines 1023–25). Slander is an antinatural form. It comes from those who are estranged not only from the masculine self but from their natural origins. Notice that this conception brings us back to the maternal matrix where the Leesce narrator must reckon with his origins in female matter. Slandering women transgresses nature because it vilifies the masculine self generated from women. Once again, the emphasis is put on the predicament of the male speaker rather than on the damaging effects of his slander. The Leesce dwells on the alienation of those men and the way slander jeopardizes "their nature," not women's.

This connection between masculine self-blame, the antinatural, and defamatory writing about women is emblematized by the case of Ovid:

Car on raconte en verité
Qu'on lui coupa ambdeux les couilles. . . .
Que, haïneus et tout plain d'ire,
Femmes après ce fait blasma
N'oncques depuis ne les ama. . . .
Ovides fu mal enfrenés
Quant sa bouche femmes blasmoit;
Il meïsmes se diffamoit
Par courroux et par felonie;
Sur soy en soit la vilenie.
(lines 2710–11, 2720–22, 2778–82)

For the story is told truthfully that both his balls were cut off. . . . After this happened, he was so full of anger and hatred that he railed against women. Since then, he could love them no more. . . . When he spoke out against women, Ovid was badly distempered; out of rage and maliciousness, he even defamed himself; on him be heaped the villainy.

Castration lies at the base of defamation. Because the Roman poet's sex is no longer "naturally" clear, he vents his anger on the other sex.^[20] As the Leesce appraises it, Ovid's misogynistic corpus exists in direct relation to his disfigurement: one is not possible without the other. Therein lies the poignant charge of this exemplum for the Leesce . And it stands out all the more when we take into account LeFèvre's translation of the Ovidian text De vetula , where the castrato is portrayed at length.^[21] While the castrated poet is reviled, in Ovid's case he also inspires sympathy. For this poet succeeds in writing by means of his mutilation. His (self-) mutilation is the very signature of his work.^[22] However strongly the Leesce denounces Ovid, it too is spellbound by his example. Although it invokes the castrated poet as a negative exemplum, it betrays a deep affinity with him. The Leesce narrator is haunted by a bond in writing that makes them once, as always, intellectual brothers.

Here is where we can best gauge a second crucial implication of the Leesce 's equation between masculine bad desire and self-blame. To repeat the key phrase: "He is mad who blames himself and defames the place where he is born" (lines 1029–30). By describing defamation in these terms, the Leesce narrator identifies himself implicitly as a first-class defamer in league with Ovid. Having expended most of his own response excoriating himself, he reveals his own consummate participation in the defamation of women so characteristic of medieval masterly writing. The theory of the origins of slandering women never works so well as when it implicates the narrator.

An Imperfect Conversion

This definition of slandering women as self-blame would seem to condemn the narrative outright. What defense is left to a writer who convicts himself? Given the destructive character of his own words, any dispute he might have with the dominant codes of representing women seems utterly untenable. Yet the definition of defamation is precisely what is intended to salvage the Leesce . It sets the stage for the narrator's transformation—for nothing less than a conversion experience. As we have seen, the narrator's self-scrutiny has a progressively estranging effect. This, coupled with the

realization of his defamatory work, brings him to the threshold of renewal: "Whosoever would look into the self, would cease slandering" (Qui dedens soy regarderoit De mesdire se cesseroit; lines 2769–70).

Such a model of conversion works in two powerful ways. Theologically, it offers a familiar strategy for reviving the Leesce narrator.^[23] He can be represented as a lost and hapless persona about to be saved. Through a new self-knowledge, he is liberated from bad desire, released from all past anger and remorse and thus ready to be converted. Textually speaking, this conversion bears even more important consequences. It provides a way to rehabilitate the narrator's writing. As Susan Stewart has argued, the notion of conversion appears as a remedy for crimes of writing.^[24] Such a transformation can remove all traces of past verbal damage and make his language new. In the case of the Leesce narrator, it saves him from his record of defamation. Ultimately, his language can be converted to salutary ends—to advancing rather than destroying women's names.^[25] Conversion can usher in a gynocentric writing.

This reversal is marked by a clear switch in stylistic register. The narrator composes his own balade , invoking for the first time the amorous discourse typical of court poets such as Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps:^[26]

Je forgeray toute ma vie
Pour plaire a ma dame Leesce ,
Et en soustenant sa partie
Blasmeray courroux et tristesce.
Des dames et de leur haultesce
Diray bons mos clers et luisans,
Pour confondre les mesdisans.
(lines 3447–53)

I will work away all my life to please my lady Leesce, and in supporting her cause, I shall decry anger and sadness. I shall speak a clear and bright language about ladies and their dignity so as confound the slanderers.

Here is a form of autocitation that registers powerfully. After goading himself with the degraded quotes of his own translation, the narrator is capable of speaking anew.^[27] His new language continues to be defined by the Leesce 's gender code. Insofar as it is dedicated to women's causes, it is "joy-ful." His language becomes feminized. In the remaining part of the Leesce , where various arguments advocating women are presented, this converted, feminized language is supposed to prevail.

Yet does this conversion process work? Does it really "confound the slanderers" (pour confondre les mesdisans), as the ballad refrain claims?

On one level, the Leesce 's argumentation through contraries does indeed dispute the precepts advanced by so many medieval masters writing on women. It brings them to naught, exposing the illogic of stereotyping women's "nature." In this way it challenges the defamatory character of such writing. On a deeper level, however, it continues to be bound up with that illogical, defamatory tradition of representing women. Listening to the double entendre of this refrain, I would say that the Leesce remains confused (confondre ) with the most influential model of representing women. The plight of the divided, masculine self is not so easily resolved by the scenario of conversion. Nor is his language fully reformed. The turn to peaceful lyrics is insufficient. So profound is the narrator's plight that it makes its mark on this transformed text when least expected, contaminating its clear, bright, feminized language. In the process of articulating a new self and responding against the symbolic domination of women, his complicity with masterly writing reasserts itself.

Such is the problem of what I call the sycophantic response. The sycophant is a classic insider/informer. He is known to espouse different positions so as curry favor. His reputation rides on his ability to assume allegiances deceptively. He is also known for an excessive, flattering language. His flattery is dangerous precisely because it belies its slanderous potential. The sycophant is an archetypal calumniator. In stressing both the changeable and the calumniating character of the sycophant, I am playing with the simplest understanding of the term. But I do so in order to clarify the character of the Leesce . By exaggerating its support of the very subjects it habitually reviles, the Leesce displays a fundamental sycophancy. It conveys a two-timing discourse: neither of its positions is convincing—neither condemnation nor adulation of women. And the switch from one to the other makes the sycophantic deceptiveness of the Leesce all the more apparent. While the conversionary model may turn the narrator into an advocate of women, it does not completely transform his purpose. Given his chronic sycophantic tendencies, his choice to praise women remains tainted with the concerns of misogynistic masterful writers. It is a servile gesture.

Nowhere is the issue of sycophancy more evident than in the final part of the Leesce where the converted narrator espouses a number of theorems in support of women. The question arises: to what end could such arguments be put? All of the theorems taken up belong to the standard gynocentric repertory of the later Middle Ages: the argument for women's superior material composition (lines 3724–26), the notion that women alone were created in paradise (lines 3728–35), the catalogue of exemplary martial and intellectual women (lines 3531–3679), even the view that

many women surpass men in the sheer range of their achievements (lines 3499–3502). Some of these, we will recall, are employed by the Response au Bestiaire . Still others are invoked by LeFèvre's contemporary, Christine de Pizan.^[28] And all of them together are recapitulated in the paradigmatic sycophantic response, Martin LeFranc's Champion des dames , written several generations later.^[29] In other words, the same arguments are deployed by responses of diverse character. Here is where the question of ends comes in. For what different reasons could the same arguments be used? Insofar as these various texts deploy a single repertory of arguments, it is only by examining the function of the argument that we can distinguish those responses that confirm the existing symbolic domination of women from those that envisage some change. If responses such as the Response au Bestiaire or the Leesce look similar rhetorically, they can still be set apart by the ways they exploit gynocentric theorems.

The Leesce uses such theorems to the conventional, limiting ends of so much masterly writing. In the final part of the narrative, the idea of women's sexualized identity rules. All the arguments marshaled for women are shot through with the masle/femelle lexicon. One example will make the point:

Les masles aiment pillerie
Et larrecin et roberie,
Occision et convoitise
Et tout ce qui a mal atise.
Les femelles sont debonnaires
En tous cas et en tous affaires.
(lines 3688–93)

Males like pillage, larceny, and theft, murder, and lust, and everything that is maliciously incited. Females are gentle in every instance and under all circumstances.

In these male/female polarities lie the terms that define women's existence sexually.^[30] While the depiction of the perfect woman can be read superficially as laudatory, the logic informing that praise bases it upon "femaleness," that is, upon woman's sexuality. The same is true of the portraits of exemplary women such as Sappho and Cassandra (lines 3646, 3666). They continue to predicate their achievements on their sexual identity. Individual women may be poetesses or inventors of writing, but they are still to be regarded first and foremost as "female." Far from disputing clerical representations of women, such praise reinforces them all the more strongly. As Denise Riley has rightly observed, the sexualized definition of woman used by many such gynocentric texts further

constrains the subjects they claim to champion.^[31] In this context the very privileging of leesce (joy) and the penultimate claim that women are men's joy (line 3982) make the whole work sound like a sycophantic praise poem of female sexuality—of jouissance we might say—as long as it ensures the continuity of the patriarchal line.

With the return of the most conventional definitions of female nature, there can be little doubt about the Leesce 's ultimate use of arguments in support of women. Far from figuring any significant change in the representation of women, it conforms to the principal masterly models.^[32] It bodies forth a feminine type—genteel, fertile, and above all easy to handle. The irony is that the gallery of exceptional women is also presented to promote their voluntary and responsible acceptance of existing authority. Even Minerva's wisdom is invoked to communicate the importance of deference—for the good of the body politic and of the learning that has for so long survived in the hands of the clergy (lines 3650–54). In elaborating its final refutation of misogynistic arguments, the Leesce projects figures of women who are not only not argumentative but who lend themselves to being mastered, women "whose husbands have the mastery through true love and common agreement" (dont leurs maris ont la maistrie par vraye amour et par concorde; lines 380–81). The Leesce comes eerily full circle, espousing a view with which its clerkly adversaries would not disagree—yet with which the Bestiaire respondent most certainly would.

But lest we forget, such are the recommendations of a sycophant. And precisely this sycophancy should alert us to other possible inferences. Since this persona has switched sides, flip-flopped, the discerning critic is licensed to read the text in spite of itself. The conflicted aspects of such a sycophantic work are liable to let slip issues at odds with its general character. In the long term, I believe, the Leesce did contribute an important element to the ongoing dispute with masterful misogynistic writing. Against itself, it added to the critique of the dominant sexualized representations of women by exploring further the issue of injurious language. Here I am circling back to LeFèvre's translation anxiety over the feme/diffame refrain with which I began. Through a language deeply divided and arguments deployed to repressive ends, this clerkly response helped to foreground a concept of defamation. Paradoxically, it advanced the idea of identifying an established text as slanderous.

On the face of it, there is nothing new about such ideas. In the later Middle Ages defamation was commonly understood as the language abusive to a person's name (contumeliosa verba ).^[33] Such language was deemed dangerous enough to merit physical punishment. As the principal digest of medieval legal opinion, Gratian's Decretum , assessed it, (and as LeFèvre's case

corroborated): "Whosoever devises in public words or writing insulting to another's reputation and once having been discovered does not defend the writings, should be beaten" (qui in alterius famam publice scripturam aut verba contumeliosa confinxerit, et repertus scripta non probauerit, flagelletur).^[34] This understanding, we recall, derived from Roman views concerning reputation (fama ) and loss of reputation (infamia/diffamatio ).^[35] It was based on an overarching conception of injury that included physical gestures, words, and texts (iniuria ).^[36] These views were well known to medieval audiences through various commentaries, notably Augustine's meditations on the issues of the good name.^[37] Yet LeFèvre's text moves beyond these general understandings of defamation and changes their frame of reference. The Leesce 's reflection on the origin of defamation begins to situate it in a context that emphasizes its relation to women. It picks up on the specific connection between verbal injury and women's names that was already apparent in Justinian's Code. Furthermore, its feme/diffame refrain hints at an entirely different way that relation could be understood. In this way, LeFèvre's expression is symptomatic of the Leesce 's sycophancy because it communicates at cross purposes. It dramatizes the fact that women are the perennial object of defamatory writing. By a simple reversal of terms, it also points to the concept of unjust verbal damage done to women. Speaking against itself, the Leesce brings to the fore an important and more technical way of naming and disputing injurious language.

It is in this sense that the refrain resonates in the latter parts of the Leesce . When the narrative uses it to identify defamation as a "crime" (line 3201) and a "sin" (line 3419), it points to a nascent understanding of symbolic damage inflicted textually on women. It focuses on what Susan Stewart has dubbed suggestively "a crime of writing ." When it reviews the work of clerkly authors, it even goes so far as to suggest that defamation may apply to an entire literary tradition:

en leurs libelles ne leurs fables
N'en leurs fais qui sont mal prouvables,
Ou il alleguent poësies
Et merveilleuses frenesies,
Desquelles il ne font a croire.
(lines 3806–10)

[I]n their little books, fables and ill-founded works, where they put forward poetries and marvelous madnesses that should not be believed.

While the term defamation does not occur here, the connection made between unbelievable poetry and madness implies the problem of injurious

language. As the Leesce has shown all too well, the angry frenzy of poets (frenesie ) frequently takes a defamatory form.

This is the sense too in which Christine de Pizan and other latemedieval writers exploit the idea of defamation. In fact, it is tempting to hear LeFèvre's feme/diffame refrain reverberating within Christine's public accusation of clerical writing about women.^[38] It would take many more developments on political, legal, and intellectual fronts before defamation could be wielded as a charge by women. It would require still others for defamation to be brought to bear on the status of poësie and the question of a written text's liability. Such was the labor of various fifteenth-century respondents we shall examine. Yet LeFèvre's conflicted understanding plays no small part in this process.

Beyond its response to the Lamentations of Matheolus , the Leesce 's sycophantic play with the feme/diffame dyad fosters thinking about the impact of masterly writing on women in an increasingly judgmental manner. Like a jingle, it works its way into the prevailing system of discourse, triggering different perceptions about the convention of defaming women, occasioning as yet untested strategies for bringing it to task. While this late-fourteenth-century work did not capitalize on any such perceptions and strategies, it helped to make them possible. Therein lies its most unorthodox long-term effect.

6—
Christine's Way:
The Querelle du Roman de la rose and the Ethics of a Political Response

Your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,
How can you scratch out
Indelible ink of the palimpsest
Of past misadventure?
H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall

Of all those who take on the problem of defamation in late-medieval literature, it is the poet and professional writer Christine de Pizan who disputes it most vigorously. In her allegorical poem the Epistre au dieu d'amours (Letter to the God of Love ), Christine lodges her first complaint of defamation against women:

Pour ce conclus en diffinicion
Que des mauvais soit fait punicion
Qui les blasment, diffament et accusent
Et qui de faulz desloiaulz semblans usent
Pour decepvoir elles.^[1]
(lines 775–79)

For this reason I conclude with the definition that the wrongdoers be punished, those who blame, accuse, and defame women and those who employ false and treacherous appearances in order to deceive them.

In Cupid's Court of Love, she charges both courtly and clerical writers with speaking and writing injuriously about women in general. Unlike Jean LeFèvre, she exploits a particularly prestigious literary medium to launch her critique. By resorting to allegory, she implicates the very tradition of writing she aims to dispute.

As if a poetic charge of defamation does not register sufficiently, Christine turns it into a polemical one. Her accusation against defamatory literary language is the fuse that ignites one of France's first major literary controversies, known as the Querelle du Roman de la rose .^[2] This turn toward polemics is critical, for it transforms a verbal action into an event.^[3] It

arraigns Jean de Meun's Rose before the general public, requiring its response in turn. Polemically, Christine's accusation of defamation creates a happening that her Parisian milieu is pressed to acknowledge.^[4] It calls upon the representative powers in early-fifteenth-century Paris: royal administrators and lawyers, city officials, and the Queen Regent, Isabeau of Bavaria. Christine's initiation of the Querelle mobilizes the entire community, with the result that her words raise a spectacular public challenge.

Such a move signals another stage in the medieval dispute with magisterial representations of women. It constitutes an especially vociferous case that surpasses the standard clerical disputatio . While Christine's polemic shares a disputational form with many of the works we have been examining, it ups the ante by targeting an even wider public. It breaks the academic stronghold of many disputations and situates its challenge in the midst of the city. It involves the usual clerical community, in this instance a circle of humanists prominent in Parisian intellectual life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. But it also summons the citizenry. The force of a querelle (quarrel) engages everybody.^[5] In this respect, Christine's polemic critiques the masterly textual tradition in the very social space it claims to monopolize. Indeed, it occupies that space.

In this polemical context we can begin to gauge Christine's particular charge of defamation: Jean de Meun's Rose as a "public defamer" (diffameur publique; Hicks, 22). Such an accusation may first call up the image of a person ranting and raving on the street corner. It conjures up a disturbing scene, but hardly one involving a public offense. In a late-medieval setting, however, the problem of defamation was placed necessarily in the public domain. If any invective was to work, it had to register out in the open, before the people in their implicit role as witnesses. Insofar as an individual or group reputation (fama ) rides on the words of others—on public opinion—it could be damaged in this context alone. Created publicly, it can be devalued only in choro publico . This circle of public adulation and damnation was all the more vicious where women's reputations were concerned.^[6] As the index of family and societal honor over and above their own personal honor they were peculiarly susceptible to attack. In Claude Gauvard's suggestive phrase, in medieval and early-modern society, a woman's name was condemned to be defamed.^[7]

Yet Christihe's charge does more than clarify the setting of defamation. It also identifies a celebrated literary work as defamatory of the public. That is, it finds the depiction of women in Jean de Meun's Rose to be injurious to the community as a whole. While this charge represents an individual grievance, something that Christine's first-person address makes clear, at the same time it speaks for women as a constituent element of the public. It represents the class of women as part of the community. It

thereby enlarges the frame of reference for the dispute over masterly writing about women. It brings into view its destructive social impact. The defamation of women becomes a matter of civic concern because it jeopardizes the very languages that help to define a particular community.

