Preferred Citation: Solterer, Helen. The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1t1nb1fx/

The Master and Minerva Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture Helen Solterer UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1995 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Solterer, Helen. The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1t1nb1fx/

For Josef Solterer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has already had many lives, and the one it now enjoys in print is thanks in large part to colleagues and friends. In the beginning, during my graduate school time in Toronto, I was guided by Frank Collins and encouraged steadily by Brian Stock and Leonard Boyle. Over the years in Durham, my project took shape with the North Carolina Research Group on Medieval and Early Modern Women. I count myself lucky to have found in this group and its spirited discussions an intellectual home. Jane Burns and Judith Bennett always spurred me to think further with questions at crucial moments. Ann Marie Rasmussen and Monica Green got me to see my argument as a whole. Even at a distance, Linda Lomperis and Bonnie Krueger made me realize how my work was already part of a collective venture. Along the way, there have been many people whose reactions and suggestions have made their mark on my writing, I trust for the better. For dialogue that led me in new and unexpected directions, I am grateful to: Anne Dooley, Ann Rigney, Ronald Witt, and Charity Cannon Willard; for brainstorming sessions, to Kristen Neuschel, Paula Higgins, Danielle Régnier-Bohler, Nancy Miller, and Sarah Kay; for thought-provoking conversation, to Karen Pratt, Kevin Brownlee, and Lesley Johnson; and for proverbial wit, to Seán ÓTuama. My book took final shape as a result of four challenging readings of the manuscript from Jody Enders, David Hult, Nancy Regalado, and Gabrielle Spiegel. Engaging with them made revision a creative process and showed me again what debate is all about. In the last stages, my book has benefited greatly from the linguistic savvy of Frank Collins, David Hult, John Magee, and Brian Merrilees, and the sleuthing of my student collaborators, Louis Vavrina and Jennifer Winslow. In the end, I could not have pulled it off without Elizabeth Waters, whose staying power during record-breaking heat made the difference.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the American Council of Learned Societies and Duke University Research Council, who funded my research throughout. The aid of many librarians here and abroad, and of the ever-ready staff at the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes in Paris is here gratefully recorded. Jean-Jacques Thomas and the cohort at Duke University's Department of Romance Studies sustained me with true collegial support.

My special thanks go to three fellow adventurers: Elizabeth Curran Solterer for teasing me into coming out with this book, Stephanie Sieburth for urging me to pin it down, and Michael Menzinger (+ fritz) for helping me to produce it at long last.

I dedicate this book to my father, who did not live to see it completed. His own inimitable zest for debate runs through its pages. Se non é vero é ben trovato .

TORONTO/DURHAM
JULY 1993

The Master and Minerva

1. The respondent and the master in  La Response au Bestiaire d'amour .
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2609, fol. 32.
Courtesy of the Öster-reichische Nationalbibliothek.

INTRODUCTION

She is seated at a scriptorium desk, wielding the tools of writing (Figure 1). He stands back, his hands open-palmed as if to bear the imprint of her work. Reversing the conventional configuration found in many medieval vernacular manuscripts, this miniature depicts a woman who supplants a cleric at his customary post and assumes his function as guardian of textual culture. Further, as the rubric makes clear, this woman is busy composing her response to the master's text—"the response to the bestiary, which the lady made against the request made by master Richard de Fournival" (la response dou bestiaire que la dame fist contre la requeste que maistres richars de furnival fist). Her taking to writing gives her the chance to answer his requeste directly, in the same medium. As she writes, her eyes hold him with a challenging look: here it is a master who attends to the word of a literate woman.

This image forms the initial H for the first line of the narrative: "Hom qui sens a et discretion" (Man, who has sense and understanding). The woman's response is placed within the very letter beginning the word Hom . It is represented in a way that breaks apart the unitary, homogeneous character of mankind. In so doing, her response breaks open the discourse defining and figuring it. Her version of mankind is illustrated as a give-and-take between a particular woman and man. What would ordinarily be a subject for disputation among clerical masters such as Richard de Fournival is taken over here by a woman. At the beginning of the narrative, the confrontation between a master who disputes and a disputing woman engenders debate that, in the ensuing text, will be played out according to their two positions. Questioning the concept mankind and its constituent languages leads to a sustained interrogation of the learning of one exemplary master. Given that the opening sentence paraphrases the incipit of the

Metaphysics , this woman's response takes on a well-known treatise of the Master Philosopher, as Aristotle was called in the high Middle Ages.

I begin my study of the medieval dialectic between masterly writing and woman's response with this miniature from the Response au Bestiaire d'amour because it delineates vividly many of its key questions. First, the image poses a question concerning the figuration of women in medieval narrative. What does such figuration suggest a female figure writes in response to what she reads? That women are represented as quarrelsome interlocutors or even respondents was already an integral element of European literature by the twelfth century. Their part is inscribed in the numerous debate forms that characterize medieval lyric and narrative—the Provençal tenso , the Old French requeste, complainte , and dialogue poems, among others. Andreas Capellanus's mock dialogues in the De amore (On Love ) project female voices that reply to and often foil the suits of male lovers. The epistolary tradition pairs the work of male writers with that of women who reply warily. Even in medieval versions of Ovid's Heroïdes , the letters attributed to female correspondents mark a type of interaction. Yet what happens when a woman is portrayed reacting negatively to a text already in circulation? What happens when her response, once coded and contained within love literature, breaks out and is established separately in the circuit of texts? What are the implications of a disputing female figure whose opposition operates within literate and even learned culture?

This illumination from the late-thirteenth-century Response au Bestiaire d'amour also raises the issue of how such figures of master and disputing woman register socially. It prompts us to consider the connection between figurative languages and conventions of reading and writing prevailing in medieval Europe. Such a connection needs to be gauged extremely carefully. We can neither reduce the figure to a symptom or effect of those conventions nor regard them critically as distinct phenomena. In this manner, the figure of the woman respondent occasions an inquiry into the practices of vernacular literate culture.

To embark on such an inquiry is to face straightaway a heritage of vying claims regarding the relation between medieval laywomen and the domain of written texts. The first investigations sought to establish such a relation empirically. In the early nineteenth century, critics set out to prove that medieval women were indeed literate. The French historian Jules Michelet exemplified this approach. His essay, "Fragments d'un mémoire sur l'éducation des femmes" (1838) established the standard for tracing the development of women's skills. "They [women] were deemed worthy of reading and writing . . . they became learned as well as pious."

Michelet's claim launched the argument for laywomen's entry into the world of letters.^[1] In most subsequent efforts to survey the European Middle Ages, critics collected cases such as the Bestiaire respondent as evidence for women's participation in literate culture.^[2] Whether those examples involved known individuals or textual personae, they were used to substantiate the argument for women's involvement with written texts. Such a quantitative way of proceeding laid the groundwork for the view that laywomen presided over the two principal poles of vernacular literary production—as patron and privileged reader. One of the first theorists of literacy, Herbert Grundmann, articulated this view best when he asserted: "By women and through them, vernacular poetry achieved a literate form and became 'literature.'"^[3] Grundmann's formula typifies the habit of interpreting the numbers of medieval women linked with bookish culture as proof of their decisive activity.^[4]

But because such literate women appeared prominently in a world mediated by a figurative language, their prominence has merited closer scrutiny. The presence of women readers in vernacular literature raises the question of their function. As Georges Duby has observed, the instance of women playing an authoritative role of patron and reader suggests a complex mechanism whereby their bookish superiority works to the advantage of their overlords.^[5] Far from demonstrating women's influence over vernacular writing, it points to their likely function as go-betweens in a game of clerical control. The figures of "masterful" women readers show the signs of a certain autonomy: they exercise the skills of reading and writing associated with the clergy. Yet, at the same time, these figures bespeak the designs of a small, literate caste that presents women in this light so as to better discipline them. The long-standing link between women and the literary sphere is too fraught to allow for a one-to-one correspondence between textual figure and social role. Under the iconoclastic pressure of feminist analyses, the convention of the female reader has been effectively dismantled so as to reveal the fact that such images need not necessarily confirm laywomen's influential participation in literate culture.^[6]

For all their differences, what these two interpretative positions share, paradoxically, is a very limited conception of women's relation to the domain of written texts. Women are restricted to first-degree literacy. While they are attributed the elementary skills of reading and writing, rarely, if ever, are they deemed to use them practically. Their involvement in letters is passive. Moreover, medieval laywomen in these accounts are missing the "literate" mentality by which one interprets and adjudicates the world textually. Such an understanding is discernible across much high-medieval

vernacular literature. Women are commonly typed as literalists—unable to pass beyond the letter of a text. From the scores of inscribed female readers in romance to Dante's Francesca, they are presented as reading poorly, prone to misunderstanding.^[7] And their poor reading record has everything to do with their inability to gain access to the symbolic: "The woman says: these things are too obscure for me, and your words are too allegorical; you will have to explain what you mean" (Muller ait: hi mihi sunt nimis sermones obscuri nimisque verba reposita, nisi ipsa tua faciat interpretatio manifesta; De amore , book I).^[8] Like one of Andreas Capellanus's personae in the De amore , women are represented as confused by any level of signification other than the literal. They appear beholden to their masterly interlocutors to make the symbolic comprehensible. Yet even with such instruction, it is unclear whether they are ever fully initiated into the symbolic mode (verba reposita).

By contrast, the cleric is singled out by his subtle and sophisticated figurative understanding.^[9] Trained to extract the kernel of meaning from its various husks—as the exegetical trope describes the process—the clerk excels in working his texts symbolically. The figura is his characteristic property.^[10] It is, of course, the master—the head of clerkly culture—who champions the symbolic register.^[11] Like the cleric in the Response au Bestiaire miniature, the magister is meant to brandish the figura , and with it all the tools of text-based learning.

This typing of the woman vis-à-vis the master brings us to the basis of a literate mentality. As Brian Stock has argued, the difference between literal and symbolic makes sense only within the framework of literate culture. He writes: "Such a distinction [figure/truth, symbolic/literal], of course, was unthinkable without a resort to the intellectual structures of allegory, which were in turn a byproduct of the literate sensibility. For, to find an inner meaning, one first had to understand the notion of a text ad litteram ."^[12] In this sense, the idea of women's participation in the work of high-medieval literate culture looks compromised. Insofar as they are usually depicted laboring over a literal sense, they are not judged to be literate in the fullest possible measure. Women's second-degree literacy appears untenable. So too their capacity to operate within a world defined by texts. The masterful act of symbolic interpretation seems out of reach, with the result that women's engagement with such interpretation through writing looks an even more remote affair.

Is the Bestiaire respondent then just another in the long line of literalists represented by medieval narrative? When she takes stylus in hand to write against the master's requeste , does she concentrate only upon its literal sense? Early on in her text, she observes: "For truly I know that there

is no beast who should be feared like a gentle word that comes deceiving. And I think it well that one can be a little on guard against it" (Car je sai vraiement qu'il n'est beste qui tant fache a douter comme douche parole qui vient en dechevant. Et si cuic[h] bien que contre li se puet on peu warder).^[13] This respondent recognizes the power of the symbolic and begins to pick the master's bestiary metaphors apart adroitly. She analyzes the symbolic language they comprise as a form of damage to women. Yet in so doing, she is represented as capable of deploying the symbolic herself. In fact, her reading exploits the figura as fully as would any master's lesson. In the Response , it is no longer a question of whether a woman can interpret symbolically or not, but rather what her interpretation enables her to do.

I shall argue that the encounter between the master and the woman respondent changes the medieval type of the female literalist in significant ways. There we can discern how women respondents emerge as decoders of the symbols of masterly writing. More importantly, in such an encounter we can find them becoming critics of that writing. If the case of the Bestiaire d'amour respondent gives us any clue, women are seen to interpret negatively the symbolic language associated with the masters. Far from remaining at a superficial level, stumped by the letter of a text, the respondent comes to exercise her own skills in symbolic interpretation. With these skills, she is equipped to contest the sexualized representations of women—the various feminine metaphors of flora and fauna—that hold sway, and to challenge the very symbol system that defines the clerico-courtly discourse authoritatively.^[14] Indeed, the respondent disputes what I call, after Pierre Bourdieu, the symbolic domination of a tradition of representing women in medieval letters.^[15]

Once we begin to entertain such an argument, we should consider any medieval models of a woman's response. There are, in fact, many, though they have rarely been conceptualized as such.^[16] The first, pervasive model is a rhetorical one. A variety of medieval topoi existed that associated woman's language with the format of response. Dante evokes them suggestively in the De vulgari eloquentia where he surmises: "But although in the Scriptures woman is found to have spoken first, it is nevertheless reasonable for us to believe that man spoke first. For it is incongruous to think that such an extraordinary act for humankind could have first flowed forth from a woman rather than from a man . . . man spoke first by way of response" (Sed quanquam mulier in scriptis prius inveniatur locuta, rationabile tamen est ut hominem prius locutum fuisse credamus: et inconvenienter putatur, tam egregium humani generis actum, vel prius quam a viro, a foemina profluisse . . . per viam responsionis primum fuisse locutum

(book I, iv).^[17] According to the standard topoi taken from the Bible, the first human speech act in Eden is attributed to Eve. Yet even when this is denied and reassigned to Adam, Eve's speech remains situated in the framework of response. If she did utter the originary word, she did so in reply to the Lord. If she did not, she is still described implicitly as responding to her human lord. This account of the first Edenic dialogue reiterates the scholastic belief in the secondary status of human language. And in its puzzlement over Eve, it accentuates the peculiar secondariness of her speech. Starting in paradise, women are allotted the role of respondent.^[18]

In the high-medieval didactic work known as the Miroir des bonnes femmes we can see how the rhetoric of the woman's response is further reinforced.^[19] Commenting upon the Biblical scenario in Eden, the Miroir focuses on Eve's response not to God or Adam but to the snake. The rubric reads: "The second stupidity of Eve was that she responded too frivolously" (la seconde sotie de eue fu en ce quele respondi trop liegierement). In this manual on noblewomen's comportment, Eve's responsiveness is introduced as a negative exemplum. It is a preeminent illustration of how not to behave. The passage continues: "I want you to know the story of the wise lady who responded to the mad knight and who spoke of [his] folly. She did not reply without her lord, but she would talk openly with him [her lord] about it. If she took the knight for mad, he took her for wise."^[20] In this comparison between Eve and la sage dame , the first woman is one with a loose tongue who does not recognize the dangers of her responsiveness. The wise lady, however, refrains from the linguistic errors of her progenetrix. In an obvious courtly setting, the lady reacts circumspectly to the problem of answering men. She is seen to recognize the dangers of their "mad" language. With this exemplum, the Miroir promotes a lesson of a wary response. The wise lady rebuffs the advances of unreliable suitors who speak to her and follows instead the verbal lead of her lord. Whoever that lord might be, she is positioned to speak after , to take up his first utterance. The wise woman's response is defined by the moral "Don't speak until spoken to."

These two cases from the late Middle Ages testify to the rhetoric of women's propensity for response. There are many others. Found in fictional and didactic works alike, the topos of the woman respondent establishes the link between woman's language and the posture of replying to man's. This link could be constructed negatively or positively. As we have seen, once responsiveness is labeled a fault, a woman's response per se is colored pejoratively. And yet absolute silence being impossible, the form and substance of a woman's response were also addressed. In this sense

the topos could be inflected positively, in keeping with the classical Latin etymology of the verb respondere —to reciprocate, to promise or pledge in return. As long as a woman's response conformed to the dictates of a man's verbal act, it could function usefully in the network of human communication.

These rhetorical characterizations undergird the second, generic model of woman's response. Again, the etymology of the word makes the point clearly: response is a Provençal, Old French neologism—a characteristically medieval form. Already apparent in the range of Provençal genres in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it involves dialogue and debate poems that evolve between a female and a male speaker.^[21] Of the various poetic genres that fit this definition, the most noteworthy is the tenso , one that, significantly enough, is well represented in the repertory of the trobaritz , the women troubadours.^[22] According to Peter Dronke, all these "response" forms share "the spontaneous movement of poetic answering."^[23] Without delving into the stereotypes that lead Dronke to associate spontaneity with putative female genres—something we have already found to be amply borne out rhetorically (compare spontaneous/legere )—I want to point out the key element of "answering." The Provençal tenso develops as a series of responses to a statement of love. The genre depicts adversarial male and female personae who dispute various aspects of love. Invariably the woman is in a position of resisting the man's onslaught. The tenso between Guillelma de Rosers and Lanfranc Cigala exemplifies this dynamic:

Domna, poder ai eu et ardimen
Non contra vos, qe.us vences en iazen,
Per q'eu fui fols car ab vos pris conten,
Mas vencut vueilh qe m'aiatz con qe sia.

Lafranc, aitan vos autrei e.us consen
Qe tam mi sen de cot e d'ardimen
C'ab aital geing con domna si defen
Mi defendri'al plus ardit qe sia.
(lines 49–56)^[24]

Lady, I have the strength and the daring not to oppose you since I could vanquish you lying down, for which reason I was crazy to have started disputing with you, but because I desire that you should vanquish me in whatever way possible. Lafranc, I grant and assure you that I feel such daring of heart that with the savvy with which a woman defends herself, I shall defend myself in the most brazen way possible.

These two final stanzas of the tenso reveal the twofold challenge of a woman's response. Guillelma is reckoning with the various maneuvers that typify Lanfranc's language—here, the characteristic claim that the man will prevail by being overcome by the woman. This paradoxical contention is coded in terms of men's force (poder) versus women's savvy (geing). Yet the woman interlocutor is confronting the designs of amorous discourse the personae articulate. The defense she must mount is also directed against the very tradition of speaking about love to women. Guillelma and Lanfranc's tenso dramatizes the formidable power of a prevailing symbolic language.

In the Old French repertory of requeste/response , the problem of contesting that symbolic power also comes to the fore. Take, for instance, an early-fourteenth-century case entitled La Prière d'un clerc et la response d'une dame .^[25] The woman contends:

Dites quanque voudrez, je vous escouterai,
Mes ja, certes, pour cen plus tost n'ous amerai.
Ja pour toutes vos truffles plus fole ne serai.
Ausi com la cygoigne ne plus ne mainz ferai.

La cygoigne mengüe le venim et l'ordure
Ja ne li mesfera, quer c'est de sa nature.
Mes non fera a moi, j'en sui toute seüre,
Trestout vostre parler, quant je n'i met ma cure.
(lines 181–88)

Say whatever you want to, I'll listen to you. But I will not love you, that is more than certain. For all your foolishnesses, I will not be so mad. Just like the stork, I'll do no more, no less. The stork ingests venom and dung so that they will not hurt it, for that is its nature. But so long as I take care, your talk will not do it [harm] to me, I'm sure of it.

