1. Jules Michelet, Oeuvres complètes , 21 vols., ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 3:888. Michelet's interest in the relation between women and clerical learning would be drastically revised later as a result of his anticlericalism.

2. The classic survey was Charles Jourdain's L'Education des femmes au moyen âge (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1871). Jourdain typified the tendency of treating the case of religious women separately. Because these women inhabited the world of the Church, Jourdain and others saw them as benefitting more easily from its bookish learning.

3. Herbert Grundmann, "Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter: Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der Entstehung des Schriftums in der Volksprache," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 26 (1936): 133.

4. Emblematic of this approach is Susan Groag Bell's fastidious accounting of women bibliophiles; see her "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 4 (summer 1982): 742-68.

5. Georges Duby, Que sait-on de l'amour en France au XII ^e siècle? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 16.

6. Roberta L. Krueger puts forward this argument powerfully in Women Readers and The Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1-14. For a comparable analysis in relation to English texts, see Susan Schibanoff, "Taking the Gold out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman," in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts , ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 100.

7. My characterization of the woman reader limited to a literal sense finds a certain parallel with Susan Noakes' discussion of the stereotype of the "bad" woman reader who stays on the surface of a text; see her "On the Superficiality of Women," in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice , ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 340-42.

8. Andreae Capellani regii Francorum De amore libri tres , ed. Amadeo Pagès (Madrid: Castellon de la Plana, 1929), 45; The Art of Courtly Love , trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Norton, 1969), 73. While Parry's choice to translate the expression verba reposita as "too allegorical" may not work completely, it does get at the polarity between literal and symbolic modes that underlies this sentence.

9. Here I am deliberately echoing the choice term soutilité ( subtilitas ) linked by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet with the emergent class of professional clerkly writer in the high Middle Ages. See " Un Engin si soutil": Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture au XIV ^e siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 1985), 7-9.

10. Eric Auerbach best outlined the prestige of figura ; see "Figura," Scenes from the Drama of European Literature , trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Meridien Books, 1959), 11-78.

11. On the master ( magister ) as figurehead, see Émile Durkheim, L'Évolution pédagogique en France (1938; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 96-103.

12. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 91.

13. Li Bestiaires d'amour di Maistre Richart de Fournival eli Response du Bestiaire , ed. Cesare Segre, Documenti di Filologica 2 (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1957), 118. All translations from the Old French are mine.

14. Gerda Lerner reminds us that it was "men's hegemony over symbol systems which most decisively disadvantaged women, for it deprived women of the act of making their own definitions." The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 219.

15. Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: L'Économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 35-36. In making this assertion, I am taking up Bourdieu's question, "Qu'adviendrait-il en effet de la vie littéraire si l'on en venait à disputer non de ce que vaut le style de tel ou tel auteur, mais de ce que valent les disputes sur le style?" (47). But my answer is somewhat different from his, for I shall argue that the woman's disputation is not necessarily absorbed back into the literary system it critiques.

16. Daniel Poirion makes passing reference to "le genre des réponses que les dames envoient à leurs amants et dans toutes les circonstances où un personnage féminin prend la parole." Le Poète et [e prince: L'Évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 253.

17. On this passage, see Danielle Régnier-Bohler's remarks in "Voix littéraires, voix mystiques," Histoire des femmes en Occident , vol. 2, Le Moyen Age , ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Paris: Plon, 1991), 2:443-44.

18. On this point of secondariness, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 24-25.

19. This late-thirteenth-century text, of which there are three known copies, remains unedited. For a résumé and lengthy description, see John L. Grigsby, ''Miroir des bonnes femmes," Romania 82, no. 4 (1961): 458-81; 83, no. 1 (1962): 30-51.

20. "Jeo uodroie que uous seussiez le conte de la sage dame que respondi a fol chiualer et qui parloit de folie quele ne respondroit pas sans son seigneur mes ele en parleroit uolontiers a li. si se tint pour fol et la tint pour sage." Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal 2156, fol. 4 verso. The rubric cited above is found on fol. 4.

21. On this pivotal structure of debate, see R. Howard Bloch, French Medieval Literature and Law (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1977), 167-89, and Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Word Play (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. 184.

22. See Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, "Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours," Speculum 67, no. 4 (October 1992): 873.

23. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study from Perpetua (203) to Marguerite Porete (1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 106.

24. Il Canzoniere di Lanfranco Cigala , ed. Francesco Branciforti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1954), 175-76.

25. "Le Débat du clerc et de la damoiselle: Poème inédit du XIV ^e siècle," ed. A. Jeanroy, Romania 43 (1914): 1-17.

26. "Ein ungedruckter Salu d'amors nebst Antwort," ed. O. Schultz-Gora, Zeitschrift für romanische philologie 24 (1900): 358-69.

27. Robert de Blois: Son oeuvre didactique et narrative , ed. John Howard Fox, (Paris: Nizet, 1950), 153-54. Roberta L. Krueger argues that "the moralist who so essentializes feminine difference also inscribes the response and resistance of female readers." "Constructing Sexual Identities in the High Middle Ages: the Didactic Poetry of Robert de Blois," Paragraph 13, no. 2 (July 1990): 10-11. The woman's response composed by Blois is marked off in manuscript by the rubric "li response contre l'amant." Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal 5201, fol. 9 verso.

28. R. Howard Bloch demonstrated this contestatory character of medieval literature, which he calls the "verbalization of trial," in Medieval French Literature and Law , 139-147. The classic analyses of the medieval disputation are Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der seholastischen Methode: Nach den gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen dargestellt , 2 vols. (1909-11; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957), and Palémon Glorieux, La Littérature quodlibétique de 1260-1320 , 2 vols. (Le Saulchoir: Kain, 1925; Paris: Vrin, 1935).

29. On these questions of women's schooling and literate practices, see Joan Ferrante, "The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy," in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past , ed. Patricia Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 9-42, and Alain Derville, "L'Alphabéisation du peuple à la fin du moyen âge," Revue du Nord 66 (April-September 1984): 761-77.

30. Emblematic of the Critical Legal Studies movement's exploration of this concept is Richard Delgado's, "Words That Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name-Calling," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 17, no. 1 (spring 1982): 133-81. Catharine A. MacKinnon focuses on the specific relation between verbal injury and women in Only Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). MacKinnon argues for making the law concerned with what speech does, not with what it says (29).

31. Aristotle maintains "In epideictic speeches, the sources of the exordia are praise and blame." The "Art" of Rhetoric , ed. and trans. John Henry Freese (London: William Heinemann, 1926), III, xiv, 5-7. On laus and vituperatio , see also Cicero, De inventione , II, in " De inventione" and "Topica ,'' ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 173-78, and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria , 4 vols., ed. and trans. Harold E. Butler (London: W. Heinemann, 1920-22), III, 4, 2, and III, 7. For an account that typifies the scholastic and humanist understanding of louenge and vitupere in the French Middle Ages, see Jacques Legrand, Archiloge Sophie: Livre de bonnes meurs , ed. Evencio Beltran (Geneva: Slatkine, 1986), 88-95.

32. Albertano's text is translated in Dei Trattati Morali di Albertano da Brescia , ed. Andrea Da Grosseto (Bologne: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1873), 1-174, esp. 141-143 on iniuria . Hugh's text is edited by G. Hendrix in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 48 (1981): 172-97.

33. This text exists only in a seventeenth-century edition; see Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Les Péchés de la langue: Discipline et éthique de la parole médiévale , trans. Philippe Baillet (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 240. The original Italian edition is I Peccati Della Lingua: Disciplina ed Ethica della Parola nella Cultura Medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987).

34. Casagrande and Vecchio review all of these categories meticulously, and many more; see ibid., 187-212, 223-29, 239-52, 275-89, 303-12.

35. For ample evidence of this mentality, one has only to consult the Bullaire de l'Inquisition française au XIV ^e siècle et jusqu'à la fin du grand schisme, ed. J.-M. Vidal (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1913), 475-76, 492-94.

36. See R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 132-33, and Edward Peters, Inquisition (New York: Free Press, 1988), 48-52. Both Moore and Peters underscore the point that heretics were commonly accused of slandering the ecclesiastical authority, for which they were often subject to torture.

37. The influence of the law, P.S. Lewis reminds us, "haunts any investigation of later medieval society," Later Medieval France: The Polity (London: Macmillan, 1968), 10.

38. Corpus iuris civilis: Codex Iustinianis , 2 vols., ed. Paul Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1928), book 9, xxxvi; 2:387. On the Roman and medieval canonical study of iniuria , see the entry in the Enciclopedia del Diritto (Rome: Giuffre, 1964), s.v. iniuria .

39. The Civil Law, Including the 12 Tables, the Institutes of Gaius, the Rules of Ulpian, the Opinions of Paulus, the Enactments of Justinian, and the Constitutions of Leo , 17 vols., trans. Samuel P. Scott (Cincinnati: The Central Trust Co., 1932), 15: 60. For the Latin text, see Corpus iuris civilis: Codex Iustinianus , book 9, xxxv, 2:386-87. It is interesting to note that this earliest legal formulation of iniuria is accompanied by another statute involving the specific cases of women's names: "The action of injury will lie in your favor for two reasons: first, because a husband is understood to have some regard for his wife's reputation for chastity; and second, because a father is considered to sustain damage when the character of his daughter is assailed." The Civil Law 15:59. (Iniuriarum actio tibi duplici ex causa competit, cum et maritus in uxoris pudore et pater in existimatione filiorum propriam iniuriam pati intelleguntur. Corpus iuris civilis: Codex Iustinianus book 9, xxxv, 2:386.) Consider, however, that women's names are linked here to injury not on their own individual terms, but as a function of their family's reputations.

40. The thirteenth-century canonist Hostiensis (Henry de Segusio) provides a characteristic commentary on Justinian's statute. See his Summa aurea , ed. Oreste Vighetti (Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1963), book 5, 1720-24.

41. See Claude Gauvard, " De Grace especial": Crime, état, et société en France à la fin du moyen âge , 2 vols., Publications de la Sorbonne Histoire ancienne et médiévale, no. 24 (Paris: Éditions du C.N.R.S., 1991) 1:111-43, 2:719-52. Gauvard pays particular attention to the ways in which the principle of verbal injury is explored in terms of honor.

42. See Gauvard's extensive discussion of verbal injury and questions of political crime, notably treason, 2:832-49.

43. On the notion of blasphemy, see David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 85-96; Injures et blasphèmes , ed. Jean Delumeau (Paris: Imago, 1989); and Paroles d'outrage, Ethnologie française 22, no. 3 (July-September 1992), especially the commentary of Gérard Lenclud and Jacques Cheyronnaud, 262-64.

44. There is, of course, room for great experimentation in any poetic tradition. In this sense, the tradition appears to be continually disputed. Yet once the dispute involves the damaging power of its language, it surpasses any notion of poetic play.

45. Alan M. E Gunn puts it well when he argues: "The pilgrim-student becomes the audience and the target of an archetypal symposium—one having the particular form of a university disputatio as conducted by the masters of rival lecture halls. "Teacher and Student in the Roman de la Rose : A Study in Archetypal Figures and Patterns," Esprit Créateur 2, no. 3 (fall 1962): 133.

46. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose , 3 vols., ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: H. Champion, 1973).

47. Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut , 3 vols., ed. Ernest Hoepffner (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1908), vol. 1.

48. Alice Jardine rightly identifies this Querelle as a pivotal moment in the history of the relation women/representation: Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 96. However, as I hope to show, the various debates that make up the Querelle do not appear out of the blue.

49. Thomas Aquinas's assessment is representative of the definition of defamation prevailing in the high and late Middle Ages: "Insofar as words are signs representing something to the attention of others, they are able to inflict much damage; one way a man can be damaged in this manner is the detriment of either his honor or respect that is shown to him by others. If anyone will say anything disparaging about him in front of many others; this therefore is a major form of defamation ( contumelia )" (Inquantum vero [verba] sunt signa repraesentia aliquid in notitiam aliorum, sic possunt damna multa inferre; inter quae unum est quod homo damnificatur quantum ad detrimentum honoris sui vel reverentiae sibi ab aliis exhibendae. Et ideo major est contumelia, si aliquis alicui defectum suum dicat coram multis). Summa Theologica , ed. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1914), 2a2ae, q. 72. We should note the frequent variation in translating the Latin terms contumelia and detractio . I am translating contumelia as defamation and detractio as detraction or slander. For an overview of the classical and medieval understanding of defamation, see T. Ortolan, s.v. diffamation , in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, contenant l'exposé des doctrines de la théologie catholique, leurs preuves, et leur histoire , 15 vols., ed. Alfred Vacant and Eugène Mangenot (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1930-1950). For a review of the Roman conception on which the medieval understanding was based, see Arrigo Diego Manfredini, La Diffamazione verbale nel diritto romano (Milan: A. Giuffre, 1979).

50. Le Débat sur le roman de la rose , ed. Eric Hicks (Paris: H. Champion, 1977), p. 16.

51. "Slander is the belittling of the glory and fame of another person through biting and envious words" (Detractio est alienae gloriae et famae mordax et invida per verba, aut diminutio). Vincent de Beauvais's definition exemplifies this classical notion as it was received by medieval thinkers. Speculum doctrinale (Venice: Hermannus Liechtenstein, 1494), IV, c. 169.

52. In " La Belle Dame sans mercy et ses imitations," ed. Arthur Piaget, Romania 30 (1901): 28-35.

53. "N'y a-t-il pas en effet dans la recherche d'une injure l'idée d'empêcher l'autre de répliquer, de lui 'clouer le bec'? N'y a-t-il pas aussi cette idée de combat oratoire—de joûte, dit-on parfois—ou perd celui qui se tait et dans lequel l'art de répliquer est considéré comme une maîtrise de soi?" Evelyne Larguèche, L'Effet injure: De la pragmatique à la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 7.

1. Li Lai d'Aristote d'Henri d'Andeli , ed. Maurice Delbouille (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1951).

2. At a key moment in Aristotle's seduction, this proverb is introduced by way of the story of the cat and the candle. One popular version goes as follows:

L'en puet bien par usage
Faire le chat si sage
Qu'il tient chandoile ardant
Ja n'iert si bien apris
Se il voit la souris
Qu'il n'i aut maintenant.
Mieux vaut nature que nourreture.
(no. 262, 107)

Through training one can make the cat so smart that he holds a burning candle. But he will never be so well trained that when he sees a mouse he won't have it right away: nature is worth more than nurture.

Li Proverbe au vilain, die Sprichwörter des gemeinen Mannes, Altfranzösische Dichtung nach den bisher bekannten Handschriften , ed. Adolf Tobler (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895).

3. "Mullerum astutia decepit sapientissimos." "Ne de mulieri potestatem animae tua, ne ingreditur in virtute tu et confundaris." (These are written in the characteristic cribbed Latin of the schools.) See Joachim Storost's discussion of the various thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century maxims, "Femme chevalchat Aristotte," Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 66 (1956): 189-90.

4. The Lai figured in several influential clerical manuals, including the Disciplina clericalis of Jacques de Vitry; see Delbouille in Li Lai d'Aristote , 39-40. It is interesting to contrast this with a woman's reading. The late-thirteenth-century mystic Marguerite Porete turned the Lai into a theological exemplum on the limits of human love. "But the young girl was at such a distance from the great lord in whom she had placed her love that she could neither see nor have him. For this reason she was often troubled, because no love other than this was satisfying to her. And when she saw that this faraway love that seemed so close and so much a part of her was so removed from her, she thought that she could assuage her malaise through imagining some figure of the lover who had pierced her heart (Mais si loing estoit ceste damoiselle de ce grant seigneur, ou quel elle avoit mis son amour d'elle mesmes, car veoir ne avoir ne le povoit; par quoy en elle mesmes souvent estoit desconforter, car nulle amour fors que ceste cy ne luy souffisoit. Et quant elle vit que ceste amour loingtaigne, qui luy estoit si prouchaine ou dedans d'ele, estoit si loing dehors, elle se pens que elle conforteroit sa malaise par imaginacion d'aucune figure de son amy, dont elle estoit au cueur navree). "Il 'Miroir des simples âmes' di Margherita Porete," ed. Romana Guarnieri, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965): 521.