Christine's charge of the Rose as a public defamer capitalizes on a Roman model for regulating language on behalf of the people (comme anciennement les Rommains triumphans; Hicks, 21). This model appraises defamatory language as a potential threat to the commonweal. As it was outlined to medieval audiences by Augustine, the Roman model interprets the individual speech act or text functionally: it ties the speech act to the welfare of the community.^[8] In fact, so tightly are they bound together that the defamer is seen as one whose transgressive language assaults the integrity of the group. Slandering any single member violates the polis. Consequently, there is enormous pressure to isolate the defamer and stigmatize him publicly. In the extreme, this leads even to exile, as Ovid's well-known case underscores.^[9] Against the menace of public defamation, then, the forces of government and its laws are marshaled. This means criminalizing the defamer. In the terms of Cicero, the Roman authority hovering over the Querelle :^[10]

[I]n his hanc quoque sanciendam putaverunt, si quis occentavisset sive carmen condidisset, quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri, praeclare; iudiciis enim magistratuum, disceptationibus legitimis propositam vitam, non poetarum ingeniis, habere debemus nec probrum audire nisi ea lege, ut respondere liceat et iudicio defendere.
(De re publica , IV, x, 12)^[11]

Though they provided the death penalty for only a few crimes, [our Twelve Tables] did provide it for any person who sang or composed a song which contained a slander or insult to anyone else. This was an excellent rule; for our mode of life ought to be liable to judgment by the magistrates and the courts of law, but not by clever poets; nor ought we to be subject to disgrace unless we have an opportunity to answer and defend ourselves in a court of law.

The crime of defamation is inflected poetically. Implicit here is the rivalry between the poetic and the legal—the right to "figure" freely and the duty to do so in keeping with the polis. This is a fundamental opposition to which I shall return. For now, suffice it to remark the irony of the Roman model for the Querelle de la Rose . Christine holds both the role of the defamer and the one stigmatizing the defamer. Let us not forget that for the Parisian humanist intelligentsia, her polemical maneuvering would confirm the time-honored stereotype of woman as defamer. At the same time, by issuing the charge Christine aligns herself with the civic and legal

authorities. The lawbreaker breaks into the law. The putative defamer becomes the judge, and this reversal sends her to the very center of the polis.

Such a rhetorical move brings home the fact that there is nothing natural about the categories "defamer" and "judge" and the social boundaries that distinguish them. Nor are the linguistic norms that mark off defamation from socially acceptable language absolute. Protocols specific to a social milieu designate certain locutions as slanderous, and such protocols are themselves subject to change. Christine's initiation of the Querelle involves a role reversal that sets just such a change into motion. By assuming the stance of judge before the public, she places her critique at the center of the public sphere. From this position, Christine can question the logic that continues to identify her rhetorically as a defamer. More importantly, she challenges the way that defamation has been conceptualized in relation to women: how it is that such defamation appears, for the most part, perfectly licit. This is something that LeFèvre's writing could not accomplish, since as a quintessential insider's work it was always already aligned with the law.

But what sort of public territory does Christine intend to take over? Given the reactions of her interlocutors, Christine appears, at first sight, to enter into the realm of humanist debate. An entry into this public realm is labeled straightaway a form of trespass. One disputant, Gontier Col, attacks her charge of defamation for its "outrageous presumptuousness" (presumpcion oultrageuse; Hicks, 100).^[12] Another, Jean de Montreuil, associates Christine with a proverbial range of outcasts—heretics and Jews newly banished from Paris.^[13] Both attacks suggest a deep insecurity. Col and Montreuil speak from a threatened, even precarious position. And the fact that all of Christine's interlocutors interpret her critique of Maistre Jean de Meun's writing as a transgression from without suggests just how defensive they are about their own clerico-humanist domain—what Grover Furr has called "the group-exclusive" preserve of humanism.^[14] Their dealings with Christine make no allowances for her entry into that public sphere. Far from it: Montreuil's description of the weapons of speech, writing, and physical force marks the Querelle as a serious battle over that sphere (Hicks, 30).

To encroach upon the territory of humanist intellectuals, however, involves breaking into an even more prestigious and extensive public space. Christine aspires to nothing less than the res publica —the space of the commonwealth:

Et comme anciennement les Rommains triumphans n'atribuassent louenge aucune ne honneur a chose quelconques se elle n'estoit a l'util-

ité de la chose publique, regardons a leur exemplaire se nous pourons couronner cestuy rommant.
(Hicks, 21)

And as in ancient times when the triumphant Romans would not accord praise or the slightest honor to anything if it were not to the utility of the commonwealth [la chose publique ], let us look to their example to see whether we can crown this romance.

By establishing what are Ciceronian coordinates for the civic domain, she situates the problem of defamation toward women at its very center. Correspondingly, she becomes the chief guardian of that domain. She assumes the persona of a Roman censor . From the outset of the Querelle , this implicit configuration invests her with the role of evaluating utility, bestowing honor, praise, and blame. That is, she is empowered with the censorious functions of the adjudicator of public welfare.^[15] As this Roman model was understood in the fifteenth century, the censor stood for the common good.^[16] He surveyed the citizenry's language and behavior that might jeopardize the social equilibrium. In this sense the censor figure exemplifies public authority—the power acting on behalf of the people.^[17] In this sense too, we can qualify Christine's position in the Querelle . Having traversed the greatest possible rhetorical distance from no-man's-land to the center point of public authority, her persona pronounces the charge of defamation against women censoriously. While Christine's charge does not involve the specific terms of censure, it carries that weight. And as we have seen, it registers strategically as well as rhetorically. Christine's pronouncement operates within the Parisian commonwealth; it realizes the Roman rhetorical figure. Her entrance into a humanists' disputation thus opens up the civic space and invests her with the task of adjudicating the public issue of defaming women.

The notion of public, civic space, in the Querelle de la Rose —"la chose publique"—directs our attention once again toward the effects of texts defamatory to women. It resembles the Bestiaire Response 's effort to dispute a category of masterly writing on behalf of all women. It builds on the Leesce 's conflicted attempt to conceptualize the injurious character of so many clerical figures of women. This it did in the peculiarly charged social environment of late-medieval Paris, where disputes were the rule, not the exception.^[18] As a result, Christine's polemic asks us to examine how defamatory writing affects not only the individual parties represented but the social group of which they were a part.

Following Christine's lead, I shall pursue this question pragmatically. My analysis will thus concentrate less on Christine's polemical reading of

the Rose than on the bearing it has on the public. Within the commonwealth, how are representations of women identified as injurious and how then are they judged? This way of proceeding may seem to take us on a detour, beyond the Querelle to another of Christine's allegories, the Chemin de long estude (The Way of Lengthy Study ). But by taking this route, we will be better able to discern the implications of Christine's dispute with the conventions of masterly writing about women.

From Insult to Injury

We can begin with no more telling instance of Christine's pragmatics than her objection to Reason's naming of genitalia in the Rose . This argument has been understood habitually as one of nominalism versus empiricism.^[19] Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil are seen to defend the use of any name, no matter what its significance. Christine, by contrast, is seen to be concerned (and shocked) by the sexual significance. Consequently, Christine appears to occupy the moral high ground while the humanists aim for a more sophisticated level where names are unencumbered by morality and signification is a purely linguistic affair. With such a view, it is hardly surprising that the humanists emerge as the discerning critics and Christine as the easily offended prude.

Yet if we pay close attention to the way Christine formulates the issue of naming genitalia, her position looks anything but empiricist. For her, a name must be gauged according to its function in social intercourse. Anything named—la chose nommée —is inextricably bound up in the commonwealth—la chose publique . Moving away from a purely formalist problem of signification, Christine is concerned with the way significance is determined socially. What a name is taken to signify is a matter of social consensus. In attending to the circumstances of names such as vis (dick) or couilles (balls), Christine is interested in their conventional social efficacy. She focuses on their effects in the body politic:

Et que honte doye estre deboutee en parlant en publique des choses dont nature mesmes se hontoye, je dis que, sauve la reverence de l'autteur et la vostre, grant tort commectéz contre la noble vertu de honte, qui de sa nature reffraint les goliardises et deshonnestetés en dis et fais; et que ce soit grant vice et hors ordre de pollicie honneste et de bonnes meurs appert en mains lieux de l'Escripture saincte.
(Hicks, 14)

And whether shame/modesty should be insulted in speaking publicly of things about which even nature itself is ashamed, let me say that except for your reverence, and the author's you commit a great wrong

against the noble virtue of shame/modesty, which naturally restrains dishonesty and bad behavior in word and deed, and the fact that it is a serious vice beyond the order of honest government and good behavior is made apparent in several places of Holy Scripture.

Speaking the words for genitalia is not shameful. Rather, what is shameful is the fact that their articulation in this particular society can realize a symbolic form of violence against women. More often than not, these words signify damagingly for them. Furthermore, this pattern of signification is linked to irresponsible and harmful behavior, "goliardises et deshonnestetés." Unleashing such language publicly can act as a trigger mechanism for abusive conduct. The use of such words in what are habitual, sexualized slurs about women can often culminate in physical aggression. Under these circumstances, female shame is less symptomatic of excessive modesty than it is of the anxiety about verbal violence—about defamation—and its carnal counterpart. Aristotle's Ethics , translated by one of Christine's favorite authorities, the philosopher/translator Nicole Oresme, defines shame in just these terms. Oresme's version reads: "Fear of infamy; that is to say, fear to suffer confusion, dishonor, blame" (Vercunde est paour de ingloriacion; c'est a dire, paour de avoir confusion, deshonneur ou vitupere).^[20] That women blush while reading the Rose indicates that they recognize the defamatory way the words of sex can signify for them in courtly society (Hicks, 20). It is a measure of this language's potentially harmful consequences.^[21] Such consequences are borne by individual and group alike. In Christine's view, a determining link exists between the injury defamation inflicts on a woman and on her community—the "ordre de pollicie" as a whole.

This issue of social ramifications is pivotal to her conception of defamation. Insofar as defamatory language is part of a social code governing the public place, she insists on analyzing it in relation to that place. Consider the following cameo scene from the Mutacion de Fortune , another allegory Christine was composing at the time of the Querelle :

Sont ilz courtois ou gent honnie
Ceulx, qui tant dient villenie
A femme, comme pourroit dire
Le plus ort villain de l'Empire?...
Tesmoing d'un, que je ne cognoiz,
Mais il bati, n'a pas .III. mois,
Une femme, dessus le pont
De Paris, dont il meprist moult;
Et si est homme de renom,
Ce dist on, je ne sçay son nom.

La son saoul la bati d'un aulne,
Devant chacun, et de la paume,
Pour ce que elle ne vouloit,
Pour lui, faire ce qu'il ne loit
Faire a quelconques preude femme,
Et si n'a renom de diffame.
(lines 5353–56, 5359–70)^[22]

Are those who speak maliciously of women courtly or despicable people, as they might say, the most ignoble villain in the Empire? . . . I attest to one whom I do not know, but on top of the bridge in Paris, he beat a woman, not three months ago, and in so doing acted wrongly. And he is a man of a certain reputation, as they say, though I do not know his name. There he beat her to his satisfaction with a stick before everyone, and with his bare palm, because she did not want to do for him what is not fitting for any upstanding woman to do, and he still has no reputation for defamation.

The connection here between slander and violence toward a woman is immediate and direct. So too is the involvement of "everyone" in the city. The scene is set up in such a manner that every citizen, including Christine, the eyewitness, is implicated. But how are they complicitous? Because they observe firsthand the passage from defamation to brutal abuse? Christine's analysis foregrounds the public arbitration of reputation and thereby accentuates the public's unavoidable involvement in its effects. Here is a reputable man who is seen to turn his verbal abuse into blows and a woman who in the attempt to avoid defamation is assaulted. To the degree that the public maintains the man's good name, they are his accomplices. And to the degree that they tolerate his defamation or do not perceive it as such, they are responsible for his conduct. The defamer/ assaulter is not the only guilty party. Once set in the public theater, the infractions of defamation become the commonwealth's affair.

That is why one principal criterion in Christine's dispute with the Rose is utility. How does a work contribute to the common good? Or, as Christine puts it early on in the Querelle : "To what advantage or profit is it to the listeners?" (et a quel utilité ne a quoy prouffite aux oyans; Hicks, 15). This notion of utility can provide an antidote to defamation of women. Pragmatically it is its very opposite: useful speech or writing works to the public's benefit. Christine's critique of the Rose as a "useless" text pushes this opposition further. Not only does the Rose accomplish nothing, a work that does no work, but as a form of idleness (oisiveté ) it fosters destructive action.^[23] In this sense, the ultimate danger of a useless text lies in the way it can wreak havoc in the very public it is meant to serve.

Because the Querelle works polemically, Christine's principle of utility is never taken up. It is matched instead by a competing one: the autonomy of poetic form. As many critics have noted, this principle is introduced into the debate by way of the new humanist theories of poetry circulating in fifteenth-century Paris:^[24]

Aussi en ce pas la y faingny poetiquemant, et aux poetes et paintres a tousjours esté licence pareille de tout faindre, comme dit Orace.
(Hicks, 93)

At this point he also feigns poetically; and to poets and painters there has always been such a license to feign everything, as Horace says.

Aussy veult monstrer Meung qu'il estoit naturel et crestien en parlant de Nature, et sy estoit poete, come j'ay dit, par quoy li laissoit de tout parler par ficcion.
(Hicks, 98)

Meun also wishes to show that it is natural and Christian to talk about Nature, and in this manner he was a poet, as I have said, by which he was permitted to talk about everything through fiction.

Pierre Col advances an early-modern "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." At its center lies the notion of licence : an unconditional liberty to speak. Whether coded in figurative or fictional terms, it constitutes an utter freedom: the poet says anything and everything (tout faindre, tout parler). Yet by its own definition, this freedom is double-edged. It legislates its own law. It is, etymologically speaking, licit. Conversely, it breaks with the established public law. Poetic license also goes beyond the bounds, and borders on excess. It is licentious, prone to disregard the accepted rules. Included, then, within this single pivotal locution are the warring aspects of lawfulness and lawlessness, judicious and dangerous freedom. Paradoxically, the very articulation of absolute poetic freedom contains within it the signs of its own danger. It carries with it the potential for violence. As we have already discovered in the Ciceronian configuration, this is the paradox that sets the irrepressible poetic at loggerheads with the public law. There is a perennial tension between the unfettered poetic word and its injurious potential. In the case of the Rose , this tension is directed for the most part against women. Licentious poetria , inflected as a feminine form, threatens being visited upon them.

By espousing the principle of poetry's licentious license, Col invests Jean de Meun's Rose with an omnipotence as form. As a consequence, the question of utility is never addressed. In our terms, this means that a poetic form whose omnipotence is expressed through the feminine is kept

strictly divorced from its pragmatic results. However strongly humanist understandings of poetry are based on its social value, Col and Montreuil do not entertain this aspect of humanist doctrine in the Querelle . Their interest lies in vindicating the formal autonomy of the Rose without acknowledging its defining feminine figure and without regard to its effect on its female audiences.

This formalist position is corroborated by a belief in the sacredness of the poetic text: "The gravities of mysteries and the mysteries of gravities" (misteriorum pondera ponderumque misteria; Hicks, 28). As Pierre-Yves Badel has pointed out, Montreuil's phrase conjures up the "holy of holies" of the biblical text, a writing so magnificent that only the elect can fathom its meaning (419). Through such an analogy between romance fiction and the Bible, the poetic is subsumed into the hieratic. Its mysterious character distinguishes it from all other verbal types, rendering it sublime. This sublimation of form is further borne out by the theorem regarding speech par personnages . According to this theorem, the words of Jean de Meun's allegorical characters are the touchstone of poetic license. And their total impunity is applicable to other cases:

"Se ung se nomme adversaires du roy de France (ce dit dame Eloquance), et soubz ce non il li fait guerre . . . se en la persone d'ung Sarrazin . . . ung home seine erreurs en la foy, en sera il excusé" Et d'autres pareilles, qui tant soit pou ne sont a propos. Je li demande: pour tant, se Salluste recite la conjuracion de Catiline encontre la chose publique de Romme, en est il pour ce coulpable? pour tant, se Aristote recite les oppinions des anciens philozophes contenans erreurs en philozophie, est il semeur d'erreurs en icelle?
(Hicks, 101–2)

"If someone names himself an enemy of the king of France (so says Lady Eloquence), and under this name he wages war against him . . . if in the persona of a Sarrasin, a man sows errors in the faith, will he be excused for it?" And other similar cases that are not really relevant. I ask her: nevertheless, if Sallust recites Catiline's conspiracy against the commonwealth of Rome, is he himself guilty? Further, if Aristotle recites the opinions of the ancient philosophers containing philosophical errors, is he thereby propagating errors in this ?

Col extends full liberties to any figurative formulation, even in political and philosophical discourse. He argues for the philosopher's right to enunciate errors. Exploiting de Meun's term reciter —the very one used in the Rose to rebuff the complaint of misogynistic defamation—Col champions the autonomy of any speech act enunciated hypothetically or through an

assumed persona. And he does so, tongue in cheek, by means of the projected speech of such a persona, Lady Eloquence. As long as the speech act occurs under these conditions, anything goes—including the dreaded word of sedition. We have here the most radical elaboration of a notion of speech that tolerates no limitation. And this is most clearly evidenced in the political arena, where curses and verbal plots against the commonwealth abound. The statesman reserves the right to entertain or repeat injurious statements by virtue of his protected speech. By introducing such an example, Col takes up Christihe's concern with the public domain only to deride it—or, one might say, to dismiss it knowingly. By focusing on the nature and the exercise of such a privileged and autonomous speech, Col disregards the question of utility. His commentary deflects the question of a text's pragmatic relation to the body politic—a question that certainly plays a central role in the humanist enterprise. Consequently, he blocks the charge of defamation of women before it can ever take hold. If injurious language is sanctioned absolutely by a principle of verbal autonomy even when it is entertained against the polis, then the idea of defaming women has no bearing. This is for two reasons. Not only does defamation per se make no sense under such conditions, but the specific case of defamation against women is inconceivable. When the criterion of utility does not pertain, even the simplest understanding of verbal injury cannot take shape.