Her response focuses on the question of the clerk's dangerous language. The trope of truffles (foolishnesses) captures the flavor of a language that is outlandish and at the same time disturbing. Further, it carries with it a foul intent (venim/ordure). The respondent thus deploys her own symbol of the stork not only to keep her distance but to expose the potential harm of the clerk's word. Implicitly she elaborates a critique. From within the conventions of amorous discourse, this woman's response signals a challenge to that discourse. However discreetly, the response raises the issue of the discourse's possible destructive effects.

There are also signs of such a challenge in the epistolary genres of Old French known as saluts d'amour . In the unusual instance of a late-

thirteenth-century love letter attributed to a woman (salus d'amours féminin ), the respondent takes her clerkly interlocutor to task linguistically:^[26]

Biaus amis, qui si me proiez,
je ne cuit pas que vous soiez
si destroiz por moi com vous dites,
car trop de losenges petites
savez pot la gent decevoir.
Honis soit qui a dame dira
qu'il l'aint, s'il ne dit voir .
(lines 1–7)

Dear friend who beseeches me, I don't think that you can be quite so distressed about me as you say, for you know too many of the little slanderous expressions [losenges] to deceive people. "He who does not tell the truth when he says he loves a woman shall be shamed ."

The problem, once again, resides in the disturbing and fraudulent character of the clerk's language. "Losenges" is no external threat here. It does not refer to the paradigmatic slander of those outsiders called lauzengiers or mesdisants who play a stock role in medieval love poetry. Instead "losenges" is internalized. It comprises a danger intrinsic to the prevailing discourse invoked by a lover to address his lady. The notion of verbal destructiveness thus applies to its conventional figures. It is the woman respondent who begins to say as much.

Such a concept of verbal destructiveness was taken over by many medieval clerical writers to justify the model of the modest woman who speaks circumspectly. Witness the late-twelfth-century didactic text, Le Chastoiement des dames of Robert de Blois.^[27] In a commentary on woman's social manners, Blois is concerned with instructing women how to decline requestes or offers of love. His concern has everything to do with the likely harmful quality of those offers. In Blois's account, declining means knowing how to avoid this harm by responding to the would-be lover in an unambiguously negative way. To this end, he sees fit to include a trial response for his women readers:

Quant vos sa plainte oï avrez,
Tot ensi se li respondez:
"Beaux sire, certes a mon vuil
N'avroiz vos jai de par moi duil,
Et se vos pot moi vos dolez,
Saichiez bien que fol cuer avez. . . .
Ne sai qu'en moi veü avez,
Mes bien pert que vos me tenez

A la plus nice, a la plus fole,
Quant dite m'avez tel parole.
De tel beaulté ne suis je mie,
Qu'ale face panser folie.
Et certes se je tele estoie,
Plus natemant me garderoie . . . .
Ne le dites pas en riant,
Mes ausi con par mautalant.
(lines 684–89, 714–21, 738–39)

When you have heard his complaint, respond in the following manner. "Dear sir, it is certainly not my wish that you have any sorrows, and if you are grieving on my account, you should know that you have a mad heart. . . . I don't know what you saw in me, but you are lost if you take me for the most gullible and naive when you speak to me with that language. I am hardly that beautiful; it would be madness to think so. And were I like that, I would be careful to be on guard. . . . "Don't tell him [the knight] this laughingly, but with a certain irritation.

Blois elaborates an unyielding "woman's response"; it exposes the fallacies of the knight's beguiling pretty talk, just as it queries its ulterior motives. Moreover, it is meant to be delivered sharply and judgmentaly.

As the final recommendation in a comprehensive scheme to discipline women's conduct, Blois's set piece gives us some sense of the net of maneuver and manipulation in which a woman's response is caught. That Blois ordains what the response should say and how it should be spoken is symptomatic of the habit in high-medieval culture to prescribe women's voices. It is his prerogative as cleric to establish how the woman responds. Further, it points to the larger social value of training laywomen to be wary as far as men's advances are concerned. This is part of the clerical learning about women that I shall explore in part 1. Yet precisely this interest of Blois's in mandating a woman's response gives us a glimpse of the response's considerable strategic potential. His insistence on devising his own version bespeaks a concern for all that women could say in response to the dominant courtly and clerical discourse on them. Whereas Blois's response lets that discourse stand unscathed, there is always the possibility for others to take on that discourse critically.

Here we circle back to our argument regarding the woman's response. Throughout the high Middle Ages, the response increasingly became a field for challenging the dominant feminine symbols in poetic discourse. Rhetorically and generically, it provided a framework in which a critique of the standard figures could develop. And in this it corresponded strikingly

with the scholastic ritual of the disputation. While the woman's response displayed a contestatory aspect typical of so much of medieval literature, it derived its particular force from the disputatio .^[28] Moreover, it resembled the set role of the responsio (response) in these debates as they were conducted in the schools and the universities. This is the role of the student set the task of replying to the masters and disputing their propositions point for point. The Bestiaire d'amour respondent epitomizes such a student; in fact, the intense oppositional engagement of her response mimics the public sparring matches of the disputation that defined intellectual life in the high Middle Ages. This disputationa] character of the woman's response was further reinforced by a variety of social factors: the numbers of noble and bourgeois literate women during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were steady, the rudiments of education were placed in their hands, and opportunities for book learning were even available to them.^[29] Socially, there were reasons supporting women's figurative affiliation with scholastic practices such as the disputatio . By the late Middle Ages, at the time of those heated debates known as the Querelle des femmes , the figure of the woman respondent/disputant no longer conformed to the many powerful courtly and clerical prototypes in the line of Blois.

But how could a woman's response intervene efficaciously in the domain of textual culture? Even when we account for the prestigious model of the disputatio informing it, the question of its specific challenge still remains. Faced with a discourse on women legitimated by clerkly scholarship, how precisely could the response dispute it? The cardinal criterion available to the woman's response, I shall argue, is the idea of injurious language: words in and of themselves can cause harm to the public. Such an idea proves especially elusive to us today. In a society where our sense of the power of language is so thoroughly attenuated by other media, where violence is linked more and more with audiovisual imagery, the possibility that words can enact harm is difficult to fathom. Were it not for the reemerging concern over hate speech and the idioms of "fighting words," the idea of verbal injury would seem remote, little more than a curious avatar of an earlier mentality.^[30] Yet for much of medieval culture, injurious language was an article of faith. "Sometimes words cause more trouble than flogging" (aliquando plus turbant verba quam verbera). Gregory the Great's dictum, cited proverbially throughout the Middle Ages, exemplifies this sense of the damaging power of language. The echo "verba/verbera" gets at the heart of the analogy between words and physical blows. In a preprint society such as the medieval world, this link was acutely felt, and with it the fundamental connection between words and action. Simply put, words constituted action. Neither a substitute nor an

alternative for action, they functioned as action. They were thus also actionable.

The signs for this medieval understanding of injurious language are legion. Inheriting the classical rhetorical conceptions of the languages of praise and blame, many thinkers from the twelfth century on were preoccupied with the good that words could incur and the harm that they could inflict.^[31] Among the many treatises on the language arts, there were those that dealt specifically with disciplining the tongue. Take, for example, Albertano of Brescia's Liber de doctrina loquendi et tacendi (Book on the Doctrine of Speaking and Being Silent ) and Hugh of Saint Cher's De custodia linguae (Concerning the Care of Language ).^[32] And there were those that focused on the problem of wayward language, such as Robert Grosseteste's De detractione et eius malis (On Detraction and its Evil ).^[33] Given this preoccupation, it is hardly surprising that catalogues of verbal transgression were drawn up. In the high Middle Ages, we can point to a significant number of clerical pastoral manuals that identified every possible transgressive speech act. Slander, perjury, rumor mongering, sarcasm, lying, invective, calumny, false praise: all these types were laid out and assessed according to motivation, defining features, and appropriate compensation.^[34] In these analyses, the rhetorical categories of injurious language are approached practically. As a result, their occurrence in everyday speech and writing can be judged. Acts of verbal injury are subject to correction. Whether these particular pastoral manuals were ever used to condemn individuals and mete out punishment is a moot point. But what is clear is the governing mentality among the medieval clergy and society at large that evaluated any number of speech acts as punishable.^[35] Indeed, such acts were criminalized. This is borne out amply by the inquisitional record of public beatings and mutilation of those convicted of various verbal sins. The person who spoke injuriously against ecclesiastical or political authority was to suffer the consequences physically: that person's words were turned back against the body itself.^[36]

What was already a profound understanding of injurious language gained further technical weight during the later Middle Ages. This was due in no small part to the revival of Roman law.^[37] The canonists' extensive commentary on Justinian's Code and other inherited precepts brought to the fore the Roman conception of iniuria as the code defined it.^[38] "You can bring an action for injury in the usual way against those who are ascertained to have done anything for the purpose of reflecting upon your character" (quin immo adversus eos, quos minuendae opinionis tuae causa aliquid confecisse comperietur, more solito iniuriarum iudicio experiri potes).^[39] This statute established a tort whereby any offense directed against an individual's or a group's reputation was subject to legal judgment. According to medieval canonists, it stigmatized any words intended

to hurt a person's or group's public name.^[40] The code's statute and its medieval interpretations thus served to reinforce the rhetorical and pastoral principle of injurious language. Over the course of the fourteenth century, this principle grew more and more prominent precisely because it was associated with the formidable apparatus of classical legal thought.^[41] In this manner, it became a question of political discussion as much as a clerical, ecclesiastical concern. By the fifteenth century, the problem of verbal injury was focused in the public domain.^[42]

I sketch this background so that we can recognize the context for the idea of verbal injury in the woman's response. Its use was by no means unique. In fact, it was symptomatic of the pervasive concern over verba/verbera animating high-medieval society. But it was nevertheless highly unusual for the woman's response to employ the concept of verbal injury as a powerful tool against the dominant symbolic discourse on women. Ordinarily, we are accustomed to attribute such a concept to the powers that be. It is the prerogative of the prevailing authorities, who invoke it as a way of securing the existing order. In periods of social unrest such as the later Middle Ages, the Church used it to brand the delinquent believer, or royalty employed it to single out the seditious language of citizens it suspected. With the charge of verbal injury, the heretic and the traitor were stigmatized, accused of the worst verbal infraction—blasphemy.^[43] Yet in the case of the medieval woman's response, this charge was taken right to the center of a reigning poetic discourse. The criterion of injurious language was a spearhead directed against the most orthodox symbolic language about women, and thus against the most indisputable.^[44] It was the driving principle of a developing critique of the prevailing feminine representation that passed for learning in vernacular medieval culture.

No work better stood for this learning than the Roman de la rose . Yet significantly, no French work more powerfully elicited the problem of verbal injury. Contained within Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's text are both a stock of misogynous wisdom concerning women and an analysis of slander—all this in a narrative that closely resembles a university debate between masters and disciples. As many have remarked, the Rose is a disputatio gathering together various authorities who speak vehemently and often slanderously on the subject of loving women.^[45] It is the female allegorical figure, Reason, who addresses explicitly the danger of such slanderous or injurious language:

Tencier est venjance mauvese;
et si doiz savoir que mesdire
est encore venjance pire.
Mout autrement m'en vengeraie,
se venjance avoir en volaie;

car se tu meffez ou mesdiz,
ou par mes fez ou par mes diz
secreement t'en puis reprendre
por toi chastier et aprendre,
sans blasme et sanz diffamement . . . .
Je ne veill pas aus genz tancier,
ne par mon dit desavancier
ne diffamer nule persone,
quele qu'ele soit, mauvese ou bone.
(lines 6976–85, 6993–96)^[46]

Quarreling is evil vengeance, and you should know that slander is even worse. If I wanted vengeance, I would avenge myself in quite another way. For if you misbehaved or spoke slanderously, I would secretly find a way through my actions and my words to chastise and instruct you without blame and without defaming you. . . . I do not wish to quarrel with people or to repel or defame anyone by my word, whomever he might be, good or bad.

Reason distinguishes her own teaching by the absence of any defamatory elements. It is, quite simply, blameless. Yet in making this distinction, Reason draws attention to the potential link between authoritative languages and slander. She suggests the possibility that those languages promoted as doctrine can prove injurious. Such a possibility inheres in the speeches of many of the allegorical personages in Jean de Meun's Rose . We have only to think of Genius, Ami, or Male Bouche , the emblematic bad-mouther. But in its largest terms, that possibility of slander implicates the narrative as a whole. The profound irony is that the text constituting the most encyclopedic medieval knowledge of women, as well as the most elaborate symbolic language representing them, raises the issue of its own injurious character.

This problematic of verbal injury was pursued specifically in relation to poetic texts by the fourteenth-century writer Guillaume de Machaut. His Jugement dou Roy de Navarre rehearses a dispute between a lady and Guillaume over the slander of women in his love poetry:

Guillaume. . . .
Se je le say, vous le savez,
Car le fait devers vous avez
En l'un de vos livres escript,
Bien devisié et bien descript:
Si resgardez dedens vos livres.
Bien say que vous n'estes pas ivres,
Quant vos fais amoureus ditez.

(lines 862, 865–71)^[47]

Guillaume. . . . If I know it, you know it, for the matter involving you is what you have written in one of your books and well described and depicted. So look in your books. I really know that you aren't drunk when you compose love poetry.

Here the charge of "mesdisance" (line 831) is levied against the writing of an individual poet. This disputant takes exception to one of his books, and by extension to all of his work. She is unwilling to accept the usual excuse of unruly behavior (ivresse ) that is part and parcel of the lover-poet's identity in medieval amorous discourse. Of course we must not lose sight of the fact that her charge of verbal injury comes out of Machaut's own text. Like the Rose , the Jugement dramatizes the problematic. Indeed it goes so far as to represent Guillaume's desire for correction (line 911). Yet by dint of explicitly presenting the problem, the Jugement attempts to deflect it. Depicting the poet's own judgment and punishment is one way of defending him against the claim that his work is slanderous.

With the early-fifteenth-century Querelle des femmes , the problem of verbal injury gained particular momentum.^[48] In this framework, it moved out of the context of poetic works and into that of public polemic. The first authoritative text targeted was, not surprisingly, the Roman de la rose . It was the professional writer Christine de Pizan who launched the charge of slander in an open debate with several Parisian humanists defending Maître Jean de Meun. This woman's charge exploited the issue of verbal injury in several innovative ways. To begin with, Christine's dispute with the Rose introduced a particular technical conception of defamation.^[49] In her first letter addressed to Jean de Meun's humanist defenders, she asks:

En quel maniere puet estre vallable eta bonne fin ce que rant et si excessivement, impettueusement et tres nonveritablement il accuse, blasme et diffame femmes de pluseurs tres grans vices et leurs meurs tesmoingne estre plains de toute perversité?^[50]

In what manner could it [the Rose ] be valuable and directed toward a good end, that which accuses and blames women so excessively, impetuously and so untruthfully, which defames them by several enormous vices and finds their behavior full of all manner of perversity?

Christine's question draws attention to the effects of defamatory language. And it refines the general idea of words that do harm by reintroducing the classical notion that words can damage the fame (fama ) of a person or group.^[51] On a larger scale, Christine's critique of the Rose made visible the public reputation of women and its peculiar vulnerability to defamation.

Consequently, it planted the problem of texts defaming women squarely in the public domain. Her part in the Querelle du Roman de la rose made it an issue for the community as a whole. As Christine asserted in the same letter: "A work of no utility and out of the common good . . . is not praiseworthy" (oevre sans utilité et hors bien commun ou propre . . . ne fait a louer; Hicks, 21).

In this notion of "the common good" we can detect the second, farreaching innovation of Christine's disputation. Putting the emphasis on the public implications of defamation enabled her to transform the Querelle de la Rose ethically. Ultimately Christine is concerned with the damaging effects a defamatory text can produce upon the public. What injures a particular social group injures that society at large—the body politic. Christine engaged with the Rose powerfully by gauging the social benefits or liabilities of this text and by holding it publicly responsible. Following her lead, we will examine this question of the value or end of medieval works representing women; our inquiry will bring us to consider their defamatory language from an ethical point of view.

However singular Christine's disputation may appear, its ethical point was by no means lost. Another debate in the fifteenth-century Querelle des femmes pushed it still further. With the controversy over the poem La Belle Dame sans merci by the well-known court poet Alain Chartier, the problem of the value of a work became a matter of public adjudication. In a response to Chartier's poem attributed to three women, "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie," the notion of defamation against women was exploited in a fully legal sense. Such a juridical conception was already apparent in the Querelle de la Rose : when Christine lodges her complaint against Jean de Meun's text in the public forum, she speaks legalistically. Indeed there are many cases, such as Guillaume de Machaut's Jugement poems, where a legalistic force is brought to bear on literary language. The pattern reaches all the way back to the Roman de la rose and the teachings of Reason cited above, where she alludes to the right to plead the case of defamation before a judge (par pleindre, quant tens en seroit, au juige, qui droit m'en feroit; lines 6989–90).

What distinguishes the women's dispute with Chartier's Belle Dame is the move to charge an authoritative poetic text with a crime of defamation. Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie indict the poet for his "writings in which you defame us so greatly that we became infamous" (res escrips, esquelz tu nous diffames Tant grandement que se fuissons infames; lines 12–13).^[52] The women make the link between his defamatory writing and their infamy—their complete loss of fame or reputation legally speaking. Because the masterful writing of Chartier causes their name to become infamous, they seek amends. This fifteenth-century woman's response

worked to make the language of an authoritative poem not only ethically responsible but legally actionable as well.

This move comes from figures not easily associated with the privilege of legal redress. In this late-medieval scene, the case of women disputants "suing" an established and well-regarded poet is eye-catching. Once again the roles are reversed, and women representing the public domain with the power of the law behind them dispute the defamatory language of a prominent poetic text: they take on a work of a master poet by recourse to the magistrate.

"In the search to injure another verbally, is there not, in effect, the idea of preventing the other from responding, of shutting the person up; is there not also this idea of combat in words—of jousting, so to speak—where the one who shuts up loses, and the art of responding is considered a type of self-mastery?"^[53] Evelyne Larguèche's description echoes hauntingly with the problem and the promise of the medieval woman's response. The woman's response is bound by the dominant discourse on woman that promotes the model of the modest and wary woman. It is caught somewhere between discreet talk and silence, between reacting politely and, in Larguèche's terms, being shut up. Given the possibilities that such a discourse is injurious, such silence seems all the more likely. Yet the medieval woman's response allows for a challenge. More importantly it forges that challenge in the well-known but seemingly inapplicable terms of injurious language. Entering the combat of words that is the disputation, the woman's response reverses the usual dynamic of injurious language by naming it outright. As a result, the concept of verbal injury can be directed at the heart of the discourse on women relayed by clerical magistri and master vernacular poets. This concept can be attributed to the very powers that promulgate the notion and reserve it for stigmatizing outsiders. In the pages that follow, I shall track the various rhetorical, ethical, and legal ways the woman's response foregrounded the problem of the social controls of discourse. Tracing the response in late-medieval French culture will clarify what I take to be an important chapter in the history of the conception of verbal injury. Within the framework of the response, the conception is progressively shaped—from the general notion of insulting language to the technical understanding of defamation. The woman's disputational response attests to major developments in the view that language found to be damaging can be taken to public account. The polemical debates of late-medieval France offer a particularly rich site for establishing such language as actionable.