5. For a survey of Lai d'Aristote iconography, see Pietro Marsilli, "Réception et diffusion iconographique du conte 'de Aristote et Phillis' en Europe depuis le moyen âge," in Amour, mariage, et transgressions au moyen âge , ed. Danielle Buschinger and André Crépin (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1984), 239-70, and Susan L. Smith, "The Power of Women Topos on a Fourteenth-Century Embroidery," Viator 21 (1990): 228. Natalie Zemon Davis comments on the sixteenth-century legacy of the narrative in "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), 135-36.

6. "Power is strong because, as we are beginning to realize, it produces effects at the level of desire—and also at the level of knowledge. Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it." Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77 , ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 59.

7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , book 7, chap. 2, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation , 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

8. Augustine, De civitate Dei , 2 vols., ed. Bernhard Dombart (Leipzig: Teubner, 1909), book 5, chap. 19.

9. It is hardly anachronistic to evoke Hegel's model of the master/slave dialectic here. While most readers tend to understand this model in the subjective terms of desire as Hegel outlined it in the Phenomenology of the Spirit , chapter 4, it is crucial to recall that he also analyzed it in objective, historical terms. In the Philosophy of History , Hegel studied the dynamic between mastery ( Herrschaft ) and slavery or servitude ( Knechtschaft ) as it appeared during the European Middle Ages. His study focused on two phenomena: feudal rule and intellectual life in the universities. Both the relation between the feudal lord and vassal and the university master and student offered him important examples of the historical manifestation of the master/slave dialectic. He dwelled particularly on the case of intellectual life: "Just as all Europe performed the spectacle of knightly warfare, feuding, and tournaments, so also was speculation a tournament scene" (Wie Europa allgemein das Schauspiel von Ritterkämpfen, Fehden und Turnieren darbiet, so war es jetzt auch der Schauplatz des Turnierens der Gedanken). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte , in Sämtliche Werke , 22 vols., ed. Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart: Frommanns, 1949), 11: 503.

10. I mention here two exemplary studies. Sandra Lee Bartky pursues the philosophical investigation of oppression and women in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 22-33. In a psychosocial context, Jessica Benjamin considers the problem of sexual domination by concentrating on "the desires of the dominated": The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 52-68.

11. In the Hegelian master/slave model, the dialectic suggested male/female terms too. As Genevieve Lloyd has argued, this dialectic posited implicitly the role of dominant men in opposition to subservient women; see The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 91-92.

12. Hélène Cixous put forward this premise clearly in "A Woman Mistress": "It is a discourse agreeing more with masculinity than with femininity . . . woman doesn't enjoy herself in it, I never said she was incapable of it." See Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 146.

13. Toril Moi, "Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge," in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis , ed. Teresa Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), 192.

14. Consider in this light Joan Cocks's observation: "The self-identity and self-understanding of the population assigned the position of the masculine Master are generated out of the regime rather than the other way around, so that men can think, speak, and write the terms of masculine/feminine, and decorate, refine, and extend them, without being their true author or first heretic at all." The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique, and Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 1989), 186-87.

15. "Si feray fin mon dittié du debat non hayneux commencié, continué et finé par maniere de soulas sans indignacion a personne." Le Débat sur le roman de la rose , 150.

16. Joan Kelly, "Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes , 1400-1789," Signs 8, no. 1 (autumn 1982): 19.

17. Foucault speaks of "the insubstantiability of the notion of the master, an empty form haunted only by the various phantoms of the master and his slave, the master and his disciple, the master and his workman, the master who pronounces law and speaks the truth, the master who censors and forbids." Power/Knowledge , 139.

18. In his now standard survey of the teaching methods of the master in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Martin Grabmann identifies the disputation ( disputatio ) as a form of combat. Grabmann, Geschichte der scholastichen Methode , 2:16-21.

19. The description is Durkheim's, L'Évolution pédagogique en France , 166. See his discussion of the pedagogical process as a whole (164-87).

20. Hans Walther, Das Streitgedicht in der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck, 1920), 3.

21. Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 113-41, examines this medieval pattern. Ong goes on to make the case that this drift toward domination is still apparent in today's pedagogy: see Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 20-25. Janice Moulton traces the full legacy of this pattern in "A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method," in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science , ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 149-64.

22. See the following portraits of the master: Jacques LeGoff, Les Intellectuels au moyen âge (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 80-89, and John W. Baldwin, "Masters at Paris from 1179 to 1215: A Social Perspective," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century , ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 143-53.

23. See Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages , 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 1:21-22, and Gordon Left, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), 167-73.

24. De disciplina scholarium (Pseudo-Boethius), ed. Olga Weijers (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 99. The potential explosiveness of this pattern of subjection and mastery is brought out in the following warning: "Let the disciple never be violent toward his master" (he sit autem discipulus violentus erga magistrum; 99).

25. Das "Livre d'Enanchet" nach der einzigen Handschrift 2585 der Wiener Nationalbibliothek , ed. Werner Fiebig (Jena: Wilhelm Gronau, 1938), 5-6.

26. Le Chastoiement d'un père à son fils , ed. Edward D. Montgomery, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), Robert de Blois , 133-55.

27. For many such accounts, see the Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis , ed. Henricus Denifle and Aemilio Chatelain (Paris: Delalain, 1891). As Jody Enders has suggested recently, the controversies and brawls recorded there create the picture of "an intellectual battlefield." Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 93-94. On this picture, see Enders's full discussion (92-98), and John W. Baldwin, The Scholastic Culture of the Middle Ages, 1000-1300 (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1971), 60-65.

28. Juan Luis Vivès, In Pseudodialecticos: A Critical Edition , ed. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 82-83.

29. Palémon Glorieux calls the quodlibet "the magisterial act par excellence," stressing the "hostility" that frequently enlivened the form. La Iittérature quodlibétique 1:14, 28. Glorieux outlines the medieval master's pedagogy as a whole in "L'Enseignement au moyen âge: Techniques et méthodes en usage à la faculté de théologie de Paris au XIII ^e siècle," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire au moyen âge 35 (1968): 65-186, esp. 106-11, 123-24. See also Leonard E. Boyle's commentary on the quodlibet as a ''free-for-all": Pastoral Care, Clerical Education, and Canon Law, 1200-1400 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), 52-56, Bernardo C. Bazan, John W. Wippel, Gerard Frauden, and Danielle Jacquart, Les Questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit, et de medicine . Typologie des sources du tooyen âge occidental, 44-45. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 35-48, and Jody Enders, "The Theater of Scholastic Erudition," Comparative Drama 27, no. 3 (fall 1993): 341-63.

30. The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury , trans. Daniel McGarry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 190.

31. Alexander Murray's discussion of the "latent or open combativeness" of intellectuals makes this process clear: Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), chap. 10, esp. 234-35.

32. On this parallelism, see my discussion in "Figures of Female Militancy in Medieval France," Signs 16, no. 3 (spring 1991): 526-29.

33. For all of Abelard's bad press, as David E. Luscombe reminds us he was also admired throughout the Middle Ages and named a doctor in the same league as Thomas Aquinas. See The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard's Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 12-13. As far as his letter writing goes, Abelard gained a new following among early-fifteenth-century Parisian humanists such as Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col; see Carla Bozzolo, "L'Humaniste Gontier Col et la traduction française des Lettres d'Abélard et Héloïse," Romania 95, no. 2-3 (1974): 212.

34. "Martis curie penitus abdicarem ut Minerye gremio educarer; et quoniam dialecticarum rationum armaturam omnibus philosophie documentis pretuli, his armis alia commutavi et tropheis bellorum conflictus pretuli disputationum." Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum , ed. J. Monfrin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967), lines 24-28, 63-64. It is worthwhile comparing Abelard's twelfthcentury portrait of the relation between the master and Minerva with a fifteenth-century one; see Jacques Legrand's commentary on "the fiction of Minerva as the mother of wisdom" [la ficcion Minerva est appellee mere de Sophie], Archiloge Sophie , 27.

35. This expression, famme laengueice , is intriguing. If we accept the rendering in Godefroy as one who chatters and gossips, then we can recognize it as the topos of the garrulous witless woman. Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IX ^e au XV ^e siècle, 10 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1885), s.v. langoieur .

36. The identification of these figures with the duke and duchess of Brabant is made in the prologue on the same folio as the illumination.

37. Michèle Gaily investigates the structure of the disputation as it occurs in many of the same texts, but without attending to the figuration of women: "Le Huitième Art: Les clercs du XIII ^e siècle, nouveaux maîtres du discours amoureux," Poétique 75 (September 1988): 279-95.

38. For the Concilium , see Les Débats du clerc et du chevalier dans la littérature poétique du moyen âge , ed. Charles Oulmont (1911; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 93-110; for the Jugement , also known as Florence et Blancheflor , see Edmond Earal, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge (Paris: E. Champion, 1913), 251-69.

39. See Sylvia Huot's remarks on the representations of the clerk-poet in contemporaneous manuscripts: From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 59-64.

40. Evelyn Fox Keller has traced the metaphorical language of secrets prevailing in science and the predominant trope of wresting the secrets away from a reminizeal nature: "Making Gender Visible in the Pursuit of Nature's Secrets," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies , ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 69. See also her most recent remarks in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), 40.

41. See Jacques Monfrin, "La Place du Secret des Secrets dans la littérature française médiévale," in Pseudo-Aristotle, "The Secret of Secrets": Sources and Influences , Warburg Institute Surveys, no. 9 (London: Warburg Institute, 1982), 73-113; Placides et Timéo ou Li secrés as philosophes , ed. Claude Alexandre Thomasset (Geneva: Droz, 1980), and Claude Alexandre Thomasset, Commentaire du dialogue de Placides et Timéo: Une Vision à la fin du XIII ^e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1982), and Steven J. Williams, "The Scholarly Career of the Pseudo-Aristotelian 'Secretum Secretorum' in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1991).

42. See Martin Levey and Safwat S. Souryal, "Galen's On the Secrets of Women and on the Secrets of Men : A Contribution to the History of Arabic Pharmacology," Janus 55, no. 2-3 (1968): 208-19, "Pseudo-Albertus Magnus: Secreta mulierum cum commento , Deutsch. Critical Text and Commentary," ed. Margaret Schleissner (Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1987), and Women's Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus' "De secreta mulierum'' with Commentaries , trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). My colleague Monica Green's ongoing research on vernacular translations of the Secreta mulierum and the other important gynecological text, the Trotula , leads her to argue that the term "secrets" gained a new significance scientifically throughout the thirteenth century. I am grateful to her for sharing with me "Slander and the Secrets of Women," a chapter from a current book manuscript tentatively entitled Women and Literate Medicine in Medieval Europe: Trota and the "Trotula ."

43. Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire , 103-5.

44. For a general review of the so-called aetas Ovidiana , see Birgen Munk Olsen, "Ovide au moyen âge (du XI ^e au XII ^e siècle)," in Le Strade del testo: Studi di tradizione manoscritta , ed. Guglielmo Cavello (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1987), 67-96. Peter L. Allen examines the Ovidian legacy in French medieval literature: The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 38-58.

45. On this point, see Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid's "Ars amatoria," "Epistulae ex Ponto," and " Epistulae Heroidum " (Munich: Arbeo Gesellschaft, 1986).

46. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism , ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) lays out the various waves of translation and commentary on Aristotle. The Metaphysics was translated in stages, and was not completely known and commented on before 1220. So too with the Ethics . The Politics was recovered ca. 1260. Since the biological works were censored from the Parisian faculties, they were also not fully available until that time (74-79). Fernand van Steenberghen proposes much the same scenario in Aristote en occident: Les origines de l'aristotélisme parisien (Louvain: Éditions de l'Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1946), 60-61, 91, 96-97.

47. In this chapter, my Aristotelian rubric reflects this medieval tendency to associate any number of learned classical texts with the name of Aristotle. As the editors of the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy remind us: "An examination of the medieval Latin Aristotle cannot consider only the genuine works of Aristotle, but must also deal with works credited to Aristotle in the Middle Ages although now believed to be spurious" (45). The same holds true for Aristotelianism in vernacular works. My rubric is a citational marker signifying great authority, and may not always refer to the works of the Greek thinker.

48. Ovid, Ars amatoria P. Ovidi Nasonis , ed. E. J. Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); The Art of Love , trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 113.

49. We find this same expression describing women's behavior in that paradigmatic text of misogyny, the Lamentations of Matheolus , here cited in Jean LeFèvre's translation: "Woman leads man to his limit. It is fitting that I give you an example of their prevarication" (La femme maine l'omme a methe. Droit est qu'exemple vous en mette De leur prevarication; I, lines 845-47).

50. Judging from those florilegia that included material from the De amore , this sentence was particularly important; see Alfred Karnein, "De amore" in volkssprachlicher literatur: Untersuchungen zur Andreas-CapellanusRezeption in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985), 297.

51. Toril Moi reads the lover's claim on the subordinate role as a sign of "a certain sadistic dominance": "Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love," in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History , ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 24. Compare this with Joan Ferrante's reading: "Male Fantasy and Female Reality in Courtly Literature,'' Women's Studies 11 (1984): 78-84.

52. See Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 45.

53. Betsy Bowden, "The Art of Courtly Copulation," Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979): 81-82.

54. The key phrase in the condemnation was: "In the schools they presume to treat and to dispute these ludicrous falsehoods" (insanias falsas in scolis tractare et disputare presument); quoted by Alex J. Denomy in "The De amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Condemnation of 1277," Mediaeval Studies 8 (1946): 107.

55. L'Art d'amors und Li Remedes d'amors: Zwei altfranzösische Lehrgedichte yon Jacques d'Amiens , ed. Gustav Korting (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1976).

56. On this issue of force, see Kathryn Gravdal's discussion of esforcier, the term used to designate sexual violence: Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Old French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 4-6.

57. Consider the cynical step-by-step account laid out by the contemporaneous Art d'amour of Guiart: "And so she'll cry out when she feels your hand, 'Get away from me, I certainly don't love you!' The more she will say that to you, the more you should tighten your grip. Press yourself upon her body-tobody and you will have your fill, since you will have had her virginity" (Et se ele s'escrie, quant sentira ta main: "Fuyez vos deseur moi certes pas ne vous aim!" Corn plus le te dira, et tu plus la destrain Join toi pres nu a nu, si en feras ton plain Puis qu'auras eu part dedanz son pucelage). See Artes amandi: Da Maître Elie ad Andrea Cappellano , ed. A. M. Finoli (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1969), lines 93-102, 233. Compare this with the Clef d'amours : "And as much as you resort to force, such force is very pleasing to young girls. Don't let them do what can best be done to them. A woman would never dare to say out loud what she desires greatly" (Et combien que forche l'appeles, tel forche plest mout as puceles: ne lesse mie por lor fet a fete cen qui bien lor fet. James feme n'oseroit dire de bouche cen que tant desire"). La Clef d'amours , ed. Auguste Doutrepont (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1975), lines 1137-42).

58. Pierre Bourdieu identifies such symbolic violence as not only a dimension of all domination but as essential to the phenomenon of masculine domination: "La domination masculine," Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales 84 (September 1990): 11.

59. One of the few critics to study this influx as far as French literature is concerned is Tony Hunt. But he concentrates on Chrétien de Troyes. See "Aristotle, Dialectic, and Courtly Literature," Viator 10 (1979): 95-129.

60. See La Poissance damours dello Pseudo-Richard de Fournival , ed. Gian Battista Speroni, Pubblicazioni dell Facoltà di Lettere e Filosophia dell'Università di Pavia 21 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), and "Li Houneurs et li vertus des dames par Jehan Petit d'Arras," ed. Rudolf Zimmermann, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 108 (1902): 380-88. The version of Li Consaus d'amours that I am working with here is as yet unedited. My study is based on the manuscript text found in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2621, fols. 1-17 verso. This text is not to be confused with another related didactic text called Li Consaus attributed to Richard de Fournival: " Li Consaus d'amors ," ed. Gian Battista Speroni, Medioevo Romanzo 1 (1974): 217-278. Similarly, it should be noted that in the description of the manuscript, Hermann Julius Hermann misnames it La puissance d'amour , after a rubric, thereby overriding the name as it is also found on fol. 1. Die westeuropäischen Handschriften und Inkunabeln der Gothik und der Renaissance mir Ausnahme der niederländerischen Handschriften , 2 vols. (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1935-36), 2:62.

