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.