In order to study the dialectic between masterful writing and women's response, I have made this book a diptych, with one part for each position.

These positions are by no means fixed. I do not intend to reinforce two binary opposites pitting master against woman respondent. I derive these positions from the medieval disputation and use them pragmatically. My pragmatic choice is especially crucial when it comes to the position of the woman's response. By attributing a role from the disputation to female figures, I do not assign to them any particular definition of femininity. Nor do I assume them to be women. In this study, the medieval figure of a woman disputant is a role that can be played by anyone. This is already evident in the disputation, since its performative quality allows participants to take on a number of different roles. The disputational figure of a woman could be deployed by women or men. The Bestiaire d'amour respondent illustrates how difficult it is to know which is the case. But we do know that this figure was adopted by individual women, as the case of Christine de Pizan demonstrates clearly. I shall examine all these cases together because, in the end, it is not the gender of those who use the figure of the woman respondent that concerns me. Rather it is the functions and effects of the figure. What are the implications of this figure emerging in late medieval literate culture?

Pursuing such a question involves an enormous field of inquiry. This is particularly true because of the disputational character of so much of medieval literature. I have selected texts that explicitly stage the encounter between the figures of master and woman respondent. And I begin by studying the medieval institution of mastery so as to establish the context and the terms of the woman respondent's interventions. Part 1 traces the ritual practices of the clerical world of learning as they appear in highmedieval French narrative. Like their scholastic brethren, the vernacular figures of the master and disciple test their knowledge of women in the disputation. This testing process creates and reinforces a language about women that proves domineering. I will look first at the various ways the disputation over women functions as a binding agent between disciples, that trains them for the role of magister . But I will focus principally on a symbolic domination of women resulting from the language shared by master and disciple. Two models of mastery, the Ovidian and Aristotelian, will serve as test cases. Looking at a variety of debate poems that use these models will enable us to clarify how such a domination operates. In thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century narrative, however, there are signs that the intellectual mastery of women is no sure thing, and correspondingly, that the symbolic dominance it exerts does not hold. In chapters 2 and 3 of part 1, I shall trace the uneven legacy of this symbolic domination.

Part 2 investigates how the woman respondent came to dispute a dominant masterly discourse on women. By shifting from the figures of

masters disputing the subject of women to the figures of women disputing, I sharpen the issue of a discourse's accountability to its audiences. In what ways did the woman's response press the problem of the social regulation of representation? There were already glimmerings of this problem within thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century narrative; the Bestiaire d'amour and the Response au Bestiaire illustrate this amply. Yet in the later Middle Ages the problem intensified. Not only did the woman's response indict existing texts, but in the case of Jean LeFèvre's Livre de leesce and the debate over the Roman de la rose it arraigned the canonical works of earlier generations. The woman's response reached back in textual time, extending its challenge of verbal damage to the literary tradition per se. In studying the later phenomenon of the Querelle , I wish, then, to draw connections between the critique of feminine representation internal to the masterly discourse and the critique coming from without, between a lover's "wounding, beautiful talk," as one respondent puts it, and the injurious character of the discourse as a whole.

1—
PROFILES IN MASTERY

2. The Master Philosopher meets a woman. Marginalia in a fourteenth-century
Roman d'Alexandre .
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, f.fr. 95, fol. 254.
Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

3. Aristotle upended. Marginalia in a fourteenth-century  Roman d'Alexandre .
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, f.fr. 95, fol. 61 verso.
Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

1—
Ovidian and Aristotelian Figures

There are three things which Aristotle failed to explain: the toil of bees, the ebb and flow of the tides, and the mind of women.
Irish proverb

With the thirteenth-century Lai d'Aristote , the medieval clergy offers us a parable of its relations with women. This is a "boy meets girl" tale involving no less than the Master Philosopher. He is depicted as a distracted intellectual, taken from his books, and she as a seductress who magnifies her alluring figure with a mirror (Figure 2). This encounter goes directly against Aristotle's recommendation to the emperor Alexander to keep away from women:

Si vos porra on mener paistre
Ausi com une best en pré!
Trop avez le sense destempré,
Quant por une pucele estrange
Voz cuers si malement se change.
(lines 166–70)^[1]

One could thus put you out to pasture just like a beast in the field. When your heart changes so completely on account of a strange girl, you have destroyed your good sense.

The master fares no better than his "woman-crazy" student, for in the subsequent scenes of seduction, Aristotle is so attracted to this foreign creature that, as we see in the miniature, he allows her to ride him like an animal into Alexander's court (Figure 3). A woman thus consigns "the best clerk in the world" to bestiality (line 449), to the very place where his own teaching had relegated her. His book learning discredited and his mastery debased, Aristotle becomes the object of ridicule. As Cato's sentence sums it up: "It is disgraceful for the doctor when he convicts himself through his own fault" (Turpe est doctori cum culpa redarguit ipsum; line 521).

In its simplest terms, the Lai d'Aristote follows the proverbial wisdom: "Nature is worth more than nurture."^[2] This lesson of a dominant nature runs implicitly along gender lines. With woman on top, in a position suggesting her sexual dominance, the natural is identified with the feminine (Figure 3). This coding of the nature/culture opposition suggests other feminine/masculine polarities. One maxim associated with the Lai reads: "Female cunning deceives even the most learned," and another: "Do not let woman's power trespass on your mind or enter into your spirit, or you shall be confounded."^[3] Any intelligence ascribed to women (astutia ) is defined a contrario , as a threat to men's. It rivals the trait distinguishing the clerk. According to these maxims, the Lai stresses the polarity between men's reason and women's nonrational intelligence. The "boy meets girl" plot is transformed into a meditation on the feminine rapport with intellectual authority and knowledge. Judging from the Lai 's widespread circulation and the iconography and commentary that it inspired, this meditation touched a nerve in the medieval clergy.^[4] It provoked concern that—like these amusing marginalia—underlies their thinking.^[5]

In its largest terms, then, the Lai raises questions about mastery. It thus rejoins a longstanding philosophical inquiry into the links between intellectual capital and authority—in Foucauldian terms, the power/ knowledge nexus.^[6] And it reformulates that inquiry specifically in terms of the feminine. When women are involved, what exactly does it mean to be masterful? Mastery refers first of all to a type of competence or expertise. For medieval clerks, as for us, it entails working through a particular body of material and gaining control over it. With mastery comes a certain assurance, since the masterful command of material itself comprises a mode of power. According to one Aristotelian axiom cited often in the late Middle Ages: "It would be strange if, when a man possesses knowledge, something else should overpower it and drag it about like a slave."^[7] Already visible here is the related issue of domination. Mastery precisely evokes the struggle between people that leads some to dominate and others to submit. Understood sociologically as well as intellectually, it refers to the perpetual give-and-take between people. It exemplifies what Augustine called "the burning passion for domination." (cupiditas ardens dominationis ).^[8] From the first encounter between individuals or groups, each party attempts to gain the upper hand. The dynamic of dominance involves contending with the other person in the attempt to overcome his or her difference. In the Hegelian terms that color any contemporary analysis of mastery, it involves a sparring match whereby each tries to reduce the human qualities of the other and thus emerge master vis-à-vis

a subordinate object.^[9] The struggle is ongoing and the contradiction apparent, for each party depends on the need to be validated as a person by the antagonism or resistance of the other.

However separate and distinct these two senses of mastery are, the Lai d'Aristote brings to the fore their charged interrelations. With its scene of the master mastered, it discloses the clerical fear of losing intellectual control through women, and at the same time it reveals the pressures to maintain that control over them. By communicating the inverse scenario, the Lai suggests the impetus to command women effectively. It thus invites us to consider the ways masterful intellectual authority can become a form of domination. It focuses our attention on the process whereby what is valued positively, the production/possession of knowledge, can translate negatively into a mastery of women.

This process has occasioned various feminist reflections on mastery.^[10] Given the potential for knowledge as an instrument of domination, there was reason to investigate how women were implicated. In Aristotelian terms, the question was: if women have been dispossessed of knowledge historically, does it follow that they could thus be dragged about like slaves?^[11] Feminist theory began by analyzing mastery in its twofold sense as a normative system of relations elaborated and enacted principally by men. Such reasoning led some feminists to label both senses of mastery pejoratively. Mastery is deemed problematic because it represents a masculine way of leading an intellectual life. Correspondingly, women are seen to assume masterful intellectual authority reluctantly, since to do so brings with it the legacy of their subordination.^[12]

By imputing to men the conversion of masterful expertise into domination, this critique runs into its own difficulties. The danger lies in confirming that conversion. While feminists have argued that intellectual authority can be used disadvantageously against women, by labeling it a "masculine" phenomenon they reinforce the pattern of disallowing women's intellectual mastery. "Just as the child's attempt to impose control and order on its world cannot be equated with exploitative domination," Toril Moi reminds us, "it is singularly unhelpful to see all forms of intellectual mastery simply as aggressive control and domination."^[13] To do so is to run the risk of rejecting the potential for masterful expertise together with its abuse. Further, this critique is liable to confuse the instruments of mastery as domination with its causes.^[14] The critical challenge lies instead in examining the logic undergirding the twofold notion of mastery. When Christine de Pizan calls her polemical participation in the Querelle de la Rose "nonhateful, a form of solace that outrages no one," she avoids an ad

hominem critique and concentrates on the injurious language of the Rose itself.^[15] In her study on the Querelle des femmes , Joan Kelly targets "not men, but misogyny and male bias in the literate culture," thereby echoing Christine's sentimen.^[16] For medieval and contemporary critic alike, analyzing the ways authoritative traditions of knowledge work against women means critiquing the ideological system that individual masters represent.

In juxtaposing such feminist critiques of mastery with the Lai 's tale of Aristotle upended, I wish to situate the problem of the master in a specific context. My purpose is to introduce a historical framework for our theoretical discussion and thus to substantiate what Foucault has warned is notoriously insubstantial.^[17] I shall argue that the medieval structures of mastery so tellingly displayed in the Lai provide a matrix for subsequent configurations. It was the scholastic institution of the master (magister ), developed over the course of the twelfth century, that played a significant part in cultivating the affinities between mastery as intellectual authority and mastery as mode of domination. And it did so by casting the intellectual enterprise agonistically. As Martin Grabmann has taught us, the process of learning in the high Middle Ages was fundamentally defined by struggle.^[18] Whether in a scholastic context or its vernacular counterpart, acceding to the station of master was, quite literally, a fight: "crude behavior, insults, threats, 'it came even to blows.' "^[19] The very language of learning was imprinted with this aggressiveness. Altercatio, conflictus, disputatio, querela : many medieval pedagogical terms bespeak a potential for violence.^[20]

This agonistic character of learning created the circumstances for converting intellectual authority into a mode of domination. Indeed, in Walter J. Ong's view it favored that conversion.^[21] To what extent that particular conversion concerns women, however, is less clear. In the role-reversal game of the Lai d'Aristote , where are the signs of women's intellectual struggle? How does the dominating impulse that animates learning touch them? In order to answer these questions, we need first to study the dynamics between the medieval master and his disciple.

Learning to Dispute

Appearing with the twelfth-century schools, the magister occupied a prestigious position in the rarefied milieu of the literate clergy.^[22] And with the foundation of the universities in the thirteenth century, he

grew to be an ever more prominent figure.^[23] His official title distinguished him as an authoritative scholar who presided over the canonical texts. At the same time, the licentia docendi invested him with a specific pedagogical responsibility. The master was in charge of instructing groups of student-disciples and of initiating them in a world of scholarship. This initiation staged a confrontation of wills that was to culminate in the disciple bending to the master. According to the popular clerical manual De disciplina scholarium : "He who has not learned that he is subjugated [to the masters], could never come to know himself as master" (qui se non novit subjici, non noscat se magistrari).^[24] In vernacular descriptions as well, the master/disciple rapport develops out of a sense of rivalry and respect. A late-thirteenth-century didactic work, the Livre d'Enanchet portrays just how charged that rapport is:

Et si-l doit metre ainz au boen meistre q'au mauvais, por ce que-u boens meistre est mout utel chose au deciple. Et il doit sorestier a la dotrine son maistre; por ce q'ausi corn la grotere de l'aigue chaant [chaut] d'en haut cheive la piere dure, vance l'usage a savoir ce que-u cuers de l'ome ni voldroit maintes foiees. Mes il doit mult honorer son meistre, por qu'il est lo segond signe de science, et doit mult enquerir sa dotrine et noter ses paroles et son chastiemant.^[25]

And he should dedicate himself to a good master rather than to a bad one, since a good master is extremely useful to a disciple. And he should attend to the doctrine of his master, for just as a drop of water fallen from above pierces the hard rock, so too the use of knowledge hits a man's heart where it is oftentimes not receptive to it. But he should greatly honor his master, since he is the second sign of knowledge and he must seek energetically after his doctrine and take note of his words and teaching.

As "lo segond signe de science," the master embodies the world of learning (dotrine ), outfitting the disciple for an intellectual life. Yet that preparation involves yielding to the master's authority as well as to his knowledge. The Livre d'Enanchet shows the master handing down a chastoiement . This Old French term, echoing the Latin castigare found in the Disciplina , combines the notions of instruction and latent strife: one goes with the other. Imparting a doctrine entails a type of castigation or chastisement. This castigation was directed toward both men and women; contemporaneous didactic texts such as Le Chastoiement d'un père à son fils and Le Chastoiement des dames are built on one and the same model of the master taking the student in hand.^[26]

This sense of discipline discloses the tensions informing the master/ disciple relation. While the disciple struggles to attain the master's respect and wisdom, the master in turn castigates him. Contention fuels their exchanges and, paradoxically, binds the two figures together. If the surviving accounts give us any indication, such contentious relations ruled university life.^[27] Even the latter-day humanist critic Vivès would describe the scene as all "that scholastic shadowboxing and contentious altercation" (scholasticasque illas umbratiles pughas et contentiosas altercationes).^[28] The medieval master inducted the disciple in an intellectual life whose characteristic methods were conflictual. The question-and-answer modes of instruction (quaestiones ), the disputations (disputationes ) that began the debates pitting masters against students (quodlibeta )—such standard dialectical methods trained the student to work against his master.^[29] If the disciple was ever to assert himself, he had to proceed adversarially—in John of Salisbury's words, through "verbal conflict"—mounting challenges and refutations of what the master put forth.^[30]

These challenges were never meant to jeopardize the institution of mastery. On the contrary, the entire agonistic process was geared to outfit the disciple for the master's role.^[31] It distinguished those few disciples who would eventually assume the magister title from the many others who failed to meet the test. The sustained disputations sanctioned certain disciples as members of the scholastic elite. In the end, the chastoiement validated them as authorities able to discipline others. In this, the master/ disciple engagement resembles the sparring between knights, for there too the clash provides a mechanism for bonding that secures both men in the same courtly, chivalric roles.^[32]

No more telling example of the disputational dynamic exists than the case history of Peter Abelard. The dialectical method of thought that he pioneered in his treatise the Sic et Non was illustrated uncannily in his own dealings with his peers: his unceremonious rejection of his master, Anselm of Laon, his attacks against a rival master, William of Champeaux, his sparring with his own followers. Abelard exemplifies the way the medieval system of intellectual mastery functioned by creating conflict so as to better establish control of intellectual problems. The difficulty in mastering a particular body of knowledge was played out through disputation. And far from dividing the masters and students definitively, their disputatiousness acted to consolidate their caste. The more bitterly they fought among themselves, the more tightly they closed ranks and cemented their control over intellectual matters. Abelard's reputation makes this clear. However he depicted himself as renegade and outcast, medieval posterity identified him as one of the masters' own.^[33]

Abelard's case is also important because it reveals how the feminine begins to inform the disputatiousness of medieval masters and disciples. Intellectual traditions in Europe had long typed knowledge as a woman (scientia ), and its highest form, wisdom, as a female deity (sapientia ). Like many other masters straight on through the Renaissance, Abelard dedicated himself to the goddess of wisdom, Minerva. "I gave up completely the court of Mars so as to be brought up in the lap of Minerva. . . . I put the conflicts of the disputation over and above the trophies of combat."^[34] Abelard's description of his entry into intellectual life gives us a telling sense of how the pursuit of knowledge is connected with the feminine. Embracing wisdom implies coming into contact with a woman. Yet this embrace is not incompatible with aggressive impulses. Although Abelard renounces the god of war, he does not relinquish the martial arts. For him, the bellicose and the feminine come together in the form of the disputation. Under the aegis of Minerva, verbal battles are to be waged. That Abelard chooses this goddess as mentor shows how the scholastic activity of disputing comes to be figured through women.

But if intellectual mastery is represented in part through the feminine, where do women figure in? We come back to the question of women's encounter with clerical intellectual life. Can they participate in the master/ disciple disputation? Abelard's explosive experience with Héloïse hardly bears this out. His tutelage of her was short-lived, leading quickly to their sexual relation. In the vernacular domain, the picture is little different. In the Livre d'Enanchet , for instance, the master who debates with his disciple puts forth the following doctrine (la dotrine dou clers ): "It is better to sit in a corner of the house that is not in the throughway; not like a woman who wags her tongue" (il est mieuz seoir en un angle de sa maison qe n'est en chiés comun. Ne corn famme laengueice! Fiebig, 7).^[35] This portrait of the model clerk distinguishes him from the woman who talks too much. And it spatializes his distinctive role. Whereas the woman plants herself in the middle, the clerk is recommended to place himself apart, in isolation. Such a scene, I would suggest, builds on the standard outline of the social hierarchy of roles in Andreas Capellanus's De amore : "In addition, among men we find one rank more than among women, since there is a man more noble than any of these, that is, the clerk" (Praeterea unum in masculis plus quam in feminis ordinem reperimus, quia quidam masculis nobilissimus invenitur ut puta clericus; II, 1; Parry, 36; Pagès, 10). The fact that the clerk inhabits a separate space underscores his unique position. Not only does he represent the "most noble" man, but he has no female equivalent. In the clerical schema of Capellanus or the Enanchet , there are few signs of women assuming the stance of disciple.