We come here to the core of the Querelle : the confrontation of set positions that pits the humanists' sacrosanct poetic form against Christine's notion of a socially profitable language. The only possible change is one of rhetorical degree. Over the course of the Querelle , a language of absolutist power develops: orthodoxy versus apostasy, legitimacy versus criminality. Such oppositions conjure up scenes of interrogation and punishment in the public square, even of exile and book burning. As Christine invokes this language, she takes it to the extremes of heresy and treason:

Mais je te demende se quant yceulx ou autres, ou la sainte Escripture recite telz choses, se il y a devant ou aprés personnages ou aultre propos qui conforte et afferme par molles parolles et attrayans que l'en trahisse ou que l'en soit herite, et ainssy des autres maulx: tu sces bien que nennil.
(Hicks, 133–34)

But I ask you whether when these or others, or the holy Scripture recite such things either before or after characters or other speeches, that

through soft and attractive words encourage and spur people to treason, heresy, or other evils ? You know very well that it is not the case.

Naming the Rose a heretical and treasonous text escalates the problem of verbal injury to the greatest possible degree. It turns the injury into a civic threat. Theologically and politically, it codes defamation as the gravest crime.

That Christine resorts to this language has a decided iconoclastic punch to it. We must remember that her persona begins as the classic defamer—the deviant whose reversed charge of defamation propels her toward a central seat of power. Speaking in this absolutist idiom is for her, then, a subversive act. It represents her ultimate challenge, her final effort to bring the textual problem of defaming women into view. At the same time, it points to her success in appropriating the public arena. Her claim to expel Jean de Meun's Rose from the city demonstrates her skill at making a text injurious to women publicly accountable.

However troubling Christine's absolutist language may appear to readers today, it provides the best measure of her own disputational project. Like the Bestiaire respondent before her, she is working to make the general principle of injurious language relevant and applicable to the canonical representation of women. Their common aim is to make public the relation between verbal figuration and domination. Yet Christine goes further. By situating this relation in the space of the commonwealth, her response to defamatory masterly writing pioneers the grounds of the social responsibility of that writing. In a fashion virtually unprecedented in European vernacular culture, it explores the idea that an authoritative poetic discourse can be rendered answerable to its publics; specifically, that the authoritative discourse on women can be taken to task. Critical attention long has been riveted on the Querelle as either an expression of medieval culture's characteristic misogyny or an emancipatory credo for poetry. What has gone largely unremarked is the confrontation between the humanistic notion of a "supreme fiction" and Christine's Roman notion of its public accountability. It is the representation of women that brings this confrontation to a climactic point. A textual model of pure form clashes with one of social pragmatics. This clash has had enormous cultural ramifications. Over the centuries following the Querelle , the debate over the responsibility of the poetic text to its community is rehearsed again and again.^[25] The balance is continually renegotiated, sometimes in favor of the public, sometimes in favor of poetry. But in one of its earliest vernacular formulations, this debate hinges on the defamatory representation of women as it is disputed by a woman.

The logic of polemics leaves the Querelle de la Rose at a standoff. There is a sense in which its polarized disputation leads nowhere. The particular argument over defamation does not evolve, nor do the positions of the disputants change significantly. Without the final determination (determinatio ) of a master figure, this querelle finds no definitive and satisfying conclusion. Christine's alchemical analogy captures this sense of stasis in the Querelle de la Rose . The huffing and puffing of alchemists that she describes accentuates the illusory production of the dispute: "And they blow hard, and for a tiny bit of sublimate or residue that seems marvelous to them" (et soufflent fort, et pour ung petit de sulimacion ou congyeil qui leur appere merveillable; Hicks, 126).^[26]

At the same time, Christine's description highlights the specific limits of her position as respondent:

Ainssy est il de toy et de moy et de plusseurs: tu l'entens et le prens d'une maniere, et moy tout au rebours; tu recites, je replique. Et quant nous avons fait et fait, tout ne vault riens; car la matiere en est tres deshonneste, ainssy come aucuns arguemistes qui cuident fere de fiens or.
(Hicks, 126)

So it is with you and me and many others. You understand it [the book] and take it in one way, and I, at cross purposes. You recite, I respond. And when we have worked and worked, it all comes to naught; for the matter is very dishonest, just like alchemists who think they can make gold out of dung.

All the elements that we have linked to the dispute with masterly writing about women converge in this passage. A rebours : like the Bestiaire respondent, Christine finds that the disputational dynamic places her "at cross purposes" with her interlocutors. She too is brought to argue counterproductively. She is unable to exit from the Querelle with the clear conviction that her response to Jean de Meun's Rose has registered effectively. Why? Recitation/Response : the familiar terms of masterly debate reassert themselves. Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col, like Jean de Meun before them, continue reciting the positions of earlier masters. Recitation permits them to deny all commitment and responsibility for what they have been saying about women. Correspondingly, Christine risks being trapped in the reiterative form of response—a type of echo chamber that may bring her argument against the prevailing masterly representation of women "to naught."

Lest this alchemical trope give the impression that Christine abandons the problem of the defamation of women, leaving it unresolved, it is important to look beyond the Querelle de la Rose . Indeed, it is worthwhile thinking through the Querelle in an entirely different way. In this respect, we can do no better than to follow the lead of Christine's authorities, Nicole Oresme and Aristotle, who state in the Ethics : "Accusations, quarrels and complaints occur only, or rather primarily, out of friendship, that is, for the sake of utility. This is a reasonable thing."^[27] According to this standard, a disputation can at times prove socially useful or productive.

The key to this rethinking is to be found in the conjunction of the Querelle with the allegory Christine composed immediately thereafter. The Chemin de long estude narrates Christine's intellectual development as a journey across the earth and the heavens.^[28] It culminates with her return from heaven and her mandate to instruct rulers. The last part of the Chemin reads like an exemplary portrait of the prince. In the passage from the Querelle to the Chemin we can detect the makings of Christine's most ambitious response to the defamatory character of magisterial writing about women.^[29] The key is this: if a polemical mode cannot succeed in countering the public defamation of women, then she will oppose it in another mode. Put another way, if Christine's rhetorical occupation of the public sphere does not rid it of defamatory, socially destructive language, then she will forge another language to do so. The Chemin marks her first major experiment in working ethically and politically. In this turn, Christine appropriates and refashions the Boethian case.^[30] But what exactly is the connection Boethius offers between the concerns of the Querelle de la Rose and the Chemin ? As she interprets his dilemma, it represents the fate of a public servant falsely slandered: "What greater evil or displeasure or what greater reason for impatience could besmirch the innocent than to hear oneself defamed without cause, as is apparent in the accounts of Boethius in his book of consolation?" (quel plus grant mal et desplaisir peust sourdre a linnocent ne plus grant cause de impacience que de soy oir diffamer sanz cause comme il appert par les rapors de boece en son livre de consolacion).^[31] Like Boethius, Christine personally confronts the dangers of defamation. And like him, she reacts by addressing those dangers in a different, ethical framework. Unlike him, however, her ethical experiment in the Chemin also transforms her into a political advocate. More than a censor of the public language about women, more than its ethical defender, she becomes the author of a political discourse beneficial to all citizens.

12. Christine and the Sibyl before the five heavenly deities,
Chevalerie, Noblece, Richece, Sagece, and Raison.
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, f.fr. 836, fol. 19.
Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Visionary Advice

How to become a credible spokesperson for a discourse that represents the entire city's interests? In order to meet this challenge, the Chemin cultivates what I shall call a prophetic mode. Such a mode is by no means

foreign to Christine's strategies in the Querelle . Her polemic is forwardlooking insofar as it works to establish a useful language about women for the future. Yet the Chemin pushes the prophetic even further. It forges a language for the polis that covers both past and future representations of the people. This all-inclusive dimension distinguishes prophetic language and gives it a predictive force.

The first agent of the Chemin 's prophetic mode is the Cumaean Sibyl—the grande dame of prophecy for medieval culture.^[32] Existing solely as voice, this female figure epitomizes the elusive power of the prophet.^[33] She seems to come from nowhere, and yet because she oversees all that is known and will be known, she is everywhere. Her vision spans the world. In this manner, the Sibyl represents a fitting companion guiding Christine's persona through the Chemin 's lengthy allegorical journey: across the known world, its marvelous fringes, and all the way to the heavens, where the figures of Noblece (Nobility), Richece (Wealth), Chevalerie (Chivalry), and Sagece (Wisdom) preside (Figure 12). The Sibyl's guidance is also crucial because her prophetic powers are linked expressly to governance. She stands in a long line of vatic women whose inspired words pronounce on city rule, indeed, whose words determine the fates of cities:

Et a cel homme [Aeneas]
Dis la fondacion de Romme,
Dont il meismes seroit la souche.
Ce lui prophetisay de bouche. . . .
Portay a Romme neuf volumes
De livres de lois et coustumes
Et des secrez de Romme, ou temps
Que la gouvernoit par bon sens
Tarquinius Priscus.
(lines 609–12, 621–25)

And to this man, I spoke about Rome's foundation of which he himself would be the stock. I offered him prophesies from my lips; I carried to Rome nine tomes of the laws, customs, and secrets of Rome of the time when it was governed sensibly by Tarquinius Priscus.

The Cumaean Sibyl embodies the source of law and custom, of all that is most sacred about the originary city. She is responsible for its foundation, and by inference for its ongoing development. Her example thus underscores the critical degree to which the prophetic is bound up with the city's welfare: its language is committed to its equitable rule.

That the Chemin begins with the Cumaean prophetess reveals Christihe's particular interest in the prophetic. Invoking the Sibylline ex-

ample creates an implicit comparison with Vergil's model in the Aeneid . Christine does not miss the opportunity to contrast her prophetic mode to that of Latinity's first civic poet. This is clear in the passage where the Sibyl is represented leaving Aeneas to his city-building task and turning her attention to Christine's persona:

Or me suis je manifestee
A toy que je voy apprestee
A concevoir, s'en toy ne tient
Ce que grant estude contient,
Et pour ce me suis apparue
Cy endroit.
(lines 635–40)

Thus I came to you, whom I see ready to conceive of such things; even if all that great study contains does not take in you. And for this reason I have appeared in this place.

Christine's transition from Vergil's account to her own is direct and self-legitimizing. Furthermore, given the echo with Dante's Inferno , this rite of passage signals her complementary ambition to imitate the prophetic example of Italy's first civic poet.^[34] The implication is that her work (esrude ) will benefit from the examples of both masters. It will create a language befitting an equitable city—a goal that neither Vergil nor Dante finally accomplished.

Let us not forget, however, that at the outset of the Chemin Christine's persona does not recognize the Sibyl. This misapprehension is the surest indication of the distance she must travel before gaining the power of prophecy. Unable to see or speak clearly at first, she will grow in assurance through the course of the narrative (Chemin ). And the aim of this development is to combine the prophetic and the wise—the two discursive categories that prove indispensable to the city according to Christine's Greek and Roman authorities. The fact that Christine's persona mistakes the Sibyl for Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, implies that the defining traits of these two discourses are as yet missing in her. Yet it sets the standard for their coming together. Christine's misprision suggests that the vatic and the sapiential will ultimately converge to sanction her discourse.

The second agent of the Chemin 's prophetic mode is its heavenly vector. The narrative traces Christine's ascent along Dantian lines. It maps out what she calls elsewhere "la Voye de Paradis" (the route to Paradise).^[35] With its intense heat and blinding light, this way points Christihe's persona unmistakably toward another realm that demands an enhanced vision:

Mais tant oz desir de savoir
Et congnoistre et appercevoir
Toutes les choses de cel estre,
Que bien voulsisse, s'il peust estre,
Que tous mes membres fussent yeux
Devenus, pour regarder mieux
Les belles choses que veoir
Povoie.
(lines 1805–12)

But I had such a great desire to learn, know, and perceive everything of this being that I really would have wished, if it were possible, that my entire body could become eyes so as to inspect more fully the beautiful things that I was able to see.

The fantasy of being transformed into all eyes epitomizes the limitless vision associated with Paradise. This is the same vision that sanctions prophecy and makes for omniscience. As Dante conceives of it, this heavenly vision involves the desire to pass into another dimension, indeed, to push beyond the limits of mundane representation.^[36] Here is the paragon of "pure poetry" as form, what would doubtless be the fiction of mysteries and the mystery of fictions for Montreuil, Col, and their humanist brethren. In Christine's case, however, such a heavenly vision serves a more pragmatic purpose. Its power can be put to the use of the commonwealth. Once fathomed, it can be redirected toward a social end. It can be relayed through the salvific language Christine seeks to establish. So it is that her persona comes back from Paradise. This is no descent in a pejorative sense. Rather it constitutes a return and progressive reintegration of the seer and her transformed vision/language into the body politic. Whereas Dante's persona rises higher and higher to a point of no return, Christine's returns earthward with the gifts of prophecy, ever mindful of her social responsibility. The language of the Chemin remains bright with "the great festival of flashing lights"—the fluorescent trace elements of an all-seeing, allknowing perspective (Paradiso , XX, 84). But in the end, it is grounded in a worldly, specifically civic enterprise.^[37]

This return is cast as a feminist move of sorts. If we recall the theories of women's origin rehearsed by many gynocentric respondents such as LeFèvre, woman alone is born in Paradise. That is, woman issues from the terrestrial paradise. In Christine's description: "Ancient, true stories from the Bible that cannot lie, tell us that woman was first formed in terrestrial paradise, not man."^[38] This is the predominant landscape in the Chemin . Having achieved the summit of Paradise, Christine's persona returns to earth by way of the terrestrial paradise (lines 2055–56). In fact, it is the

setting for the Chemin 's lengthy debate over the ideal character of the prince and the citizenry. This stands to reason because in Christine's thinking the earthly paradise represents the best link between the heavens and the city. It is a perfect mediating site. As one associated with women, it provides an ideal place for her transformation into a prophetess. It stages her new political role as mediator between the heavens and the commonwealth.

This mediating character brings us to the third element of the Chemin 's prophetic mode. Astrology entails for Christine an authoritative discourse, indeed, a popular or secular prophetic form:

Astrologien est parfait,
Par science scet quanqu'on fait,
Des planetes congnoist le cours
Et des estoilles tousles tours,
Tout le compas du firmament
Et toutes scet entierement
Les choses qui sont a venir;
Comment elles doivent venir
Scet il tout par sa grant science.
Brief, en lui est, je vous fiance,
Toute philosophie entiere.
(lines 3399–3409)

The astrologer is perfect because he knows scientifically whatever happens; he knows the orbits of the planets and the cycles of the stars, he knows the compass of the firmament, as well as everything about the future; he knows through his great learning how it will all transpire; in short, I swear to you, in him is gathered all of philosophy.

Christine's panegyric accentuates the important alliance between astronomy and good governance. Insofar as the astrologer comes as close as is humanly possible to possessing total knowledge—"en lui est route philosophie entiere"—he represents the ideal public counselor. Following Plato, Aristotle, and even Cicero, she places the astrologer beside the ruler. She enlists him as a public servant and makes his star-gazing civic business. It is important to remember, however, that this configuration was under attack during this period. Not only was astronomical science challenging the prophetic claims of astrology, but Christine's authority, Nicole Oresme, argued against astrology's political value.^[39] The fact that Christine continues to speak astrologically in the face of such opposition reveals how personally committed she is to its prophetic language. Her father, Tommaso de Pisano, was the court astrologer for Charles V. Astrology represents a powerful

legacy for Christine, so powerful that it underwrites her advocacy of politicized astrology.^[40] Christine's transformation into an ethical/political writer depends on her exploiting her astrological patrimony.

Yet is the preoccupation with this particular prophetic mode merely a family affair? We have a clue, I believe, in the term, aviser , which recurs in the latter part of the Chemin. Aviser combines the closely connected senses of seeing ahead and advising. The word reveals the critical ligature between vision and counsel, between a vatic faculty and a political role. Intervening in the debate over the ideal character of the prince, Christine's persona says:

Puis qu'il vous plaist, diray le voir
De mon avis sus l'ordenance
De la mondaine gouvernance.
(lines 3080–82)

Since it is pleasing to you, I'll tell you the truth of my view [mon avis ] on the ordinance of earthly governance.

The truth she claims is predicated on prophetic insight. No matter of opinion, it constitutes an otherworldly order of knowledge—akin to the perceptions of a Boethian "pure discerning mind." (IV, vi, 1) This turn of phrase, "diray le voir De mon avis," is worth dwelling on for a moment. Read in the context of the Chemin , it exemplifies Christine's ethicopolitical ambitions. It identifies her as the ideal civic counselor. When read in the larger context of Christine's work, it highlights a further element in her ongoing dispute with masterly writing. "Le voir de mon avis" offers the perfect corrective to the humanists' slogan in the Querelle : "tout parler par ficcion" (saying everything by fiction). As Joël Blanchard has argued convincingly, one of the most pressing challenges facing the poet in early-fifteenth-century Paris involved véridiction —the capacity to speak the truth fully.^[41] As Christine takes up this challenge, she roots her "truth" in so many layers of prophetic language that it appears, at least rhetorically, incontestable. Furthermore, her avis is properly dedicated to the polis. Vision/counsel versus fiction, truth-telling versus autonomous speech: Christihe's juxtapositions reveal the impoverishment of Col's "fictive" autonomy. What is missing in Col is precisely the ethico-political dimension. Christine's avis possesses this dimension because it both serves and contributes efficaciously to the community. With its overarching perspective, it claims to represent the interests of the entire group in a truthbearing language beneficial to all. This is not to say that free speech cannot be exercised ethically. Nor is it to suggest that an ethical fiction does not exist. On the contrary: Christine's writing from this stage on is the proof

of that. Rather it is to say that where the humanists fail in vindicating "fictive" autonomy, Christine succeeds in articulating a socially responsive one. Where they fail in defending the Rose ethically, the Chemin proves exemplary.