61. I cite passages from the beginning of these works that indicate their Aristotelian allegiance: "So that we might come to this [understanding], our master Aristotle instructs us for our advantage and profit, and he says in this way that . . ." (Arristotes nostre maistres pour a cou venir nous enseigne pour no proufitable avantage et dist en tel maniere . . .); Li Consaus , Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2621, fol. 1. "Dear son, our master Aristotle demonstrates to us by reason that man's heart which would desire woman cannot speak badly or dishonestly of it; I will show you how" (Biaus fieus, aristotes nos maistres nous moustre par raison que cuers d'oume qui femme conuisteroit, n'en puet dire mal ne deshouneste; si vous mousterrai coument); "Li Houneurs,", ed. Zimmermann, lines 8-10, 382. "Thus all should know that whatever will be said hereafter will be confirmed by the fitting evidence of nature, firm and true, and spoken from the mouth of the Philosopher, established truthfully" (si sacent tout que cankes ci aprés sera dit sera fermé par droite proeve de nature, ferme et veritaule, dite de bouce de philosophe esprouvé de verité); La Poissance , ed. Speroni, 30.

62. This question exists separately in numerous florilegia of the late Middle Ages: quid mulier sit . See Bruno Roy, "A la recherche des lecteurs médiévaux du De amore d'André le Chapelain," Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa Quarterly 55, no. 1 (January-March 1985), 56.

63. Li Consaus d'amours , Vienna 2621, fol. 1 verso: "iou ai dit et pour moustrer comment il puist avenir que uns hom puist damours dou tout savoir."

64. These three Aristotelian narratives are also found with several other key narratives; Le Jugement d'amour, Art d'amours , as well as Le Bestiaire d'amour and La Response au Bestiaire that I shall consider later. Because they are grouped together, these works beg to be read in relation to each other. For details on their manuscript settings, see Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book , 66-74 (for Li Houneurs , Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale 25566), and 152-6 (for La Poissance , Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale 526), and Ferdinand Wolf, "Über einige altfranzösische Doctrinen und Allegorien von der Minne," Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien (Philosophische-Historische Klasse) 13 (1864): 135-92, (for Li Consaus , Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2609, 2621).

65. This theory posits the cooler cells on the left side of the uterus as the matrix for females and those on the warmer right as the matrix for males. Any fetus developing in the middle cells would, of course, be hermaphroditic. On this theory, see Robert Reisert, Der siebenkammerige Uterus: Studien zur mittelalterlichen Wirkungsgeschichte und Entfaltung eines embryologischen Gebarmuttermodells (Pattensen: Horst Wellm Verlag, 1986). I am grateful to Monica Green for drawing my attention to this work. Joan Cadden remarks on the way this theory became a virtual doctrine for medieval authors, often being associated with other classical and late ancient (including Aristotelian) views that operated according to binary oppositions. "The strings of associations, right-warm-male and left-cool-female, return us also to the gender implications of medieval views of sex difference," Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 198.

66. On the Greek background of this "outstanding variability" see Maud W. Gleason, "The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.," in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World , ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990): 389-416.

67. Sylviane Agacinski, "Le tout premier écart," in Les Fins de l'homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida , ed. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 120.

68. See E. Jane Burns's commentary on Aristotle's "messy matter," Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 89-91. See also Thomas Laqueur's remarks on the way this feminine matter functions within a metaphysically ordered hierarchy: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 61-62. Lynda Lange critiques this formulation in "Woman Is not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle's Biology of Reproduction," in Discovering Reality , 1-16.

69. Prudence Allen discusses how the Aristotelian biological understanding of "woman" and the metaphysical frequently come together; see The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.-A.D. 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), esp. 83-126, 252-467.

70. See the version of this definition in the late-thirteenth-century didactic dialogue Placides et Timéo : "And Aristotle in his book on Nature [the Metaphysics ] agrees with this, and he says that woman is an incomplete man; that is to say, a failed, imperfect one" (Eta ce s'accorde Aristote en ses Natures et dit que femme est homme achoisonne, ce est a dire faillis et non mie parfet; Placides et Timéo , 150-51).

71. According to Walter Ullmann, one of the effects of the medieval reception of Aristotle's Politics, Ethics , and Physics is the problem of the seat of ultimate sovereignty: Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1961), 233.

72. Since the Politics was translated into Latin ca. 1260, it is possible that the authors of these texts knew these principles in Aristotle, and not only through commentaries and other indirect sources. On the contemporaneous tradition of commentary, see Martin Grabmann, "Die mittelalterlichen Kommentare zur Politik des Aristoteles," Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , Philos.-hist. Abteilung 2, no. 10 (1941).

73. Alfred Karnein discusses this idea of imperfection in terms of Aristotle's metaphysical lexicon: specifically, his distinction between perfect and principal attributes. " Wie Feuer und Holz : Aspekte der Ausgrenzung von Frauen beim Thema Liebe im 13. Jahrhundert," Zeitschrift füt Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 19 (1989): 101.

74. On this point, see Sharon Farmer on the way women's speech is figured in contemporaneous sermon literature: "Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives," Speculum 61, no. 3 (July 1986): 517-43.

75. "So the lady's voice is the most gentle that ever was, the most powerful for all time" (Dont est vois de dame ki est li plus douce vois ki soit, li principaus poissance dou siecle); Li Houneurs , Zimmermann 387. "The most powerful thing in love is woman's comely language" (Li cose ki de li a plus de pooir enamor corn bielle parolle [de feme]); Li Consaus d'amours , fol. 3.

76. Consider also the version appearing in Martin LeFranc's fifteenthcentury Champion des dames : "Aristotle barely understood the secrets of nature. I don't know if you believe it, but it is said that woman outwitted him and taught him to act as a horse does. When she had undertaken to do this, she stuck her spurs into him" (Aristote tousles secrez de nature a paine comprit. Je ne scay passe vous ce crez, mais l'en dit que femme le prit a son engin, et lui aprit comme le chevalet feroit qui quant ace faire entreprit, elle des talons le feroit; lines 6089-96). Martin LeFranc, Champion des dames , ed. Arthur Piaget, Mémoires et documents publiés par la société d'histoire de la suisse romane, 3rd series, 8, (Lausanne: Payot, 1968), 194.

77. Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de leesce de Jehan LeFèvre, de Resson , 2 vols., ed. Anton Gérard van Hamel (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1892-1905), 1:33-34.

78. For another reading of this passage, see Bloch, Medieval Misogyny , 52.

1. Jacques LeGoff alludes to the small monopoly of magistri in Paris during this period and to the dangers of an "intellectual technocracy" that they posed: Les Intellectuels au moyen âge , 132.

2. This configuration was well established by the early thirteenth century: the magister who presided and made the final determination ( determinatio ), the opponens who raised the problems and posed the questions, and the respondens , the disciple or bachelor who explicated and clarified the problems. See Bazan et al., Les Questions disputées , 42.

3. This miniature also represents the standard presentation portrait of an author to his patron. But by placing the lady in the patron position, it accentuates the disciple's precarious role all the more. Through this configuration we can catch glimpses of the disciple's particular dilemma as fledgling writer approaching his patroness.

4. " Le Roman de la poire" par Tibaut , ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1984); Le Dit de la panthère d'amours par Nicole de Margival , ed. Henry A. Todd (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1883).

5. Ernstpeter Ruhe elucidates the importance of the love letter, or as it is called in Old French, the salut d'amour , for teaching the ars dictaminis ; see De Amasio ad amasium: Zur Gattungsgeschichte des mittelalterlichen Liebesbriefes , Beiträge zur romanischen Philologie des Mittelalters, vol. 10 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1975), 215-69.

6. For details on how this letter game forms part of an elaborate audiovisual design in manuscript, see Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book , 177-84.

7. On this trope of obscurity, see Douglas Kelly, "Obscurity and Memory: Sources for Invention in Medieval French Literature," Studies in Medieval Culture 16 (1984): 33-56.

8. Marchello-Nizia outlines this pattern of lyric refrains; see Le Roman de la poire , xxxiv-xlviii.

9. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, "Le Clerc et l'écriture: Le 'Voir-dit' de Guillaume de Machaut et la définition du 'dit,'" in Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters , ed. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1980), 151-68.

10. On this criterion of contraries in scholastic argumentation as it is adapted by vernacular narrative, see Gérard Paré, Les Idées et les lettres au XIII ^e siècle: "Le Roman de la rose" (Montréal: Centre de psychologie et de pédagogie, 1947), 31-32.

11. G. E. R. Lloyd outlines the Aristotelian category of contraries that made such an impact on medieval logic. See Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 86-89.

12. Nancy Freeman Regalado underscores the connection between contraires choses and the erotic: "Une lois de plus 'les contraires choses,' les exempla , fournissent à Jean de Meun le vocabulaire nécessaire pour parlet littéralement de la partie de l'expérience humaine qui échappe au langage, l'expérience éotique." "'Des contraires choses': La fonction poétique de la citation et des exempla dans le Roman de la Rose de Jean de Meun," Littérature 41 (February 1981): 77. I would argue that in the case of the Roman de la rose as in the Poire , the erotic must be inflected in terms of women.

13. On the definition of "the contrary woman" in medieval Aristotelian thought, see Allen, The Concept of Woman , 468-69.

14. It is just this feature of the "multiplicity of actors" that Palémon Glorieux finds characteristic of masters' debates: "L'Enseignement au moyen âge," 123.

15. As Kathryn Gravdal points out, there is an important semantic shift when " ravir " signifying "to carry away by force" in the twelfth century evolves to mean "being carried away" by the later Middle Ages. Ravishing Maidens , 4-5.

16. See the comparable representation in the Poire : "Then I lose all speech and I seemed like a figure struck dumb who does not move or react and cannot sound a word" (Adont pert la parole tote et m'estoit corn ymage mue que ne se muet ne se remue ne que ne puet soner un mot"; lines 2182-85).

17. It should not be surprising, then, to find in the acrostic allusions to the question of physical force: "Woman prefers that one force her to accomplish her will rather than that she authorizes it; thus she refuses her desire" (fame aime mielx qu'en la forçoit d'acomplir son bon qu'el l'otroit, si que son desirier refuse"; lines 2674-76).

18. This synchrony of the two oeuvres is made explicit at one point: "And Love, who takes charge of the actions of lovers and of their work, does not labor out of kindness for me" (et Amors, qui enprent Les fais des amans et lor oevre, Par sa bonté por moy n'i oevre; lines 1817-19). This phonic pun between oeuvrer and ouvrer runs through the Panthère.

19. I borrow this musicological term from Jacques Chailley, "La nature musicale du Jeu de Robin et Marion ," in Mélanges d'histoire du théâtre du moyen âge et de la Renaissance offerrs à Gustave Cohen (Paris: Nizet, 1950), 115.

20. As Sylvia Huot puts it, "lover and lady literally 'make love.'" From Song to Book , 190.

21. Christiane Marchello-Nizia coined this expression for amorous discourse in general: "L'Invention du dialogue amoureux: Le masque d'une différence," in Masques et déguisements dans la littérature médiévale , ed. Marie-Louise Oilier (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1988), 227.

22. Pierre Bourdieu, "La Domination masculine," 23.

1. "And similarly the consecrated masters first receive the brilliance of the intellect" (Et similiter sacri doctores mentium splendorem primo recipiunt. Sicut montes enim doctores primitus radiis divinae sapientiae illuminantur). From Breve principium de commendatione sacrae scripturae , in Opuscula theologica , 2 vols., ed. Raymond A. Verardo (Rome: Marietti, 1954), 1:442; quoted in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy , 81. For a fuller consideration of the master figure in Aquinas, structured as a question and response, see the Quaestiones disputatae , XI, and Summa theologica , 1, q. 117, a. 1: Über den Lehrer, de magistro , ed. and trans. G. Jüssen, G. Krieger, and J. H. J. Schneider (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988).

2. "Each thing is perfect in its activity when it can produce another thing similar to itself." This notion of reproduction was the subject of considerable contemporaneous speculation; see Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle , 2 vols., trans. John P. Rowan, (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961), 1:15.

3. This classification occurs in a thirteenth-century Aristotelian treatise De lingua , that outlines various sins of language. On this classificatory scheme, see Casagrande and Vecchio, Les Péchés de la langue , 129; I Peccati Della Lingua , 159-60.

4. This is the commonest incipit ; see "Matheus von Boulogne: Lamentationes Matheoluli ," ed. Albert Schmitt (Ph.D. diss., Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 1974), 44. In the version translated by Jean LeFèvre, it comes after the Ovidian preface: "Je fus jadis maistre clames"; see van Hamel's edition, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de leesce , 1:3.

5. For the Italian picture, in addition to the Segre edition, see Il Bestiario d'Amore e la Riposta al Bestiario , ed. Francesco Zambon (Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1987), and Una Versione Pisana Inedita del "Bestiaire d'Amours ," ed. Roberto Crespo (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1972); also Jeanette Beer's fine translation, Master Richard's Bestiary of Love and Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). All translations are mine, except where I refer specifically to Beer and cite hers.

6. For details of Fournival's biography, see L'Oeuvre lyrique de Richard de Fournival , ed. Yvan G. LePage (Ottawa: Éditions de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1981), 9-12. Christopher Lucken is in the process of publishing his thesis, which represents the most comprehensive study of Fournival's writing to date. See "Les Portes de la mémoire: Richard de Fournival et l"ariereban' de l'amour," (Ph.D. diss., University of Geneva, 1994).

7. Richard H. Rouse surveys his exceptional library in "Manuscripts Belonging to Richard de Fournival," Revue d'histoire des textes 3 (1973): 253-69. Of particular interest are Fournival's Aristotelian holdings, which included the De animalibus and Avicennan versions of the Physica, De caelo et mundo , and the De anima (263-64).

8. Both Beer and Alexandre Leupin mention the connection with Aristotelianism but do not explore its full dimensions: Beer, Master Richard's Bestiary of Love , xv, and Alexandre Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 147.

9. The Complete Works of Aristotle , book I, 980a-b, 2:1552. For a medieval Latin version, see Metaphysica Aristotelis: Translatio anonyma sive " media" , ed. Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 7.

10. On Fournival's use of memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 223-24; see also Huot, From Song to Book , 141-47.

11. Elizabeth V. Spelman critiques this problem of women's sensory character and their potential for rationality in "Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul," in Discovering Reality , 27.

12. I explore these distinctions further in "Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: The Senses of Medieval Reading," Comparative Literature 46, no. 2 (spring 1994): 129-45.

13. On the Bestiaire in the context of the ars dictaminis , see Ruhe's remarks in De amasio ad amasium , 254-55. On the Aristotelian animal lore that the Bestiaire exploits, see Miguel J. C. de Asúa, "The Organization of Discourse on Animals in the Thirteenth Century: Peter of Spain, Albert the Great, and the Commentaries on the De animalibus " (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1991).

14. I have studied this pattern of recognition in "Letter-Writing and Picture-Reading: The Bestiaire d'amour and Medieval Textuality," Word and Image 5, no. 1 (1989): 131-47.

15. See Florence McCulloch, "Le Tigre au miroir: La vie d'une image de Pline à Pierre Gringore," Revue des sciences humaines 130 (April-June 1968): 149-60.

16. Ignacio Malaxecheverria's reading of the bestiary genre touches upon this issue of ambivalence; see Le Bestiaire médiéval et l'archétype de la féminité (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1982), 9.

17. I invoke here Sarah Kofman's rich commentary on the inferences of the Freudian equation—narcissistic woman = beast of prey ( Raubtiere ) found in the Essay on Narcissism ; see L'Enigme de la femme: La femme dans les textes de Freud (Paris: Galilée, 1980), 63-64.