4. The duke and duchess of Brabant and the master of the  Consaus d'amours .
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2621, fol. 1.
Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Such definitions of clerical life give us a first glimpse into the vexed position of women vis-à-vis intellectual mastery. They are at odds with the clerical role. Yet they are not completely evacuated from its domain. The inaugural miniature from the Consaus d'amours , a late-thirteenthcentury didactic treatise, exemplifies this dilemma (Figure 4). The woman, the duchess of Brabant, sits side by side with her lord the duke—an apparent partner in the lessons the master pronounces.^[36] But the text that follows relays a debate engaging the men alone. Designed implicitly as a master/ disciple dialogue, it leaves little room for her. In fact, the insignia of the various figures in the miniature confirm this: while the book links the duke to the academic learning of the master, the scroll identifies the woman with the oral. The duchess appears ready to repeat the master's formulas but unable to engage with them fully and make them her own. The structure of the master/disciple dispute seems to both accommodate women and disqualify them.^[37] While included theoretically as part of the proceedings, they are nonetheless blocked from participating in its work: mediums of the disputation, yes; real contestants, no.

A Clerkly Savoir Faire

This precarious position of women is established in Latin and vernacular literature in texts such as the Latin Concilium Romarici montis and the Old French Jugement d'amour .^[38] These two related twelfth-century works offer a paradigm of women's circumscribed role in the world of intellectual mastery. The Concilium and the Jugement dramatize a disputation on love conducted exclusively by women. One side argues that the clerk is the best lover, and the other, the knight. Locked in an intractable quarrel, the female opponents bring their cases to be judged; in the Concilium before an assembly of women, and in the Jugement before the God of Love. Opinions are unanimously in favor of the clerk. Both these texts are obvious propaganda pieces for the clergy.^[39] Yet the degree to which women advance its cause is surprising. Why this recourse to female surrogates? Why should clerical discourse articulate its own privileged claims by way of women?

From the outset of the debate, this surrogacy looks incomplete: "No one called a man is admitted to that place; nevertheless some were present who had come from faraway; they were not laymen, but respectable clerks" (nemo qui vir dicitur illuc intromittitur. Quidam inde aderant, qui de longe venerant, Non fuerant laici, sed honesti clerici; Concilium , 10–12). The androgynous clerks appear only on the sidelines. Yet such an appearance makes clear that while they do not speak their part, they are still directing it through a female agent. Women are deemed both capable and incapable of assuming the clerks' position. Later on in the narrative, the limits of their intermediary role are specified: "For the women, the art is in knowing the things of love, but they are ignorant of what a man should know how to do in practice" (Harum in noticia ars est amatoria; Sed ignorant, opere quid vir sciat facere, lines 34–35). The distinction here is between women's familiarity with the subject of love and "manly" clerks' ability to exploit it. One talks, the other acts on his knowledge. In effect, the women champion all those clerkly traits that the knight does not possess, especially knowledge: "I beseech you to love clerks above all, by whose wisdom everything is disposed" (Precor vos summopere clericos diligere, quorum sapientia disponuntur omnia; Concilium , lines 186–87). Or as the clerk's advocate, Blancheflor, argues in the Jugement : "The clerk knows more about courtliness, he ought to have a girlfriend more than anyone else, even more than the knight" (Ke clers set plus de courtoisie et ke mieus doit avoir amie ke autre gent ne chevalier; lines 249–51).

This clerkly brand of knowledge is presented in academic terms: recorded in writing, developed through commentary and disputation. Love is thus for the clerk less a physical affair than one of learning. Even the knight's advocate notes this: "When your lover is at the monastery, he pores over his psalter, he turns over and over again the parchment, and for you he makes no other play" (Quant vos amis est au moustier, torne et retorne son sautier, torne et retorne cele piel: pot vous ne fait autre cembiel; Jugement , lines 115–17). From the opposing position, the clerk's commitment to written texts is also figured as powerful, if not allengrossing.

Given the clerk's superior knowledge, what exactly is he alleged to know? While the image of the clerk with his psalter suggests theological learning, by the end of the Concilium he is associated with the secrets of women (abdita ). The history of ideas in the West has long identified secrets as a choice intellectual category and typed them, like the Minervan myth of knowledge, invariably in feminine terms.^[40] Whether we look to the Greek philosopher contemplating the mysteries of nature or the Renaissance man of science probing the material world, the quest for knowledge habitually seeks a feminine object. In medieval culture, this fascination with feminine secrets was widespread. Witness the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum or the Secres as philosophes , two compendia of the most recondite items of scientific knowledge that maintain this feminine character.^[41] Or the widely known thirteenthcentury gynecological texts, Secreta mulierum (The Secrets of Women ).^[42] In contemporaneous vernacular literature as well, women's secrets were the quarry par excellence. Andreas Capellanus's De amore , for one, contends that the would-be lover should begin by tracking them: "Presently he begins to think about the fashioning of the woman and to differentiate her limbs, to think about what she does, and to pry into the secrets of her body" (Postmodum mulieris incipit cogitare facturas et eius distinguere membra suosque actus imaginari eiusque corporis secreta rimari; Parry, 29; Pagès, 3). This probing into secrets is also emphasized in Drouart La Vache's French version of the De amore :

En son cuer recorde et ramenbre
La faiture de chascun menbre,
Les venues et les alees
Et cerche les choses secrees.
(Li Livres d'amours , lines 237–40)

In his heart he recalls and remembers the form of each member, its comings and goings, and he searches for their secrets.

The lover's fantasy about different members of the woman's body heightens the desire to get at her secrets. The greater the reflection on them, the greater their lure.

In the case of the Concilium , the women stake everything on the clerk's understanding of their secrets: "They strive to act on our affairs and take control of our cause, but thanks to them, even through their grace, our secrets will never be made known" (Causas nostras agere student atque regere, quantum possunt, etiam per eorum gratiam, nostra quedam abdita nunquam erunt cognita; lines 189–91). The inference is that the clerk knows how to keep women's secrets discreetly. Yet as vernacular love literature attests richly, the threat also exists that knowing such secrets invites their violation. Once they are thought, they will be made known. Through whatever party, they risk becoming common knowledge. The clerk's understanding of women's secrets carries a sexual charge insofar as those secrets are consistently associated with their bodies. If this understanding does not suggest "knowing" women in the sexual sense, it does involve a carnal knowledge of them. Since the pro-clerkly Concilium and Jugement both condemn the knight for having sex with women (lines 179–80), their claim on the secret knowledge of female sexuality is all the more important.

We can now begin to answer a number of our initial questions: if these texts include women in a version of the master/disciple disputation, they do so in a manner that ultimately counts them out. By projecting women as privileged mouthpieces of clerical wisdom, the Concilium and Jugement make them party to clerical claims on the knowledge of women. They enlist women complicitously: neither clerk nor master themselves, women are depicted enunciating the clerical right to possess women's own secrets. It is no surprise, then, that they are moved progressively out of the debate.

Once clerical disputation claims the topic of women, the risk emerges that mastering such knowledge means using it as a form of control. Just as the master/disciple dialogues stage a battle of sorts so as to secure their hold over a body of knowledge, so too the Concilium and Jugement battle over the clergy's prerogative to know women. The result is to reserve that knowledge for themselves and, concomitantly, to bar women from it. Both texts build the case implicitly for an exclusive clerical knowledge of women. In so doing, they represent that knowledge as potentially domineering.

The medieval clergy's appropriation of the topic of women's knowledge constitutes in and of itself a powerful order of symbolic domination. From the master/disciple configuration arguing over a feminine object to the story of women defending the clerk's superior knowledge, a

discourse coercive to women is in the making. It is a masterful discourse in both the positive sense and the negative. Through the disputation, it represents and defends the clergy's special claim on women's knowledge. Their intellectual authority is seen to extend rightfully over it. Valorizing the clerks' prerogative to know women has the effect of disenfranchising them. In clerks' hands, such knowledge can become a way to dominate masterfully. We have here a discursive pattern that, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown us, can exert enormous power because of its social use.^[43] It is a discourse attributed to the revered caste of the clergy. And it is elaborated didactically in a variety of texts called enseignements (teachings) that purport to relay a doctrine. Through such narratives, the model of masters disputing the "secrets" of women takes hold in French medieval culture, and with it the pattern of using the knowledge of women as a type of power over them.

Representations of the master/disciple debate create this symbolic domination by means of two models of mastery that recur in enseignements . The first, the Ovidian, is derived from habitual rereading of the Ars amatoria and the Remedia amoris .^[44] In the thirteenth century, as much as in the twelfth-century "age of Ovid," these works formed an integral part of the school curriculum.^[45] They were so well known that they laid the foundation for a particular model of mastery. With the second model, the Aristotelian, the picture is more complicated. This model took shape as a result of the thirteenth-century translation and assimilation of key works—the Metaphysics, Politics , and Ethics , as well as the biological treatises. In fact, the second model of mastery underwriting French narrative testifies to the turbulent reception of Aristotle's works at the University of Paris: the fitful recovery of the Metaphysics , the fragmentary understanding of the Ethics , the controversy over teaching the biological works.^[46] As we shall see, the Aristotelian model of mastery typifies what Fernand van Steenberghen called the "eclectic Aristotelianism" of the period (126). It is thus based on the array of Greek and Arabic texts that were so frequently attributed erroneously to the Master Philosopher during the later Middle Ages.^[47]

Studying the Ovidian and Aristotelian models of mastery together is important for several reasons. First, it will help identify the specifically Aristotelian terms of mastery. It will also bring into sharper relief the mark of the magistri 's learning in French medieval narrative. Yet by contrasting the Aristotelian model of mastery with the Ovidian, we can approach the problem of symbolic domination in a nuanced way. The differences between the two models will reveal the many, varied ways that dominance was expressed. This study will prepare the ground for consid-

ering the woman's response. It will set up our inquiry into how the response tackles the symbolic domination of women in masterly vernacular texts. Working through the models for such domination will enable us in part 2 to work the woman's response back the other way.

A Game of Prevarication

As an entry point into the Ovidian model of mastery, let us consider one of its most influential precepts:

Posse capi: capies, tu modo tende plagas.
uere prius uolucres taceant, aestate cicadae,
Maenalius lepori det sua terga canis,
femina quam iuueni blande temptata repugnet;
haec quoque, quam poteris credere nolle, uolet.
(Ars amatoria  I, 270–74)^[48]

Women can always be caught: that's the first rule of the game. Sooner would birds in the spring be silent or locusts in August, sooner would hounds run away when the fierce rabbits pursue, than would a woman well-wooed refuse to succumb to a lover; she'll make you think she means No! while she is planning her Yes!

Relations between men and women are set up right away as a game, the object of which is to make women cede to their male lovers. This objective is described by a string of oxymorons. It would take a wholesale reversal of natural law—noise giving way to silence, prey turning into predators—to match the instance of women not succumbing to men. If we look closely, women's yielding is oxymoronic: it is expressed through a whole range of polarized oppositions.

Representing women as naysayers confirms the strategic value of this opposition. Whereas "No!" is a common initial response to any advance, here, as a rhetorical expression of difference, it blocks unanimity between men and women. It forestalls what is taken as inevitable. However briefly, the female "No!" suspends the sought-after conclusion of the man's game by swerving from automatic assent. Like the response of a hunted animal who, in a last desperate gesture, veers away, this "No!" is taken to seal the woman's fate. It is the signature trait of what I shall call feminine prevarication.^[49] That the clerkly narrator takes it as a sign of the woman's compliance signals how in an Ovidian model of mastery a woman's opposition functions as the preface to her succumbing.

This oxymoronic quality of women's yielding is captured by another Ovidian maxim, this time from Andreas Capellanus's De amore : "For what greater thing can a woman give than to yield herself to the mastery of someone else?" (Quid enim mulier maius dare posset quam si suam personam alieno disponat arbitrio?; I, 3; Parry, 43; Pagès, 17). Capellanus's phrase is also based on the view that women are meant to give in. While the Latin does not specify the idea of mastery explicitly, the expression "disponere suam personam alieno arbitrio" conveys the sense that women are to bend to the will of another (that alienum arbitrium belonging, as a rule, to father, husband, confessor). In this manner, a single answer to Capellanus's question is projected: there is no greater thing for women to do than yield. Or is there? Because the maxim stands as a question, room is left for second thought. And because it occurred commonly in those scholastic anthologies of quotable quotes, the florilegia , readers were invited to speculate beyond the pat response: "No, women can give nothing greater."^[50] But what alternative could there be? That women do have something greater to give, or that women are not meant to yield? Even if most medieval clerkly readers would work through the question dialectically to arrive at one answer, the fact that its syntax entertains others points to the pivotal role of opposition. The implicit structure of the masters' disputation makes this clear. Once again, we find how clerical discourse draws a close connection between opposition and yielding; in this instance, between women's opposition and their yielding to men.

The Ovidian model of mastery explores this connection through a playful dialogue between men and women. Orchestrated by a master-narrator, this dialogic format dramatizes the yes/no prevarication. It renders the opposition in the banter between male/female speakers; indeed, it intensifies that opposition through frequent impasses. All this is intended to set the stage for women ceding to the will of their male interlocutors. In order to show how this pattern of feminine prevarication functions for Ovidian mastery, I shall concentrate here on two dialogues from the De amore , the first because it includes the maxim "What greater thing can a woman give?" and the second because it offers the most complex piece.

Andreas's dialogue between a middle-class man and woman (plebeius/plebeia ) opens with a flourish of off-putting remarks. The woman responds to the man's praise of her beauty by accusing him of lying: "You seem to be telling fibs, since although I do not have a beautiful figure you extol me as beautiful beyond all other women and although I lack the ornament of wisdom you praise my good sense" (Tui videntur falsitatem continere sermones, quia, quum mihi non sit pulchritudinis forma decora,

me quasi super omnes formosam mulieres extollis, et quum sim ornatu sapientiae destituta, me tanquam prudentem tua verba commendant; Parry, 37; Pagès, 11). Her challenge deflates his exaggerated claims in a manner that confirms women's putative modesty. The man is quick to come back, and chips away progressively at the woman's opposition. His rejoinders attack it by arguing a point both ways in the same breath. This strategy appears first in his assertion that she looks to be a noblewoman (Parry, 38). When she rebuffs his claim, the middle-class man is shown to take her response as both correct and mistaken: "Good character and good manners alone have given to you a more worthy kind of nobility . . . but since an excellent character makes noble not only women but men also, you are perhaps wrong in refusing me your love, since my manners, too, may illumine me with the virtue of nobility" (Parry, 38; Pagès, 12). Agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously with the woman enables the man to undermine her spurning remarks. Through such equivocal argumentation, the man makes it nearly impossible for her to reject his remarks out of hand because it is no longer evident what precisely is being rejected, or indeed to what end. The woman is meant to be baffled, with the result that she concedes the point and switches the subject abruptly: "You may deserve praise for your great excellence, but I am rather young, and I shudder at the thought of receiving solaces from old men" (Parry, 39; Pagès, 13). We find here a first-rate example of a dialectical method of reasoning whereby abandoning one's habitual stand and projecting other opinions provoke the same reaction in the interlocutor. As the master-narrator sets up the dialogue, the man's ruse of shifting his own adversarial stand aims to confuse the woman.

This strategy paves the way for the man's rhetorical gesture of his own yielding:

Nonne maiori doctor est dignus honore vel laude, qui omnino discipulum imperitum sua facit doctrina prudentem, quam qui reddit doctum sua sapientia doctiorem? Noves ergo miles amoris ac in amore rudis te mihi peto magistram et tua doctrina plenius erudiri.
(Pagès, 15)

Doesn't a teacher who by his instruction makes a prudent man [disciple] out of one who has never had any instruction deserve more honor and praise than one who teaches more wisdom to a man who is already wise? That is why I, a new recruit in Love's service and awkward in love, ask you to be my teacher [master] and to train me more fully by your instruction.
(Parry, 41)

In this description of the man's yielding, we find the key terms of mastery, terms that the French translator of the De amore , Drouart la Vache, expounds upon:

.I. clers plus a loer feroit,
Qui .i. disciple enseigneroit,
en .i. art lui sage rendant,
que cil, qui .i. bien entendant
rendroit plus saige par estude.
(lines 1073–77)

A clerk would be more praiseworthy who would instruct one disciple, making him knowledgeable in one art, than a clerk who would make one already trained even wiser through further study.

Both Capellanus and Drouart cast the male/female relation as one between master and disciple. In this instance, the master role is allotted to a woman. After all the rhetorical maneuvering, the man rests his case by appearing to give her the intellectual upper hand: he names the woman magistram . Yet let us be careful in gauging this strategic naming. What is striking is the way the man acts out what he intends the woman to do.^[51] To simulate assenting to the master is to contrive the woman doing the same thing. In the framework of the master/disciple debate, the master-narrator can use the man's apparent embracing of a subservient position to set up the woman's parallel action. Logically and rhetorically he works to move her into yielding: the more frequently she says "No," the more frequently it is interpreted in the opposite way. The more she is represented as an authority figure, the more she is identified as one to be bested. Here the man's obeisance correlates with the ultimate aim of the woman yielding.

This paradox is best understood in terms of the conventional give-andtake of power. In such a circumstance, it is those with authority who are able to give it up. Self-abnegation makes sense only when the person believes he is entitled. As Barbara Johnson puts it trenchantly: "It would seem that one has to be positioned in the place of power in order for one's self-resistance to be valued."^[52] In the case of Ovidian narrative, the masternarrator capitalizes on just such a power: he redistributes the roles so as to overdetermine the woman's ceding to the man. Representing the man as temporarily submissive is meant to signify his ultimate dominance. The master-narrator's contention is this: to defer from a position of power can offer, paradoxically, a means of exerting it.

This projection of a magistra invites an oppositional reading on the part of the woman. Naming her "master" creates an opportunity for her resistance. In the ludic structure of Ovidian mastery, that projected name al-

lows her to play the game differently. Instead of a simple role reversal, it implies reworking the very conception of mastery. As she states: "You say that you wish to submit to my instruction in this matter, but I absolutely refuse the task" (Sed dicis in hoc mea te velle disciplina doceri; hunc autem penitus recuso laborem"; Parry, 41; Pagès, 15). The woman can assume the magistra role without taking on its conventional task of disciplining disciples. If clerical representation legislates the incompatibility of women and mastery, then from her oppositional perspective, her play with mastery can signal something else—indeed, as she calls it, a type of wisdom (sapientia ). Her intellectual authority can break out of the disputational dynamic of submission and domination.