Towards the Sapiential

With this order of "visionary advice," then, Christine's persona is ready to represent a type of civic ethics. And the emblem for this ethics, as classical thought defined it, is nothing less than sapientia or wisdom. Having authorized itself prophetically, the Chemin experiments with what I shall call sapiential writing. Inspired and learned, forward-looking and yet committed to the present, this narrative pursues a way of speaking and writing about wisdom as a necessary civic virtue. In so doing, it embodies wisdom itself. The Chemin realizes the virtue in the process of advocating it for the polis. Such a course is startling on several accounts. That a female persona practices wisdom moves beyond the passive identification of wisdom with the feminine that Minerva represents for so much of medieval clerical writing. Christine's persona disputes the exclusive claims on wisdom made by the male clergy—a claim so well-defended, according to Michèle LeDoeuff, that a woman cannot easily contest it.^[42] This was particularly the case in Christine's milieu, where intellectual life was still tightly controlled by the clergy. Her sapiential writing thus raises the question of a woman humanist.^[43] Furthermore, it explores the conflicted position of "wise women" in the polls. To what degree can their actions constitute a critical part of a community's deliberations? Christine seems intent on envisaging a more active role for them than her Greek and Roman models posited.^[44] Indeed, her sapiential writing projects a determining ethical/political role for women. I shall return to these two startling questions again.

In the simplest terms, Christine's sapiential writing is defined by its erudition. The debate over the ideal qualities of the citizenry in the second half of the narrative marshals a remarkable array of citation and commentary, the so-called dits d'auteurs . It turns the Chemin into a model florilegium that could rival any clerical anthology of the day.^[45] Here is a work that delights in the stuff of learning, amassing disparate material and displaying it in ever more inventive ways. It communicates the thrill of acquiring bookish knowledge.^[46] Yet Christine's obviously pleasurable erudition is no self-engrossing affair. It develops in accordance with its social utility. In this sense, it realizes one of Aristotle's

ethical principles as the philosopher/translator Nicole Oresme renders it: "The study of all books engenders, fosters, and cultivates in the hearts of those who listen to them an affection and love for the commonwealth, which is the best quality to be found in a prince and his counselors after the love of God (L'estude de tous livres engenre et embat ou acroist es cuers de ceuls qui y entendent, affeccion et amour au bien publique, qui est la meilleur qui puisse estre en prince et en ses conseilliers aprés l'amour de Dieu; Livre de Ethiques , Prologue, 1d [Menut, 99]). For Christine, the study of all books is a measure of her ethical and political responsibilities. The process of working through such learning equips her for a civic role. In fact, it commits her to that role all the more strongly. As her writing gains intellectually, it rises to the challenge of overseeing the affairs of the polis. In this sense, her sapiential writing comprises a practice as well. It realizes the same ethical conduct that it recommends for the benefit of the prince and his people. It participates in the essential functioning of the commonwealth.

When we approach Christine's sapiential writing as a practice, we can begin to detect the important ethico-political role it devises for women. Her portrait of the prince among his people depends in large part on their intervention. Whereas most humanist versions of this portrait do not make room for any female political activism, Christine's, by contrast, highlights it. Two examples will make the point clear. In the first, Christine details the case of a woman unjustly accused of a crime. She is condemned by a drunken monarch gone out of control. The rule of the kingdom looks in jeopardy. Yet the woman's pleas remind us that wisdom is not merely the personal trademark of the ruler, but in the best of circumstances a trait informing the entire body politic. She challenges the prince's judgment, thus appealing to another standard: "So after his drunkenness, he went to listen to her and revoked the sentence he had given that was so badly ordained" (Dont apres l'ivrece vaca A elle oir, et revoca La sentence qu'il ot donnee, Qui moult estoit mal ordenee; lines 5567–70). In Christine's example, the proverbial victim becomes a decisive agent of wise justice. The woman calls the errant prince back to good rule. By playing the role of the fully empowered citizen, she insures not only that justice is rendered her personally but also that the community's welfare is respected. Her voice is the ethical one, and it speaks responsibly for the polis as a whole.

In the second case, that female ethical voice is further strengthened. It belongs to a widow who turns to the delinquent prince seeking justice for her murdered son:

Tu es, dist elle, mon debteur.
Que te vauldra, s'autre me paie;
Tenus es de faire la paie.

Et lors l'empereur, esmeu
Des paroles, si a veu
Le cas, et du cheval descent,
Et a celle femme en present
Fist droit et satisfacion.
Dont fu grant approbacion
Qu'il estoit parfait justicier
Sanz prolongnier ne delaissier.
(lines 5790–5800)

You are, she said, my debtor. What will it be worth to you, if another pays me; you are bound to keep the bargain. Whereupon the emperor, moved by these words, and having seen the case, got down from his horse and made good on the spot with this woman, giving her satisfaction. Thus there was great approval that he was a perfect judge without hesitation or procrastination.

The woman articulates a classical definition of justice: speak the truth and pay your debts. She is the mouthpiece for an ethical principle meant to sustain the commonwealth. Furthermore, her exchange with the prince secures his reputation: were she not to require justice from him, his good name would be diminished. Through a woman's intervention, the prince's necessary fame as judge is vindicated and his judgment is perfected.

These scenes capture the essence of Christine's sapiential writing. Like the intervention of the two women, her work is to function ethically on behalf of the people, but it must do so in the face of irresponsible discourse and delinquent governance. Because the appointed representatives of justice—rulers and philosophers alike—have failed, the Chemin claims the task of pronouncing ethically. Women take over the duty of protecting the citizen's name and thereby of defending the integrity of the group. Against all philosophical precedent, it is women's work that sets the ethico/political standard. Against most literary conventions, it is a woman's writing that exemplifies it.

What is the connection between this ethical stance and Christine's writing as a whole? What bearing could her ethics possibly have on her dispute with Jean de Meun's Rose ? With these questions, my argument comes full circle. Christine's ultimate response to the Querelle de la Rose , emerges through the practice of sapiential writing in the Chemin . Such an ethical textual practice responds to the general problem of defamation. In the most efficacious way, it disputes the particular problem of defamatory masterly texts about women. If defamatory writing is defined by its injuriousness, then the sapiential is defined by its beneficence. Where the

former wreaks symbolic violence, the latter makes amends. In fact, sapiential writing seeks to counteract past symbolic violence. Because of its commitment to the polis, it rehabilitates earlier damaging writing and endeavors to reorient it ethically to the society's benefit.

These distinctions make Christine's sapiential writing her most potent reply to the defamatory Rose . But they also empower her critique of its humanist defenders. Her ethical textual practice calls into question their practice, one linked specifically in the Querelle to Dame Eloquence (Hicks, 92–112.) Although Christine can hardly challenge the eloquence of Col and Montreuil, she can point up the absence of any accompanying wisdom. Christine's own sapiential writing serves, in effect, to indict retroactively the Rose 's humanist defenders for their lack of wisdom. And this in turn impugns their dedication to the commonwealth. According to the Roman authority so beloved by the humanists and Christine herself: "But if you have eloquence without wisdom, then Cicero teaches you that such eloquence is pernicious to the state and the commonwealth."^[47] Judged by this standard the humanists' contribution to the Querelle is devoid of the very quality that defines the ethico-political. Christine argues implicitly that the humanists' eloquence is pernicious or defamatory itself. Under such circumstances, her own sapiential writing in the Chemin (and thereafter) functions doubly. Its principal aim is to compensate for the verbal injury of women in a masterly text such as the Rose . But in so doing, it surpasses the humanists' discourse ethically and politically. Christine's work is distinguished by the same civic virtues they claim for their own.

This strategy did not go unnoticed. A contemporaneous pedagogical treatise composed by a noblewoman for her sons gives us a glimpse of the effects of Christine's writing:

Cristine de pisay a si bien et honnestement parle, faisant dictiers et livres a l'ensaignement de nobles femmes et aultres, que trop seroit mon esperit failly et surpris voulloir emprendre de plus en dire. Car quant j'auroie la science de Palas ou l'eloquence de Cicero, et que, par la main de Promoteus, fusse femme nouvelle, sy ne porrose je parvenir ne attaindre a sy bien dire comme elle a faict.
(Enseignemens que une dame laisse a ses filz en forme de testament , B.N. f.fr. 19919, fol. 27)^[48]

Christine de Pizan has spoken so well and so honestly, composing treatises and books concerning the instruction of noblewomen and others, that my spirit would surely be surprised and overwhelmed in trying to say anything more. For even when I had the learning of Minerva or the eloquence of Cicero and were I, by the hand of Prometheus, to

become a new woman, even then I could still not reach her level nor attain speaking as well as she has done.

We have here the virtues that distinguish Christine's way: Minervan wisdom and Roman eloquence define her writing as a powerful ethicopolitical medium for women and men in the community. As the very antithesis of the defamatory, it offers a socially responsible discourse. Her eloquent sapiential writing dismantles the symbolic domination of women maintained so effectively by the masterly clerical tradition. In its place, it devises a language that represents women's interests equitably. If such a language cannot change social relations between women and men, it can name them differently.^[49] It can thus safeguard the welfare of all citizens, the making of "new women and men." All Christine's subsequent writing pioneers just such a socially enriching idiom, of which one sign might well be the locution—femme/fame/sapience —of defamed women made newly famous by their wisdom.

7—
A Libelous Affair:
The Querelle de la Belle Dame sans merci and the Prospects for a Legal Response

Her voice—of all her admirables the admirablest, the very pitch and timber of La Belle Lettre sans merci.
John Barth, Letters

In late-medieval France, the feme/diffame problem took another important turn legally. What had prompted Jean LeFèvre's conversion and Christine de Pizan's ethical critique of Jean de Meun's Rose could also occasion juridical accusations. The problem of damaging women's names, indeed one might say of "de-naturing" them (di-ffame ), became a matter of litigation and public redress. Writers and poets could be charged according to a legal definition of defamation.

Formulating the problem of defamation in legal terms taps into an immense body of speculation that extends all the way back to Justinian's Code and Roman law. The canonical conception described defamation as an unjust harming of another's reputation (injusta alienae famae laesio ).^[1] This harm could take many forms and occur in many places. As Justinian's Code outlined it:

Si quis famosum libellum sive domi sive in publico vel quocumque loco ignarus reppererit, aut corrumpat, priusquam alter inveniat, aut nulli confiteatur inventum. Sin veto non statim easdem chartulas vel corruperit vel igni consumpserit, sed vim earum manifestaverit, sciat se quasi auctorem huiusmodi delicti capitali sententia subiugandum.^[2]

If anyone should find defamatory material in a house, in a public place, or anywhere else, without knowing who placed it there, he must either tear it up before anyone else finds it or not mention to anyone that he has done so. If, however, he should not immediately tear up or burn

the paper, but should show it to others, he is notified that he will be liable to the punishment of death as the author.

Defamation involves an attack on a person enacted symbolically. The fact that it targets the symbolic entity of a reputation and not a body does little to diminish its seriousness. In such a world, where words were not yet sundered from deeds, defamation was tantamount to physical assault. Hence the defamer or the one who collaborates in defamation is subject to corporal punishment—even death. As medieval canon and customary law continued to propound Justinian's statute, its stringent force varied little: in Gratian's rendition, defamation was a verbal infraction and the defamer, a criminal who must take a beating.^[3]

When it comes to the cause of a poet, this prevailing medieval conception of verbal injury poses a variety of questions: in what way is a speaker or writer accountable to the public?; are texts actionable?; if so, how are they rendered liable for damages? It also raises key issues concerning the social parameters of discourse and the controls developed to enforce them. At stake is that charged rapport between language and action—the relay between verbal representation, its effects, and the public regulation of both. For jurists and poets of the late Middle Ages, defamation offered a crucial model for reckoning with the power of discourse. Since it attempts to account for the influence of linguistic forms on its audiences and the public domain as a whole, defamation charts the boundaries of responsibility: the place where a party assumes, in legal terms, liability.

Nowhere is the juridical problem of defamation of women more clearly articulated than in the controversy provoked by Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans merci .^[4] The title of this fifteenth-century courtly poem hints at the Querelle that ensued. Portraying the lady as merciless prompted immediate and vehement reactions. In fact, Chartier's Belle Dame seems to have polarized the court of Charles VII, where it first circulated in 1424. It touched off a far more acrimonious debate than the Querelle de la Rose a generation earlier. This is hardly surprising, given the state of civil war in France at the time: internecine rivalries between Armagnac and Burgundian factions divided the royal court where Chartier served as secretary. A group of anonymous courtiers lodged the first complaint, objecting to the way the poem acts to "disrupt the quest of humble servants, and snatch from you [women] the happy name of mercy" (rompre la queste des humbles servans et à vous tolir l'eureux nom de pitié; Laidlaw, 362). Chartier answered with his own Excusacioun aus dames , patterned after Jean

de Meun (Rose , lines 15129–212). It was the second work that sparked a woman's response. And La Response des dames faicte a maistre Alain , attributed to "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie," launched an indictment of defamation.^[5] The confrontation between Chartier's Belle Dame / Excusacioun and the Response des dames brought out the legal problem of the text's public accountability. It is difficult to ascertain if and how this confrontation was ever adjudicated. The Querelle de la Belle Dame continued to be played out in the years thereafter; a flurry of poems were composed in defense of Chartier's poem. Yet despite its inconclusiveness, the affair retained its legalistic tenor.

With its legal conception of defamation, this little-known Querelle pushes our investigation into the symbolic domination of masterly writing about women still further. We should first recognize it as another disputational encounter between a well-known courtly text and a woman's response, this time involving a poet in his prime. Yet the recourse to legal models in the woman's response to Chartier's Belle Dame changes the very terms of such a disputation. Invoking the law of defamation adds a novel and powerful criterion to the medieval critique of masterly representations of women.

At the same time, the Querelle de la Belle Dame highlights the considerable difficulties in interpreting the woman's response in any disputation. The major pitfall, as ever, is the stereotype of the defaming woman.^[6] In the reception of the Querelle de la Belle Dame , this stereotype comes through in the efforts to identify the respondents with the damoiselles d'honneur so frequently depicted in contemporaneous manuscripts (Figure 13).^[7] While there are favorable images of a close-knit circle of loyal women—such is the case of the Champion des dames miniature—there are also unfavorable images. The identification of "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie" with such damoiselles reproduces the negative portrayal of them found throughout chronicle literature of the early fifteenth century.^[8] It stigmatizes them with the clichéd reputation of damoiselles d'honneur as gossips and bad-mouthers. The modern critical tendency to name the respondents as such women of the court reconfirms unwittingly the favorite clerical exemplum of damoiselles for calumny.^[9]

Secondly, the reading of the Querelle de la Belle Dame as a politicized literary game elides the specific character of the woman's response.^[10] It is based on the premise that the respondents are figures caught up in the intrigues of courtly ritual. It takes them to be pawns in the hands of more powerful political players.^[11] Whether the respondents are allied with the Armagnac or Burgundian camp, whether they are deemed actual women or figurative ploys manipulated by these camps, the result is much the

13. A circle of dames and damoiselles d'honneur.  Le Champion des dames .
Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, BM Rés. 352, fol. 384 verso.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de Grenoble, France.

same. Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie are seen as formidable opponents to Chartier when women are linked deterministically to defamation. This dismissive reading of the Querelle de la Belle Dame rides on the cliché that women are exemplary defamers.

If our analysis of the woman's response has demonstrated anything, it

is the imperative of breaking out of the vicious circle that defines women's language pejoratively. In the case of the Querelle de la Belle Dame , this means shifting the focus away from the respondents as women—ergo, as defaming women. Such a focus has reinforced commonplace medieval views of the feminine and obscured the innovation that is the Querelle 's central strategy: pursuing a defamatory text legally. By moving attention away from the gender typecasting, we can better gauge the effects of the woman's response in this Querelle . Whether "Jeanne," "Katherine," and "Marie" represent women or men is not the determining issue. What matters more is the consequence of their interventions. If we attend to what I have called the chiasmic link between respondent figures and their context, we are in a better position to discern the implications of their legal charge of defamation.

The Sting of Verbal Injury

The medieval law of defamation hinges first and foremost on the concept of injury (laesio/iniuria ).^[12] The Response des dames to Maître Alain's Belle Dame involves testing such a principle of verbal injury on a particular figuration of women. It attempts to assess the connection between the representation of something hurtful and hurtful representation. The Response des dames does not object to the portrait of the pitiless lady but to the transfer of such a portrait from a specific female persona to other women. It questions how the poet gets from the figure of a merciless lady (dame est sans mercy, line 4) to representing existing women as cruel (nous sommes crüelles, line 19).

On closer inspection, we discover that the contested figure is an unattached woman:

Je suis france et france vueil estre,
Sans moy de mon cuer dessaisir
Pour en faire un autre le maistre.
(lines 286–88)

I am free and wish to remain free, without relinquishing my heart to make another its master.

Repeated obsessively throughout the Querelle , Chartier's version of a woman's liberty gets to the core of medieval representations that code female separateness as merciless.^[13] When read conventionally, it converts women's freedom into an instrument of torture for men. That woman speaks her freedom wounds her male interlocutor; that she speaks a desire to have no master is liable to kill him. The Belle Dame 's claim brings out

the tortuous impulses informing so much of medieval amorous discourse. Yet read another way, her claim also stands as the credo of a free agent. It suggests a noncommittal stance, one that identifies the woman on her own terms, in relation to no one else. The crux lies in the fact that Chartier's poem allows for both readings. It showcases a woman able to claim her franchise , yet it reprimands her for her liberty's cruel ends—the lover's death.^[14] It should not be forgotten that this "free woman" is also set up as a negative exemplum to Chartier's audience:

Et vous, dames et damoiselles
En qui Honneur naist et asemble,
Ne soyés mie si crüelles,
Chascune ne toutes ensemble.
(lines 793–96)

And you, ladies and young women, in whom honor is born and resides, never be so cruel, not one of you, nor all of you together.

According to the Response , what risks being defamatory is the depiction of a woman's freedom as nefarious. It is this perverse figure of her independence that appears objectionable. This finding is highly ironic. As any reader of medieval love poetry knows, there could be no more banal portrayal. Before Chartier, there was a good two-century run of the merciless female type. Yet it is the one element distinguishing Chartier's variation on a hackneyed image that changes the picture. A female persona who is both liberated and a murderer brings to a head the problem of injurious representation. She epitomizes the cause of verbal injury.