18. Sarah Kay shows how these distinctions can yield a curious set of associations in clerical analysis: "if women are to body as man is to mind, and the body is a necessary source of knowledge, then women are a necessary source of knowledge." As Kay rightly points out, "this is not serious philosophy, but an elaborate joke." See "Women's Body of Knowledge: Epistemology and Misogyny in the Romance of the Rose ," in Framing Medieval Bodies , ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994): 211-35. I am grateful to her for sharing her essay with me.

19. That this combination continues to be fascinating is borne out by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novella, The Professor and the Siren (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), itself a fantasy on the rapport between the master figure and the bestial woman.

20. Beryl Rowland touches on the Christological implications in "The Art of Memory and the Bestiary," in Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy , ed. Willene B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 13.

21. Danielle Régnier-Bohler, "Femme/Faute/Fantasme," in La Condicion de la mujer en la Edad Media , ed. Yves-René Fonquerne and Alfonso Esteban (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1986), 486-87.

22. Leupin reads the lady as a symbol of castration; see Barbarolexis , 160.

23. On this issue of loss, see Christopher Lucken, "Du ban du coq à l' Ariereban de l'âne (A propros du Bestiaire d'amour de Richard de Fournival)," Reinardus 5 (1992): 123-24.

24. "Li Commens d'amour," ed. Antoinette Saly, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 10 (1972): 49. This text is commonly attributed to Richard de Fournival because it occurs in manuscript with the Bestiaire and the Poissance d'amours .

1. An excellent index of the importance of the responsio is the thirteenth-century commentary on the art of responding. See, for instance, the popular treatise attributed to Albert the Great, Die Mittelalterlichen Traktate De modo opponendi et respondendi: Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte , ed. Lambert Marie de Rijk, Belträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, vol. 17 (Munster: Aschendorff, 1980).

2. P. Mandonnet offers the following description: "La dispute se tenait sous la direction du maître; mais ce n'était pas lui, à proprement parler, qui disputait. C'éait son bachelier qui assumait l'office de répondant et commençait ainsi son apprentissage de ces exercices." Quoted by LeGoff, Les Intellectuels au moyen âge , 102. See also the discussions of the responsio and the respondent role by Glorieux, La Littérature quodlibétique , 1:31-32, J. F. Wippel, "The Quodlibetal Question as a Discursive Literary Genre," in Les Genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales: Définition, critique, et exploitation , Actes du Colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve, May 25-27 1981. (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d'études médiévales de l'Université Catholique de Louvain, 1982), 68, and Boyle, Pastoral Care , 53-54.

3. Li Proverbes au vilain: Untersuchungen zur romanischen Spruchdichtung des Mittelalters , ed. Eckhard Rattunde, Studia Romanica 11 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1966), 135.

4. I am thinking of works such as Les Diz et proverbes des sages , ed. Joseph Morawski, Bibliothèque de la Faculté des Lettres Université de Paris, 2nd series, 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1924), and the "Enseignements d'Aristote et d'Alixandre," of which Hermann Kunst gives a partial edition in Mitteilungen aus dem Eskurial , Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 141 (1879).

5. According to Jauss, "Le droit de questionner est une prérogative qui reste du côté des seigneurs; devoir répondre et ne pouvoir parler que lorsqu'on est interrogé est le sort de l'assujetti." Hans-Robert Jauss," Adam Interrogateur (pour une histoire des fonctions du modèle question/réponse)," Texte 3 (1984): 160-61.

6. On this double bind of the "good student" in relation to the master's infallibility, see Pierre Boutdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, La Reproduction: Eléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement (Paris: Minuit, 1970), 136-38.

7. Leupin, Barbarolexis , 158.

8. Segre, Li Bestiaires d'amour , 105-36. See also Beer's translation, Master Richard's Bestiary of Love and Response , 41-58.

9. All citations and translations are based on Segre's edition and my reading of the manuscript, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2609, fols. 32-53 verso.

10. On the Aristotelian paradigm, see Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy , 86-89. See also Ian Maclean's commentary on the paradigm in early modern scholastic thought, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2-3.

11. In this formulation, I am improvising with Elizabeth Berg's notion of the "third woman"—the figure who plays fast and loose with the master's precepts in order to push beyond the dominant representations of her; see "The Third Woman," Diacritics 12, no. 2 (summer 1982): 14, 16.

12. Hélène Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, and Annie Leclerc, La Venue à l'écriture (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1977), 41.

13. Jeanette Beer has placed the respondent's version in the context of latemedieval Judaic exegesis: "Richard de Fournival's Anonymous Lady: The Character of the Response to the Bestiaire d'amour," Romance Philology 42, no. 3 (November 1989): 272. Mieke Bal argues that such a version calls into question "man's priority and domination." See Femmes imaginaires: L'Ancien testament au risque d'une narratologie critique (Paris: Nizet, 1986), 216.

14. For the canonical catologue of these arguments as they circulated in Latin and the vernacular in the high Middle Ages, see Paul Meyer, "Les Manuscrits français de Cambridge," Romania 15 (1886): 321.

15. Like Thomas Aquinas and numerous other thirteenth-century exegetes, the respondent glosses Aristotle's exposition on matter: Metaphysics , book 8. See Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle , 2:619-50.

16. By far the best-known medieval commentary on the creation of woman in the Aristotelian mode is that of Aquinas in Summa theologica , 1, q. 92 ("The Production of Women), 93 ("The End or Term of the Production of Man"), 99 ("Of the Condition of the Offspring as to the Body"), and 102 ("Of Man's Abode, Which is Paradise''). Summa theologica , 4:274-304, 4: 350-54, 4:364-72.

17. It is important to remember here that matter and essence are not synonymous in Aristotelian terms and hence even less so in the respondent's revisionist argumentation. As Diana Fuss rightly observes, debating the problem of matter, and notably matter as body, does not infer that matter has an essence. See Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 50-51.

18. Elizabeth Janeway, "On the Power of the Weak," Signs 1, no. 1 (autumn 1975): 103-9.

19. Nancy Freeman Regalado speculates on this point in " Vos Paroles ont mains et piés : Woman's Wary Voice in the Response au Bestiaire d'amors de Maître Richard de Fournival ." I am grateful to Prof. Regalado for sharing with me this unpublished paper presented at the Kentucky Romance Languages conference, 1986.

20. Roger Dragonetti argues that they "symbolisent les réactions sociales malveillantes." See his sketch of lauzengiers/mesdisants and their function in courtly discourse in La Technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), 272-78.

21. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2609, fols. 43 verso-53 verso. For details of this text in manuscript see Hermann, ed., Die westeuropäischen Handschriften , 2:62-66; Segre, Li Bestiaires d'amour , lxiii-lxiv.

22. Derrida, following Lévi-Strauss, meditates on what it means to lose a proper name and what it means to have all names socially obliterated. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 107-18.

23. It is worthwhile recalling here that the lure of a woman's reputation was the trigger mechanism for the master's Bestiaire . As the first respondent observes: "For there are so many people who have dealings with you and you with them that you first heard talk of me through hearsay. For this reason I listen gladly to the talk and I see readily those who know how to speak and behave well. That is the reason why, I believe, that you came here first to find out who I was, and whether anything about me might please you" (Car tant de gent ont a vous a faire et vous a eux. Que par oir dire aves aucun de moi oit parler por cou que ieu oi volentiers parler et voi volentiers ceaus qui sevent parlet et iestre. Et par cesti raison cuic iou que vous premiers venissies ca et savoir qui iou estoie ne se aucune coze qui en moi lust vous poroit neint plaire; fol. 41; Segre, 136).

24. This gesture repeats the qualifier running through the first Response : "je qui feme sui." It also recapitulates what the opening miniatures of the two Responses illustrate: together and apart, the woman respondent and master exist within the overarching H of HOM (Man).

25. In this sense, the second Response echoes tellingly with Denise Riley's aim of querying the "substantial realms of discursive historical formation." "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5.

26. See "Des Vilains ou des xxii manieires de vilains," ed. Edmond Faral, Romania 48 (1922): 243-64.

27. The phrase is Bernard Cerquiglini's: "Variantes d'auteur et variance de copiste," in La Naissance du texte , ed. Louis Hay (Paris: José Corti, 1989), 105.

28. Jeanette Beer exemplifies this critical search; see "Richard de Fournival's Anonymous Lady," 267-73.

29. Peter Dronke comments on the vexed historicity of Héloïse and Constance: Women Writers of the Middle Ages , 84-90, 140-43.

30. Behind the woman respondent, Cesare Segre discerns a "uomo di certa cultura religiosa, turbato dalla gioiosa mondanità del Bestiaire " (xxviii); Ernstpeter Ruhe concurs, putting the Bestiaire/Response in the context of elaborate epistolary games typical of high medieval clerics: "La Peur de la transgression: À propos du Livre d'Enanchet et du Bestiaire d'amour ," in Amour, mariage, et transgressions au tooyen âge , ed. Danielle Buschinger and André Crépin (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1984), 320-22.

31. Gerald A. Bond makes a similar point in "Composing Yourself: Ovid's Heroïdes, Baudri of Bourgueil, and the Problem of Persona," Medievalia 13 (1989 [for 1987]): 84.

32. Toril Moi, "Feminist, Female, Feminine," in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism , ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 120.

33. Gabrielle Spiegel's discussion of social logic is helpful here: "Sites of linguistic usage, as lived events, are essentially local in origin and therefore possess a determinate social logic of much greater density and particularity than can be extended from totalizing constructs like 'language' and 'society.'" "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," Speculum 65, no. 1 (January 1990): 77.

34. As Roger Chattier recommends, there is much to be gained by attending to "particularity"—to studying materials within precise, local, and specific contexts." See The Cuhure of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3; French edition, Les Usages de l'imprimé (XV ^e -XIX ^e siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 10.

35. For details of the manuscripts, see Segre, Li Bestiaire d'amour , xxxii-lxv, Huot, From Song to Book , 148-49, and Hermann, Die westeuropäischen Handschriften , 2:53-62.

36. This northern Francophone provenance is a function of our current understanding of the Response 's manuscript transmission. Ongoing codicological research may lead us in additional directions. By all accounts, the Bestiaire was copied and read in fourteenth-century Flanders, Britain, and Italy. This variegated reception history suggests that it fanned out rapidly over Europe. Its earliest copies, however, link it to the Parisian court and northern France. For the status quaestionis of Bestiaire manuscripts, see the appendix to Christopher Lucken's dissertation, "Les Portes de la mémoire."

37. Vienna 2609 includes the Medecines d'amour, Bestiaire d'amour , and Response au Bestiaire d'amour ; Vienna 2621 includes La Poissance d'amours , which I call, after the name given in the text, Li Consaus d'amours, Li Prison d'amour , and L'Art d'amour . See the discussion in chapter 1. See also Hermann, Die westeuropäischen Handschriften , 2:62-66. Hermann proposes a limited affiliation between the two codices; that is, between 2609 and the folios of 2621 containing Li Prison d'amours of Baudouin de Condé.

38. For the thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century versions, see Chronica noblissimorum ducum Lotharingiae et Brabantiae ac regum Francorum, auctore magistro Edmundo de Dynter , ed. J. Wauquelin (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1854-57) and Chroniques de Brabant et de Flandre , 4 vols., ed. Charles Piot, (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1879), vol. 4. Among modern historiographical accounts, see Henri Pirenne, Les Anciennes Démocraties des Pays-Bas , Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1910), 157-94, and for the analogous Flemish case, David M. Nicholas, Town and Countryside: Social, Economic and Political Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders (Bruges: de Tempel, 1971). Martha C. Howell makes a similar case in feminist terms in Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

39. "Francia quot vites, tot habet Brabantia lites." Quoted by Alphonse Wauters in Les Libertés communales: Essai sur l'origine et leurs premiers développements en Belgique, dans le nord de la France, et sur les bords du Rhin , (Brussels: A. N. Lebègue, 1878), 643.

40. Pirenne, Les Anciennes Démocraties , 95-135, esp. 126-29.

41. On the history of the Communes, it is interesting to juxtapose a nineteenth-century liberal assessment with a contemporary socialist one; see Alphonse Wauters, Les Libertés communales , and Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus: Jacques et Ciompi, les révolutions populaires en Europe aux XIV ^e et XV ^e siècles (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1970).

42. In histories of Brabantine, Flemish, and Artesian town life, as in literary surveys, it is commonplace to postulate the significant degree of literacy among the bourgeoisie, as well as their intervention in questions of education. See André Uyttebrouck, Le Gouvernement du duché de Brabant au bas moyen âge (1355-1430) , (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1975), 26-28; Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique , 7 vols. (Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1929-32), 1:350.

43. See Charles Stallaert and Philippe van der Haeghen, De L'Instruction publique au moyen âge du VIII ^e au XVI ^e siècle, Mémoires couronnés et mémoires des savants étrangers publiés par l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres, et des beaux-arts de Belgique 23 (Brussels: Académie royale, 1850); Alphonse Wauters, Les libertés communales , 619-20. For an analogous French example, see Gustave Carré, L'Enseignement secondaire à Troyes du moyen âge à la Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1888), 1-26. Henri Pirenne, L'Instruction des marchands au moyen âge," Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 1 (1929): 13-28, and Lynn Thorndike, "Elementary and Secondary Education in the Middle Ages," Speculum 15, no. 4 (October 1940): 400-408, cover similar ground. Much of the trenchwork in digging up source materials was undertaken in the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of the twofold interest in the Middle Ages and pedagogical reform.

44. Stallaert and van der Haeghen,"De L'Instruction publique," 100-102.

45. This is a process that Adam de la Halle's late thirteenth-century jeus had already attested to ironically. Consider the Jeu de la Feuillée , where Adam, the Artesian tradesman, attempts to cast off his business life for the life of a cleric, only to fail miserably:

Seigneur, savés pour coi j'ai men abit cangiét?
J'ai esté avoec feme, or revois au clergiét. . . .
Or ne pourront pas dire aucun ke j'ai antés
Ke d'aler a Paris soie nient vantés. . . .
Par Dieu! sire, je n'irai hui.
(lines 1 2, 5-6,958)

Lords, do you know why I've changed my habit? I was with a woman, now I'm returning to the clergy. Those whom I've frequented will not be able to say that I have only bragged about going to Paris. . . . My God, sir, I won't be going today.

46. Joan Ferrante's discussion illustrates this tendency well: "The Education of Women in the Middle Ages," 12. See also James Westfall Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages , University of California Publications in Education, vol. 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), and Léopold Delisle, "Études historiques: De l'instruction littéraire de la noblesse française au moyen âge," Le Correspondant 36 (1855): 444-50.

47. See Pirenne, Les Anciennes Démocraties , 154-55.

48. Paul Rousselot is one of the very few who acknowledges the discrepancy; see Histoire de l'éducation des femmes en France , 1883; rpt., Research and Source Works Series, History of Education, vol. 8 (New York: Burr Franklin, 1971), 44-98. David M. Nicholas acknowledges the likely parity between schooling for boys and girls in The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 127-29. See also Erika Vitz's comments to this effect: Women in the Medieval Town , trans. Sheila Marhie (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), 71-72, 97-98. In this respect the figure of Catherine of Alexandria in a saint's life from thirteenth-century Picardy is telling. She is represented as a highly literate woman, impeccably schooled and well able to dispute with the kingdora's best orators.

Ainc ne fu feme mix lettree
Ne des .vii. ars mix escolee. . . .
Pour une femme a disputer
A fait l'empereres mander ...
.L. maistres orateurs
(lines 73-74, 307-10)

Never was a woman more literate, or as well schooled in the seven arts. . . . The emperor commanded such a woman to dispute with fifty master orators.

" De Sainte Katherine": An Anonymous Picard Version of the Life of St. Catherine of Alexandria , ed. William McBain (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1987). This portrait of the woman disputant seems to suggest contemporaneous pedagogical opportunities for women in this region.