Such is the potential of the magistra . Yet if we read the Ovidian model in context, the rhetorical projection of the magistra is used finally to elicit the woman's submission. This becomes all the more clear when we notice that it occurs in the discussion of the gradus amoris —the well-known ladder of love. Of the four steps, the lover dwells upon the last, defined as a "yielding of the whole person" (in totius personae concessione; Pagès, 16). Here is where the man poses the question "What greater thing can a woman give than to yield herself to the mastery of someone else?" The narrator moves from a scene persuading a woman to yield to a man's greater knowledge to one where she is encouraged to yield physically. The connection is telling: an act of intellectual mastery is associated with a physical act. By anticipating this end, sexual intercourse, the master-narrator argues that "woman can always be caught." Indeed, he attempts to prove his authoritative knowledge about them by projecting this image of their bodily submission. As it is, the woman's yielding is never fully represented; it is left in suspense. In her words: "If great things cannot be won without great labor, since what you are seeking is one of the greatest you will have to be exhausted by a great deal of labor before you get what you want" (Si absque gravi labore magna parari non possunt, quum id, quod postulas, sit de maioribus unum, multis te oportet laboribus fatigari, ut ad quaesita munera valeas pervenire"; Parry, 44; Pagès, 17). The dialogue thus reveals a decided gap between the cajoling words of the male lover and their physical effects. Correspondingly, in the framework of the master/disciple debate it shows up the discrepancy between the master's teaching and its being put into action by the disciple.

If we take this "plebeian" dialogue as a single unit of argumentation, then, all the exchanges show her opposition to the advances of the male lover. In the Ovidian scheme, a woman's prevarication is symptomatic of

her fitful desire to defer to men's greater authority. And as such, it furnishes the master and disciple a reason to dictate to her. However, the fact that the woman is never seen to yield, that the lessons on women are never realized, offers a limit case for the Ovidian model of mastery.

In the second, aristocratic dialogue we shall examine, this game of feminine prevarication is extended as the banter between a man and woman is transposed allegorically. Both participants deploy a figurative language that culminates in the well-known story of the palace of love. Yet what happens exactly when the clerical argument for women's yielding is coded in the tropes of gates and castles of love (Parry, 69–70)?

From the outset, the woman shows the characteristic signs of prevarication. On the one hand, she admits to having granted the man favors: this is the "Yes!" element (Parry, 70). On the other, she asserts that he can never obtain what he is after: "For I am firmly resolved with all my heart never to subject myself to the servitude of Venus or endure the torments of lovers" (firmum etenim est et totius meae mentis propositum Veneris me nunquam supponere servituti nec amantium me poenis subiicere; Parry, 70; Pagès, 43). All these references to servitude and enduring pains (poenas ) reveal the familiar dynamic of the woman fending off the man's rhetorical moves. If we accept Betsy Bowden's thesis of the double entendre of poenas (pains/penises), that dynamic is sexualized in a familiar way.^[53] Here the woman prevaricates according to the Ovidian master's plan. Yet the woman's language also demonstrates her capacity to use allegory defensively. She turns the covert terms back against their author. Not only is she represented as understanding their veiled meaning, but she succeeds momentarily in deflecting them as well. This pattern builds when the woman introduces her own figure of French freedom:

Malo igitur aere modico Franciae contenta adesse et liberum eundi, quo voluero, possidere arbitrium quam Ungarico quidem onusta argento alienae subiici potestati, quia tale multum habere est nihilum habere.
(Pagès, 44)

I would rather, therefore, stay in France and be content with a few coppers and have freedom to go where I would, than to be subject to a foreign power, even though I were loaded down with Hungarian silver, because to have so much is to have nothing.
(Parry, 71–72)

Her trope contrasts freedom at home with submission to a foreign power. As we have seen in the previous dialogue, this "foreignness" is peculiarly charged. While it refers to the person and will of another, it

casts that alterity, by way of the French/Hungarian comparison, adversarially. In the woman's configuration, she risks losing her free will and being dominated by an enemy with very little to show for it. This figure recalls the maxim with which I began. They both explore the question of yielding to another/foreign will (disponere suam personam alieno arbitrio). Furthermore, they both signal the Ovidian master's argument on the bending of women's will. But there the similarities end. In this case, the noblewoman speaks figuratively in self-defense. Whereas the clerical speaker of the maxim seems in the end to valorize yielding, the woman puts the highest premium on defending her freedom. She uses the trope to refuse to yield.

Her figurative efforts are nonetheless circumscribed. As Bowden aptly characterizes it, the nobleman's rhetoric gives the woman a false choice: have sex, or have sex (74). "If you choose to walk that path [of freedom], unbearable torments will follow you" (Si tali curaveritis via ambulare, intolerabilis vos poena sequetur; Parry, 72; Pagès, 45). In the act of acknowledging her freedom, the narrator threatens her with the double entendre of pain/penis. And it is this pun that sets the scene for the most ambitious allegory of the dialogue; the palace of love. Exploiting a classical tradition of sexualized allegory, the man represents a castle inhabited by "certain communities of ladies" (Parry, 73). It is a structure with many portals, some guarded by recalcitrant women, others by more welcoming types. The lover's goal involves finding a way in.

Constructing such an elaborate allegorical structure is a masterful ploy. As such, it distinguishes the lover as an authority on a near par with the clerk. This association is confirmed by the fact that the man mimics those teachings of a master found elsewhere in the De amore : "There are also other lesser precepts of love which it would not profit you to hear, since you can find them in the book written to Walter" (Sunt et alia amoris praecepta minora, quorum tibi non expediret auditus, quae etiam in libro ad Gualterium scripto reperies; Parry, 82; Pagès, 54). The man's allegory is a mise en abyme of the master-narrator's, indeed, of Capellanus's own. It is thereby legitimated. In this sense too, it is shown to surpass the woman's skills. As she confesses: "These things are too obscure for me, and your words are too allegorical; you will have to explain what you mean" (Hi mihi sunt nimis sermones obscuri nimisque verba reposita, nisi ipsa tua faciat interpretatio manifesta; Parry, 73; Pagès, 45). Like a subordinate, she is represented acquiescing in the end to the man's superior knowledge. While the exercise of mastering the woman intellectually works through a form of projection in the first

dialogue, here it is established directly. The male speaker becomes a master vis-à-vis a female student by means of allegory.

As we saw in the first dialogue, this stance of intellectual mastery has a carnal dimension. And the woman brings it out: "But whether what you say is true or false, the story of these terrible punishments frightens me so that I do not wish to be a stranger to Love's service" (Sive igitur vera sint sive falsa, quae proponis, terribilium me deterret poenarum relatio, et ideo ab amoris nolo militia exsistere aliena, sed eius affecto consortio copulari; Parry, 83; Pagès, 55). The familiar language of pains/penises (poenas ) is extended to include copulare . The objective of women yielding is described in obvious sexual terms. Allegorizing the game of feminine prevarication heightens the clerical move to represent women submitting in intercourse. Once again, we find a master-narrator who directs the male/female banter toward a sexual end, who privileges that end as a subject for clerical debate. As the Roman de la rose demonstrates all too well, the act of expounding allegorically about sex is a master's prerogative.

It is this very aspect of Ovidian mastery that may well have provoked the ecclesiastical condemnation of the De amore in 1277. Not only were methods of medieval schooling put to the service of disputing "women," but such disputations lent themselves to questions of sexuality. The value of intellectual authority was compromised by such ironic discussions of sexual relations with women. What's more, this compromise affected the domain of teaching. By using Ovidian mastery as a school subject, it gives it a certain credibility. As the article of condemnation puts it," "They presume to treat and dispute in the schools such ridiculous falsehoods."^[54] This issue of falsehood clearly implicates master and disciple. Given the pedagogical exchange that frames the De amore , the danger lay in representing (falsely) the subject of mastering women as a reputable clerical concern.

In order to see how this Ovidian mastery is figured increasingly as a school subject—one of the medieval vernacular's "three Rs"—we need to turn to another text. Jacques d'Amiens's reworking of the Ars amatoria presents a series of dialogues.^[55] But his Art d'amors uses them as set pieces of clerical analysis. "About entreating [women], I have well demonstrated my meaning and sense; I will now teach you what I think and know about [their] responses. They will respond to you in many different ways" (Or t'ai bien de proier moustre et mon sens et ma volenté, des responses t'enseignerai cou que i'en pens et que i'en sai. Diversement te respondront; lines 746–49). Separating out the men's requestes from the women's responses , it sets up an exegetical challenge. The masterly narrator is to test the disciple's knowledge about how to take charge of women verbally. In his commentary, the various women's responses become occasions for

testing their hermeneutical skills. Five different requestes , followed by five hypothetical ripostes, provide a spectrum of explications de texte .

In keeping with the Ovidian model, each woman's response is by definition negative. In the case of the first woman, who rejects the lover because he defies her husband, the narrator's commentary revolves around the familiar figure of the master:

Ha! douce dame debonnaire,
aprendes, c'uns autres set faire;
se un autre assayet avies,
vostre baron mains priseries;
par une escole et par un mestre
ne puet nus hom bien sages estre;
(lines 770–75)

Ah sweet, gentle lady, learn what another knows well how to do. Had you tried another, you would appreciate your own lord more; no one can be truly wise through just one master, at just one school.

The erotic relation is linked to the pedagogical. The master-narrator displays a woman ready to learn something new—a body of knowledge in another man's possession. He thus tries to manipulate her through her appetite for greater knowledge. Belittling her allegiance to a single master (her husband), he entreats her to embrace another. The inference is that her increasing knowledge involves her deference to an increasing number of masters. The process of learning is for her inextricably connected with a power dynamic, with being lorded over.

The second and third women's responses presented by the narrator dramatize opposition based on fear of treachery. For the third woman, this implies physical danger: "For you should well know the truth of the matter: for all that can befall me, I do not wish to lose my soul or to dishonor my body" (car bien sacies par verite: m'ame perdre et mon cors hounir ne voel, se miex ne m'en puet venir; lines 833–35). The woman's reference to sexual violence—"mon corps hounir"—prompts the narrator to intervene:

Quant tu ces responses oras,
en ton cuer ioie avoir devras,
car celles qui ensi respondent
lor corage molt bien espondent;
puis c'a toi se veut desraisnier,
il n'i a fors del embrachier
et de parler bien sagement
et si li respont doucement.
(lines 836–43)

When you hear these responses, you should have joy in your heart, because those women who respond in this way are revealing their innermost thoughts. Since she wishes to debate with you, there is nothing to do but to embrace her, talk to her prudently, and respond gently.

The fact that the woman expresses her opposition in sexual terms is taken as a sure sign of her desirousness. That she explicitly says "No!" to sex signals her real interest. This analysis of the woman's prevarication is intended to embolden the lover and give him joy (avoir en cuer ioie .) For any medieval student of love, as for any critic of love literature, such ioie carries decided sexual implications.

This Ovidian pattern of divining the woman's likely assent in her most adamant objections intensifies with the fourth and fifth responses. Here the women protest too much. This excessive "No!" licenses the lover to proceed. As the master-narrator evaluates it, if the lover persists in stating his case, he should prevail over her fiercest resistance: "For the good sense, the courtesy, the valor and gallantry that she will discover will make her fall in love whether she wants to or not: this is no exaggeration" (car li sens et la cortoisie, la grans valors, la druerie k'elle i trueve, le fait amer, u voelle u non, tout sans fauser; lines 964–67). "Whether she wants to or not": the clerkly narrator is hardly concerned with the woman's desire. It has little bearing on the outcome because the man's authority insures that he will have ultimate sway.

With the final response, the narrator explicates the most facile conquest:

. . . biaus sire ciers,
Je ne sai nient de tes mestiers;
por diu, sire, laissies me ester!
je n'en quier plus oir parler,
que ie ne sai, a coi ce monte. . . .
ne voellies, que soie hounie;
je ne sai mais voir, u ie sui,
ce poise moi, c'ains vos connui,
et nuit et iour, u que ie soie,
me sanle, que adies vous voie.
(lines 986–90, 995–99)

Dear sir, I know nothing of your needs; for god's sake, sir, let me be. I don't want at all to hear talk about what I don't know, what's the point? . . . You should not wish that I be humiliated. Since I have known you, I don't even know where I am—that bothers me! And night and day, it seems to me that I see you wherever I am.

This time the woman's negativity is represented as self-negation, and her lack of confidence gives the lover grounds for taking her in hand. By emphasizing the woman's ignorance, the masterly narrator reinforces the idea that it is in her best interests to be seduced (lines 996–97). Clerical analysis recommends that the male lover save her from herself.

Celle quite respont ensi,
elle est vencue, ie te di,
il n'i a fors de l'embracier,
de li acoler et baissier,
elle est entree el decevoir:
avoir en pues tout ton valoir [voloir].
(lines 1000–1005)

I tell you, the woman who responds in this manner is won over. You have only to embrace her, hug and kiss her, she has entered into the deception; you can have everything you want.

In this scheme of things, a woman's limited knowledge serves the master's purposes twice over It justifies the clerkly narrator's interest in knowing women. Since women are deemed to possess minimal self-knowledge, the subject falls appropriately into the clerkly domain. Furthermore, the task of mastering such a subject promises to be delightful for the disciple. The master's commentary makes clear that working through the range of women's responses yields a certain pleasure—one that is also colored sexually (ton valoir/voloir, line 1005).

This link between the pleasure in knowing women and the vicarious sexual pleasure is made explicit in Jacques d'Amiens's Art d'amors . The master reflects at length on women's yielding in sex. In thematic terms, this reflection builds on the standard Ovidian recommendation that forced sex is always in order with women (Ars amatoria , I, lines 673–76). Yet what is particularly telling is the placement of the master-narrator's commentary. That it follows directly after the women's responses shows yet again the clerical insistence on debating women's sexual yielding:

La, u elle se destendra
et fera samblant de courcier,
si le dois tu voir esforcier;
la, u elle s'estordera,
l'enforcement molt amera;
honteuses sunt del otroier,
por cou les doit on efforcier,
seul a seul pub c'o toi s'enbat,

outree veut soit sans debat,
et telle i a qui de son gre
t'otroiera sa volente,
que faire vaura cortoisie
ne force faire n'aime mie,
mais durement se desfendroit,
c'outre son gre l'en forceroit:
se de tel afaire le vois,
sa volente atendre dois
et li pries molt doucement,
que souffrir voelle ton talent.
(lines 1203–21)

There where she defends herself and pretends to be angry, you should look to take her by force. There where she tries to escape, she really loves force. Women are too shy to grant it themselves: that's why one must force them. If she struggles with you, one on one, she really wants to be conquered without any further discussion. And there is the woman who willingly gives in to you in her own way and, with all respect to courtliness, does not like to be forced and defends herself fiercely, if one tries to force her beyond her desires. If you see such a situation, you should wait for her to yield; beg her very gently so that she is willing to submit to your desire.

The master-narrator considers every possible female reaction to sex, and no matter what the woman's attitude, his analysis attempts to justify force.^[56] If she is obstreperous or insecure, pugnacious or obliging, the narrator has reasons to recommend that the man should take control. Such an analysis pushes the postulate of feminine prevarication to the limit. The woman's most strenuous self-defense is interpreted as an invitation for the man's force and as her incapacity to speak her own desires. Both female "No!" and female "Yes!" are read to mean much the same thing: the range of difference so meticulously recorded and commented upon in the responses is streamlined—reduced to a uniform representation of woman's yielding sexually to the man.^[57]

In the debate between a masterly narrator and his student, the game of male/female dialogue is thus used to explore the pattern of feminine prevarication. The analysis of these requestes/responses charts the changing fortunes of women's negativity. There is enormous latitude for play here: the Ovidian predilection for teasing out that negativity comes through in the numerous variations in representing women's reactions. Yet the presiding master aims, finally, to telescope this rich variation in an image of women's yielding. Whether constructed literally or allegorically, this image

becomes central. In fact, it comes increasingly to function as an incitement. The masterly transaction in knowledge about women recommends further action. As the narrator in Drouart la Vache's translation of the De amore describes it:

Quant li amans sera venus
A cogitation pleniere
Des secres, en tele maniere
Puisqu'il pensera as secrez,
Si il estoit maistres de decrez
Ne se savra il maintenir
Aincois le convendra venir
Tantost au fait, comment qu'il aille.
(lines 246–53)

When the lover will have thoroughly contemplated her secrets, thinking about those secrets much as would a master of decrees, he will not know what to do next. Thus it will behoove him to act as quickly as possible, however best he can.

The driving logic behind such didactic texts is to convert a newly gained intellectual power into a physical act. To what extent such an incitement was realized is, of course, impossible to gauge. We find ourselves here in the tricky realm of discourse's impact on action. Yet if we cannot establish that the Ovidian model of mastery led to physical violence against women, we can say that the climactic call to action substantiates that violence symbolically.^[58] Ovidian knowledge is so powerful that it can inflict a form of verbal damage. Furthermore, this recommendation to exploit "the secrets" of women affects not only women but all those who come under the sway of this discourse. It indoctrinates those in the role of disciple into mastering a misogynist knowledge of women. For these reasons, it constitutes one of the principle sites of symbolic domination in Ovidian writing.

This type of symbolic domination of women gains another significant dimension in the vernacular with the influx of so-called Aristotelian learning.^[59] Those works, debated vigorously at the University of Paris, also impinged upon late-thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century French narrative. They made a particular mark on a little-known cluster of texts: La Poissance d'amours, Li Consaus d'amours and Li Houneurs et li vertus des dames .^[60] All three claim to dispute the learning of Aristotle.^[61] All three also deploy a variety of material from Galen, Albert the Great, and Arabic commentary under his name. With this material they bring biological and political terms to the Ovidian argument for woman's yielding. These

French texts argue the topic of woman by interrogating her physical construction, what the Houneurs narrator calls "the natural strength of her power" (le natural vertu de se poissance; Zimmermann, 382). They also explore the political dimensions of the question found in many clerical works: "What is this thing woman, and what is she worth?" (quels cose feme est et kelle vaut; Li Consaus , Vienna 2621, fol. 2 verso)^[62]

In this respect, the Poissance, Consaus , and Houneurs develop an Aristotelian model of mastery of enormous intellectual pretension. Imitating the disputations of the Parisian faculties, they are at once pugnacious and pedantic. The master-narrators problematize the question of women dialectically, and in order to master it they complicate it still further. In contrast with Ovidian narrators, they aspire to a comprehensive kind of knowledge. The Consaus narrator boasts: "I have said and shown how it could happen that a man could know everything about love."^[63] While the Aristotelian narrator begins at degree zero, his dialectical reasoning is meant to lead him in the end to produce a whole and complete body of knowledge. This sense of totality implies a system, a set of categories according to which love and women should ultimately be defined.

With the Poissance, Consaus and Houneurs , this systematic approach of Aristotelian mastery reinforces the symbolic domination of women.^[64] These late-thirteenth-century and early-fourteenth-century texts provide a field in which we can study the increasing abstraction of women, from a speaker, to a type of text in Ovidian dialogue (the response ), to "this thing."

An Academic Matter

As vernacular texts assimilated scholastic learning, their analysis of woman began with her physical composition. In the Poissance d'amours , the master-narrator tells his disciple: "It is fitting that you learn first about the character and composition of woman; I will teach you about this in a way that is understandable to both clerics and lay people" (Il couvient que tu saces premierement connoistre le talent et le complexion de femme: si le vous aprenderai aukes, en maniere que li clerc et li lai me porront bien entendre; Speroni, 37).