I should mention that such a contested figure of la femme france may well carry another political charge. Chartier's figure also conjures up the female personification, La France . During this period of foreign occupation and deep civil unrest, her freedom was most certainly under attack. As Chartier portrayed her in the Quadrilogue invectif , she was the butt of considerable verbal abuse.^[15]

By singling out Chartier's negative characterization of a woman's franchise , the Response points to a transfer mechanism whereby the exasperation of men is displaced onto women. In the poetic economy of the Belle Dame , such a mechanism dictates the fate of the lover and his final denunciation of the woman. Yet as the Response des dames maintains, it also applies to the condition of the poet: "don't assign your madness to women" (ne charge point ta frenesie aux femmes, line 15). Chartier's "madness" is the corollary of the lover's characteristic malaise. To put it another way, this "male malady" is an animus driving the text of the Belle Dame as much as it drives the lover's hostile speech acts toward the free-standing woman. It functions as the motor of the poem. By identifying frenesie as

an animus of Chartier's work, the Response des dames takes the allegation of defamation one step further. Not only does it field the threat of verbal injury, but it attempts to explain its processes. It offers a reason why a language defamatory toward women occurs.

Here we can discern the fundamental difference separating the Response des dames from the courtiers' complaint against the Belle Dame sans merci . Whereas the Response tackles the issue of verbal injury legalistically, the complaint is concerned only with the ways Chartier's persona threatens the courtiers' poetic models and social role. The terms of their objection quoted above make this clear. "The quest of humble servants" takes precedence over "the woman's happy name of mercy." The rituals of courtly life, as men perform them, outweigh the value of a woman's reputation. Or to invoke another expression of the galants , "the damage to and estrangement of the humble servants" caused by the Belle Dame is more serious than "the diminishing of the women's power" (dommage et esloingnement aux humbles servans et amandrissement de voustre pouoir, 362). For all the anguish experienced on behalf of women, the courtiers' challenge to Chartier's work comprises a self-absorbed lament. Caught in this narcissistic bind, it can never address the problem of injurious language. While its rhetoric may imply it, its argument never pursues it.

Emblematic of the Response 's focus on verbal injury is the scorpion image:

Tu es ainsy comme l'escorpion.
Tu oingz, tu poins, tu flattes, tu offens,
Tu honnoures, tu fais bien, tu le casses,
Tu t'acuses et puis tu t'en deffens,
Tu dis le bien, tu l'escrips, tu l'effaces.
(lines 24–28)

You are thus like the scorpion. You speak unctuously, you sting; you flatter, you attack; you honor, you do good, you destroy it; you accuse yourself and then you defend yourself; you say the right thing, you write it, you erase it.

This figure captures the menace of words; indeed, it is a canonical image used to describe slander.^[16] In keeping with medieval bestiary lore, the scorpion illustrates a type of poisonous harm: its sting could be fatal. With one deft metaphoric stroke, then, the Response des dames turns Chartier's persona of the murderous Belle Dame back on itself. It shows its baleful influence to register not on lovers and courtiers but on the public of women. At the same time, the Response 's scorpion image is seen to injure discreetly and deceptively. Unlike the animalistic images that assault the Bestiaire respondent, it attacks under cover. This aspect of the image gives

us a clue to the resistance the Response faces. It implies Chartier's denial of the very notion of verbal injury. Let us not forget, the women's text responds to the Excusacioun as well as to the Belle Dame , and it is Chartier's second text that elaborates strategies for outmaneuvering the Response 's subsequent charge of defamation. The scorpion's flailing motions, the swift turnabouts in position, suggest the evasiveness of the Excusacioun . One example will make the point. In the God of Love's interrogation of the besieged poet, Cupid asserts:

Tu fais et escriz et envoyes
Nouveaulx livres contre roes droiz.
Es tu foul, hors du sens ou yvre,
Ou veulx contre moy guerre prendre,
Qui as fait le maleureux livre,
Dont chascun te devroit reprendre,
Pour enseigner et pour aprendre
Les dames a geter au loing
Pitié la debonnaire et tendre,
De qui tout le monde a besoing?
(Excusacioun , lines 23–32)

You compose, write, and send off new books against my laws. Are you mad, out of your mind, or drunk? Or do you want to wage war against me? Who has composed this accursed book from which each person must gain from you how to teach and instruct ladies to banish that elegant and tender Pity, of which everyone is in need?

To which the writer of "this accursed book" replies:

Leur serviteur vueil demourer
Et en leur service mourray,
Et ne les puis trop honnourer
N'autrement ja ne le vourray;
Ains, tant qu'en vie demourray,
A garder l'onneur qui leur touche
Employeray ou je pourray
Corps, cuer, sens, langue, plume et bouche.
(lines 145–152)

I wish to remain their servant and die in their service [of women]. And I could not honor them any more, nor vow to it in any other way. So, for as long as I shall remain living, I shall use as I can, body, heart, senses, tongue, pen, and mouth to guard their honor from whatever concerns them.

By placing this critique in the mouth of the God of Love, Chartier shifts the burden of responsibility. Indeed, by representing the writer as apologetic

to Cupid alone, he makes the writer subject to a mythic authority. Chartier and his poem will stand corrected only before the supreme literary arbiter of the law. With such a scene, Chartier tries to neutralize the courtiers' complaint and the Response des dames . Yet in the terms of the Response 's scorpion image, the shifts between admitting the damaging quality of the Belle Dame and protesting the poet's honorable service of women accentuate the injuriousness of Chartier's writing. They substantiate the injury. The fact that the Excusacioun accommodates both the flattery and the attack, the acknowledgement of guilt and the implicit disavowal of it, epitomizes its continuing harmfulness. Moreover, this vacillation applies to the relation between the Belle Dame and the Excusacioun as well. By entertaining the problem of harmful representation only to leave it in suspense, the second text aggravates the danger of the first. Read together, Chartier's poems exacerbate the injury.

A Literary Disclaimer

We come here to a key stage in our inquiry into the effects of the women's legal charge of defamation. In the confrontation between the Response and the Excusacioun , we can detect signs of the struggle over the criterion of verbal injury. These two texts signal changes in the conceptualization and social uses of defamation in French late-medieval culture. On the one hand, the Response 's extremist language signals the power invested in the legal principle of verbal injury. On the other, the Excusacioun 's evasiveness intimates the strategies being developed to block it. If the Response is legitimated by long-standing juridical and philosophical conceptions of defamation, it also faces tactics designed to deflect the allegation of injurious language, tactics that have everything to do with the status of literary discourse.

In order to clarify changes in the concept and use of defamation, compare the various medieval terms that I have introduced over the last three chapters. Justinian's formulation in the code inherited by the Middle Ages leaves considerable latitude as to the form defamation takes. It can involve spoken language (verba ), written material (scriptura ), even pictures (imagines ). The Ciceronian description, well known in late-medieval France, concentrates specifically on the song (carmen ). As we discussed in chapter 6, the abusive language (flagitium ) of the song is attributed to the particular talents of poets (ingenium poetarum ). Defamation thus enters into the province of the literary arts. Augustine's commentary on Cicero underscores this link between the defamatory and the literary even further. In the City of God passage read widely in the late Middle Ages, the defama-

tory work of the poets is characterized specifically in fictive terms (conficta a poetis ). What is potentially defamatory is poetic confabulation—fiction.

It is not at all clear that medieval commentators capitalized on these various distinctions. Yet the continuing repetition of distinctions made in high-medieval commentaries signals a new preoccupation with classical arguments over the accountability of poetry. The fact that they dwell on the defamatory cantilenus (song) and libellus (little book, pamphlet) points to their concern with the opposition between the autonomy of poetic/fictive forms and the regulatory mechanisms of the law.^[17] The claim for the inviolability of literary language is already visible in these terms.^[18] Equally discernible, however, is the opportunity for legal recourse against defamation committed by poets.

The two poles of this argument may well remind us of today's controversy over what constitutes "free speech."^[19] While such a notion is certainly foreign to the Middle Ages, there is a way in which the confrontation between Chartier's Excusacioun and the Response raises the question of what is "free" language and what is actionable, injurious language. Both debates, the contemporary and the medieval, revolve around the principle of words as harmful. And in the process, they both come up against that most hallowed version of free speech: literature. The problem lies in establishing whether the particular character of the literary or the fictive renders it inviolable and safe from any public action. In one version of the contemporary debate, the feminist legal theorist Catharine A. MacKinnon has argued for the need to elaborate anew the principle of verbal injury in relation to various sacrosanct categories of "free speech."^[20] To do so offers one way to establish legal grounds that would enable women to sue the "free speech" of others that proves offensive to them. The fierce opposition mounted against MacKinnon's argument gives us an indication of just how entrenched the notion of an inviolable language is in contemporary jurisprudence. In the debate as the Querelle de la Belle Dame rehearses it, such a notion is only beginning to take shape. The Response runs up against an early version of the argument for making certain types of language free from legal action. It contends with a nascent defense of literary language as legally unactionable. In spite of their differences, when these two debates are placed side by side, they set into relief the enormous stakes involved in establishing the damage of words and proving legal liability.

As the Response lays claim to these stakes, it accentuates the problematic status of the literary. This is already evident in the scorpion image when the women remark Chartier's habit of speaking well, writing, and effacing: "tu dis le bien, tu l'escrips, tu l'effaces" (line 28). Their turn of phrase sums up the poet's self-serving vacillation. Yet there is something

further disclosed by the link between writing and effacement. In fact, if we look to one of Chartier's cameo portraits of the writing process, writing appears to constitute a form of effacement:

Et s'enfermë en chambre ou en retrait
Pour escripre plus a l'aise eta trait,
Et met une heure a faire un tout seul trait
De lettre close.
Un peu escript, puis songe et se repose,
Puis efface pour mettre une autre chose.
Le Débat des deux fortunés d'amours  (lines 322–27)

And he shuts himself up in a room or in isolation so as to write more easily and at leisure. And it takes him an hour to do a single stroke of a private letter. He writes a little, then dreams and relaxes. Then he erases so to put something else.

What is on one level an astute description of the rhythms of revision points on another to the way writing can efface what it represents. The visible and the invisible, the assertion of a point and the denial: writing accommodates both these possibilities in its own characteristic white space. In critiquing the Belle Dame and the Excusacioun together, the Response is alert to this prospect. It recognizes in the notion of writing that effaces a strategy for dodging responsibility for the injuriousness of its language. If writing is capable of erasing what it represents, how can one determine verbal injury? Or to put it in terms introduced by the Response , how can anyone pinpoint defamatory writing when it relays "a double language" (line 63)?

The Response 's criteria of effacement and doubleness become all the more telling when we look at the structure of Chartier's Excusacioun . His apology is set up as an "if" clause:

Se vous ne lisez et voyez
Tout le livret premierement. . . .
(lines 123–24)

If you do not first read or look at the whole book. . . .

S'en doit tout le monde amasser
Contre moy a tort et en vain. . . .
(lines 213–14)

If everyone should gather against me wrongfully and in vain. . . .

S'ilz en ont rien dit ou escript
Par quoy je puisse estre repris. . . .
(lines 222–23)

If they have said or written anything by which I could have been accused. . . .

The Excusacioun reads like a series of conditionals culminating in one particularly audacious one: "If I dared to say or imagine that any lady was merciless, I would be a false liar, and my word injurious" (Se j'osoye dire ou songier Qu'onques dame fust despiteuse, Je seroye faulx mensongier Et ma parole injurïeuse; lines 177–180). Such an "if clause" enables the narrator to protect himself by appearing to assume the blame. Admitting to the crime of slander within brackets that stay firmly closed is his way of exonerating himself of the charge. And the form that self-exoneration takes—the "if" condition—is the classic paradigm for literary discourse. From Aristotle straight through to Wittgenstein, the literary is distinguished by its framework of double meaning, one that aligns it strucrurally (although not functionally) with the lie and the dream.^[21] In Chartier's case, the Excusacioun attempts to defend the Belle Dame on the grounds not only that the figure of the cruel woman is mendacious, but also, implicitly, that as a literary object it is tenable. The heuristic parentheses of literature seek to render the Response 's accusation of defamation irrelevant, and they do so in the same terms as a dream.^[22] By opening up an oneiric space between truth and falsehood where his writing becomes double, Chartier's Excusacioun tries to vindicate the Belle Dame as a literary form that cannot, by definition, defame women.

This strategy recalls Pierre Col's argument in the Querelle de la Rose concerning the distinction between poet and persona.^[23] There too a space is opened up in which characters as objectionable as la Vieille are legitimized and at the same time disassociated from Jean de Meun. The hypothetical status of the persona defended by Col is another version of the "if" clause exploited by Chartier, and the rationale behind these two positions is similar: to liberate the writer from liability. While the Parisian humanists, like Chartier, understand language to carry with it the power to injure, they award poets a special dispensation from it. Such is poetic license.

Chartier, however, pushes this privilege further. He maintains:

Quant un amant est si estraint,
Comme en resverie mortelle,
Que force de mal le contraint
D'appeller sa dame crüelle,
Doit on penser qu'elle soit telle?
(lines 201–5)

When a lover is so anguished as in a fatal reverie, when the force of malaise constrains him to call his lady cruel, why should one believe she is so?

Here the emphasis has already shifted from the relation between the poet and his figures to the figures' believability. At first glance, such a standard of believability suggests the common criticism of reading à la lettre . Once again, it appears, women are deemed incapable of deciphering the figurative, let alone of detecting its presence. Chartier's respondents join the long line from Andreas Capellanus's women through Christine de Pizan who are typed as crude and naive readers. Yet by the early fifteenth century, "believability" referred less to the opposition between the letter and the figure, and hence to women readers' difficulty in navigating it, than to the idea of verisimilitude.^[24] It signaled that revived classical notion central to the humanists' apologies for poetry.^[25] Chartier's question, "why should one believe she is cruel?" lies somewhere on the cusp between theories of figurative writing and theories of the literary as a distinct type of writing.^[26]

This transition distinguishes Chartier's part in the Querelle de la Belle Dame . The fixation on figura , invariably linked to a clerical disapprobation of fables, was subsiding. Rising in its place were the various classical theories that charted a separate and autonomous terrain for the literary. Such an orientation is not surprising. We have only to recall the early-fifteenthcentury French vogue of Boccaccio's writings on "the fervent and exquisite invention of poetry," or the Petrarchan formula of velamen figmentorum (veil of fictions).^[27] As we have discovered, the Querelle de la Rose was already significantly indebted to all these new articulations of the power of poetry.^[28] Yet in the Querelle de la Belle Dame , these various articulations are exploited in such a way as to assert the distinct ontological status of Chartier's poems. Moreover, this assertion serves as the ultimate legal disclaimer. Informed by the impressive repertory of apologies for poetry, Chartier aims to exculpate his writing ontologically from all liability.

Liable for Libel

This point is not lost on the Response des dames . If the women's text engages first with Chartier on the score of verbal injury, it goes on to attack the ultimate defense that his poems are only literary compositions. In other words, it takes on directly the thorny problem of their ontological status:

Tu dis moult bien, que on ne doit pas croire,
Pour cuidier toy et ton livre excuser,
Et que l'effort d'amours t'a fait recroire
De bien parler et de bon sens user.
(lines 73–76)

You say well that in order to trust you and pardon your book, one shouldn't believe it, and that the force of love made you give up on speaking well and using your good sense.

The fundamental critique is this: how can Chartier query the believability of the cruel woman persona by bracketing it literarily and make his own defense believable? Put another way, what is the difference ontologically between the Excusacioun and the Belle Dame ? Why should his readers believe in one any more than the other? Having chided them for their interpretative naïveté, how can he expect them to give credence to his Excusacioun written in an identical mode? In effect, the Response catches Chartier at the game implicit in all literary discourse. To use the women's turn of phrase, the literary "doubleness" enabling him to admit the "falsity" of his female representations in one poem need not destabilize his writing per se. Literature's double standard authorizes him to denounce his writing as duplicitous by the same means that it equips him to defend it. The paradox is that it can change ontological footing, entertaining empirical truth claims together with literary ones. Yet here is where we need to be most conscious of our own conceptions of literary discourse, as well as of our aptitude to interpret the Querelle de la Belle Dame accordingly. Whereas most readers today take such a game for granted, it was by no means a given in the early fifteenth century. Indeed, the Response des dames would not credit such an understanding, blocking the logic that allows for the Excusacioun to be "true" and the Belle Dame "false." Their text refuses to accord ontological autonomy to Chartier's texts as literary objects—under certain circumstances. More precisely, it rejects the notion of literary autonomy as grounds for the writer's evasion of accountability. This is not to say that the idea of the autonomous literary work escapes the Response des dames ; such a position would reinforce the common, condescending identification of women readers as literalists.^[29] On the contrary, while the Response grants the particular ontology of the literary text, it repudiates it as a means of denying public, legal responsibility. According to the Response des dames , "literariness" is not a valid disclaimer, nor can it be invoked so as to have one text render null and void another. Chartier's writing is still accountable before its audiences. This is all the more so in light of the prestige of the written text and its wide public circulation.^[30]

That the Response rejects the ontological argument underscores the force of its defamation charge. It is a power we can best gauge in two ways. First of all, the Response des dames meets the challenge of the Excusacioun by criminalizing the charge of defamation. It changes radically the legal process by which language injurious to women can be held accountable.

Such an action gains another dimension when we contrast it to other actions taken at the Châtelet court in Paris during this period. The causes concerning paroles injurieuses abounded.^[31] They involved women and men, bourgeois and noble alike. Even corporate entities such as the University served as plaintiffs.^[32] No social group in the city was excluded from this trend. Yet no matter how notoriously litigious fifteenth-century French society is taken to be, it is remarkable to consider that an expletive spoken in public could be common and sufficient grounds for legal complaint.^[33] Expressions such as putain, maquerelle (slut, whore) or maquereau, ruffien (pimp, lush) could bring a defendant into court.^[34] While the legal theory of defamation interpreted by canonists hinges on a far graver verbal assault, on the false imputation of a crime, the surviving record leaves open the possibility for many forms of verbal abuse.^[35] So deep-seated was the understanding that abusive language is actionable that any number of citizens rose swiftly to the challenge of a slur. This phenomenon built stronger and stronger momentum, occasioning by the early sixteenth century a veritable explosion in litigation.^[36] Defamation was an exemplary late-medieval cause.