49. Philippe de Navarre's recommendation went as follows: "A fame ne doit on apanre letres ne escrire, se ce n'est especiaument pot estre nonnain; car par life et escrire de fame sont maint real avenu" (One should instruct women neither in writing nor reading, unless it is especially for nuns; for women's reading and writing come to a bad end). See Les Quatre Ages de l'homme: Traité moral de Philippe de Navarre , ed. Marcel de Fréville (Paris: FirminDidot, 1888), 16.

50. See extracts of a sixteenth-century chronicle quoted by Myriam Greilshammer in L'Envers du tableau: Mariage et maternité en Flandre médiévale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 13.

51. Charles Jourdain brought this remarkable case to light; L'Education des femmes au moyen âge , 10. See Maroie's will, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection de Flandre, Tournai, no. 8.

52. See Derville, "L'Alphabétisation du peuple," 765.

53. See Philippe Philibert Pompée, Rapport historique sur les écoles primaires de la ville de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839), 24-25. The proceedings are reproduced on 156-61.

54. For a review of beguine culture in northern Europe, see Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (1939), rpt. in Ausgewählte Aufsätze , 3 vols., vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1976), Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture, with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 365-87, Walter Simons, "The Beguines in the Southern Low Countries: A Reassessment," Bulletin de l'Institut Historique Belge de Rome 59 (1989): 63-105, and Carol Neel, "The Origins of the Beguines," Signs 14, no. 2 (winter 1989): 321-41. Alphonse Wauters attests to the importance of beguinages in the Brabant, Le Duc Jean I ^er et le Brabant sous le règne de ce prince (1267-1294), in Mémoires couronnés et autres mémoires publiés par l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres, et des beaux-arts de Belgique 13 (Brussels: Académie royale, 1862): 378-79, 424, 432; Bernard Delmaire explores the communities in the Franco-Flemish arena we are considering: "Les Béguines dans le nord de la France au premier siècle de leur histoire (vers 1230-1350),'' in Les Religieuses en France au XII ^e siècle, ed. Michel Parisse (Nancy: Presses Universitaires, 1985), 121-62. Jean-Claude Schmitt charts the analogous case of German communities in Mort d'une hérésie: L'Église et les clercs face aux béguines et aux beghards du Rhin supérieur du XIV ^e au XV ^e siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1978).

55. Caroline Walker Bynum makes the point that thirteenth-century beguines came from the "new bourgeoisie" and other townspeople: Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 18.

56. "La Règle des fins amans: Eine Begininregel aus dem Ende des XIII. Jahrhunderts," ed. Karl Christ, in Philologische Studien aus dem Romanische- Germanischen Kulturkreise , ed. B. Schädel and W. Mulert (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1927), 192-213.

57. As Brian Stock has pointed out, contexts are less functionally supportive of a text than they are interactive with it in both reinforcing and disruptive ways: see Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 34-35.

58. The entire passage from which this comes is well worth quoting: "Et noumeement li hom qui saime se doit garder de tencier a nului. Car bien se wart quiconques tence a sen parel si est fourconsellies. Et qui tence a plus haut de lui si est foursenerie. Et qui tence a plus bas de lui si est une vuites. Et dautre part sil tence a un sage home il ne puet avoir nul droit. Car nous savons bien ke nus sages ne desiert com tence a lui. Et dautre part qui tence a fol ne a sage si resamble celui qui se combat encontre son ombre. cest a dire a celui qui nest mie" (And truly the man with self-respect must keep from disputing with everyone. For the one well guarded knows that whosoever disputes with peers is badly advised. And who disputes with superiors is crafty. And who disputes with subordinates is a base person. And on the other hand, who disputes with a wise man has no right. For we well know that no wise person deserves to be disputed with. Furthermore, he who disputes with the fool as with the wise man resembles the one who fights with his shadow, that is to say, with somebody who doesn't exist at all; Vienna 2609, fol. 49). Interestingly enough, this proverbial expression, se combattre encontre son ombre , crops up repeatedly in the Querelle des femmes . On this point, see Geneviève Hasenohr, "La Locution verbale figurée dans l'oeuvre de Jean LeFèvre," Le Moyen Français 14-15 (1984): 247.

1. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny , 4.

2. Jean LeFèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de leesce , vol. 2.

3. I am referring here to works such as Boccaccio's De claribus mulieribus (1350s), Martin LeFranc's Champion des dames (1450s), Jean Marot's Vray-Disante advocate des dames (1480s), and even Henri Corneille Agrippa's Traité de l'excellence de la femme (1509). As Marc Angenot has argued, all these texts can be read as one discursive register with a single ideological function. See his Les Champions des femmes: Examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes 1400-1800 (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Québec, 1977), 159-61.

4. Geneviève Hasenohr-Esnos surveys the principle works in LeFèvre's translating career, beginning with the Lamentations and including the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula and the Distiques Caton , Cato's proverbial wisdom. See the introduction to her edition of Le Respit de la mort de Jehan LeFèvre (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1969), xviii-lv.

5. Hasenohr-Esnos cites three such cases in Le Respit de la mort , xiii-xiv: these are Paris, Archives Nationales, X ^ic 14, no. 62 (LeFèvre defending Marie de Basentin, dame de Flary, in 1364), X ^ic 19B, no. 173 (Jeanne de Fay in 1368), and X ^ic 24A, no.130 (Marie Aucoch in 1372).

6. Ironically, a critic such as Italo Siciliano finds the move to recant even more unacceptable than the rehearsal of misogynistic learning. "LeFèvre, aterré par le remords d'avoir traduit les Lamentationes du clerc bigame, crut effacer ce crime par un crime bien plus déplorable en composant le "Rebours de Matheolus." François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du moyen âge (Paris: Armand Colin, 1934), 363-64.

7. I give here only a sampling of its occurrences in the Leesce : lines 281-82, 328-29, 801-2, 893-94, 2139-40, 2231-32, 3193-94, 3933-34. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet remarks the homology fame ( woman ), fama ( fame ) in medieval writing and underscores the fact that the pronunciation of the two terms, and often their spelling, was identical. La Couleur de la mélancholie: La Fréquentation des livres au XIV ^e siècle 1300-1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 142.

8. Stephen Heath epitomizes this critical unease when he asks: "If I take it [feminism] up into me, into my life, calling into question the assumptions of the position of myself . . . how do I develop a reflection on it, how do I think and talk and write about— with —feminism without falling back into the male argument, without producing another version of the object feminism up for grabs, 'the stakes'?" "Male Feminism," in Men in Feminism , ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), 2.

9. Toril Moi, "Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge," 195.

10. "Honorable ladies, if, on the other hand, it seems to you that I am telling stories, don't take me for a liar, but take it up with the authors who have written down in their books the words that I have spoken and those which I will speak; if wise men who composed books long ago did not lie, I will not lie in any manner . . . I have done nothing but recite" (D'autre part, dames honorables, s'il vos samble que je di fables, por manteür ne re'an tenez, mes aus aucteurs vos an prenez qui an leur livres ont escrites les paroles que g'en ai dites, et ceus avec que g'en dirai; ne ja de riens n'an mentirai, se li preudome n'en mentirent qui les anciens livres firent . . . je n'i faz riens fors reciter). Roman de la rose , lines 15185-94, 15204.

11. "' Litis preterire noli, Post inimicias ': Se gens tancent, ne le repelles mie Car la tancon est de paix ennemie Il appartient au mauvais de mesdire Et ceulz mentent qui sont meuz en yre." See J. Ulrich, ed., "Die Übersetzung der Distichen des Pseudo-Cato von Jean de Paris," Romanische Forschungen 15 (1904): 86-87. LeFèvre cites another similar proverb in the Leesce : "Lest the horror of strife/litigation resound, a wild tongue should be restrained" (linguam refrenans temperet Ne litis horror insonet; lines 1579-80).

12. This abdication is highly ironic since the subject he refrains from translating, elderly women, has already been treated at great and scurrilous length in his translation of the Ovidian De vetula : Jean LeFèvre, La Vieille ou les derniers amours d'Ovide: Poème français du XIV ^e siè cle traduit du latin de Richard de Fournival par lean LeFèvre , ed. Hippolyte Cocheris (Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1861), book 2, lines 2829-3042.

13. While this pattern illustrates Antoine Compagnon's notion of quotation as the defining labor of a text, it also is crucial to see it as a working out of the writer's past textual habits: La Seconde Main: Ou, le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 36.

14. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinki makes the case that in LeFèvre's argument the term "riote" applies equally powerfully to the discourse of men. I am grateful to her for sharing with me an early version of her essay "Jean LeFèvre's Livre de Leesce : Praise or Blame of Women?" Speculum 69, no. 3 (July 1994): 705-25.

15. In this sense, LeFèvre makes R. Howard Bloch's contention that "you are not only wrong, you also contradict yourself." Medieval Misogyny , 4.

16. Karen Pratt has argued similarly that the Leesce puts logic in the service of exploding the spurious analogies elaborated by the Lamentations . Many thanks for sharing with me her paper "Analogy or Logic, Authority or Experience? Rhetorical and Dialectical Strategies for and against Women."

17. In this, the Leesce corresponds well to Foucault's own analysis of power and desire. See Power/Knowledge , 59.

18. Such an analysis dovetails with commentaries in contemporaneous pastoral manuals extending all the way back to Gregory the Great's analysis that diagnose mesdire in terms of anger. See Casagrande and Vecchio, Les Péchés de la langue , 29, 224-45.

19. This is, of course, one of the main tenets of Luce Irigaray's critique of patriarchal reasoning: "route théorie du 'sujet' aura toujours été appropriée au 'masculin.'" See Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 165.

20. The story of castration is a crucial but rare incident in medieval versions of Ovid's life; see Fausto Ghisalberti, "Medieval Biographies of Ovid," Journal of the Warburg and Courthauld Institutes 9 (1946): 32.

21. LeFèvre, La Vieille , book 2, 2087-2556. LeFèvre's translation of this biographical version of the De vetula never names Ovid's castration outright, but refers to it obliquely as sa mutacioun (7). It does expound at length on the biology and social status of the castrato . In an Aristotelian scientific language typical of the didactic treatises considered in chapter 1, it stigmatizes him as sexually indeterminate. In other words, it wields the conventional criteria that identify him as a natural abomination. On this figure, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, "L'Hybride," Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 7 (1973): 49-61. Given the incident of Ovid's own castration, LeFèvre's translation too bears all the traces of a poetics of self-blame.

22. Much ink has been spilled on the question of castration in medieval texts. Leupin calls it "the originary loss that is the primordial instance of metaphor." Barbarolexis , 95. R. Howard Bloch sees it linked paradoxically to the problems and potencies of language; Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 139-40. My interest here is to point out the way this myth about fear of women is deployed to excuse, if not to legitimate, a slanderous writing about them.

23. See John Freccero's discussion of the predominant Augustinian model of conversion; Dante: The Poetics of Conversion , ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4-5.

24. Stewart goes on to make the case that the conversions posed, of the plagiarist or the forger, are "re-forms not of writing, but of authorial subjectivity." Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 23.

25. "To everything he [Matheolus] can say about it, I respond without grief and without anger, thanks to the counsel of Leesce" (A tout quanqu'il en pourra dire Je respon sans dueil et sans ire, tout par le conseil de Leesce; lines 2319-21).

26. In fact, "Guillaume"'s sentence in the Jugement dou Roy de Navarre for having spoken badly of women is nothing less than to write "un lay . . . sans tenson," "une chanson," and "une balade'' (lines 4182-83, 4184, 4189).

27. It is interesting to note that this formulation also displays the engin that is LeFèvre's typical signature: forgier . In other words, the site of the narrator's conversion is also the place where the author chooses to sign his own name. On this signature, see Hasenohr-Esnos, Le Respit de la mort , xv-xvi.

28. Christine considers the theory of female matter and of woman's creation in paradise in Livre de la Cité des dames . See Christine de Pizan, "The Livre de la Cité des dames of Christine de Pizan: A Critical Edition," 2 vols., ed. Maureen Lois Cheney Curnow (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1975), 1:651-53 (part 1, chap. 9). Like LeFèvre, she includes in her account of exemplary women: Semiramis (1:677-81; chap. 15), Panthisilea (1:694-701; chap. 19), Lambethe (1:682-83; chap. 16), Camilla (1:716-17; chap. 24), Carmen (1:747-49; chaps. 37-38), Medea (1:732-34; chap. 31), Sappho (1:728-30; chap. 30), Minerva (1:739-43; chap 34), the Sibyls (2:786-94; part 2, chaps. 1-3), and Cassandra (2:798-99; chap. 5).

29. I consider Martin LeFranc's work the paradigm (if not parody) of the sycophantic response because it claims to gather all the arguments in support of women circulating in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Across five books, it narrates allegorically an academic disputation on women. It pits Malebouche (a clerc/magister figure) against a knightly Champion , creating a clerc/chevalier debate in reverse. It summarizes arguments on the composition of the female body (book 2), includes a critique of Jean de Meun's Rose (book 3) and a catalogue of virtuous women (book 4), and concludes with the crowning of the Champion as the victor (book 5). So encyclopedic is this tract that it was rarely read in full; such is the claim of the "Complainte du livre du Champion des Dames de maistre Martin LeFranc," ed. Gaston Paris, Romania 16 (1887): 383-437. For very much the same reasons, one suspects, the same could be said today. The text remains unedited in its entirety. As Simone de Beauvoir suggested, the Champion is difficult to take in. Le Deuxième Sexe , 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 1:171. Only the first two books are available in Le Champion des Dames , ed. Piaget.

30. For other instances of this sexual definition of woman, see lines 3530-32, 3660, 3736-40, 3837-39, 3902-5.

31. Riley, " Am I That Name ?" 10-13.

32. Jill Mann makes a similar point when she states: "Jehan LeFèvre's two works confirm the view that writing against women and then apologising for it is as often as not just a convenient way of manufacturing a literary subject; neither activity is evidence of a seriously held view of women." Apologies to Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25.

33. On this formula as it was cited by numerous medieval commentators, see the exemplary discussion of the thirteenth-century canonist Hostiensis, de iniurias et damno dato , book 5, in his Summa aurea . See also R. H. Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 , Publications of the Selden Society, 101 (London: The Selden Society, 1985), xix. For a discussion of the discursive problem posed by defamation, see Ann Righey, "Fame and Defamation: Toward a Socio-pragmatics," Semiotica 99, no 1-2 (1994): 53-65.

34. Corpus iuris canonici , 2 vols., ed. A. Richter and A. Friedburg, (1879; Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1959), 1: C. 5, q. 1, c. 1. There is a telling echo here between this punishment for defamation and LeFèvre's desire to be beaten (line 1559).

35. The catchphrase of this understanding was "reputation is personal dignity" (fama autem dignitas est). On this understanding, see Francesco Migliorino, Fama e Infamia: Problemi della società medievale nel pensiero giuridico nei secoli XII e XIII (Catania: Giannotta, 1985), 75.

36. "And whosoever says or does anything in order to diminish the reputation of another is considered to have done injury" (et quicumque causa minuendae opinionis alicuius aliquid fecerit vel dixerit; iniuriam tenetur). "In what way does injury happen: in three ways, by a thing, by words, and by letters [texts]" (Quot modis fiat iniuria. Trib. re, verbis, et litteris). Hostiensis, Summa aurea , 1717.

37. One telling index of this concern is the considerable space given the subject in contemporaneous florilegia . See, for instance, the dozens of citations concerning fama in the popular anthology circulating in fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century France, Thomas Hibernicus's Manipulus florum . See a later incunabulum version, (Piacenza: Jacobus de Tyela, 1483), fols. 64-64 verso. Among the authorities cited, Augustine is preeminent. See, for instance, his discussion of different Roman and Greek attitudes toward fama in literary or theatrical contexts: "For they [the Greeks] saw that their gods approved and enjoyed scurrilous language in plays, not only of men, but of the gods themselves, whether the infamous actions imputed to them were the fictions of poets or were their own iniquities commemorated and acted in the theaters" (cum viderent dis suis accepta et grata esse obprobria non tantum hominum, verum et ipsorum deorum in scaenicis fabulis, sive a poetis essent ilia conficta, sive flagitia eorum vera commemorarentur et agerentur in theatris.) Augustine, City of God , book 2, chap. 9. Compare this with his discussion of the search for a good reputation (book 5, chap. 19) Significantly enough, this is a search that Augustine links explicitly with the passion for domination ( cupiditas dominationis ).

38. Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler propose LeFèvre as a source for Christine's work: Poems of Cupid, God of Love: Christine de Pizan's "Epistre au dieu d'amours" and "Dit de la rose," Thomas Hoccleve's "The Letter of Cupid" (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 114-15. Rather than concern ourselves with the vexed problem of the origins of ideas, I would prefer to direct critical attention to the different ways LeFèvre and Christine capitalized on similar conceptions.

1. L'Epistre , in Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan , 3 vols., ed. Maurice Roy (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1886-96), 2:25.

2. Le Débat sur le roman de la rose , ed. Hicks. All references will be to this edition; all translations are mine. A complete English translation can be found in Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures no. 199 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

3. See Marc Angenot's remarks on the structure of polemic: La Parole pamphlétaire: Contribution à la typologie des discours modernes (Paris: Payot, 1982), 38-39.

4. Kevin Brownlee distinguishes carefully between Christine's participation in the Querelle as a whole and her polemical transformation of it into a book. "Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Romance of the Rose," Romanic Review 79, no. 1 (1988): 213-14. By "polemics" I mean to refer to both, insofar as one could not exist without the other.

5. The language of disputation runs straight through the letters of Christine and her various interlocutors, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier, and Pierre Col (Hicks, 7, 30). In modern discussions, this language has been effectively replaced by that of querelle (quarrel) or debate. For reasons of convenience, I adopt this more familiar term while reminding my readers that the Querelle du Roman de la rose fits into the categories of disputational forms I am investigating.

6. Jean-Claude Carron describes this circle aptly: "Nous ne sortons pas du champs de la parole . . . médisance, diffamation, injure ou louange: nom, renom, honneur, ou diffamation; dire, médire, dédire, interdire ou bénir." "Les Noms de l'honneur féminin à la Renaissance: Le nom tu et le non dit," Poétique 67 (September 1986): 273.

7. "Ce sont les hommes qui dénoncent l'honorabilité des rilles et qui, par l'injure sexuelle, les condamnent à être 'diffamées.'" Gauvard, " De Grace especial ," 1: 320.

8. See City of God book 2, chap. 9. For a discussion of the ways this Roman model was understood by medieval commentators, see Migliorino, Fama e Infamia , 148-49. On the model itself, see Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 191-93. Paul Veyne offers a good analysis of the public regulation of defamation in "Le Folklore à Rome et les droits de la conscience publique sur la conduite individuelle," Latomus 42, no. 1 (January-March 1983): 3-30. I am grateful to Philippe Roussin for bringing this essay to my attention.

9. Fausto Ghisalberti, "Medieval Biographies of Ovid," 32.

10. In the late-medieval intellectual milieu of the Querelle , Cicero emerges alongside Aristotle as a key figure. In Étienne Gilson's description, "Dans les oeuvres de type scholastique, le nom propre de l'auteur le plus frequémment cité est celui d'Aristote; c'est encore l' aetas aristoteliana ; dans celles du type que nous nommerons "humaniste," le nom qui revient sans cesse est celui de Cicéron: c'est déjà l' aetas ciceroniana ." "Le Message de l'humanisme," in Culture et politique en France à l'époque de l'humanisme et de la Renaissance , ed. Franco Simone (Turin: Accademia delle Scienze, 1974), 4.

11. Cicero: "De re publica," "De legibus ," trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 240-41; Cicero's fourth book was not known in the Middle Ages, although this particular passage was well known through Augustine's citation and commentary on it in the City of God , book 2, chap. 9. I quote it because it gets to the heart of the legal problem posed by defamatory poetry as medieval respondents would reckon with it. It is interesting to note that another translator renders the passage "si quis occentavisset sive carmen condidisset, quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri" explicitly in terms of defamation: "the offense of making a pasquinade or composing a song which was defamatory or libelous." Cicero: On the Commonwealth , trans. George Holland Sabine and Stanley Barney Smith (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1960), 240.

12. The whole passage reads: "But you say 'I do not condemn the author in all parts of the said book . . .' as if you wanted to say that you condemn him in what you take from it [the book], and make yourself judge after you have spoken by opinion and outrageous presumption" (Mais, fais tu, 'je ne condampne pas l'aucteur en toutes pars du dit livre . . .'; comme se tu voulsisses dire que tu le condampnes en ce en quoy tu le reprens, et te fais juge, aprés ce que tu as parlé par oppinion ou presumpcion oultrageuse; Hicks, 99-100).

13. "Therefore they act up, as Lactantius said, and they cut in so as not to hear: 'They close their eyes lest they would see the light that we bring,' observing the customs of the Jews against Our Savior, according to which enemies are made judges" (Obstrepunt igitur, ut air Lactantius, et intercidunt ne audiunt: 'oculos suos opprimunt ne lumen videant quod offerimus,' morem Judeorum adversus Salvatorum Nostrum observantes, penes quem inimici facti sunt judices"; Hicks, 34). This startling comparison between Christine and the Jews as heretics shows one powerful technique of stigmatizing her work. Nadia Margolis reviews Christine's very different characterization of the Jews in "Christine de Pizan and the Jews: Political and Poetic Implications," in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1992), 53-73.

14. Grover Carr Furr III, "The Quarrel of the Roman de la Rose and Fourteenth-Century Humanism" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979), 227. Furr puts forward the case for the inevitable professional defensiveness of the French humanists endeavoring to carve out a space for themselves in the legal and notorial circles of the Parisian court. "Their solidarity," he writes, "is reflected in a desire for reconciliation even in serious disputes, an attempt to keep all disagreements within the group" (167). That Col and Montreuil escalated the Querelle de la Rose offers another sign of their refusal to consider Christine's entry into their circle.

15. On this model, see Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes , 2 vols. (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 2:143-51. See also Georges Dumézil's analysis of the mythology undergirding the Roman censor in Servius et la fortune: Essai sur la fonction sociale de louange et de blâme et sur les éléments indo-européens du cens romain (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 173-76.

16. The censor's power derived, of course, from Roman law, which according to medieval commentators represented "the holiest civil wisdom" ( res sanctissima civilis sapientia ). On this formula in medieval commentary, see Pierre Legendre, L'Amour du censeur: Essai sur l'ordre dogmatique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 103.

17. Benveniste reminds us that "il est une notion complémentaire de censor , qui s'y trouve constamment associée dans les emplois latins, et que notre définition implique: c'est celle d'autorité'; censeo est très souvent employé avec auctor et auctoritas . . . . On qualifie de auctor , dans tous les domaines, celui qui 'promeut,' qui prend une initiative, qui est le premier à produire une activité, celui qui fonde, celui qui garantit, et finalement 'l'auteur.'" Le Vocabulaire , 148, 150.

18. I am referring here to the internecine political rivalries dividing Paris between the Armagnacs, the Burgundians, and the royal faction. On the horizon as well, there is the specter of the papal schism and the prospect of an English occupation. In this climate, a polemic like the Querelle de la Rose flourishes particularly well.

19. Daniel Poirion's view is emblematic here; see "Les Mots et les choses selon Jean de Meun," L'Information littéraire 26 (January-February 1974): 9.

20. The passage continues: "And shame comes about and is visible in a similar way as does fear when a person is in danger. For those who feel shame blush, and those who feel fearful of death go pale" (Et vercunde se parfait and se monstre semblablement comme fait la paour que l'en a en perilz. Car ceulz qui ont vercunde rougissent, et ceulz qui ont paour de mort palissent). Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le Livre de Ethiques d'Aristote , ed. Alfred Douglas Menut (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1940), 273. The terms honte and vercunde have slightly different significances, but in this context they both refer to that innate feeling of modesty.

21. In Sandra Lee Bartky's analysis of shame, it functions as the mark of women's "pervasive affective attunement to the social environment." While this is often interpreted as the sign of women's subordination in that environment, it can also signal their critical understanding of the conventions ruling it: Femininity and Domination , 85.

22. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune par Christine de Pisan , 4 vols., ed. Suzanne Solente (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1959), 2: 38. It is striking to notice that the Mutacion includes many such reflections on the problem of defamation; see, for instance, lines 5301-52, 5388-91, 5770-5802, 6975-88.

23. "This said work could better be called idleness than a useful work in my judgment" (celle dicte euvre, qui mieulx puet estre appellee droicte oysiveté que oevre utile, à mon jugement; Hicks, 12).

24. Pierre-Yves Badel exhaustively reviews the indebtedness of Jean de Montreuil and the Col brothers to humanist figures such as Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Coluccio Salutati. See " Le Roman de la rose" au XIV ^e siècle: Étude de la réception de l'oeuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 420-26. See also A. Coville, Gontier et Pierre Col et l'humanisme en France au temps de Charles VI (Paris: Droz, 1934), 147.

25. On this debate, see Marc Fumaroli, L'Age de l'éeloquence: Rhétorique et "res litteraria" de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980). Fumaroli emphasizes how the argument for the civic responsibility of eloquence is consistently advanced as an imitatio ciceroniana (110-13).

26. This trope also represents Christine's parting shot about the humanists' belief in the uplifting, transformative power of poetry. The sublime, in this case, is a tradition of defamatory feminine representation made over falsely.

27. "Mais accusacions, quereles, et complaintes sont faites seulement ou mesmement et principalement en amistie qui est pour utilite. Et c'est chose raysonnable." Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le Livre de Ethiques , 446. While Jean de Montreuil seems to share much the same view when he claims that truth is born of a dispute, "like gold from a furnace" (Hicks, 30), as we have seen, Christine sees this gold as little more than dung.

28. This conjunction is underscored by the dates Christine incorporates in the two works: 2 October 1402 for the Querelle (Hicks, 150) and 5 October 1402 (Christine de Pizan, Le Livre du chemin de long estude , ed. Robert Püschel [Berlin: Damköhler, 1881], 8). Charity Cannon Willard maintains that the Chemin was begun immediately after Christine finished her most vehement rebuttal of Col: Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Her Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984), 105-6. All references to the Chemin de long estude will be to Robert Püschel's edition. Andrea Tarnowski's edition with Lettres gothiques is forthcoming.

29. Several critics have commented on this shift. Joël Blanchard, for instance, considers the Querelle as "un détournement d'intérêt": "Compilation et légitimation au XV ^e siècle," Poétique 74 (April 1988): 141. And he recognizes the way Christine's Mutacion de Fortune, Chemin de long estude , and Lavision-Christine represent a new intellectual and poetic departure: "Christine de Pizan: Les raisons de l'histoire," Le Moyen Age 92, no. 3-4 (1986): 417. Nadia Margolis comments on the turning point of moral concerns: "Christine de Pizan: The Poetess as Historian," Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 3 (July-September 1986): 266. So too does Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan , 73, 100. Our challenge lies in interpreting the affinities between the Querelle and Christine's subsequent efforts that make such a shift possible.

30. Glynis M. Cropp surveys the extent of their affinities in "Boèce et Christine de Pizan," Le Moyen Age 87, no. 3-4 (1981): 387-418.

31. Christine de Pizan, Lavision-Christine: Introduction and Text , ed. Sister Mary Louis Towner (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1932), 157, lines 19-22. It is clear from the subsequent passages the extent to which Christine identifies with the unjustly defamed Boethius: "Wasn't it said of me all across town that I was in love . . . for so it is that such reputations become common knowledge, and often erroneously, through the great contact and commerce between people together, and by conjecture and what seems true" (ne rut il pas dit de moy par toute la ville que ie amoye par amours . . . car comme telz renommees communement vienent et souvent a tort par grant accointance et frequentacion les personnes ensemble et par coniectures et couleurs voit semblables; lines 22-27). Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac are currently preparing a new edition of Lavision-Christine .

32. The phrase is Bernard McGinn's: " Teste David cum Sibylla : The Significance of the Sibylline Tradition in the Middle Ages," in Women of the Medieval World: Essays in Honor of John Hine Mundy , ed. Julius Kirshner and Suzanne E Wemple (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 17. See also Josiane Haffen, Contribution à l'éude de la Sibylle médiévale (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1984), 13-20, and Maureen Quilligan's discussion of the Sibylline example in other works of Christine, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's " Cité des Dames " (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 105.

33. "I am known by my voice alone; my voice the Fates will leave me" (Voce tamen noscar; vocemque mihi rata relinquent; Ovid, Metamorphoses , 2 vols., trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: Heinemann, 1916), 2:14, 153).

34. On Christihe's double bind of indebtedness and rivalry with Dante, see Kevin Brownlee, Discourses of the Self: Autobiography and Literary Models in Christine de Pizan , forthcoming.

35. Un autre chemin plus perfaict
Y a, qui des mains Dieu fu fait. . . .
Qu'il maine cellui qui le passe
Si hault qu'il voit Dieu face a face.
C'est la Voye de Paradis.
Mutacion de Fortune , lines 3243-44, 3251-52, 3273

There is another more perfect way, made by the hands of God . . . that leads the one who takes it so high that he sees God face to face. It is the route to Paradise.

36. John Freccero puts it best when he observes: "By attempting to represent poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of the Inferno and the Purgatorio ) and has remained the ultimate aspiration of poets ever since." Dante , 209-10.

37. This movement away from the public space of the commonwealth and then back toward its center is analogous to the movement in the Querelle . Whereas Christine's defamer begins from a negative position outside and makes her way to the central position of the censor in the polis, in the Chemin she reaches the positive position outside, Paradise, and makes her way back to the polls. This pattern also resembles the movement in Boethius's Consolatio between the ethereal reaches of theoretical philosophy and the ground level of practical philosophy. Boethius, "Tractates," "De consolatione philosophiae ," ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973), I, i, 19-22.

38. Et les vrayes hystoires anciennes de la Bible,
qui ne puet mençonge estre,
Nous racontent qu'en Paradis terrestre
Fu formée femme premierement
Non pas l'omme.
L'Epistre au dieu d'amours , lines 604-8

39. It is interesting to note that Oresme's treatise, Le Livre de divinacions , critiques this notion of judicial astrology on the grounds that it risks harming the body politic: "Such a thing is more dangerous for persons of this estate, such as princes and lords, to whom belong public governance" (telle chose est plus perilleuse a personnes d'estat comme sont princes et seigneurs auxquels appartient le gouvernement publique). G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers: A Study of His Livre de Divinacions , (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 50.

40. See Charity Cannon Willard, "Christine de Pizan: The Astrologer's Daughter," in Mélanges à la mémoire de Franco Simone: France et Italie dans Ia culture européenne (Geneva: Slatkine, 1980), 95-111.

41. What counts is "ce passage de qualification au cours duquel le poète se constitue comme sujet disant la vérité en évoquant le plus souvent l'autorité qu'il detient et qui lui confère une pré-eminence pour parler." Joël Blanchard, "L'Entrée du poète dans le champ politique au XV e siècle," Annales E.S.C. 41, no. 1 (January-February 1986): 47-48. Here Blanchard is evidently drawing on a Foucauldian notion of le franc-parler : the truth-speaking claim.

42. Michèle LeDoeuff, "Women, Reason, Etc.," Differences 2, no. 3 (fall 1990): 6. In light of LeDoeuff's point that women involved in learning pay a price, it is interesting to consider Christine's becoming a man in the Mutacion de Fortune (lines 149-53). That the representation of her own gender oscillates in her writing at just the time when Christine is beginning to wrestle with philosophical discourse suggests how difficult a task it is.

43. On this problem see Susan Groag Bell, "Christine de Pizan: Humanism and the Problem of a Studious Woman," Feminist Studies 3, no. 3-4 (1976): 174, and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 441.

44. In this respect, Christine's texts confront the Aristotelian conundrum as Elizabeth Spelman describes it: "Without their work, the polis could not exist, but they [women] do not participate in the activities of the polis." Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 38.