This philosophical term complexion evokes the characteristic process of breaking down every object into an assembly of parts—the particles and quarks of scholastic thought. From person to complexion to body parts: the Poissance narrator reduces "woman" progressively to ever more manageable units—so manageable, in fact, that the master-narrator considers his analysis accessible to the laity.

Given the way these three narratives analyze a critical female object, we may expect their progressive breakdown to lead to some sort of biological essence. The very question "What is this thing?" seems to be heading toward a proposition "This is what woman is." On the contrary, treated dialectically the "woman" question gives rise to still more complex anatomical and biological issues. The Poissance version reads:

Au conmencier, pour miex ataindre le verité de me matere, je di que femme a .vij. lius ou enfant pueent recevoir noureture et vie, et sont li quatre liu proprement as enfans marles, et li autre troi liu proprement pour les femmes; dont il puet avenir et avient que uns enfes marles sera nouris ou propre liu de femme, et li femme ou propre liu de l'omme. De coi il avient que, quant femme a esté nourie ou ventre se mere en autre liu ke u sien propre, ele a d'aucune cose samblance d'omme; et se li hom a esté nouris ou ventre se mere en liu de femme, il sera en aucune cose femenins. Et bien saciés que femme ki n'est droite femmenine, c'est pour chou que ele n'a mie esté nourie ou ventre se mere en sen propre liu; et del homme qui est femenins ensement.
(Speroni, 37–38)

To begin with so as to better reach the truth of my subject matter, let me say that a woman has seven places where children may receive sustenance and life, and four of them are properly for males and the other three properly for females. And it can happen that a male child nurses at a place proper for the female, and a female at one proper for the male. And so it happens when a woman was nursed at her mother's breast at a place other than is proper for herself, she has a certain male semblance. And if a man was nursed at his mother's breast at the female place, he will be feminine. And you should know that a woman who is not truly feminine is so because she was not nursed at the proper place at her mother's breast, and conversely, for an effeminate man as well.

In this first attempt to reckon with woman's composition, the masternarrator considers those persons who contain within themselves both "feminine" and "masculine" elements. By invoking the popular pseudoGalenic theory of the seven-celled uterus, he presents a picture of various hybrid creatures whose sex is highly ambiguous.^[65] Far from locating a distinct female property, he grapples with outstanding variability, whereby the beings of women and men are shown to belie various combinations of femininity and masculinity.^[66] Apparent here is a central crux for the biological inquiry: no matter what effort is made to pin down the female, to identify her by isolating and dissecting her intrinsic

parts, this thing splinters into myriad other elements. As Sylviane Agacinski has argued in reference to Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals , this female object jeopardizes the strict logic of sexual difference that it has been used to define.^[67] In this medieval "Aristotelian" text, by focusing on the origin of these hybrid creatures the Poissance master argues that the woman, as reproductive machine, bodies forth a womanly man and a manly woman. In other words, while the man may bear the effects of such a sexual mix, it is the woman who is the first cause. Described in biological terms, it is the woman's body that contains the necessary ingredients resulting in bisexual individuals. Even if the hybrids are represented as types of mistaken identity, the man having nursed at the female "place" on the mother's body and the woman at the male "place," the woman also possesses the capacity of determining sexual form. In this scheme of things, she is the exemplar of an all-inclusive difference. By this I mean she is an object that can be broken down into an indefinite number of paired oppositions and at the same time embrace them all.

While the Poissance explores this all-inclusive difference biologically, in the Consaus it becomes a metaphysical problem as well. Indeed, the one implies the other. Evaluating woman as a primal shaper of sexual being is thus to study her as a primal being per se:

Car feme proprement est li matere dou monde qui les houneurs fait croistre et montepliier. Car les hautes proeches darmes et de cevaleries sont pour elles et par elles faites et alevees et maintenues en viertu. Feme est a un mot tout et feme vaut tout.
(Vienna 2621, fol. 3)

For woman is really the matter of the earth that makes all honors grow and multiply. For the greatest feats of chivalric and military prowess are accomplished for them and are elevated and maintained forcefully through them. Woman, in a word, is everything and is infinitely worthy.

With the expression "li matere dou monde," the master-narrator takes up the standard Platonic/Aristotelian formulation identifying the substratum of the world with the feminine, indeed, with the most elemental form—her menstrual flux.^[68] Yet he goes on to align women's reproductive power with their social creativeness, their material value with their value as catalysts of men's prowess. As this masterly narrator designs it, women's generative capacity is comparable to their ability to generate action in others. Through this line of reasoning, he advances the proposition that women's worth is all-inclusive. Physically synthetic, linguistically complete, and

metaphysically coherent, the female thing appears here as the sum of all differences. This simple tautological phrase—"feme est a un mot tout"—testifies strikingly to the habit of linking biological and metaphysical all-inclusiveness in women. The Consaus narrator extends the biological notion of women containing all manner of sexual difference to an ontological one of utter plenitude. In this, his argument resonates with the thirteenth-century Aristotelian commentaries that understand metaphysics as a type of natural philosophy.^[69]

The Houneurs narrator makes much the same claims when he asserts:

Je proeuue le vertu de femme ensi, que ie di que, se toutes les douceurs de toutes les riens du monde estoient d'une partie, et femme seule fust de l'autre part, ne porroit cuers ne cors d'oume tant de douceur sentir ne trouuer en riens qui soit, com il porroit en femme; car nule douceurs n'est apartenans ale douceur de femme.
(Zimmermann, 382)

I prove the specific female strengths of women in this manner: I say that if the gifts of everything in the world were placed on one side, and woman alone on the other side, neither man's heart nor body could find a better gentleness to experience than he can in woman, for no gentleness approaches that of woman.

By separating out woman and her qualities, this master asserts the completeness of the female part. For him, it stands apart in all senses. Whether that part is defined socially, physically, or ontologically, these three works all posit it as something greater, more comprehensive than any one definition of woman might first indicate. Such a proposition may seem at odds with the Aristotelian definition of woman as incomplete so dear to medieval commentators.^[70] But I argue along Agacinski's lines that female lack also involves, in the Aristotelian dialectical structure, a form of surplus (120–21). If woman is defined dialectically as the lesser half, she is also the material foundation that sustains all those differences. Her incompleteness is symmetrically balanced by her capacity to exceed every formal limit. In this paradoxical sense these Aristotelian narrators postulate a female totality.

Such a complexion of woman complicates the initial question of these three narratives considerably. Rather than any one homogeneous concept, their masterful interrogation brings to the fore a multiple, superabundant female entity. And such an entity tests the intellectual authority of the Aristotelian master in these narratives. Or one might say it takes that authority to the limit. If for argument's sake the master is

willing to entertain this superabundant female biology, one that escapes his grasp with each new category introduced, his intellectual command is challenged. It is not clear whether he can exert control over his knowledge of women by establishing a stable definition or whether instead he has let his object get out of hand. Under such circumstances, the narrator reframes the problematic female object politically. Having converted women into things to analyze and having found them to defy easy categorization, these Aristotelian narrators redefine the problem as the political issue of sovereignty: how to rule women.^[71] As a way to test their working definition of an all-inclusive woman, they work through principles in Aristotle's Politics that lead to the conclusion that in household and public government, the male is by nature better fitted to command than the female (I, v., 1–2).^[72]

The Poissance articulates this analysis most cogently:

Je di ensi au conmencement: que li principes deseure toutes les coses du monde c'est hom, qui tout gouverne, et qui tout ajue a estre maintenu et demené juskes au definement du cors de toute cose. . . . Saciés que je di que hom a sour femme le pooir principaument, mais il ne l'a pas parfaitement, saciés le vraiement.
(Speroni, 31)

And so I say at the beginning that the principle reigning over all things in the world is man who governs everything and does so so that everything will be maintained until the physical end of all things. . . . You should know that I say man has the principal power over women, but he does not have it completely. You should also know this well.

The master-narrator represents man's governance of women as imperfect in the Old French sense of parfaire (to accomplish), incomplete.^[73] No matter how well he states the principle of sovereignty, in the same breath he must also admit the conditions women place upon it. The sheer force of his masterful assertion (saciés que je di) cannot satisfy them: there is a cautionary hint of women's separate political position.

This recognition of the limits of men's political authority over women is but another version of the problematical biological definition. In both cases, the narrator is laboring at the conundrum of women not fitting into, or rather surpassing, his set categories. Just as the female entity did not conform exactly to the conventional lineaments of sexual identity, so too she breaks through the grid of men's governance.

But why exactly does a woman not fit politically? The Poissance master pushes the problem further, hypothesizing the female faculties:

Et pour chou k'ele lust a homme droite compaigne, plaine de douceur, mist Diex en femme, par gentil courtoisie, parole et vertu de counoistre et d'entendre raison. Et pour chou ke femme connoist et entent raison, ele se set et doit savoir garder d'omme. Par coi on voit souvent avenir ke, quant hom prie une femme k'ele soit acline a se volenté, li memoire et li raisons de cheli ne s'i acordera mie.
(Speroni, 32)

And so that she could be a fitting companion to man, full of gentleness, God placed in woman, in all kind courtesy, speech and the power to know and to understand reason. And since she has knowledge and understands rationally, she knows how to guard herself from man. Thus it is that often it happens that when a man bids a woman to yield to his will, her memory and reason do not agree.

The key factor is woman's rational capacity. Although she possesses it by dint of being man's partner, her rationality can serve to separate her from him. Reasoning is a mode of woman's self-assertion. In the master's hypothetical scenario, it is precisely her rational faculties and memory that explain why a woman does not consistently bend to the will of her men as she is ordained to do. That a woman thinks and remembers accounts for the breaks and so-called discord that underlie the imperfections of man's polity. In these breaks, of course, lies an enormous potential for a woman's distinct social and political capabilities.

In the master's formula describing woman's faculties of "speech and the power to know," the linchpin turns out to be linguistic. By speaking she exercises her knowledge and, in turn, by speaking she is to uphold the sociopolitical code of courtoisie . Without language, no matter how vigorous a person's rationality it cannot be brought to bear on a pattern of social conduct. As the Aristotelian master-narrators underscore time and time again, the linguistic element provides the indispensable medium through which modes of behavior are formulated and advanced:

Car parolle commence le droit d'amors, parolle le conduist et maintient, parolle fait amors durant et ferme et remuant. Parolle en fait venir le ioie et le soulas. Parolle droitement est li droite signourie qui toute amor gouverne et maintient en droite disne noblecche.
(Li Consaus ; Vienna 2621, fol. 13 verso)

For the word is the fitting beginning of love, it cultivates and sustains love; the word makes it strong and lasting and ardent. The word brings joy and solace. The word is the just rule which governs all love and maintains properly its dignified nobility.

Parole sert et confite le plus principal de l'oume, c'est le raison et le sapience; car parlers par nature est li principes desseure toutes coses faire auoir par droit goust d'entendement.
(Li Houneurs ; Zimmermann, 387)

Language serves and confirms the principal [faculties] of man; that is, reason and wisdom. Because language is by nature the principle above all else by which one gets a taste for reasoning.

In light of the masters' analytic precedents, the problem then becomes: can woman's speech throw the reigning discourse of courtliness into disarray? Just as woman's generative capacity disrupts the master's biological paradigm, just as her action alestabilizes his political structure, so too her language risks exploding the entire apparatus he is assembling. As a divinely accorded principle, it cannot easily be discounted.

The prospect of woman's verbal power turns out to be a tantalizing subject that generates enormous concern.^[74] It represents the limit case of the Aristotelian order of intellectual mastery. Insofar as the language constitutes rationality and knowledge, insofar as it realizes "the just rule," women's parole is itself a sovereign form. As such, it calls into question the assertion of men's sovereignty. A potential instrument of "that rule," it contests the fact that sovereignty has been conceptualized exclusively as men's affair. In this manner, women's language also challenges the masters' authority. Rationally grounded, her parole can then rival the masters' and disciples' language deployed to justify men's sovereignty over women. There is an implicit conflict between the unaccountable verbal power of women and the masters' standard.

That is why these master-narrators put great store in training their disciples how to discipline women's speech:

Saciés, biaus dous fieus, il i a deffense, si le vous aprenderai. Il est ensi que, par raison et par droiture, li poissance et li vertus et li sapience d'oume puet bien toutes les raisons que femme puet dire fraindre et apetier, tout par nature. Contre ces soutiues paroles que femme ara dit, hom doit dire ensi, et reprendre le sentense de tout ce que ele ara dit.
(La Poissance ; Speroni, 55)

You should know, my fine dear son, that there are defenses—I will teach them to you. It is thus right and fitting that the power, strength, and wisdom of man can discipline and control all the arguments that woman can put forward, all through nature. Against the subtle words that woman will speak, man must first speak in this fashion, taking up the gist of all that she will have said.

Having conceded a measure of linguistic independence in women, the master must at all costs reimpose man's authority over it. Appealing once again to reason as man's prerogative (par raison et par droiture), he represents his "natural" superiority reasserting itself. This representation, we should note, combines power (poissance) with knowledge or wisdom (sapience). In other words, where women are concerned, wisdom will be used as a mode of power. It substantiates a formidable authority that can exert the type of symbolic domination we have been investigating. A masterful discourse that depicts women's language as requiring discipline is itself domineering.

As if to stress the urgency of regaining control over women's language, the Aristotelian master also directs this imperative toward women themselves. In an exceptional address to them, he states:

Parole sert et donne sustance et entendement a tout le boin de l'oume, c'est sapience, eta toutes raisonnables meurs; car parole est conmencemens et gouvernemens de toutes coses mener a cief. Et si voel bien que dames sacent certainement que riens ne plaist tant a ami n'a nul houme conme biaus parlers et sagement.
(La Poissance ; Speroni, 71)

The word is enabling and gives substance and meaning to all men's efforts. It is wisdom and is fitting behavior. Because language is the origin and structure leading all things to their conclusion. And I really want ladies to know for certain that nothing is more pleasing to their male friends or to men in general than beautiful, wise talk.

Et bien voel ke dames sacent qu'il n'est nus hom tant soit de diuerse vie ne de mauvaise, qui naime, qui ne crieme et qui ne honneure douce personne de femme droite feminine, de bele conuersation.
(Li Houneurs ; Zimmermann, 385)

And I deeply wish that ladies know that there is no man, whatever his social rank, who does not love the woman, who does not honor and respect the gentle, properly feminine woman of exquisite conversation.

The key to this disciplining strategy involves the notion of women's beautiful talk (biaus parler/bele conversation ). And this beauty is amplified and intensified to a superlative degree. The woman's voice epitomizes "the most gentle," "the most powerful."^[75] This beauty is perfected by the master and signals his manipulative rhetoric working to control woman's language. Lavish praise functions as a way to legislate a woman's speech and conduct. In fact, in the extreme it is used to determine

her social identity; in this case, what it means to be properly feminine (personne de femme droite feminine). The fact that the masters dwell so much on woman's exquisite talk reveals their attempt to commit her to the sociolinguistic code of courtliness under their jurisdiction. Praising her language means trying to straitjacket it in a rhetoric that denies her parole 's putative sovereignty. The masters' impetus to praise should give us a sense of just how crucial the disciplining of women's language is. For not only does the men's "courtly" sovereignty over women ride upon it, but the masters' authority does so as well. Persuading women to conform to courtly language that captures them "beautifully" comprises another cardinal instance of the narrators exerting intellectual mastery over them.

Lest there be any ambiguity about the masterly design of vaunting woman's "beautiful language," let us look at the Houneurs narrator's parting shot. In a string of tautological compliments of women, he contends: "And everyone should know that no one can speak badly of women who does not say it about himself" (si sace cascuns que nus ne puet dire mal de femme quil ne le die de lui meismes; Zimmermann, 387). The defamation of women rebounds back on the male speaker. Indeed, it is defined as a critique of the male self. This narrator shows little recognition of the difference between the sexes. What exactly distinguishes women from men is largely blurred. As a consequence, the slandering of women cannot be interpreted as the hatred of alterity but only as a form of self-loathing—of self-destructiveness in a self that is inflected in masculine terms.

Femme/lui meismes : this equation of presumed equivalence bespeaks the tendency to convert intellectual mastery into a form of domination. The danger for the master-narrators of these texts is that their debates can lead to subjugating the other so thoroughly as to imperil its independent self-consciousness. Total control implies that the other may cease to exist, with the result that what is being mastered is little more than an inert, unresponsive object. With formulations such as these, the Houneurs makes apparent how easily Aristotelian intellectual mastery can be headed toward this dead end of domination. In the very lauding of woman's language, among other traits, lies the masters' desire for her total objectification. For all the discriminations introduced by their process of dialectical reasoning, the overriding aim has been to maneuver women critically into this position.

Once the masterful discourse on women betrays this domineering tendency, the question of sex is not far behind. Each of these three Aris-

totelian narratives concludes with references to taking women sexually at will. This recommendation is cast in the euphemistic language of sourplus . At the Houneurs master's prompting, the disciple aspires to "taste what the surplus of the [woman's] body contains" (gouster chou que li sourplus dou cors comprent; Zimmermann, 386). The Consaus recommends that he "do with the surplus what you think is reasonable" (del sourplus faites selonc le raison que vous i quidies; Vienna 2621, fol. 9 verso). And in the most suggestive rendition, the Poissance narrator contends:

Car saciés que femme est si noble et si gentius que trop aroit grant honte de dire a son ami: "Faites de mi vo volenté"; et pour l'abomination que ses cuers aroit de ce dire, doit hom se compaignie conquerre aussi con par force.
(Speroni, 68)

For you should know that woman is so noble and gentle that she is too ashamed to say to her lover: do with me what you will. And since she cannot bring herself to utter this abomination, the man should thus conquer his companion by force.

A female surfeit, a surplus that had always exceeded the bounds of Aristotelian categories, is in these configurations finally mastered. In recommending that women be overpowered sexually, the Aristotelian masters use the very term that had up to this point typified their intellectual analyses of women. Rather than name coitus outright, they render it abstractly through an expression that signals their formidable intellectual authority. The double entendre of sourplus suggests how mastering the knowledge of women can itself become a form of domination—represented in physical terms and realized symbolically.

In the shape of these three works, the Aristotelian order of mastery comes into focus. Just like their doubles at the University, these master-narrators dispute a variety of properties of a female critical object, the most challenging being the linguistic. Whereas the Ovidian master gives voice to women, ventriloquizing them playfully in responses , the Aristotelian figures consider only the idea of their parole . This proves the crux that obliges them to muster all their analytic powers. As a medium of knowledge, woman's parole exemplifies the greatest threat to their own intellectual enterprise. It is no surprise, then, that the debate over woman's language hints at the drift from an intellectual control of women toward a physical mastery of them.