Women were no strangers to this spirited legal scene. As coplaintiffs and defendants, they were as engaged as any other group in pursuing their defamers and seeking public redress.^[37] And given the frequency with which the crime of defamation was accompanied by the threat of physical attack, their taking action was not uncommon. As Christine de Pizan and the three Belle Dame respondents noted, when injurious language is hurled at women, it frequently involves a violent follow-through. In the causes that come down to us, la femme diffamée also risks bodily abuse. Such instances by no means offer an equivalent to the charge of "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie." Nor indeed should we be looking for one. Whether a replica of the respondents' case is visible or not is irrelevant for our argument. What is significant is the surrounding circumstances that confirm the idea of citizens suing on the basis of defamation. That such an act involves a crime marks an important correlation between the Response des dames and the Parisian legal record. That it involves a crime of writing sued for by women signals the novelty of the Response , and the second powerful influence that it exercises: libel.

The Response to Alain Chartier introduces a case of defamation that we recognize today as peculiar to written and pictorial texts. And it does so in a manner that plays adroitly with the multiple, fluid meanings of the medieval term libelle . Put another way, the women's text spans a rich, semantic complex whereby libelle , that simple, all-purpose word for book, refers to writing as artifact, type of infraction, and formidable legal instrument. Exploiting this full range of meaning, it focalizes the legal

encounter between a text deemed defamatory and its aggrieved female public. Furthermore, it addresses its two chief aspects—the occurrence of defamation and the legal process for pursuing it. To elucidate the many different ways the Response realizes the term libelle , let me tease out here its various implications.^[38]

One common meaning in the late-medieval context appears in the juridical expression libelle diffamatoire (defamatory writing). A straightforward translation of the Roman term libellus famosus , it denotes those instances of defamation committed in written form. And as such, it stigmatizes them as illegal.^[39] This term hangs thick in the various Querelles we have considered thus far. Indeed, it was part of the juridical jargon and apparatus that stamp the writings of almost every Parisian intellectual at the time.^[40] A few examples are in order. In Jean LeFèvre's Livre de leesce , the narrator converted to the cause of women labels all clerical texts after Matheolus "libelles diffamatoires" (line 3522). In the controversy over Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose , Jean Gerson inveighs similarly against such works:

Aucun escripra libelles diffamatoires d'une personne, soit de petit estat ou non—soit neis mauvaise—, et soit par personnaige: les drois jugent ung tel estre a pugnir et infame. Et donques que doivent dire les lois et vous, dame Justice, non pas d'ung libelle, mais d'ung grant livre plain de toutes infamacions, non pas seulement contre homes, mais contre Dieu et tous sains et saintes qui ainment vertus?
(Hicks, 72, xxiii)

Anyone who writes defamatory books of a person, whether of mean estate or not, whether not at all bad, whether through another character: the laws judge such a person infamous and worthy of punishment. And thus, what should the laws, and you, lady Justice, say about not just a small book [libelle ], but a huge book full of all sorts of vituperations, directed not only against men, but against God and all saintly men and women who love virtue?

And in the statutes of the Cour Amoureuse , that stylized Parisian Court of Love devised by Parisian courtiers, the following article is included: "All that is said is, whatever accursed delinquent who will have composed personally defamatory books or have had them made by one or others will be under pain of having his arms stripped" (Tout ce que dit est, sur peine de effacier les armes de tel maleureux delinquant qui telz libelles diffamatoires aroit fait en sa personne ou fait faire par autres, .I. ou pluseurs).^[41] All three examples use the expression libelles diffamatoires as a way of pointing the finger at works judged abusive of women. Whether they situate those works in a clerical or courtly context, whether they denounce them

as a type of intellectual fantasm, in the case of LeFèvre, or as a debasement of chivalric ideals, in the Cour , or even as a threat to religious orthodoxy, in Gerson, the understanding of injurious writing remains much the same. Naming works libelles diffamatoires serves as a convenient derogatory label. It identifies them as publicly unacceptable and actionable within a classical and medieval rhetoric of liability. And because Gerson sets up an allegory of a court of justice, the specifically legal dimensions of the term are accentuated.

So far the Response des dames appears to abide by a common understanding of libelle . It is structurally consistent with LeFèvre's and Gerson's use, for it too singles out the existence of such damaging, misogynistic writing to condemn it. Functionally, however, in a text voiced by three women there is a profound difference distinguishing the Response 's naming of libelles diffamatoires . The Response des dames breaks out of the vicious circle of idolatry that fetishizes a female reputation the better to control it. It suggests other modus operandi that bespeak an alliance between women and the law. It moves beyond stigmatizing the defamatory writing ritualistically in a manner that has no bearing on the parties involved. For "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie" to identify such libelles is to represent a legal inquiry initiated by the women personally affected.

Here is where a second, major inference of the medieval term libelle enters in. It is important to remember that the Latin word for book was adapted during the earliest phases of Western jurisprudence to designate the writ publicizing an allegation.^[42] It is the brief bearing a charge that would ultimately serve as an indictment. By definition a public document, the libelle brought an infraction out into the open and through the intervention of a magistrate gave it technical weight. Such is the predominant sense of the word as it emerges in the juridical lexicon of Old French. In the thirteenth-century Coutumes de Beauvaisis , Philippe de Beaumanoir offers this account:

Et pour ce, de ce qui plus souvent est dit en la court laie et dont plus grans mestiers est, nous traiterons en cest chapitre en tel maniere que li lai le puissent entendre. C'est assavoir des demandes qui sont fetes et que l'en puet et doit fere en court laie, lesqueus demandes li clerc apelent libelles ; et autant vaut demande comme libelle.^[43]

And for this reason, we will discuss in this chapter, in such a way that laymen can understand it, what is most often said in secular courts and what is most needful. This is concerning complaints which are made and which you can and should make in secular courts, which complaints are called by the clerks libelles ; and a complaint is the same as a brief.^[44]

Such a usage carries over into late-medieval parlance. So widely accepted is this connotation that it occurs even in satires of legal process. In the fifteenth-century Farce du maître Pathelin , the lawyer's blusterings make this clear: "How the tricky man toils long and hard over presenting his complaint!" (Comme le meschant homme forge de loing, pour fournir son libelle!" lines 1273–74).

The Response des dames thus delivers a libelle (legal brief) against the libelle diffamatoire (defamatory writing) of Chattier. It throws the book at the Belle Dame . Having challenged the writing formally, it realizes the next, crucial step whereby the women as plaintiffs accuse it legally—on their own account—of libel. The Response works to establish the liability of Chartier's poem and binds it to the legal requirement of ensuing investigation. Once a brief is lodged, the chances for evasions are severely restricted. Whether that brief is eventually upheld or dismissed, it has defined the crime of writing against which all further proceeding must be measured.

As a libelle , a little legal book, the women's Response also circulates oppositionally in the space of the city. Where Matheolus sends off the misogynistic Lamentations with an Ovidian envoi—"va t'en, petit livre, va t'en en la cité"—here the respondents are quick to launch their own libelle publicly. They promulgate it as a court order against another defamatory text in the civic domain that it appears to dominate.^[45] The Response thereby claims its own place in the public square, just as it does in the civic discourse so prized by fifteenth-century clerical writers and humanists.

Libel, legal brief, little book: I have followed all the resonances of the medieval term libelle , including echoes with the English word "libel." These are echoes, let me emphasize, that hold neither in Old nor modern French. Libelle is not used, strictly speaking, to juridically designate a crime. But I have entertained this word play because it enables us to reach the heart of the Response des dames ' challenge. The libelle represented by this work recapitulates a wide and revealing semantic range that covers the literal meaning of written material, the extended meaning of defamatory writing, as well as the stiff, technical sense of a legal writ. The singular action this narrative takes capitalizes on the malleable and charged concept of defamation in the late Middle Ages, and it does so in a manner suggesting its particular advantage for women. Articulated in their voice, libelle —in all its senses—is not invoked lightly or hypothetically. It is performed by female personae who are not proxies but are themselves the plaintiffs. It becomes their legal instrument.

The Response des dames's libelle is shot through with a lurid language. There are notable allusions to hanging and burning, references to recanting

and the public disgrace of infamy (lines 6–8, 45–48).^[46] The Response even types Chartier a heretic, much as Christine did with Matheolus and Jean de Meun (line 78).^[47] Such a rhetoric resonates with the turbulence reigning in early-fifteenth-century Paris. Given the charged political tensions, the threats concerning heresy proliferated, and in an ecclesiastical context these could result in the rituals of book burning and execution.^[48] The profound belief in verbal injury coupled with a fear of social chaos frequently sanctioned a violent end for the heretic and his works.^[49] Mimicking details of these rituals, the Response participates in the inflammatory atmosphere of the times.

By the same token, this extremist language is a defining element of polemical logic. As we discovered with the Querelle de la Rose , it is the gesture of challenge and disputation. No point is made neutrally, nor are its consequences underplayed. In the case of the Response , this language full of menace also points to the particular force of its polemic. It underscores the seriousness of its legal charge. Here again is the idiom of absolutist power, which enables women respondents to exert rhetorical influence they would not otherwise possess.

But it does not convey the spirit of the public redress the Response des dames seeks. For one thing, it does not presume to ban Chartier's writing. In delivering the brief, the respondents maintain: "For you write as you shall want to write" (Or escrips ce que escripre vouldras, line 80). At some level, they acknowledge the incorrigible continuity of poetic composition, its boundlessness. Insofar as the Response makes no claim to prohibit Chartier from writing, its libelle motion does not carry with it any program of enforcing textual conformity. After all, it challenges a text that, however politically precarious, remains the paragon of poetic orthodoxy. Its ambition is to explode such orthodoxy. Its chief concern lies in the harmful consequences of a dominant mode of representation. It seeks to adjudicate those consequences to the satisfaction of the aggrieved parties involved without eliminating the writing outright.

So it is that the Response accentuates the open-endedness of its litigation. Any libelle is caught in the rounds of charge and countercharge, and the Response is no exception. It anticipates a later stage, where Chartier would be confronted with the respondents' advocates (lines 101–4).^[50] In its conclusion it promises an ongoing exchange between the women plaintiffs and the poet. Such an exchange would entail not only negotiation but further writing. To issue a libelle against a crime of writing, let me repeat again, occasions more and more text, a prospect in perfect keeping with the Response 's purposes. In the attempt to reconcile injurious textual representation and offended parties, the prerogative to write is by no means destroyed. Nevertheless, the libelle for libel still stands. The peculiar, novel

power of the women's Response resides in its legal action that confronts a writer with his public.

A Matter of Fiction and Treason

That the Querelle continued after the Response des dames suggests the strong impact of its libelle . In the decade following the Belle Dame , five other works appeared that sought to undo the charge of defamatory libel levied against Chartier.^[51] At the center of these works is an interrogation of the Belle Dame persona. She is put on trial—over and over again. Such a scene enables these works to answer the Response's libelle : it makes the literary character and not the writer accountable. Yet it also discloses the ongoing struggle with the defining issues of the Querelle : the writer's liability for verbal injury and the ontological standing of his book. As we shall see in the two following examples, the poets in Chartier's circle experimented obsessively with deflecting the charge of defamation. This experimentation hints at the tensions remaining over the writer's responsibility and the sovereignty of his literary text. It discloses frustration over the fact that these questions are unresolved or unresolvable. To what degree this exasperation is vented on the women respondents should become clear.

In the trial of the Belle Dame mounted by the poem La Cruelle Femme d'amour , the issue of Chartier's liability is met head-on. When the allegorical figure Truth is called as a witness to vouch for the woman, she balks, stating:

Celle qui se mist en mon nom
Pour ceste cause soustenir
Ne fu aultre que Fiction:
Poeterie la fist venir
Et ma semblable devenir;
Et se transmua Faulseté
Pour sa trahison parfurnir
En la semblance Leauté.
(lines 329–36)

The one who took my name to support this cause was none other than Fiction. Poetry made her come and become like me. And Falsehood changed herself into a semblance of Loyalty to accomplish her treason.

The Cruelle Femme supplies the missing component that hovers over the entire Querelle : Fiction. On first glance, Fiction appears to be the standin for Truth, and a fraudulent one at that. The chief alliance thus unites Fiction, Falsehood, and the Belle Dame . Yet given the Cruelle Femme 's intricate allegory, which sets the courtroom scene within several dream

frames, we must interpret this configuration carefully. Although the humanist understanding of poetry is invoked pejoratively here—that is, to distinguish a false portrait of a woman from a true one—it serves to valorize Chartier's text. Fiction functions here in her tantalizing duality: as falsehood and as distinct discursive mode. She recoups the standard clerical disapproval of deceptive fiction together with the emancipatory concept of fiction as the highest exaltation of truth. Indeed, she plays one off against the other. Consequently, the Cruelle Femme can accommodate the charge of defamatory representation, appearing to appease the women respondents in the very act of marking out a separate sphere for the fictive. By admitting that Chartier's Belle Dame is cruel and not even a lady, La Cruelle Femme en amour appears to credit the Response 's charge. It entertains the poet's liability. Yet by making that admission through Fiction, transformed now into a positive, potent term, it checks that liability from ever being established legally. What we most commonly think of as an early modern concept of fictionality is introduced here as a means of making the Belle Dame legally inviolable. The Cruelle Femme defends Chartier's poem on ontological grounds.

We have here the most explicit and technical reply to the claims of verbal injury in the Response des dames . The Cruelle Femme explicitly names a principle already apparent in the Querelle de la Rose and prominent in Chartier's Excusacioun . The double epithet it thus introduces—Poetry/Fiction—places the notion of a literary ontology squarely in the technical vocabulary of a philosophical debate that is more or less foreign to Chartier's own work.^[52] Furthermore, the pronounced legal frame brings out the often-overlooked fact that Fiction also represents a juristic formula.^[53]Fictio figura veritatis was at the center of several canon legal debates during the late Middle Ages.^[54] As a concept in the Cruelle Femme , then, Fiction commands particular influence, benefiting from a specifically legal meaning as well as from a poetico-philosophical one.

Reinforced doubly, the ontological vindication of fiction would appear to win the day. In a shrewd move, one legal premise of fictio figura veritatis blocks another—the Response 's claim of laesio/iniuria . Yet if we note the subsequent development in the Cruelle Femme , this is far from the case.^[55] No matter how strongly the case for fiction's sovereignty has been propounded, there lingers the suspicion that it does not completely nullify the Response 's legal claims. In some fundamental way, the criterion of an autonomous literary object fails to dispense with the issue of accountability for damages. This failure has less to do with the irregular currency of the Poetry/Fiction theory in fifteenth-century France than it does with the uneasy fit between the theory and the legal doctrine of defamatory writing. Once again we discern the irreconcilability of literature and libel at this particular

historical moment. It prompts still more exaggerated defenses of Chartier.

In the wake of Fiction's mock denunciation of the Belle Dame persona, the Cruelle Femme represents her as convicted of the most heinous crime. The God of Love pronounces that she has committed lèse-majesté—an infraction for which she is to lose her own proper name (lines 747–52). To find the Belle Dame guilty of treason is to throw one last sop in the direction of the women respondents. Condemning the literary persona is meant ultimately to appease them. Yet this "condemnation" also signals the frustration of Chartier's defenders over the sheer intractability of the liability question. The more numerous the arguments for the fictive text's unaccountability, the more unavoidable a text's responsibility to its community appears. The more sophisticated those arguments, including even the "Fiction as Poetry" theorem, the more unyielding the question of verbal injury remains. Let us not forget that the crime of treason, "lèse-majesté," is itself formulated as a wounding (lèse ) perpetrated through words: "de sa bouche a arresté."^[56] The final recourse left to Chartier's defenders involves recasting the charge of verbal injury and foisting it back onto those who raised it.

Here is where we can detect that the ultimate object of the Cruelle Femme 's accusation of treason is "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie." According to this poem, the Response des dames dared to attack the work of a royal poet. As many critics have suggested, late-medieval intellectuals were deeply preoccupied with treason and the damage done to sovereignty—so preoccupied, in fact, that the problem was easily transferable.^[57] Any number of social phenomena were associated with treason. It is in this sense that Jean de Montreuil attempts first to interpret Christine de Pizan's critique of the Rose as an attack on the integrity of the master.^[58] And it is in this sense too, that Chartier's defenders use the charge of treason to accuse the respondents implicitly of another form of injuriousness. By introducing the crime of lèse-majesté, they turn the tables on the Response des dames and thereby try to exit the intractable Querelle over liability with the law on their side.

Such a gesture should be familiar by now. Targeting "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie" in this manner reconfirms the stereotype of women as defamers. To characterize them as treasonous is another way of defining their own language as inherently damaging and dangerous. Indeed, it casts their language as nothing less than demonic.^[59] As Le Jugement du povre triste amant banny , another poem in Chartier's defense, appraises it, women's defamation holds dire consequences for the entire body politic: "For when they want to attempt to be hurtful, everyone is devastated" (Car quant vouldroient tascher a nuyre, / Tout le monde seroit gasté; lines 831–32).

This ploy of labeling the women treasonous and by implication defamatory was intended to shift the focus of the Querelle away from the outstanding problem of the poet's legal liability for his writing. Rhetorically, it may well have worked. The controversy seems to have trailed off at this stage. Yet that it comes to the point of invoking the gravest crime against women is revealing, for it suggests the disturbing power the Response des dames as libelle could have exercised.

What, then, are the consequences of the Response des dames ? The inconclusiveness of the Querelle around Alain Chartier's writing should not fool us into concluding that there were none or that the consequences were ineffectual. However short-lived the incident, it represents an important step toward legal recourse. In fact, it appropriates legal recourse as a mechanism with which to combat the symbolic domination of women through a masterly poetic discourse. It manipulates the prevailing laws of defamation in such a way as to stigmatize the individual writer involved and to put his writing—symbolically—in the dock. Given how influential the legal regulation and rhetoric of defamation was in fifteenth-century France, the Response 's deft play with the law proves all the more provocative. It is, let me underline, first and foremost a form of play. It does not substantiate a case of three women plaintiffs suing for damages. But exploiting ludically the legal apparatus concerning defamation does elicit other strategies for challenging publicly the dominant representation of women. This, as the Response suggests in jest, is in the unlikely event that their words will come to blows: "For it will never happen that woman will fight you" (Car point n'affiert que femme t'en combatte; line 88).