45. The florilegium model is, of course, the epitome of the clerical method of compilation that Joël Blanchard describes, in Christine's hands, as "à la lois une appropriation et un affrontement. C'est interventionniste." "Compilation et légitimation au XV ^e siècle," 153.

46. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet describes this pleasure in learning in another way as "ce rapport boulimique, anthropophagique au savoir." "L'Etrangère," Revue des langues romanes 92, no. 2 (1988): 243. See also her reflections on this pleasure in La Couleur de la mélancholie , 67, 73-80.

47. "Si vero sine sapientia habes, docet te Tullius talem eloquentiam civitatibus ac rebus publicis esse pernitiosam." I am quoting here the version of Nicolas de Clamanges, an Avignon humanist, considered by many, including the Parisians, to be the exemplary humanist. Cicero, Opera omnia , ed. Johannes Lydius (Lugdini Butavorum, 1613), 356.

48. The text is found on fols. 1-27. This passage is quoted and mistranscribed by Mathilde Laigle, Le Livre des trois vertus de Christine de Pisan et son milieu historique et littéraire (Paris: H. Champion, 1912), 39.

49. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it: "Il n'est pas d'agent social qui ne prétende, dans la mesure de ses tooyens, à ce pouvoir de nommer et de faire le monde en le nommant: ragors, calomnies, médisances, insultes, éloges, accusations, critiques, polémiques, louanges ne sont que la petite monnaie quotidienne des acres solennels et collectifs de nomination, célébrations ou condemnations, qui incombent aux autorités universellement reconnues." Ce que parler veut dire , 99.

1. This conception of harm ( laesio ) inflicted by words was divided into two subcategories: slander, the unjust revelation of a hidden charge ( detractio est revelatio injusta criminis occulti ) and calumny, the revelation of a false accusation ( calumnia est revelatio criminis falsi ). For a résumé of these medieval canon legal formulations, see Dictionnaire de droit canonique , 7 vols., ed. R. Naz (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1949), s.v. diffamation , and Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 , xvi-xxvi.

2. Corpus iuris civilis: Codex Iustinianus , book 9, xxxvi; 2:387. The translation that follows is taken from The Civil Law , 15:61-62.

3. Justinian's article appears verbatim in Gratian's Decretum , C. 5, q. 1, c. 3; Corpus iuris canonici , 1:545. The rubrics for the causae read: "He who neglects to pronounce good on the reputation of another in writing shall be beaten" ([F]lagelletur qui scripta in alterius famam probate neglexerit) and "Those who place defamatory material in a church shall be anathematized" (Anathematizentur qui famosos libellos in ecclesia ponunt).

4. For Chartier's texts, as well as the first letters in the Querelle, see The Poetical Works of Alain Chattier , ed. James C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 328-78. References are to this edition; all translations are mine.

5. See Piaget, " La Belle Dame sans merci et ses imitations," Romania 30 (1901): 28-35.

6. Piaget's reaction is paradigmatic: "Faut-il prendre au sérieux cette querelle ridicule? Les courtisanes ont-elles réellement monté une cabale contre le secréaire du roi?" " La Belle Dame sans merci et ses imitations," 35.

7. Pierre Champion inaugurated this critical tack by naming the three Belle Dame respondents as Jeanne Louvet (Mme de Bothéon), Marie Louvet (Mme de Vaubonnais) and Catherine de l'Isle-Bouchard; see his Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle , 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1923), 1: 71.

8. One telling example involves the account of several damoiselles attending Isabeau of Bavaria who were imprisoned for slander. See Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys contenant le règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422 , 6 vols., ed. and trans. Louis François Bellaguet and Amable-Guillaume-Prosper Brugière, baron de Barante, (Paris: Crapelet, 1839-52), 3:268-73. For another contemporaneous version of this exemplum, see Michel Félibien and D. Guy-Alexis Lobineau, Histoire de la ville de Paris , 5 vols. (Paris: G. Desprez & J. Desessartz, 1725), 2: 765.

9. Yann Grandeau outlines this exemplum as it is propounded by Jacques Legrand and Jean Juvenal des Ursins, "De Quelques Dames qui ont servi la reine Isabeau de Bavière," Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu'à 1610) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (1975): 159-62. It is this exemplum that Christine de Pizan seeks to overturn with her recommendations to women at court concerning the dangers of mesdire : "So with this it is said similarly that women at court should be on their guard not to blame or defame one another because of the sin and other causes that can result from it. Further, whosoever defames another deserves to be defamed himself" (Avec ce, les femmes de court se doivent garder, semblablement que dit est, de ne blasmer ne diffamer l'une l'autre, tant pour le pechié et aultres causes ja assignees comme aussi que qui diffame autre, dessert que lui meismes soit diffaméz. Le Livre des trois vertus , ed. Charity Cannon Willard with Eric Hicks (Paris: H. Champion, 1989), 146.

10. I take exception with Leonard W. Johnson's view that it involves "a literary game not to be taken too seriously, except in a literary context." Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 143-44.

11. Poèmes d'Alain Chartier , ed. James Laidlaw (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1987), 25.

12. From the Justinian Code to Gratian, through most every medieval legal commentator, defamation falls under the heading de iniuriis; see Corpus iuris civilis , book 9, xxv-xxxvi, and Corpus iuris canonici C. v, q. 1, c. 1-3.

13. As William W. Kibler remarks, this separatedness has been the interpretative key, taken by some critics in the past as the sign of her bourgeois identity and by others as the sign of her modernity: ''The Narrator as Key to Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy," The French Review 52, no. 5 (April 1979): 716.

14. We should be careful to note the semantic evolution of the term franchise . In much love literature of the high Middle Ages it signifies the courtly virtue of nobility of spirit, as in the Roman de la rose (line 942). But by the later Middle Ages it increasingly means liberty or independence. In this sense, franchise can be specifically linked to the damoiselles d'honneur with whom the respondents are associated. At the time of the Querelle de la Belle Dame they were seeking franchise as employees of the court; Charles VI had issued decrees in 1411-12 offering to "the officers, servants, and relations, noble and non noble, all the liberties, exemptions, and freedom [ franchise ] which ours enjoy and employ" (les officiers, serviteurs, et familiers nobles et non nobles toutes les libertez, exempcions et franchise dont les nostres joïssent et usent). On this point, see Yann Grandeau, "De Quelques Dames," 145.

15. Only two years earlier, ca. 1421-22, Chattier depicted la France in this manner: "a lady who maintains her dignified bearing and nobility that signified her excellent pedigree. But she was in such suffering and so disconsolate that she seemed like a lady fallen from a state of high honor, given what her condition showed. And in her appearance she was severely distressed and troubled by a great misfortune and pain to come" (une dame dont le hault port et seigneury maintien signifioit sa tresexcellente extraction, mais rant rut dolente et esplouree que bien sembloit dame decheue de plus haut honneur que pour lots son estat ne demonstroit. Et bien apparissoit a son semblant que forment feust espoventee et doubteuse de plus grant maleurté et douleur advenir). Alain Chattier, Le Quadrilogue invectif , ed. Eugénie Droz (Paris: H. Champion, 1923), 6. Given the desperate political stakes at the time, it is hardly far-fetched to discern in the homology la femme france another sign of the fight over who and how to represent France. On this development, see Colette Beaune's analysis, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France , trans. Susan Ross Huston, ed. Fredric L. Cheyette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 289-92.

16. For another instance of this canonical figure, see Alan of Lille's twelfth-century account: "The slanderer resembles a scorpion in that a scorpion approaches the face of a virgin and consequently emits a sting and inflicts stinging injury from above. So too the slanderer. He offers favorable words face to face with men and then on the sly he concludes with the sting of a slanderer. And as if wounding them from above, he disparages the better ones" (Detractor scorpionis gerit imaginem, quia sicut scorpio praefert virginis vultum, et consequenter emittit aculeum, eta superiori vulnus infert acuatum; sic detractor in facie hominum verba favorabilia proponit, et in occulto aculeum detractionis concludit, et quasi a superiori vulnerans, melioribus detrahit). Alan of Lille, Summa de arte praedicatoria , printed in PL 210: 166B-C.

17. The discussion of the thirteenth-century canonist William of Drogheda will serve as a representative example of the high-medieval focus on these terms: "I lodge a complaint against N., who has committed an injury against me; namely, by calling me a prostitute's son, or thief or robber or farmer's son, he has written a defamatory pamphlet about me, or composed a defamatory song, or sung an abusive ditty about me; such an injury I would not want spread about. Since he had said or sung or written injuriously about me for a hundred pounds of silver, I seek to be given those hundred pounds, or I seek this injury to be made manifest through the action of iniuria ; and I take civil action . . . out of this same injury criminal action can be taken" (Conqueror de N., qui talem iniuriam [mihi intulit], scilicet vocando me filium meretricis vel furem vel latronem vel filium rustici vel scripsit de me famosum libellum vel composuit carmen famosum vel cantavit de me malum cantilenum quam iniuriam [vulgari] nollem, quod mihi dixisset vel cantasset vel scripsisset pro centum libris argenti, quas peto dari vel praestari actione iniuriaram; et ago civiliter. . . . Potest etiam agi criminaliter ex eadem iniuria). See Ludwig Wahrmund, Quellen zur Geschichte des Römisch-Kanonischen Processes im Mittelalter , 2 vols. (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1913), 2:2, 2:219.

18. My point here fits well with Kathy Eden's contention that the "influence of Greco-Roman legal theory on Christian ethics, generally, and on Augustinian ethics, in particular . . . bears significantly on the development of Christian literary theory." Poetic and Legal Fictions in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 138.

19. For a characteristically trenchant and witty assessment of this debate, see Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102-119.

20. She argues that "to reassert atomistic linear causality as a sine qua non of injury . . . is to refuse to respond to the true nature of this specific kind of harm." Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 157. It is interesting to note that MacKinnon's most recent arguments concerning the legal actionability of pornography explore the concept of verbal injury in the specific terms of defamation: "Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination," Boston University Law Review 71, no. 5 (November 1991): 793-815.

21. On this point see Wolfgang Iser, "Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions," New Literary History 21, no. 4 (autumn 1990): 940-41.

22. The Excusacioun begins as a direct address to women:

Mes dames et mes damoiselles,
Se Dieu vous doint joye prouchaine,
Escoutés les durez nouvelles
Que j'ouÿ le jour de l'estraine.
(lines 1-4)

My ladies and young women, If God grants you joy soon again, Listen to the difficult news I heard on New Year's day.

But it quickly establishes the requisite dream frame:

Ce jour m'avint en sommeillant,
Actendant le soleil levant,
Moitié dormant, moitié veillant.
(lines 9-11)

That day it happened that I was drowsy, waiting for the sun to rise, half asleep, half awake.

23. "And I say that master Jean de Meun introduced characters in his book and makes each character speak in a manner that befits him; this is known, le jaloux like a jealous man, la vieille like an old woman, and so on with the others. And it is too wrongheaded to say that the author finds evil in woman as the jealous man claims, in keeping with his character" ([E]t dy que maistre Jehan de Meung en son livre introduisy personnaiges, et fait chascun personnaige parlet selonc qui luy appartient: c'est assavoir le Jaloux comme jaloux, la Vielie come la Vielle, et pareillement des autres. Et est trop mal pris de dire que l'aucteur tiengne les maulx estre en fame que le Jalous, en faisant son personnaige, propose; Hicks, 100).

24. Christine de Pizan hints at this shift in her critique of the Rose when she maintains: "Since human understanding can barely reach to the heights of a clear knowledge of earthly truths and understand hidden things . . . so it happens that one determines imagined things more believable through opinion rather than through sure science" (Pour ce que entendement humain ne puet estre eslevé jusques a haultesse de clere cognoissance d'entefine veritey entendre des choses occultes . . . convient par oppinion plus que de certainne science determiner des choses ymaginees plus voirsemblables; Hicks, 115).

25. On this revival see Gilbert Ouy, "Paris: L'un des principaux foyers de l'humanisme en Europe au début du XV ^e siècle," Bulletin de la société d'histoire de Paris et de l'Ile de France 94-95 (1967-68): 95, Eden, Poetic and Legal Fictions , 5, and Fumaroli, L'Age de l'éloquence , 18-19.

26. It is important to stress the difference between the issue of figurative speech and that of literary discourse. On this point see John Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse," New Literary History 6, no. 2 (winter 1975), 320-21.

27. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium , ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), book 14; Petrarch, Collatio Laureationis , chap. 9. Stephanie H. Judd makes the compelling argument that such humanistic formulae and the distinctiveness of "literary" writing that they establish keep us from acknowledging the violence underwriting many humanistic narratives as well as "the judicial origins of our own practice of literary criticism." Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2.

28. See Pierre-Yves Badel, " Le Roman de la rose" au XIV ^e siècle, 419-23.

29. Daniel Poirion's remark exemplifies this pattern of identification: "Elles [Jeanne, Katherine, Marie] demandent que l'auteur fasse amende honorable. L'Excusacioun ne les a pas satisfaites; mais elles l'ont mal lue." "Lectures de la Belle Dame sans mercy," Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerrs à Pierre Le Gentil (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1973), 693.

30. Let us not forget that the Belle Dame was by far the most popular of Chartier's works across Europe, being rapidly translated into English, Italian, and Catalan; See Piaget " La Belle Dame sans mercy et ses imitations," 25-26.

31. Louis Douët d'Arcq transcribes a variety of statements from the Châtelet registers in Choix de pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI , 2 vols. (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1863-64), esp. 2:51, 2:131-32, 2:180-81, 2:185-87, 2:237-38, 2:270-72.

32. One remarkable case involves the rector of the University of Paris in the company of various magistri who sought justice at court on 19 July 1404 "for the abuse that is alleged to have been done last Monday past to the said University" (sur l'injure que on dit avoir este faicte lundi derrenier passe à ladicte Université; Douët d'Arcq, Choix de pièces inédites , 1:261-64).

33. In Peter Shervey Lewis's view, during Charles VI's reign, "litigation was incessant." Later Medieval France , 142. On this pattern of litigiousness, see Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du moyen âge (vets 1300-vets 1550) , Publications de la Faculté des lettres de l'Université de Strasbourg no. 144 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1963).

34. Douët d'Arcq, Choix de pièces inédites , 2:131, 2:190. This pattern suggests the growing importance of questions of personal honor that would dominate early-modern Europe. On this phenomenon, see Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 93-101.

35. Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 , xiv.

36. Alfred Soman, "Press, Pulpit, and Censorship in France Before Richelieu," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120, no. 6 (December 1976): 445. England offers an analogous picture according to J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (York: University of York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1980), 3.

37. In the surviving record, there are no individual women who bring complaints on their own, although by this period, we should remember, the requirement of a man's intervention had been, for all intents and purposes, superseded. That men and women sued together was often a matter of formality. See Annick Porteau-Bitker, "Criminalité et délinquance féminines dans le droit pénal des XIII ^e et XIV ^e siècles," Revue historique de droit français et étranger 58, no. 1 (January-March 1980): 24.

38. For a general etymological survey of libelle see Marc Angenot, La Parole pamphlétaire, 379-80.

39. This expression from the Corpus iuris civilis (book 9, xxxvi, de famosis libellis ) occurs in Gratian's Decretum (C. v, q. 1, c. 3) from whence it passes into every medieval legal commentary.

40. Jean de Montreuil's usage epitomizes this pattern: "I would like my error, which they would consider not a vice, but a sin and heresy (and this I cannot fail to have uttered), to be amended and corrected by you and in letters from you and the same lord and father, lest my error ever be related to my correctors and yours too, I might add, by vicious and vain rumor, and they construct from it charges of defamation ( libellos diffamatorios )" (Meum tamen errorem, qui non vicium putarent, sed peccatum et heresim (et illum non eructasse non possum), emendari et corrigi tuis et eiusdem domini mei et patris in litteris ate velim, ne, si vento aut aura levissima ad hos usque correctores meos—et tuos, dico—relatum si[t], libellos diffamatorios inde struant). Jean de Montreuil, Opera , 2 vols., ed. Ezio Ornato (Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1963), 1:39.