In the Aristotelian order of mastery there is virtually no place for a female public. Unlike the Ovidian model that grants a role to women in its

dialogue and includes a doctrine for them, it admits women unwillingly. With an occasional aside in their direction, it is directed more and more toward the disciple. The result of this evacuation of women from the scene of disputation is a far more forbidding complex of mastery. In high-medieval vernacular literary culture, the Ovidian master was increasingly flanked by a figure of daunting intellectual acumen and professional pretension. What once was an artful game became an exercise in high-tech ratiocination. The Aristotelian model set a rigorous standard for representing the mastery of the idea of woman as a significant form of knowledge. In this, it strengthened the symbolic domination of women that the Ovidian model introduced in much French writing of the later Middle Ages.

Mastery Confounded

Did this Ovidian and Aristotelian pattern of symbolic domination prevail? For all the savvy and force of masterful disputation, the sense remains that these texts cannot insure this pattern absolutely. We have only to recall the notions of woman's biological surfeit, political unruliness, and linguistic independence to discern the rifts in this pattern. These breaks are never completely resolved. However imposing the masters' authority, it is not always translated into a didactic discourse that exercises full dominance. The Consaus 's final reflection on the dangers in ruling women is revealing in this respect. Quoting the Master Philosopher, the Consaus narrator introduces again the problem of women's will to surmount all manner of opposition:

Et homs de se viertu et de sen sens doit ces humeurs de feme counoistre par quoi il se tiengne a raison et de point ferm et fier contre feme. . . . Car qui set feme tenir a tout famine de volente rant que volentes durra sera del amors sires. . . . Et dist aristotes damor qui de lui veut goir tant ken ce cas lui gouverner plus atempreement ken nul autre fait. Car raisons et atemprance est li medechine qui a folle amors apertient. Et sapielle aristotes folle amor lamor qui sourmonte le sens et le raison del home.
(Vienna 2621, fol. 12 verso)

And in his strength and understanding man should know woman's humors so that he can hold firm and fast in his reason against woman. . . . He who knows how to keep woman from exercising her will, for as long as his will lasts, he will be the lord of love. . . . And Aristotle says of love that he who wishes to enjoy it will govern over it temperately

like no other. For reason and temperance are the medicine that pertain to wild love. And Aristotle calls wild love the love that overcomes the sense and reason of man.

With these figures of woman overcoming man's reason and man oneupping her, we come full circle. We return to the issues the Lai d'Aristote raises about woman's relations to masterful knowledge. More importantly, we return to the premise that masterly discourse does not succeed in controlling those relations. Insofar as the Consaus stresses the lesson of "holding firm and fast against women," the dominance of its discourse is by no means sure. The need to repeat such lessons betrays the difficulty of realizing them.

If we read the Lai d'Aristote in relation to the Ovidian and Aristotelian masterly narratives, this difficulty is brought into sharp relief. Not only do they all endeavor to slot women into a well-articulated system of categories, but they disclose the sense that this is finally impossible. They project scenarios in which women challenge those epistemological and social categories proposed by their narrators. In the Lai , this takes the form of a burlesque "let's imagine," while in the didactic narratives it is a dialectical hypothetical. The effect is much the same: they all suggest how precarious their symbolic domination of women really is. They all express an unease over maintaining control over the knowledge of women.

So telling was this unease that it continued to disrupt the enormous late-medieval literature mounted in attack and defense of women. From the widely read misogynist tract the Lamentations of Matheolus straight through to the numerous fifteenth-century panegyrics, it breaks through:^[76]

Que proufita a Aristote
Peryarmenias, Elenches,
Devisées en pluseurs branches,
Priores, Posteres, logique
Ne science mathematique?
Car la femme tout seurmonta
Alors que par dessus monta
Et vainqui des methes le maistre.
Ou chief luy mist frain et chevestre.
Mené fu a soloëcisme,
A barbastome, a barbarisme;
Son cheval en fist la barnesse
Et le poignoit comme une asnesse. . . .
Le gouverneur fu gouverné
Et legendre fu alterné.
Elle est agent et il souffroit;

A hennir sous elle s'offroit.
La fu l'ordre preposteré,
Ce dessoubs dessus alteré
Et confondu; car mal s'accorde
Psalterion au decacorde.
Certes, ceste chevaucheüre
Fu incongrue, mal seüre.
En ce fu grammaire traïe
Et logique moult esbahïe.
(book I, lines 1080–92, 1095–1106)^[77]

Of what good to Aristotle is the Peri Hermeneias and Elenchi in all their various parts? Of what value, the Prior and Posterior Analytics , the Logic , and the science of mathematics? For woman surmounted everything and rode on top, vanquishing the master and placing upon his head both bit and bridle. And so he was led to solecisms, barbarisms of all sorts. The baroness made him into her mount, kicking him about like an ass. . . . The governor was governed and gender was altered. She is the agent and he was suffering for it, left only to whinny and neigh under her. In this way all order was blown apart. The underling changed and confounded the one above. For the psalterion and harp do not go well together. Such riding was certainly incongruous, unsafe. In this, grammar was betrayed and logic rendered useless.

Matheolus's fulminations focus upon a figure of women who systematically demolishes the edifice of Aristotelian learning.^[78]The Logic , (lines 1083, 1106), the Analytics , (line 1083): tract by tract, the edifice is broken down. In one of the most bitter reworkings of the Lai , the narrator casts the subjection of the philosopher as a wholesale destruction of his thought. The result of all this is devastating: "The governor was governed and gender was completely altered" (lines 1095–96). Not only is the masterful paradigm of knowledge as power completely blown apart, but the classificatory system of humankind—the genus, its gender—is altered unimaginably. The clerical idea of women does more than challenge existing knowledge; it represents a questioning of its very character, one that goes so far as to explode the understanding of human nature itself.

2—
The Trials of Discipleship:
Le Roman de la poire and Le Dit de la panthère d'amours

It is because things are remote from you, filtered through books and hearsay, that you feel you have to dress them up, make metaphors . . . you have renounced the flesh, but you do not renounce the thought of the flesh and, since you are a man of words, you enjoy it more avidly at second hand.
Julia O'Faolain, Women in the Wall

In an intellectual and literary world so strongly shaped by the dynamics of mastery, the disciple emerges as the focus of particular attention. However visible the master is in French medieval culture, he remains an exceptional figure. He is part of an elite. Within the clerical caste, the university community, or the lay milieu of the thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century didactic narrative we have studied, he represents a minority.^[1] The disciple, by contrast, is a popular persona. His story of immature, well-intentioned efforts is accessible and generalizable in a way his mentor's is not. His trajectory is meant to be Everyman's, one that illustrates the travails of becoming a masterful man. Moreover, it is through him that mastery in its two senses is transacted. Behind every magister in vernacular narrative stands an untested disciple. In fact, given the custom of calling a poet maistres , there is a way in which many narratives modeled on the Roman de la rose dramatize the career of the master and the process by which the disciple grows into the magister role occupied by the author. The fascination with the operations of mastery is thus cultivated by narrating again and again the story of the novice.

As numerous allegories recount that story, it involves student-narrators who apply the lessons of the master, this time the magister amoris (the

master of love.) Youthful and hardworking, these disciple figures are engaged in a characteristic twofold struggle: the need to debate with the master so as to prove their own competence and the challenge of reproducing his authoritative knowledge about women. From didactic to allegorical narrative, the shift is from representations of a doctrine to those of a discipline, from the laying out of precepts concerning "a woman's nature" to the practice of that learning. The disciple's goal of mastering such knowledge remains structured by the scholastic disputation. In the standard configuration, the bachelor took the role of the respondens or responsalis (respondent) and debated with the master as well as with the opponens , the opposing figure.^[2] From the position of respondent, the disciple could articulate his version of the master's knowledge and establish his intellectual prowess. Ideally, such prowess would also signal his autonomy. His performance in a disputation was meant to sanction his eventual rise to mastery. The paradox was that his own mastery was by no means assured. The act of disputing disclosed the disciple's difficulties in making the master's role his own—difficulties often represented in terms of the disciple's inherent weakness. As the Roman de la rose describes the disciple's predicament, "The master wastes all his effort when the disciple who listens to him does not put his heart into retaining all that he should remember" (Li mestres pert sa poine toute quant li deciples qui escoute ne met son cuer el retenir si qu'il l'en pulse sovenir; lines 2051–54).

This image of the faltering disciple comes into clearer focus when we recall the specifically submissive quality of his relations with the master. In the scholastic domain, submissiveness was the necessary rite of passage leading to the practice of mastery, but it carried with it the danger of indefinite subordination. It suggested the possibility that the disciple might never graduate to the powerful role of magister , lingering instead in a limbo of lost opportunity and underachievement. In a vernacular context where the disciple's search for mastery was directed toward women, this possibility was all the more apparent. No matter how vigorous his efforts to translate his submissiveness to a lady into ultimate command over her, this masterly goal might never be realized. Projecting a lady as magistra did not systematically insure the disciple's ultimate authority as Andreas Capellanus had intended. Like the figure in this miniature from the Roman de la poire , he might be caught in a posture of obeisance, unable to exercise his control, incapable of approaching a woman any other way (Figure 5).^[3]

The role of discipleship points up deficiencies in the structure of masterful relations. As we saw in chapter 1, masters can be depicted as precarious figures; the faltering disciple adds one more blow to an already

5. The writer in training offers his book to the lady.  Le Roman de
la poire .
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, f.fr. 2186, fol. 10 verso.
Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

shaky structure of authority. His characteristic insecurity—"his not taking heart"—is further evidence of the instability of the system of mastery as a whole. Moreover, through the faltering disciple figure we can detect the uneven pattern of symbolic domination laid down by the discourses of mastery. His story calls into question the logic of mastering the subject of

women and it does this at the very heart of the masterly system. The figure of the disciple under duress represents an implicit interrogation of that system from within.

In order to see what that interrogation entails, I shall concentrate here à titre d'exemple on two allegories exemplifying the disciple's predicament. The late-thirteenth-century Roman de la poire and the early-fourteenth-century Dit de la panthère d'amours depict the initiation of the disciple through letter writing.^[4] Both texts build on the Roman de la rose by combining the disputational model with the common pedagogical genre of the ars dictaminis (the art of correspondence).^[5] Their account of the disciple's efforts to compose a letter for a woman is thus designed as a school exercise. This exercise turns out to be an ordeal for the disciple. It is so fraught with problems that it provokes a condition in him far worse than the ill-preparedness of the Rose narrator. Fear, paranoia, a full-fledged panic attack: all these allegorical "states of mind" reveal a disciple on trial. By tracing out these various trials one by one, we shall discern more clearly the limits of discipleship.

A Trying Discipline

Like all neophytes in the clerical milieu, these two disciple-narrators begin from a position of real insecurity. Without the instructions of the master, they are tentative about their assignment of addressing a woman. Such uncertainty is the first symptom of the disciples' trouble in putting the master's knowledge about women into action. And it takes two forms. On the one hand, it highlights the difficulty they have with the art of writing that forms part of the master's craft. On the other, it shows how that difficulty increases significantly when their writing is directed toward women. That disciples cannot write easily is proof of their youthful inexperience; that they cannot write to women illustrates the charged relation the clerical domain has posited between women and textualized learning.

In the Poire , the disciple tackles his difficulty in writing alphabetically. Reciting his ABCs provides one reassuring starting point: "Amors qui par A se commence" (line 1). The Poire uses the favorite medieval ploy of an acrostic as a way to regulate the disciple's unease. It represents the disciple beginning to make sense of his writing exercise by working with its mechanics—by practicing the individual letters B, C , and so on. This letter game becomes, in effect, a field in which the disciple tests his developing skills.^[6] It is a medium of his potential mastery. Yet if this acrostic promises a type of intellectual mastery in relation to the woman correspondent, at

the same time it shows just how far the disciple-narrator must go to achieve it. It continues to reveal his trouble. His ongoing difficulty comes through in the extended letter game that follows—a narrative ABC of exemplary lovers telling their stories. This sequence spells out how the disciple-narrator should proceed. Cligés, Tristan, and Paris, in the role of master, all instruct him in their individual lessons. Through their examples the disciple is brought to articulate his own story:

Ge, qui m'en entremet, en sui bien assenez.
Cuer et pensee i met, et tant me sui penez
que s'amor me pramet ma dame, buer fui nez!
(lines 82–84)

I, who undertake this, am well supported. I put both heart and mind into this, and took such pains that I am promised the love of my lady. I am born lucky!

Wedged in between the testimonials of famous lovers is the account of the disciple's birth. He is represented narrating how he becomes an amorous subject. This narration evokes the process by which the disciple strives to establish his separateness vis-à-vis the master. Saying "I" is a crucial step in this process, because it moves beyond mere recitation of the master's words. It marks a major attempt at controlling his chronic insecurity and adapting the master's lessons himself. What has still to come, though, is the disciple's birth as a writing subject: will he be able to write masterfully about love to his woman reader?

That is why his difficulty over beginning persists. Through a second acrostic starting with the letter A , the Poire disciple speculates about the purpose of his writing exercise. And his speculation gets to the core of his relation to a master. As we have seen in those didactic narratives called enseignements , a chief goal of the disciple's disputation with the master is knowledge about women. Yet the Poire disciple admits his ignorance: "I am in no way learned" (ge ne sui mie gramment sages; line 368). Untrained, inexperienced, he appears unfit to write authoritatively. Out of this ignorance, however, the disciple forges another "obscure way" toward knowledge and autonomy (lines 342, 366).^[7] As in Lorris's Rose , subjective experience comes to play a role in the disciple's formation. However unreliable that experiential way, it ranks with any textual knowledge the master can transmit to him. This comparison is, of course, misleading insofar as the notion of subjective experience is never pure or free of outside influences. No disciple can ever begin as a solo agent. Nor will he ever be rid of his masters. His subjective experience is always a cumulative affair—the sum of his interaction with others. The second acrostic makes this

clear: it heralds another beginning of the Poire with a well-known lyric quotation.^[8] In other words, the disciple conceives of his own knowledge through the voice of others. His coming into learning involves a variety of masterful material, all filtered through his experience. In doing battle with his uncertainties, the disciple is thus shown to articulate what are echoes of the master's authoritative voice.

While the disciple's insecurity complex about women makes a zigzag of the Poire 's beginning, in the Panthère it disrupts the narrative as a whole. The trope of not daring prevails. From the outset, when "he does not dare to write the name of his lady," the narrator is struck dumb (cilz qui son dous nom n'ose ecrire; line 3). The courtly topos of discretion is exaggerated to the extreme. This fearfulness correlates with the disciple's fundamental instability. His first thought is one of incapacity; instead of aspiring to action he broods over the little he can do at all. The structure of the Panthère foregrounds this problem of the resourceless disciple. By duplicating the stock device of the dream, it shows him to be doubly desperate for the understanding an allegorical vision should offer. Because he cannot fathom the fantastical bestiary landscape of the first dream, another is required. And the second dream imaging the lady is built into the first. This Chinese-box effect accentuates the helplessness of the Panthère disciplenarrator. The closer he draws to seeing the woman, the more disjointed his dreams appear. There is little sign of the disciple having learned anything. On the level of textual construction, this resourcelessness creates an aimless quality to the Panthère . We have the impression of reading a work that turns in on itself with no objective clearly in view. Such narrative disarray betrays the disciple's profound malaise over writing masterfully.

In keeping with the Panthère's mise en abyme style, the only element that can dispel the disciple's malaise is the dit itself. Enclosed within the Dit de la panthère are what we can call drafts of dits —rough versions:

Que je par amors lor deïsse
Ma volent?é, et descouvrisse
Se de riens estoit ma pensee
En loiaus amors assenee.
Je leur dis c'un dit fait avoie,
Ou ma volenté demonstroie,
Si commençai le dit a dire
Si com vous poez oïr lire.
(lines 817–24)

Out of love, I owe it to them [various allegorical figures] to share my will and reveal that my thought has been all taken over by loyal love. I say to them that had I made a dit , I would show my desire. So I'll begin to speak the dit as you can hear it read.

However haltingly, the Panthère disciple gives voice to his doubts. Such an admission allows him to open up. It triggers a kind of self-reflection. As Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has argued persuasively, the dit involves an internalized debate based on subjective experience.^[9] And such a debate provides not only a means of self-disclosure but also of a progressive steadying of the self. His dit is replete with phrases such as ouvrir, descouvrir, dire apertement , expressions that accentuate the effort to become articulate. At this early stage, the disciple is working to come into his own.

In this internalized debate we should recognize a version of the disputation. What is habitually conducted in a public forum is, in these two narratives, moved within the figure of the disciple himself. Yet this move does not entail leaving the master behind. He remains implicitly present. As we have already seen, his knowledge is refracted through the multiple voices the disciple assumes. The master's disputation is thus integrated into the flow of the disciple's inner musings. The familiar pattern of the master talking through the disciple intensifies.

The prospect of actually approaching the woman brings this disputatiousness out. Faced with a woman reader, the disciple experiences a type of clerical psychomachia whereby he disputes with various authoritative voices. In the Poire , this debate begins just as he broaches the subject of women. An unidentified interlocutor intervenes, and the ensuing dialogue takes the well-known pedagogical form of question and answer (quaestio et responsio; line 372). For every point the Poire disciple narrator advances, he is challenged by an opposing one. Nothing is left uncontested, especially his claim that love is an oxymoron:

Max et biens, ce sunt .II. contraire,
et vos lé metez en commun
autresin con s'il fussent un!
Ce n'est pas reison ne droiture;
qui les juge selonc nature,
ge n'i voi point d'acordement.
Vos nos devez dire comment
s'acorde l'une et l'autre part.
(lines 507–14)

Bad and good, these are two contraries and you put them together as if they were one! This doesn't make sense; it isn't right. If you judge them according to their nature, I don't see any compatibility at all. You ought to tell us how one is compatible with the other.

This mock disputation invokes the criteria of contraries that shape so much of medieval logical thinking.^[10] Can the disciple work through the contrary, defined in logic by its very difference and irreconcilability?^[11] Can

he account for the irreconcilable? On the face of things, he and the masterly figure dispute love as it is emblematized by the bittersweet pear of the narrative's title. But in the context of the narrative, that pear is doubtless a cipher for women: master and disciple are in fact arguing over the contrariness of women.^[12] Poised on the threshold of addressing one woman reader, the disciple is pressed to explain what it is the general class of women represents for him. And his explanation is structured in the characteristic terms of masterful knowledge. Such a debate over "contraries" is part of a scholastic epistemological model that abstracts women. It plots them on a grid that defines them—this time—according to their oppositional difference.^[13] In arguing along these lines, the Poire disciple-narrator begins to prove his competence in conventional scholastic reasoning. Yet by the same token, the disciple's disputing of women as contraries suggests his difficulty in making sense of them. Insofar as contraries represent what is different or irreconcilable, "contrary" women exemplify the disciple's trial in approaching the one woman reader. There is a critical discrepancy between his understanding and her existence. No matter how thoroughly the disputation with the master analyzes this discrepancy, it is never completely resolved. The idea of contrary women remains a persistent conundrum—a sign of the disciple's limited understanding.