To play with the power of the law was by no means the principal strategy available to the woman's response. As we have seen in the previous chapter with Christine de Pizan, there was always the possibility of assuming the symbolic register of the masterly poetic discourse on women and thereby disputing the problem of its domination on its own grounds. The woman's response could generate its own brand of symbolic structures, sometimes in notably learned form. In the terms of the Querelle de la Belle Dame , it can co-opt the fictive for its own purposes. This is something that Christine de Pizan also demonstrates ably when she claims: "I shall say, through fiction, the fact of this transformation, how it was I became a man from a woman."^[60] But what distinguishes this Response des dames is its complementary choice of exploring a legal option. In the wake of the experiments legitimated by the Querelle de la Rose , the Response confronts fiction with the law. To mimic filing a libelle for defamation provides another formidable means of disputing the symbolic domination of

women. For it charts a space between the absolute, unqualified freedom of discourse and arbitrary censorship, between bearing no responsibility whatsoever to the public and being utterly beholden to the prevailing authority. In this sense, it pioneers a middle ground made possible through litigation, a ground where the underrepresented can render public the time-honored recurrence of verbal injury to women and seek compensation. In the most far-reaching sense, such compensation would not comprise an empirical computation of damages. Rather, it promises the practice of changing the masterly discourse on women. It involves forging another discourse, shaping other images of women that would not prove so confining. To make over Chartier's own expression, it would launch a freer figuration of women. I risk this formulation on the basis of an image in the Response des dames :

Tu trouveras et le verras au fort
Que leaulté, doulceur, bonté, franchise,
Portent la clef du chastel ferme et fort
Ou honneur a nostre pitié soubzmise.
(lines 53–56)

You will find and you will see well that loyalty, gentleness, goodness, freedom, carry the key to the strong and stout castle where honor yields to our mercy.

Always in the terms of the prevailing symbolic language, the Response forecasts a moment when franchise (freedom) would typify women. And this would provide "the key to the castle"; that is, according to the trope of woman as castle, it would legitimize a different code of representing women, unlocking them from the decorous yet tyrannical one that holds them. Such a key has no single owner. This passage can be read as referring to Chartier and the existing cadre of court poets or to women as purveyors of discourse. Whichever the case, the discursive stronghold can be broken through, replaced by a discursive model that figures women more freely. Such a figurative prospect is still framed here by other symbolic structures that are less than favorable to women: the catalogue of feminine virtues, the code of honor, and the posture of the idol. But that is why it is projected in the future tense; that is also why it is couched in an enigma—la clef —a common password for outmaneuvering hostile readers.^[61] If a freer figuration of women is presented so enigmatically, it is because it is far from being realized. If it is alluded to at all, it is because in this highly divisive, highly sophisticated milieu of fifteenth-century Paris, it is nonetheless conceivable.

14. Héloïse instructing courtiers in Capellanus's lessons on love.
London, British Museum, Royal 16.F.11, fol. 137.
By permission of the British Library.

Coda—
Clotilde de Surville and the Latter-Day History of the Woman's Response

Across a spectrum of late-medieval French culture, the figure of the woman respondent stands out. Side by side with the better-known master figure, she takes her part in the ritual of disputation. Her role displaces that of the disciple. Or rather she makes over that role insofar as she mounts a sustained challenge to the discourses on women belonging to clerical magistri and master-poets. Woman's disputing centers on the problem of injurious language, how it is that conventional models of representation can be damaging to their various audiences. This critique turns into a public call for accountability, and such a move places the woman respondent increasingly in the fractious context of Querelles . Misogynistic invective is matched by accusation, defamation by polemic. If the symbolic dominance of language injurious to women is to be broken, it requires the counterbalancing rhetoric of correction and judgment. The woman's response is rarely presented as an individualistic act in the framework of disputation; rather, it is proposed in the name of women in general. With the public controversies of the later Middle Ages, the response is made on behalf of the community at large. Its dispute with the masters over verbal injury becomes an ethical and political concern. In this it prepares the ground for the woman respondent's own mastery. While the scholastic monopoly of intellectual life still pertained in late-medieval vernacular culture, there was nonetheless a prospect of representing woman as a protomaster. Humanists continued to represent the scholarly life as a cult of Minerva, but the woman respondent also became a Minerva figure, invested with the prerogatives of learning, if not with the official title.^[1] By the mid-fifteenth century, the respondent's learning may even register authoritatively. Consider this miniature illustrating a version of Capellanus's De amore attributed, this time, to Héloïse (Figure 14).^[2] A magisterial woman such as Héloïse holds the position of scholar/counselor. Her teaching can set a standard, as this image depicts it, not only for a community of women but also for courtiers and by extension for the public as a whole.

My study of the dialectic between masterful writing and woman's response has tried to establish the importance of the respondent's profile. But I should better say: it has tried to re establish its importance. There is, in fact, nothing new about this figure. She already has a modern history. However unfamiliar she may first have appeared to us, she was known throughout the nineteenth century in France, where she was the subject of considerable scrutiny and debate. I am referring to the case of the fifteenth-century figure Clotilde de Surville. In the course of my research, I came across Clotilde and recognized in her another instance of what I have chosen to call a medieval woman respondent. Indeed, as I shall show, her case brings to the fore the category of respondent itself. It illustrates the various different ways the woman respondent has been viewed in the past. Her case thus reminds us that whether we recognize it or not, any medieval object we examine already carries with it a legacy of interpretation. Furthermore, the animated debate that she provoked raises the question of the relation between critic and object. It discloses one telling example of the presuppositions at play in establishing or rejecting the category of respondent. The nineteenth-century affair of Clotilde dramatizes the problem of how critics approach the medieval woman respondent. I wish to tell her latter-day story for several reasons. First of all, it fills in a little-known backdrop for my study, and it reveals why it has proven so difficult to discern the respondent figure. It goes a long way in explaining her absence from our interpretative map of the later Middle Ages. But Clotilde's story is revealing in larger terms as well. Telling it will help, in the end, to clarify the terms of our own critical engagement with the medieval woman's response.

Correcting the Master

In 1803, the works of Marguerite-Eléonore Clotilde de Vallon de Surville were published in Paris.^[3] These included epic poetry, epistolary verse in the manner of Ovid's Heroïdes, debate pieces, chansons d'amour , and various ballades and rondeaux . Attributed to this fifteenth-century woman was a poetic range that could put her in the company of any contemporaneous poet. Clotilde's biography was just as eye-catching as her writing. She was introduced as a provincial prodigy—a woman who imitated the verses of Petrarch and trouvères with the same ease.^[4] Her talent was developed through an extensive literary education: Clotilde resembled a humanistic bibliophile. This training brought her into contact with the Parisian court. Yet her creative efforts were equally dedicated to a group of young women gathered around her. Clotilde's biography accentuates the image of a woman writer schooling her own circle.

The lyric poetry attributed to Clotilde includes several rondeaux directed to "Maistre Alain Chartier." Addressing a leading poet of the day, they mark her public entry onto the literary scene: they are challenges. They correspond to the longstanding pattern of women figures debating with master-poets. Like many of the respondents we have considered, Clotilde takes on her interlocutor to demonstrate her poetic prowess, but more significantly, to question the terms of his.^[5] That questioning revolves first around the character of Chartier's language. Her rondeau , "Le feu d'enfer," makes this ambition clear:

Le feu d'enfer, sans notoire hablerie,
Contez bien long comme lui[ct], maistre Alain,
Sanz esclayrer: point n'est sorcellerie;
Dante cogneust, quaz'en ung tour de main,
Tous les secrets d'icelle diablerie.

Sur ce grand faict, plus on ne contrarie
Ne vous ne luy, se treuvoit le proschain,
Comme en ses vers, dans vostre parlerie,
Du feu.

Au demourant, bien est la resverie
En cour; beau livre onc ne fist tant de train:
Quand va vous veoir Apollo, je parie
Vous bayzera; de quoy moult serez vain,
Mais quant l'oyra, grand peur ay que s'escrie:
Au feu.
(1825 edition, 70)^[6]

You describe the fire of hell at length, master Alain, with no notable skill, as he did, without clarifying anything. This is no sorcery. Dante knew well all the secrets of this devilry with sleight of hand. On this point, one bothers neither you nor him anymore, if the next one were to find, in his verse, as in your way of talking, fire. In the meanwhile, there is great dreaming at court. A good book never caused such a fuss. When Apollo comes to see you, I bet that he'll kiss you; but when he hears it, I greatly fear that he'll cry out: into the fire!

In its simplest terms, Clotilde's piece plays with the master's writing. Not only does it mimic Alain's rondeau of the same name, but it echoes Dante's Inferno as well.^[7] It sets one authoritative poet against the other. In disputing the trope of being on fire, her rondeau juxtaposes Alain's exclusively erotic significance with Dante's eschatological one. This play thus signals a learned critique of master Alain, exposing his use of the trope as limited, even hackneyed, in comparison with the Italian's. Clotilde's

rondeau delivers this critique in a petulant tone. It is teasing, if not taunting. Implicitly it charges Alain and his famous rhetoric with incompetence. Moreover, because that rhetoric is evoked to celebrate his name, Clotilde's critique targets the poet's reputation. To make this point provocatively, the rondeau introduces a third sense of fire. Alain's writing is consigned to nothing less than the censorious flames of hell. The scene would be familiar to anyone acquainted with the two Querelles of the Rose and of the Belle Dame . It evokes a mock judgment and public condemnation of a book; it mimics an act of censorship not untypical in fifteenth-century Paris. While Clotilde's rondeau transposes this scene mythically, locating it in Apollo's court, its defining turn of phrase, "au feu," yields a forceful twofold critique of Alain. The word play on fire corrects his rhetoric and his public reputation as well. Clotilde's own composition is intended as the beneficiary.

The woman's debate with Alain extends further, to the issue of a poet's status. Such is the aim of Clotilde's rondeau , "l'air de la cour":

L'air de la cour, vous le diray-je? enteste,
Chief maistre Alain; c'est ung dogme receu
Despuys le jour que vous cuydez poëste,
En cheveulx gris, et qu'on s'est apperceu
Que d'Hélicon projectiez la conqueste.

Ainz comme offriez vos oeuvres pour requeste
Au blond Phoebus, devinez veoir ung peu
Ce qu'y treuva, quand en eust faict l'enqueste?
De l'air.

S'en esbayoit; à bien rire estoit preste
Tout sa cour; quand moult fort entendeu
Phesycien, lors présent à la feste
Dict: N'en gabez, ung jour de lune indeu,
Par fascheux cas, il s'endormist nud-teste
A l'air.
(1825 edition, 54)

An air of courtliness—will I say to you? Oh my dear willful master Alain, that's a received dogma around since the day you thought yourself a white-haired poet, and since it became clear that you aimed to conquer Helicon. Having offered your works as a petition to blond Phoebus, did you try to see a bit of what one found there, when the inquiry was done? Something of that air? He was dumbfounded. All the court was on the verge of laughter. When the doctor, who was there at the festivities, understood perfectly and said:

don't fool yourself. One night, by bad luck, he fell asleep bare-headed in the open air.

Clotilde's poem chides Alain over the concept of courtliness. It challenges the slavish adoption of convention that Alain sees as authorizing his talent and Clotilde recognizes—on the contrary—as having nothing to do with creativity. The woman writer outside the Parisian court disputes the insider's criteria. And the implicit term of her dispute is a humanistic idea of the poet. In effect, the rondeau contrasts the age-old courtly model of poetry with a "new," increasingly prestigious model. It challenges Alain's style as retro. He is represented as behind the times—a somewhat pathetic figure who merits gentle mockery. His outmodishness is all the more striking in Apollo's court, a humanistic framework of poetic composition. By playing with the referent for court and placing Alain before the classical god of poetry, Clotilde's rondeau sharpens her critique. Her writing deploys an alternative, humanistic poetic model unknown to Chartier. It thus establishes its own claims to a new poetic courtliness in the act of discrediting the courtly doctrine of the master.

This attack on the qualifications of the master-poet is generalized in a rondeau composed about Chartier. Instead of a direct address to the poet, it opens out to the public at large. It implicates them in the ongoing critique. In the piece "Le monde est sot qu'admire ung sot ouvrage," Clotilde's rhetoric borders on the polemical.^[8] By charging the master-poet with bad writing, it sets up the opposition between sottise and rationality, between a writer's vainglory and his/her courage. "They only have one life," Clotilde's persona says of good writing, "but the works produced by reason survive their own age" (Ils n'ont qu'ung temps; mais les oeuvres produicts par la rayson survivent à leur aage; lines 10–11). The claim is that Chartier's writing enjoys popularity because of court support. What Clotilde finds missing is a rational ground for this view. On this score she privileges her own poetry and sees it as ultimately surpassing his.

Still, Clotilde's writing does not relinquish the chance of beating the court poet at his own game, as the piece "Epistre à Marguerite d'Écosse" makes clear.^[9] This poem does not mount the same sort of polemic as the other poems we have considered. But by approaching Chartier's influential patron, it continues to target Chartier's work. The strategy this time involves reading him in relation to a gamut of other medieval poets: Jean de Meun, Charles d'Orléans, François Villon, even Christine de Pizan. As Clotilde represents it, Alain's poetic reputation looks safe if his work is set against an empty backdrop. But once the works of rival poets are filled in, his masterful status is by no means clear cut.

However pointed Clotilde's critique of Alain is, its social influence remains unclear. Can it stick? Toward the end of the letter, her persona acknowledges the difficulty:

Mais que t'en prend, Clotilde, à censurer
Ung qui desjà s'ose aux roys mesurer?...
Car bien appriz que n'est oncques d'usage,
Par bons adviz et touschantes rayzons,
De corriger ceux-là qu'applaudissons.
(1825 edition, 120–21)

But what moves you, Clotilde, to censor one who already dares to compare himself to kings? . . . For you well know that it is hardly customary according to good advice and touching reasons to correct those whom we applaud.

The trouble lies in pinning down an established poet like Chartier and in holding his writing accountable. No matter how justified her dispute with Chartier, its likely effect is minimal. Given Chartier's preeminent reputation and her own precarious one, her correction of his poetry occupies a tricky position. Censure works for the most part against the underrepresented, securing the dominance of those already in control. Here the Clotilde figure is trying to work it back the other way. Yet insofar as the problem is inscribed in Clotilde's rondeaux and the "Epistre à Marguerite d'Écosse," the move is not impossible. The letter keeps attention focused on the challenge of putting poetic representation to the test. By alluding to a censure that would condemn the reigning dogma, it raises the question of how poetic or figurative norms can be contested effectively from without.

These three texts comprise a small part of Clotilde's attributed oeuvre. But examining the rondeaux and epistle together brings out uncanny correspondences with the woman's response we have studied. Chief among these is the impetus to break with a mode of symbolic domination prevailing in high-medieval letters. Clotilde's poems resemble the work of the Bestiaire respondent in their deft dismantling of the master's figures. Both respondents analyze figurative language in order to expose its limitations. By making such analysis a public issue, Clotilde's poems also recall Christine de Pizan's polemic with Jean de Meun. For both respondents, disputing the master's writing is an affair of public concern. Yet Clotilde's astringent challenge to the living poet, Alain Chartier, approximates even more closely the text of "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie." There is a haunting parallel between the two bouts of sparring with this major fifteenth-century poet.

In their general shape, then, Clotilde's rondeaux mirror the woman's response as we found it in late-medieval French culture. They do not match the substance of the Bestiaire 's or Christine's critique. What is missing is the particular focus on the figuration of women in masterly writing. Absent too is the argument over the injurious quality of such figuration. Yet while they do not share the particular detail of the woman's disputation with the master-poets, they do display the same profile. They

all exploit the disputational structure as a way to render masterly writing answerable to its public.

Correcting the Woman's Response

For Clotilde's earliest readers in the nineteenth century, it was this disputational profile that touched off extreme reactions. To begin with, the instance of a woman poet debating with Alain Chartier was received enthusiastically. As the eminent critic Sainte-Beuve reported it: "The first success of Clotilde was enormous, the discussions spirited; there still remains a great attraction and curiosity for poetic spirits."^[10] The Romantic poet Lamartine was characteristically ecstatic:

Yesterday I came across a volume entitled The Poetry of Clotilde de Surville: these are the Gallic poems of a woman up until now unknown, whose manuscripts have just been brought to light. I won't talk to you about all this coolly, with a level head, because I was transported. . . . [H]ow is it that in a time of the deepest ignorance, a woman who never left her Gothic castle could have written such things that, in my opinion, are worthy of Tibullus, of any poet, whosoever he is?^[11]

Lamartine's zeal was shared by the general public. Over the first half of the nineteenth century its steady interest occasioned several editions of Clotilde's work.^[12]

At the same time, the profile of such a woman poet aroused concern. The fact that Clotilde sparred with Alain Chartier and yet remained unknown gave rise to suspicions. She did not fit easily into any recognizable record of late-medieval French culture. Further, the circumstances of Clotilde's modern emergence were mysterious. Clotilde's late-eighteenth-century descendent, the Marquis de Surville, claimed to have retrieved her poetry from the family archives. This labor was threatened by the Reign of Terror. The Marquis was forced to relay his version of Clotilde's poetry clandestinely to a certain Charles Vanderbourg, a German bookseller, who became her first official publisher. Such cloak-and-dagger aspects of Clotilde's publication posed the question of her veracity. This was a notorious era for literary forgeries: the scandals of Macpherson's Ossian and Chatterton's late-medieval monk, among others, were still piquing the public's curiosity.^[13] In fact, Vanderbourg was pressed to acknowledge these concerns in later editions of Clotilde's poetry: "If certain well-informed journalists have raised doubts as to the veritable authors of these poems, all men of letters are in unanimous agreement to recognize her authorship."^[14] Lines were drawn between the literati inclined to take her seriously and those new classes of professional skeptic—journalists and academic critics—who were not. Where was the

material proof of her sizable corpus? Why were there no obvious medieval references to her? Questions of this sort culminated in an accusation of fraud. The conflict between advocates and opponents of Clotilde was best exemplified by the writer Charles Nodier, who managed to take both sides. As an advocate, he contributed significantly to the fracas by republishing the most contested element of Clotilde's corpus, a set of critical notices on medieval women poets.^[15] "Clotilde's reputation reigns above all in the hearts of women. It is to them that we offer some of her poetry. It is up to them to defend the glory of her sex against the disdainful science of men."^[16] Nodier lent Clotilde his imprimatur. As an opponent, however, in his guise as professional critic, Nodier adopted a "scientific" position. Several years after publishing the notices on women poets, he exposed Clotilde's writing as imposture: "The verdict is now in on the veritable author of these interesting works. I don't believe that one can doubt that it was the Marquis de Surville himself."^[17] Nodier's reversal was symptomatic of the two principal critical attitudes that were coalescing by the mid-nineteenth century. There were literati who appreciated the genius of a woman poet and polemicist from the distant past and there were others who for the professional reasons of criticism and scholarship could not credit it. As these attitudes hardened over the course of the next generations, cases for and against Clotilde's writing were put forward. Indeed, so heated was the debate that by the 1870s it was still a matter of public concern.