41. Carla Bozzolo and Hélène Loyau, La Cour amoureuse, dire de Charles VI: Étude et édition critique des sources manuscrites , 3 vols. (Paris: Léopard d'Or, 1982-92), 1:42.

42. For a brief description of this meaning, see Dictionnaire de droit canonique , s.v. libelle . For a history of the initial step in legal procedure it represents, see Artur Steinwenter, "Die Anfänge des Libellprozesses," Studia et documenta historiae et juris 1 (1935): 32-52.

43. Philippe de Beaumanoir, Philippe de Remi, de Beaumanoir: Coûtumes de Beauvaisis , 2 vols., ed. Amédée Salmon (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1899-1900), 1: 98.

44. Philippe de Beaumanoir, The Coûtumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir , trans. F. R. P. Akehurst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 76.

45. "Liber, ibis in urbem," (Go, little book, go into the city); Lamentations , line 1; LeFèvre's translation, lines 83-84. Whereas this turn of phrase begins Ovid's work in exile, the Tristia , its invocation here has as much to do with the crucial place and function of texts in the civic sector as many late-fourteenth-century writers understood it. This becomes clear in a subsequent passage that LeFèvre inserts in Matheolus's text:

La grant doleur dont je labeure,
(Je ne suis a repos nulle heure)
Afin que, quant ils orront dire,
Ils ne se puissent escondire
Ne excuser par ignorance.

Fay publier par toute France
Que nul, s'il n'a ou corps la rage,
Plus ne se mette en mariage,
Et mesmement par bigamie.
(lines 95-103)

I labor under considerable pain—finding repose at no hour—so that when they'll hear speak of it, they will not be able to avoid it, or excuse themselves through ignorance. I am having it publicized through all of France, that no one, no matter what his bodily lusts, should engage in marriage, or similarly, in bigamy.

46. Invoking infamia is no idle rhetorical gesture, since by the mid-thirteenth century there could be no greater penalty. For the development of the doctrine of infamy, see Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 45-53.

47. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des dames , ed. Curnow, 1:624.

48. For contemporaneous incidents of book burning, see Paul Lacroix, Histoire de l'imprimerie et des arts qui se rattachent à la typographie (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 26, and Félibien and Lobineau, Histoire de la ville de Paris , 4: 563.

49. R. I. Moore considers the social manipulation that went into identifying the heretic: The Formation of a Persecuting Society , 144-47.

50. The naming of "our advocates Dessarteaulx and Chastel" has been the subject of much speculation since "Chastel" was the name of Christine de Pizan's son, who served as a lawyer and notary in the Parisian court as well as at the Dauphin's court at Bourges. But just as we must be wary of identifying "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie" as individual damoiselles d'honneur , we must take care in identifying M. Chastel. This is all the more important in light of the symbolic charge of the name ''chastel" and its use as a figure for women.

51. The earliest, the Parlement d'amour of Baudet Harenc remains unedited. Of the ten known manuscripts, I consulted Paris, B.N. f. fr. 1727, fols. 136-44 verso. Arthur Piaget comments on the Parlement : " La Belle Dame sans mercy et ses imitations," Romania 30 (1901) 317-20. The rest of the poems are edited by him in the ongoing series of articles of the same name: "La Dame leale en amours," Romania 30 (1901): 323-51; "La Cruelle Femme en amour" Romania 31 (1902): 322-49; "Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy," Romania 33 (1904): 183-99; and "Le Jugement du povre triste amant banny," Romania 34 (1905): 379-416.

52. This is a debate that Wesley Trimpi surveys exhaustively in "The Ancient Hypothesis of Fiction: An Essay on the Origins of Literary Theory," Traditio 27 (1971), 1-78, and "The Quality of Fiction: The Rhetorical Transmission of Literary Theory," Traditio 30 (1974), 1-118; esp. 108-18.

53. In Ernst H. Kantorowicz's commentary on this formula, he surmises "the jurists not only fell in with the literary and artistic theories, but may have had even the function of pathfinders, since they embarked on that theory—derived from the Roman laws of adoption—much earlier than others." The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 302-12, esp. 307.

54. Pierre Legendre goes even so far as to insist on "fiction figuring truth" as a pivotal problematic for late-medieval legal thought, a telling theorem in light of today's Critical Legal Studies movement: Ecrits juridiques du moyen âge occidental (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), XI, 514.

55. This strategy also governs another of Chartier's defenses, the "Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy"; see lines 44-48.

56. On the emergence of the concept of lèse-majesté in this period, See S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France , Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 3rd series, vol. 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 14-21.

57. Walter Ullman sees the late-fourteenth-century pattern of kings, popes, and their legal counsels debating crimen laesae majestatis as an effort to pin down the idea of sovereignty: Law and Jurisdiction in the Middle Ages , ed. George Garnett (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), VII, 24. P.S. Lewis advances much the same view in Later Medieval France , 82-87. What is of particular interest to us, however, is the way this problem is generalized to refer to myriad infractions. As Jacques Chiffoleau analyzes it: "Il faut attendre le XV ^e siècle pour observer chez les juristes une extension importante, une dilatation progressive des qualifications du crime de majesté qui finit par absorber une quantité de crimes communs." "Dire l'indicible: Remarques sur la catégorie du nefandum du XII ^e au XV ^e siècle," Annales E.S.C. 45, no. 2 (March-April 1990): 294.

58. "[S]o that I, who don't forsake my masters and benefactors without giving my all to the very last, at least as far as I will be able—do not allow their honor to be attacked either" (ut qui magistros et benefactores meos ad extremum usque singultum non desero, aut suo in honore—quoad potero—[non] sinam ledi). Hicks, 30. The key word, again, is laedere .

59. Et semble que tel chose infame,
Scelon ce que d'elle est escript,
Ne soit pas comme une aultre fame,
Mais soit quelque maulvais esprit
Qui ymaige de feme prit.
Pour mettre a mort vrai ammoreux
( Cruelle Femme , lines 681-86)

And it appears that such an infamous thing, according to what is written of her, could not be like any other woman, but like some evil spirit that took the form of a woman to put to death the true lover.

60. "Mais, je diray, par ficcion, le fait de la mutacion comment de femme devins homme." Christine de Pizan, La Mutacion de Fortune , lines 150-53.

61. On this phrase, "the key to" as an index of the concern over censorship, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 7-8.

1. Jacques Legrand, the early-fifteenth-century Parisian humanist, gives a telling image of this cult in his description of the disciple dedicating himself to philosophy: "And I, Philo, have mustered my power to seek a way to gain the love of Sophie. . . . She came from an especially noble lineage; Minerva, beloved in Athens, was her mother and Ulysses who spent his entire life chivalrously—unlike Hercules—was her father. And so I began to speak with my lady and friend in a place secreted away where there was not a soul. I began pondering her body, her eyes, and her appearance as a whole and straightaway it seemed to me that any other love would be miserable" (Sy ay fait mon pouoir, je Philo, de querir Maniere pour l'amour de Sophie acquerir. . . . Elle aussy estoit de tres noble ligniee; Minerve fu sa mere en Athene aouree, Et son pere Ulixes qui de chevalerie Contre Hercules gaigna toute sa vie. Sy me prins a parler a m'amie et dame En un lieu moult secret ou quel n'y avoir ame; En avisant son corps, ses yeux et son viaire, Et tantost me sembla route autre amour misere; lines 12-13, 30-37). Archiloge Sophie , 26. The life of learning, as ever, is cast as a love affair, an image that the woman respondent as Minerva recasts significantly.

2. On this little-known narrative, see L. Brook, "Un 'Art al'amour' inédit de la fin du moyen âge: Son cadre et ses métaphores," in Courtly Literature , ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Brepols, 1989), 49-60.

3. Poésies de Marguerite-Eléonore de Vallon-Chalys depuis Madame de Surville, poëte français du XV ^e siècle, published by Charles Vanderbourg (Paris: Heinrichs, 1803).

4. For all details, see Vanderbourg's introduction, xlvi-lii.

5. Another relevant analogue involves Jacqueline de Hacqueville and the case of damoiselles d'honneur at the Parisian court in the fifteenth century who composed rondeaux and ballades . See Paula Higgins, "Parisian Nobles, A Scottish Princess, and the Woman's Voice in Late Medieval Song," Early Music History 10 (1991): 161-72.

6. All citations are from the later edition, Poésies de Clotilde de Surville, poëte français du XV ^e siècle, new edition published by Charles Vanderbourg (Paris: Nepveu, 1825). All translations are mine.

7. See Alain's rondeau "Au feu," The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier , XIX, 383-84.

8. Poésies (1825 edition), 62.

9. Ibid., 113-21.

10. "Le premier succès de Clotilde fut grand, la discussion animée, et il en resta un long attrait de curiosité aux esprits poétiques." Charles Sainte-Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVI ^e siècle (Paris: Charpentier, 1843), 497.

11. Quoted by Auguste LeSourd in Autour de Clotilde de Surville: Lettres inédites de Vanderbourg et du Marquis de Surville (Aubenas: Clovis Habuzit, 1928), 10-11.

12. Poésies (1825 edition), Poésies Inédites de Marguerite-Eléonore Clotilde de Vallon et Chalys, depuis Madame de Surville, poète français du XV ^e siècle, published by Madame de Roujoux et Charles Nodier (Paris: Nepveu, 1826).

13. Susan Stewart sees this fashion for fakes "in light of a larger eighteenthcentury crisis in authenticity." See Crimes of Writing , 35.

14. "Si des journalistes très instruits ont élevé des doutes sur le véritable auteur de ces poésies, tousles hommes de lettres se sont unanimément accordés à y reconnaître." 1825 edition, x.

15. I am currently completing an essay on the problem of writing the history of medieval women's poetry that considers these notices.

16. "Clotilde règne surtout dans le coeur des femmes. C'est à elles que nous offrons quelques'unes de ses poésies. C'est à elles à défendre la gloire du sexe contre toute la science orgueilleuse des hommes." Poésies inédites , xv.

17. Charles Nodier, Questions de littérature légale: Du plagiat, de la supposition d'auteurs, des supercheries qui ont rapport aux livres , 2 vols. (Paris: Crapelet, 1828), 1:83-84.

18. The whole quote reads "Quatre auteurs ont déclaré avoir fait subir des remaniements à une oeuvre première due, selon eux, à Marguerite-Clotilde de Surville: ce sont Jean de Surville, Jeanne de Vallon, Étienne de Surville, et Brazais." Eugène Villedieu, "Marguerite de Surville: Sa vie, ses oeuvres, ses descendants devant la critique moderne," Bulletin de la Société des sciences naturelles et historiques de l'Ardèche 7 (1873): 141.

19. Antoine Macé, Un Procès d'histoire littéraire: Les poésies de Clotilde de Surville (Grenoble: Prudhomme, 1870), 23.

20. Bernard Cerquiglini makes this point even more powerfully: "Dans l'authenticité généralisée de l'oeuvre médiévale, la philologie n'a vu qu'une authenticité perdue. La philologie médiévale est le deuil d'un Texte, le patient travail de ce deuil. Quête d'une perfection toujours antérieure et révolue du moment unique où la voix de l'auteur, que l'on suppose, se noua à la main du premier scribe, dictant la version authentique, première et originelle, que va désagréger la multitude et l'insouciance des individus copiant une littérature vulgaire." Eloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 58.

21. Nodier made a catalogue of just such inconsistencies; Questions de littérature légale , 82.

22. "Rien en histoire ne peut naître que par filiation d'antécedent à conséquent." Quoted by Anatole Loquin, "Réponse à M. Antoine Macé: Les poésies de Clotilde de Surville," Acres de l'Académie des Sciences, Belles Lettres, et Arts de Bordeaux (1873): 158.

23. "L'origine et la véritable paternité de ces poésies," ibid., 10.

24. Ibid., 30.

25. "Nous sommes de l'avis que cet auteur était un homme. Car dès qu'il est admis que l'oeuvre est un pastiche, il nous semble qu'un homme seul a pu lui donner cette perfection." A. Mazon, Marguerite de Chalis et la légende de Clotilde de Surville (Paris: Lemère, 1873), 58.

26. "Il appartient aux femmes poètes de persuader à tousles hommes de goût que les femmes ont crée la poésie française." Poésies inédites , xvii.

27. Margaret Waller makes the point that writers in this period "treat the traditional subject of sentiment—woman—as object of a feminized man's desire." " Cherchez la femme : Male Malady and Narrative Politics in the French Romantic Novel," PMLA 104, no. 2 (1989): 148. Waller makes the point in reference to Chateaubriand, but I would argue that it is equally relevant to the fascination with and defense of Clotilde.

28. Charles Maurras puts it forthrightly: "Le romantisme a fait efféminer les âmes; l'imagination fut féminine." Romantisme et révolution: L'Avenir de l'intelligence (Paris: Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1922), 218. Whereas we have to take this in the context of Maurras's reactionary rejection of such effeminacy, the observation is still telling.

29. Vanderbourg highlights the revolutionary/royalist opposition with the following description in the introduction: "Les révolutionnaires de France ont détruit les oeuvres de Clotilde; tousles papiers de la famille fut la proie des flammes." Poésies (1825 edition), xvi.

30. R. Howard Bloch traces some of the key implications of this model as far as medieval literary studies are concerned. See "'Mieux vaut jamais que tard': Romance, Philology, and Old French Letters," Representations 36 (fall 1991): 64-86.

31. "Mais le fond des poésies de Clotilde est tout aussi impossible au XV ^e siècle que la forme; les idées, sentiments, sujets, connaissances, vocabulaire, grammaire, syntaxe, versification sont invraisemblables." Gaston Paris," Un procès d'histoire littéraire," Revue critique , 1 March 1873, 138.

32. Mark Jones, introduction, Fake? The Art of Deception , ed. Mark Jones, with Paul Craddock and Nicholas Barker (London: British Museum Publications, 1990), 17.

33. Charity Cannon Willard, "The Remarkable Case of Clotilde de Surville," L'Esprit Créateur 6, no. 2 (summer 1966): 112. See also her discussion in Christine de Pizan , 221.

34. The most obvious recent example involves John Benton's assertion that Héloïse was not the author of her letters. Barbara Newman analyzes these debates, summing them up with the statement: "Embarrassing as it it to expose these unwarranted, often misogynist assumptions, it is essential to do so. In some quarters, there still lingers a nineteenth-century bias against the very idea that medieval women wrote." "Authority, Authenticity, and the Repression of Hèloïse," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 2 (spring 1992): 128.

35. On this role of Christine, see Judith Bennett, "Feminism and History," Gender and History 1, no. 3 (autumn 1989): 251-52.

36. On this position see B. Honig, "Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity," in Feminists Theorize the Political , ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 215-35, esp. 232.

37. Feminists have long acknowledged and explored this issue; see Conflicts in Feminism , ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990).

38. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 132.

39. With this point, I concur with Kathleen Biddick's remarks about "the collapse of historian, reader, and historical subject" in medieval studies. See "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible," Speculum 68, no. 2 (April 1993): 416-17. On the general issue of the critic's relation to figures and texts of the medieval past, see Jeff Rider, ''Other Voices: Historicism and the Interpretation of Medieval Texts," Exemplaria 1, no. 2 (fall 1989): 293-312, and "Whence? Whither?" Exemplaria 3, no. 1 (spring 1991): 243-66.

40. Medieval Latin Word-List , prepared by R. E. Latham (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), s.v. identificare, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis Regni Hungariae , ed. Antonius Bartal (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), s.v. idem . Nicole Oresme's definition goes as follows: "Car le identité ou unité que ilz ont a leur parens les fait estre ensemble come uns meïsme" (For the identity or unity they have with their relations makes them exist together as one and the same). Le Livre de Ethique d'Aristote , 172b, 442. Littré cites this as the first appearance of the term identité in the vernacular: Dictionnaire de la langue française , s.v. identité , as does the Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. identity .

41. Joan W. Scott's observation is germane here: "Treating the emergence of a new identity as a discourse event [in our case, the emergence of the woman respondent] is not to introduce a new form of linguistic determinism, nor to deprive subjects of agency. It is to refuse a separation between 'experience' and language and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse." "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political , 34.