Clotilde's work was challenged first on linguistic grounds. Was her language in fact the idiom of fifteenth-century Burgundy? The syntax, the vocabulary, the rhetorical coloring: all these elements seemed to suggest a later form of French. Further, the versification did not accord with what was known of fifteenth-century court poetry. Nor did the genres correspond; they matched those of eighteenth-century fashions as well as those in any medieval period. In short, the various codes shaping Clotilde's language were all suspect.

The force of this critique was to identify her language as modernized. Under the veneer of an antique language, what Sainte-Beuve described as "the air of the good old days," a forger was at work (492). By studying the extant medieval relics, say the writings of Jean de Meun or Alain Chattier, such a forger could have cobbled together poems that simulated them linguistically. With a public both fascinated with and ignorant of the medieval past, this artificial age-old language could pass for legitimate. For a scientific critic such as Sainte-Beuve, however, there was always a tell-tale trace that gave the modern forger away. A neologism or a Latinate word reintroduced into French in the sixteenth century could signal the modern research effort that informed Clotilde's language. As the study of Old and Middle French became more sophisticated, the list of such traces grew exponentially.

This objection about Clotilde's faked medieval tongue did not go unnoticed. There were advocates of Clotilde who openly acknowledged the

extent to which it had been reworked. As one critic remarked: "Four authors have declared having undertaken revisions of the original work of Marguerite-Clotilde de Surville."^[18] The problem resided in the character of this revision process. Or to put it in still more probing terms, it resided in the nature of editorial intervention. For those inclined to give credence to the medieval provenance of Clotilde's writing, such intervention was inescapable. It would be foolhardy to claim that texts from an age before printing could arrive in modern hands directly, without any mediation. Yet such a fact need not pose a threat to its authenticity. The act of copying and modifying a medieval "original" does not impugn in and of itself that original's existence. It merely updates it. It is the explicit mark of its reception and interpretation by a later period. In the case of Clotilde, this meant a complex layering effect involving the eighteenth-century editing of the Marquis de Surville and the seventeenth-century editing of yet another descendant, Jeanne de Vallon, reaching all the way back to Clotilde's own time. As another critic stressed, this fifteenth-century woman poet was herself represented as correcting and emending the writing of others. In her humanistic role, Clotilde was seen to revise Héloïse in an effort to bring Héloïse's language into line with the linguistic and stylistic mores of the later Middle Ages.^[19] Clotilde's writing thus underwent the same sort of modification she insisted on imposing on others.

This debate over medieval language hints at the very crux that continues to underwrite today's editions of medieval texts. Where does the medieval "original" end and the modern editing begin? In Clotilde's case, this question was all the more vexing since the editions of her work appeared at the time when the philological sciences were beginning to claim that they could establish texts objectively and definitively. Given the knowledge of medieval languages during the nineteenth century, the claim was audacious. But as research into medieval languages progressed, it gained greater authority, so that by the end of the century it looked irrefutable. By that time, critics could self-righteously scoff at Vanderbourg's Clotilde, for they did indeed know a great deal more about the structure and style of fifteenth-century French. What they would not acknowledge, however, was the degree to which their own critical work still resembled Vanderbourg's. Their belief in a perfectly unmediated rendering of a fifteenthcentury text was at the same time a denial of their own editorial practices.^[20] If Clotilde's language was exposed as an eighteenth-century fake, could later editions of any medieval text not be called nineteenth-century versions thereof?

Together with the objections concerning language came the related one concerning thematic anachronism. In the same way that philologists picked out linguistic tics, others found elements that did not fit with the prevailing understanding of late-medieval literature. While the overall subject matter looked plausible, the details often did not. There were references

to planets unknown in the fifteenth century, to classical authors still untranslated into the vernacular, and to events yet to transpire.^[21] Critics were quick to note a network of allusion that linked Clotilde's writing to a literary culture of the Enlightenment. Such allusions betrayed the forger's own affiliations, so the argument went, affiliations so strong that they slid imperceptibly into the texture of the writing. Supporters of Clotilde had no real answer to these charges. The list of thematic discrepancies stood. Yet if there was no way to account for these discrepancies, there was still the problem of the critics' own familiarity with fifteenth-century letters. Did they know the period of Clotilde and Chartier through and through? The inconsistencies they attributed to Clotilde could also, conceivably, reflect gaps in their own erudition.

When we take these issues of thematics together with questions of language, we find that what was most disconcerting about Clotilde's writing was its apparent lack of context. To her critics, it was as if she appeared ex nihilo , one of a kind. Given the absence of any verifiable mention of her work during the fifteenth century and thereafter, Clotilde was a freefloating figure, shorn of any historical circumstance. In the evolutionary terms typifying critical parlance of the day, this was patently impossible. According to the often-quoted motto of the lexicographer Littré: "Nothing in history can be born except through filiation, from an ancestor to a succeeding generation."^[22] Because there was no evidence of a poetic line for Clotilde, no forerunners, no school following thereafter, her writing could not be historically validated. It was an aberration—a literary parthenogenesis. The Romantic theory of genius notwithstanding, her existence seemed little more than modern conjecture.

This concern over a lack of filiation was, in fact, symptomatic of a far greater fear. As another of Clotilde's critics expressed it, the controversy was ultimately about "the origin and veritable paternity of these poems."^[23] In this phrase lies one major preconception about the status of poetry: in the beginning was the Father. Somehow, the notion of a feminine poetic origin is beyond reason, and with it the notion that medieval poetry could be attributed in part to women disputational poets. Insofar as the medieval period was considered a point of origin by many literati, the emergence of Clotilde risked feminizing it—a prospect that seemed untenable to the growing numbers of historical and philological critics. In their view, "The history of women poets was so fantastical that it would be better not to talk about it at all."^[24]

Under these circumstances, the case of Clotilde's writing became a catalyst for the argument over women's creative potential per se. It opened up a question of literary talent that extended far beyond Clotilde's own putative medieval situation. "We are of the opinion that this author [Clotilde] was a man, for once it is acknowledged that the work involves a pastiche, it seems

to us that a man alone could have given it this perfection."^[25] The irony in this critic's assessment is doubly strong. Not only does he consider the possibility of a medieval woman poet a matter of pastiche, but in doing so he commends a man for devising such an ingenious one. In other words, the suppression of female literary talent signifies man's greater one. Discrediting her gifts vindicates his.

That Clotilde's poetry was discredited so vehemently is due in no small part to the acclaim it received as the work of a woman. In the preface of the first two editions, the editor Vanderbourg made much of the fact:

Que vous importe le siècle où vécut Clotilde, et les corrections que ses ouvrages ont pu subir? Lisez-les, et si vous y trouvez une mère tendre, une épouse embrasée de tousles feux de l'amour, poète par sentiment bien plus que par le désir de la gloire, demandez à votre coeur si un froid imitateur d'une langue surannée a pu écrire ces morceaux pleins de chaleurs et de vérité; si un homme a pu composer ces poésies, où le cachet du sexe le plus tendre et le plus désintéressé dans ses affections est si fortement empreint?
(1825 edition, x)

What does it matter to you the century in which Clotilde lived and the corrections her works have undergone? Read them, and if you find in them a tender mother, a wife inflamed with all the fires of love, a poet by virtue of her emotions much more than of any desire for glory, ask your heart whether a cold imitator of an outmoded language could have written these pieces so full of warmth and truth. Ask yourself whether a man could have composed these poems where the mark of her sex, the most tender and the most innocent in her affections, is so strongly imprinted.

Vanderbourg tried to fend off misgivings about Clotilde's work through a Romantic definition of femininity. The cardinal traits are obvious: Clotilde's passion versus a man's coolness, her tenderness versus his rigid, mechanical ways, her disinterested search for truth versus his vainglory. In the face of all opposition, then, the value of the work is predicated on its gender. In fact, the genuineness of the work is wagered upon it. This wager was pushed still further by subsequent editors. Nodier, in his advocate phase, turned it into an imperative. He challenged all women writers who knew of Clotilde to use her example as a witness. Her disputational writing was to represent the determining evidence that women, in his slogan, "created French poetry."^[26]

One is prompted to speculate about such an insistent championing of Clotilde's cause. What was the special appeal of a medieval woman poet for early-nineteenth-century Europe? Why were several poets spurred to

adopt her as a figurehead of sorts? Put another way, why would anyone want to assume her persona? Readers of Lamartine or Keats, Goethe or Chateaubriand, have long remarked on the common desire to feminize.^[27] In the obsessive search for an original purity, there was much to be gained by playing with a feminine persona, since it appeared to offer all that was antirational, unfettered emotionally, and passionately subjective.^[28] Paradoxically, then, the feminine could serve as both the means and the end of such a search. Clotilde's writing could represent both a conduit toward and a figure for the origin of what constituted a Romantic poetics.

Once we hit upon this Romantic involvement in Clotilde's writing, we can begin to recognize a spectrum of ideological issues that govern the way it is evaluated, for and against. Her case reveals not only how the existence of a late-medieval woman poet is assessed, but under what conditions that assessment proceeds. Far from existing atemporally and inviolably, these conditions themselves are products of mentalities that vary from generation to generation. In the case of Clotilde, the controversy brings together various conceptions that preoccupied a French public throughout the nineteenth century as much as it does evidence for the reality or fakery of a medieval woman poet. To state it baldly: Clotilde became a battleground between the Romantics and the professional men of criticism, between the poets and the philologists. Along this line of confrontation, we can mark out other related polarities: the royalist Clotilde, steeped in a nostalgic, ancien régime patriotism versus the thoroughly revolutionary Clotilde,^[29] the Clotilde belonging to a Middle Ages of Viollet le Duc and Mérimée versus the Clotilde belonging to academicians, a genius of the medieval past versus a specimen of that past, the maternal Clotilde versus the virile fantasm, and of course the "genuine" woman versus the manly fake.

It took nearly a century for these polarities to be exhausted fully. By the 1880s, the debate over Clotilde's writing had more or less run its course. Yet over this same period, the positivist model of historical criticism began to prevail.^[30] In fact, it was progressively institutionalized, and given such a model the figure of Clotilde was "an odd man out." So too was the idea of a woman writer who disputed with her literary peers, because it had no place in the picture of medieval vernacular letters as the philologists were composing it. In this respect, it is not surprising that Clotilde was effectively eliminated, expunged from what was becoming the official medieval record. When the doyen of philology, Gaston Paris, handed down his opinion on her, it was absolutely condemning: "The content of Clotilde's poems is just as impossible in the fifteenth-century as its form; the ideas, sentiments, subjects, knowledge, vocabulary, grammar, versification are all inconceivable.^[31] There was no space left for even entertaining the disputational figure of a medieval woman writer, for the full force of revolutionary, misogynistic science came down upon her.

A Question of Identification

In teasing out the history of the Clotilde affair, I do not pretend to resolve the issues it poses once and for all. We are faced here, I suspect, with what one curator has called "the intractable conundrum of authenticity."^[32] On the one hand, the irregular surviving evidence of Clotilde's work offers an ambiguous picture. The character of some of her verse and the context of its rediscovery do not consistently support the case for a medieval poet. On the other hand, what survives of Clotilde does bear striking resemblances to the woman's response that we have identified in late-medieval France. As Charity Cannon Willard remarked a number of years ago, Clotilde and Christine de Pizan are so similar that they appear cousins—literary replicas, one of the other.^[33] It is just this double-edged resemblance that proves the crux. Faced with this picture, we may never be able to answer with certainty the query: was Clotilde a medieval disputational writer or wasn't she?

Yet, in telling her story, my chief interest lies less in closing the putative case of fraud than it does in showing what that case tells us about the category of the woman respondent. This controversy had effects extending far beyond the individual Clotilde. In the formative years of medievalism, it played a part in discounting the figure we have been studying. The philological repudiation of Clotilde that eventually won out over the Romantic campaign for her helped to preclude the idea of the woman respondent. In exposing a single counterfeit, the medievalist establishment sought to dispense with the general premise that in the later Middle Ages there were female figures who responded to and engaged with masterful writing. It foreclosed prematurely the question of women's own disputational writing. I put the emphasis on women's engagement because, as ever, I mean to signal the notion of active participation. The figures at stake are not those in chambres des dames , the commonly represented circles of laywomen who read to be disciplined. As it turned out, this image was perfectly viable for many philological critics. Refuting Clotilde meant refuting the category of engaged women who wrote in response to what they read. Although the aim of late-nineteenth-century historical criticism was to reveal Clotilde's persona as nothing more than a fanciful cipher, one of its ramifications was to prevent the hypothesis of medieval women respondents from ever being fully explored. In this, Clotilde's case set the stage for the many subsequent debates over the authenticity of medieval women writers that continue into our own day.^[34]

With this argument, I do not wish merely to chastise an earlier generation of medievalist in a self-congratulatory manner. Such a gesture would be far too easy. Mutatis mutandis : my own critical view is subject to the same perennial process of revision. Instead I wish to push this

argument further. Examining nineteenth-century criticism's relation to Clotilde brings us to consider our own rapport with the medieval woman respondent. If we are to take full advantage of her case, we should turn the problem of involvement with a critical object in our own direction. If we take nineteenth-century critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Gaston Paris to task for discounting the category of the respondent that even a "fake" Clotilde might mirror accurately, what can we say of our project to promote it?

One strong impetus behind many feminist inquiries involves a search for positive, validating models for women in the past. In an attempt to reclaim that past as something other than unrelievedly oppressive, there is a tendency to focus upon what look like ideal if not idealized figures. Such an impetus is animated in part by a desire to identify. In investigating figures of the past, feminist critics are as liable as any other critics to visit upon them their revisionist ambitions. They apprehend those figures through the lens of their own critical concerns, with the result that those medieval figures are imported into the present day. Identifying with them means making them an integral part of current feminist debates over social and discursive change.

As this process is played out in medieval studies, Christine de Pizan has come to occupy pride of place. She fast became a heroine, championed as a spokeswoman for feminist thought.^[35] The sharpness of her critiques of Jean de Meun and the sheer breadth of her own writing made her a powerful vehicle for critical identification. Both within the field and without, Christine elicited a sense of solidarity and a sense that medieval culture could be recast critically à la femme .

The figure of the woman respondent represents an equally obvious candidate for such identification. She does so on several scores. Visible through several centuries of medieval vernacular culture, this figure traverses a considerable historical span. She creates a semblance of continuity. From the heyday of scholastic intellectual life to the earliest phase of humanism in fifteenth-century France, her disputatiousness seems part of a pattern that invites a predisposed critic to extrapolate into modern times. Secondly, her disputational stance offers an auspicious structure for identification. It corresponds with the agonistic position struck deliberately by numerous feminist critics.^[36] In fact, a telling parallel appears between the medieval woman respondent's entry into the fray of masterly disputation and the reflection on the importance of conflict in feminist thought: out of the very clash of rhetorical confrontation could come an insight into gender representation.^[37] Yet perhaps the most compelling aspect of the woman respondent is the criterion of verbal injury that she forged, because it fits well into a brand of feminist ethics being formulated today. Raising the issue of defamation and launching the

charge of libel are moves that are consonant with contemporary projects of making gender representation and all our discourses socially responsible. As Drucilla Cornell puts it aptly: "Without an ethical affirmation of the feminine which involves a different way of envisioning political struggle itself, we cannot slip beyond the replication of hierarchy inherent in the master/slave dialectic."^[38]

I have thought through a chapter in medieval cultural history by identifying the category of the woman's response. On the face of things, this is an utterly conventional category. The genre of the responsio and the posture of the respondent are fixtures in medieval intellectual life as scholasticism defined it, and even as it evolved with the advent of humanism. Yet the simple action of inflecting that genre and posture according to gender yields a very different picture of the standard medieval disputation. It is this feminized picture, I hope to have shown, that contributes a cardinal element to the history of defamation and libel.

Undoubtedly, my thinking has been colored by my affinity with the figure of the woman respondent. It shows none of the studied indifference with which nineteenth-century academic critics claimed to analyze Clotilde and dispense with her kind. Yet neither does my thinking involve the opposite (Romantic) extreme of total investment. And here I am circling back to the question of identification. My project is tempered by the conviction that the category of the woman respondent is not automatically transferable to today's concerns. However tantalizing the analogies between her case and the terms of various feminist debates today, there is good reason to keep their particular differences in mind. We have only to think of the case of censorship and its death sentence to recognize the differences in mentality and practice separating the Middle Ages from most of today's world. Such mindfulness has everything to do with attending to the circumstances particular to each historical moment. In this sense, identifying the category of the medieval woman respondent does not mean identifying with her completely.^[39]

This distinction comes into clearer focus if we pay heed to the medieval term identificare as it functioned in scholastic Latin and Middle French, indeed, as it came into the vernacular through Nicole Oresme's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics .^[40] "To identify" refers to the process of determining the various integral properties that make up a phenomenon. Such was my inquiry into the who?, how?, and why? of the woman respondent. Yet identificare also refers to the act of entertaining those properties, taking them upon the self and experiencing their similarities or sameness (idem ). Such is the activity of identification, even of identity formation. This medieval usage thus clarifies the fundamental links between these two activities of identifying. Yet it also accommodates the nuances distinguishing them. It maintains them separately.

In identifying the woman respondent as a key disputational figure in French medieval culture, my work has entertained her various properties: her contrariness, her increasingly confrontational rhetoric, her charge of slander, her appeal to the public sphere.^[41] But in so doing, it aims for two complementary but different ends: understanding how medieval debates over the injurious power of representation were articulated through gender, and pondering in our own distinct ways how representation continues to be ethically shaped.