Those limits are more sharply delineated in the Panthère , where the timorous narrator cannot even rise to the challenge of a disputation. Representing an earlier, green phase in development, this disciple "does not dare" to argue with so many masterly voices, but seeks instead their instruction:

Si fu en grant merancolie,
Comment aucun trouver porroie
Qui de ce que veü avoie
Me deïst la significance. . . .

Car j'avoie grant apetit
Et grant desirrier de savoir
Se par l'un d'eulz porroie avoir
La droite interpretation.
(lines 148–51, 200–203)

So I was in a deep melancholy. How was I to find someone who would give me the significance of what I had seen? . . . For I have an enormous appetite and great desire to know, if I could have the right interpretation by one of them [a company that he sees].

Melancholia is the mark of the absent master. And the only way to cure it involves having "the right interpretation" of women. Notice the distinc-

tion here: this is not the usual masterly drive to know, or even the disciple's penchant for debating as a way to test his new-found knowledge. Instead, the Panthère narrator searches for a set rule by which all phenomena can be interpreted correctly. The disputational process is reduced to an elementary and largely passive ritual whereby the disciple need only assimilate the various precepts concerning women that a master hands down to him. There are many. Following the example of Jean de Meun, the narrative sets out an encyclopedic variety recapitulating much contemporaneous literature. Allusions to the Roman de la rose and to Drouart La Vache's translation of the De amore , invocations of the poet Adam de la Halle's songs, long passages from lapidaries: all this represents the essential curriculum that a master passes on to a needy disciple.

Given such a program of instruction, the Panthère takes on the character of a clerical lecture (lectio ), with its many participants.^[14] The figures of the God of Love and Venus are certainly familiar from the Rose , yet in the Panthère they are not rival authorities. Venus is a complementary instructor who picks up the instruction of the disciple where the magister amoris leaves off:

Bien sai que as esté tardis
Et coars: or soles hardis
D'ore en avant et corageus,
Sans estre vilain n'outrageus.
(lines 1049–52)

I well know that you have been timid and cowardly. So be brave from now on and courageous without being a fool or outrageous.

Halfway through the narrative, the disciple's uncertainty continues to be represented through the sheer number of authorities he requires.

What is the effect of this masterful lecture, or in the Poire , of the mock disputation? Far from securing the disciple in his knowledge about women, they create further setbacks. The workout with the master sends the disciple into a tailspin—the very antithesis of masterly control. Both narrators seem as far from the exercise of their discipline as they did at the outset. We find here another zigzag in the pattern of the disciple's story. For each promising step the disciple takes toward practicing his knowledge about women there is another that turns him away from her. His progress is erratic, his attention divided. It is customary to explain this irregular pattern in terms of erotic desire. Its cycle is seen to generate obstacles that cause the man to lose track, thus intensifying his desire. Yet in the disciple's case, his zigzagging suggests the pattern of casting the woman herself as an obstacle. Insofar as the clerical world of mastery creates a

strong disjunction between the class of women and learning, one individual woman represents a perennial threat to that learning. She inspires misgivings about its command. Each time the aspiring disciple approaches his woman reader in order to test his learning, his confidence is necessarily undercut.

In the Poire , this loss of control is figured by the trope ravir . The disciple complains of being dispossessed progressively of his faculties:

Mes or les sant, car un essoine
si grant com de perde la vie
m'a del tot ma pense ravie.
—Ta pense?—Voire.—En quel maniere?
N'a tu ta penssee premiere
e ton savoir et ta vertu?
(lines 631–36)

But I feel them [the pains of love], for a worry as serious as the loss of life has seized my entire thought.—Your thought ?—Right.—In what way? Isn't your first thought with your knowledge and your power?

At stake are the very qualities that distinguish a rational man according to scholastic thought. Not only is the disciple distracted, but the defining traits of the master—his savoir and vertu —are severely compromised. He too suffers the predicament endured by Aristotle in the Lai : he is overwhelmed by a woman. His is a state of enthrallment. Let us not forget that this same term ravir evokes the ravishment or overwhelming of women. This is how Helen's abduction is described in the portraits of exemplary lovers at the beginning of the Poire (line 221). The echo is telling, for it reveals how the disciple's state is associated with women's conventional helplessness.^[15] Granted, in the narrator's case the act of being carried off physically is transposed figuratively and refers to a loss of rational functions. Yet to link the two ravissements implicitly signals just how far the disciple is from the stance of intellectual mastery.

In the Panthère the disciple's vulnerability is underscored further. Whereas the Poire narrator's ravissement suggests an initial composure and expertise that is subsequently diminished, the Panthère narrator is already on the brink of collapse. Even the lecture on vernacular learning cannot steady him. In the face of actually addressing a woman, he is reduced to a subhuman state, emblematized in the following image:

Car paor lors site court seure
Et si t'atorne en petit d'eure
Que ne pues nis la bouche ouvrir
Por ta pensee descouvrir,

Si come .i. ymage entaillie,
Qui n'a vois, ne sens, ne oÿe.
(lines 1120–25)^[16]

For fear has surely dogged you and turned you around in no time at all so that you can't even open your mouth to reveal your thought, just like a sculpted figure that has no voice, or sense, or hearing.

No Pygmalion, this Panthère disciple is, in fact, likened to his female creation—"a deaf and dumb image" as the Roman de la rose describes her (une ymage sourde et mue; line 20821). Instead of the artist who tries to create a woman, he is the created object—inert and struck dumb by his incapacities. This inanimate state represents the narrator's nadir point. And it is bound up tightly with the single instance of the woman's reported speech. Her voice rings condescendingly:

N'aiez en moi nule atendance,
Car sachiez que nule baance
N'ai d'amer, ne point de corage,
Si n'y avrez point d'avantage. . . .
De moi si tost s'esloigna donques,
Que respondre ne li poi onques.
(lines 1456–59, 1464–65)

"Don't have any hope in me. For you should know that I have no desire to love, nor indeed any will. Thus there is absolutely no gain for you." . . . She took her distance from me right away so that I could not respond to her in any way.

Such a curt rejection sends him to the lowest point yet, the dead center of the narrative.

If this state of paralysis poses questions as to the disciple's ultimate mastery, it also recalls the paradoxical strategy of taking a submissive stance toward another as a way of acquiring power. Like the middle-class lover in Andreas Capellanus's De amore , the disciple adopts a position of weakness before a magistra in order to gain the upper hand. Describing himself in extremis is meant to project her into the same place. Will she too be ravie ? This state of enthrallment thus bespeaks both the ambitions and the limits of that intellectual mastery sought by the disciple. It discloses ambitions because the figure of ravishment communicates subliminally his aim of taking charge of the woman reader. Faced with the prospect of losing control, the disciple attempts to convert that loss to his advantage by transferring it onto the woman. However, in light of his trials of uncertainty up to this point, there are few assurances that such a design can work. And here is where the limits of mastery are discernible. No matter how well tutored

the Poire and Panthère narrators are, their learning brings them no closer to exercising an intellectual authority over women. Working earnestly to command his woman reader, the disciple is never sure that he will succeed in doing so. The impetus to achieve mastery over the woman reader is broken by the suspicion that it is no sure thing.

Learning to Write

This uncertainty increases the pressure to practice the masterly craft of writing. As the Poire and the Panthère represent it, one chief way to regain the hope of intellectual mastery vis-à-vis women is to concentrate on perfecting textual skills. At the point of the disciples' greatest weakness, both texts begin to narrate the formation of a writer. The inference is that the exercise of composition could bring them some greater success than their other clerical training: writing may yet make them masters.

In the case of the Poire , once again, an acrostic reveals the real challenge of the disciple's writing. The disciple's loss of control is enunciated in the very place where the woman's name takes shape. With each letter of A.N.N.E.S., the disciple's "ravishment" is accentuated:

A.  et se te vels vers lui deffendre,
il te vendra a force prendre.
(11. 864–65)

N.  ge le vos di, bien vos gardez:
vos n'i avroiz ne pes ne trive,
ainz vos prendra a force vive.
(lines 993–95)

E.  lors vint Amors qui me menace,
si ge ne me rent tot a lui.
(lines 1160–61)

A. And if you want to defend yourself against him [Love], he'll take you by force.

N. I'll tell you, be on your guard: You'll have neither rest nor respite, for he'll take you by great force.

E. So Love came who threatens me if I don't offer myself up completely to him.

Yet, by the same token, describing his own loss of control in the process of constructing a woman's name is a mode of self-discipline. Moreover, it is a

gesture of power, for it evokes the originary and divine act of creating a person by composing her name. It mimics Adam's naming of the animals that established his sovereignty. Here the Poire disciple's naming of A.N.N.E.S. is tantamount to an imperative. Not only does it bring her into being textually speaking, commanding her to be for the purposes of his text, it also uses her nominal being to communicate a single message: follow my example—offer yourself up. She exists insofar as she is meant to duplicate the disciple's own condition of "être pris à force vive." Because the woman is understood primarily as his textual creation, her being is inextricably caught up with the transferable message of ravishment.

That writing enables the disciple to reestablish a modicum of control is made even clearer by the woman's appearance. In contrast to the Rose and many other narratives with inscribed women readers, the Poire represents "A.N.N.E.S." entering into the discourse: she speaks. And this speaking entrance signals her ravishment. As soon as the woman promises herself to the disciple, he observes: "Love carried my lady away for me, and took her there where it pleased him." (Amors m'ot ma dame ravie et l'en mena la ou li plot; lines 2300–2301). The sheer repetition of the ravir trope over the course of her name culminates in the woman's seduction: she is represented "ravie" (line 2300).

The disciple's transfer of loss of control seems to work—so well, in fact, that the woman is also figured naming the disciple acrostically. T.I.B.A.U.T. marks the textual space where the woman articulates her desire for him. These letters, however, detail aspects of the disciple's position rather than her own. They relay further canonical advice about how to win the woman over: the importance of gifts, of dialogue, of taking swift action (lines 2466–78, 2537–61, 2623–28). Her naming of him is thus conjoined to his experience. Far from a sovereign act of nomination, it is a ventriloquistic stunt: she is calling to him through his writing. Let us not forget that when the disciple's acrostic has her saying "Friend, you will have sovereignty over me," we have another textual figure for the woman's yielding. (V os avroiz la seignorie amis, sur moi; lines 2568–69).

At this point we can see how crucial the letter games are for the disciple's potential mastery. The clerkly exercise in writing enables him to simulate control over his woman reader. In fact, the acrostic proves to be the site of the disciple's vicarious experience of mastering her.^[17] There—in the most elementary, alphabetic way—he can spell out her reactions and legislate her desire. And this he does without ever representing an actual encounter or extended dialogue between them. Like so many "men of words," the disciple exploits the clerkly practices of writing as a way of figuring his control. Granted, this acrostic control is predicated on the idea of a fully literate woman reader. It presupposes a persona able to decipher the

most sophisticated textual forms. Her literacy is the foil necessary for the disciple to project a semblance of dominance. Yet within the terms of the ars dictaminis , it matters less whether the receiver of the disciple's letter conforms to his representations of her or not. What counts is the power the clerks' written medium affords him in creating the guise of his own mastery.

When we turn to the Panthère , this recourse to the powers of writing is no less in evidence. The key trope is that of oeuvrer :

. . . Tu te doutes
Por noient, gette jus les doutes;
Amans doit toujours esperer
Que son desir puist averer,
Encores n'en soit il pas dignes;
Car c'est de bien amer .i. signes.
Et s'ainsi estoit que tu fusses
Refusez, et bien le sceüsses,
Si ne t'en dois tu pas retraire
De bien dire ne de bien faire.
Oeuvre  par sens, et si t'avise;
Car se tu selonc ma devise
Veus ouvrer, moult grans avantages
T'en vendra, et as amans sages
Par ce faire te comparras.
(lines 1502–16, emphasis mine)

You are a doubter for nothing, cast away your doubts. A lover should always hope that his desire will be realized, otherwise he would not be worthy of it. For this is one sign of loving well. And if indeed you were refused, and well you know it, you don't try to speak and act well. Act [oeuvre ] sensibly, that is what I advise you; for if you wish to work according to my precept, you will gain a great advantage, and in the doing you will be compared to wise lovers.

For the disciple to realize both his erotic and intellectual desire, Venus tells him, he must commit himself to hard labor: work is required. This trope should remind us first of the travails the disciple endured early on in the narrative. There he was represented struggling to no avail—completely overextended (lines 685–736). At the same time, Venus's work order suggests a type of productivity that goes beyond the hackneyed labor of love. In the allegorical terms of the disciple's training, it also involves a hermeneutical labor. The task is for him to decode the various allegorical signs, including that of the lady-panther. His industry should yield interpretations of the many significances of his world. What had

first seemed undecipherable—including the woman—becomes gradually comprehensible.

This hermeneutical dimension of the Panthère 's trope brings to the fore an important implication as far as the disciple's mastery is concerned. While he labors away, his love letter is materializing. In fact, the end result of his endeavors, his "ouvre" (line 1514) is his "salut," his "oevre" (lines 8, 2599).^[18] The culmination of his personal travail is nothing less than his text. That the trope registers in this double way is made clear by the many scenes of composing in the second part of the narrative. The first sign of this creativity is the disciple singing himself. In the place of his various instructors, he speaks through the songs of Adam de la Halle. Admittedly, his composition works by way of a vox prius facta —an oft-quoted external voice of authority.^[19] Yet as we have seen, such a mixed voice can demonstrate the disciple's capacity to incorporate the materials of vernacular learning. Adam de la Halle's authoritative voice is now assimilated, used as an integral part of the disciple's own writing project.

This emphasis on the disciple's textual work increases with the final recommendations of the God of Love:

Et quant un poi la pues veoir,
Si pren en ton cuer hardement,
Et li di tout apertement
Comment por li visa martire.
Après ce li porras escrire.
(lines 1733–37)

And when you can see her [the lady-panther] for a little while, then take her in your heart confidently, and tell her openly how you live a martyr's life for her. After that you will be able to write her.

The disciple looks more and more like Pygmalion—creative, confident, able to create a woman for himself out of nothing. The clerical practice of letter writing is no longer a tortuous ordeal for the disciple but has become his very livelihood. All the effort in textual study played out in the course of the dreams can be put to good use. In fact, the principal lesson from the dream experience—always work away loyally—is so fully assimilated that the disciple begins to compose his own oeuvre : the dream labor is transformed into his own "collected works"—the all-encompassing Dit de la panthère . The entire cycle of his insecurity and disastrous first approach to the woman is now recounted confidently in a textual sequence of his own making. And through that sequence his intellectual mastery is posited.

In this case, the disciple's increasingly masterful writing does not project a woman reader's response. Because he represents a far more insecure persona than his Poire confrere, the commitment to textual work is

all-absorbing. There is little space for figuring the woman; no simulated dialogue between them ensues. In contrast to the Poire , the Panthère foregrounds a failed encounter. Yet that very failure proves the mainspring of the disciple's creativity. Having hit bottom, he rises to the clerical task of writing as a way to secure the self. In other words, writing is pursued in order to turn the disciple into a master. We might even say that writing is pursued for its own sake. As it turns out, the God of Love's recommendation to direct his text toward the woman is rhetorical.

Intransitive Lessons

Does all this textual labor work? Does the disciple become the woman reader's master through writing? If we recall the clerical pedagogical model outlined in chapter 1, the cardinal factor is dialogue. It is the giveand-take, the heated exchanges between magister and disciple in a disputation, that prime the disciple for assuming authority. By expending his adversarial energy dialogically, the disciple accedes to the master's role. Both of these narratives rehearse these sorts of exchanges: the disciple shadowboxes with a masterly persona represented by disparate voices. Yet the crux lies in the problem of recasting that hypothetical dialogue to include the woman reader. Only then could the disciple be shown to exercise mastery fully.

In the Poire , the makings of such dialogue are visible. As we have seen, not only does the woman speak the disciple's name but the two are represented speaking to each other. The third and final acrostic is a duet with the disciple and woman taking turns composing the word A.M.O.R.S. Their voices are intertwined in the act of producing a text together.^[20] Yet does this common text substantiate dialogue? To be sure, it caps a sequence of acrostics that serve to juxtapose the disciple's and the woman's words. What was first a matter of literal juxtaposition develops into a type of interaction. The Poire climaxes with an exchange—disciple to woman and vice versa. But if we consider this represented exchange in terms of the disciple's letter writing, it is by no means clear whether it is transferable to the woman reader. The ideal scenario of their union is certainly intended to convince her to respond favorably to the letter. However in the end, the narrative cannot establish that. Whereas it posits an obvious synchrony between A.N.N.E.S. and the inscribed woman reader, one meant to determine an identical positive reaction to the disciple, that reader's interest in dialogue cannot in the end be represented. It remains the moot point in the narrative.

In this sense the disciple's prospects for gaining authority over women

through dialogue are deeply ambiguous. Because the woman reader is never depicted responding one way or the other, his authority is never validated. It is as if the dialogue he has projected remains intransitive.^[21] Given the woman reader's silence, the disciple is in a hiatus. All his training and textual exertions have brought him to this: a position where his hopes for intellectual mastery of women are held in abeyance. The privilege of acquiring the master's doctrine about them does not translate automatically into practice.

This pattern of intransitivity is even more pronounced in the Panthère . As we have seen, the shock value of a woman is so enormous for this disciple that most of his energy is expended on gaining control of the self through writing. The disciple's work is complete when it describes his subjective condition (de tout mon estat descrire; line 2629), and not his understanding of women. Exchange with the woman reader thus looks hypothetical at best. "Were you willing to say this rondel. . . . If I would hear this from you": the Panthère represents the one scrap of dialogue conditionally (Que vous veilliez cest rondel dire. . . . Et se de vous oÿ l'avoie; lines 2512, 2527). The disciple imagines what it would be like were the woman to sing a rondeau in answer to his. Unlike the Poire , which goes so far as to project a woman's response, this narrative casts it as an as yet to be realized speech act. The woman's direct discourse is manifestly beyond the disciple's limits. Even within the freer dream space of the text, he cannot entertain interaction with the woman. In the Panthère , an intransitive relation exists with the allegorical lady-panther as well.

Such intransitivity provides a key to discipleship as it is represented by allegorical narrative. It extends far beyond the syntactical issue of dialogue and epitomizes the narrator's dilemma over failing to realize the master's lessons regarding women. This dilemma is anticipated from the beginning of the disciple's initiation. He undergoes increasing trials in order to prove his intellectual credentials. The process is protracted, pushed beyond the extreme model of the Rose . Yet with this extended initiation comes no greater certainty that he can apply his learning on specific women. The disciple's authority does not carry beyond his own solipsistic writing. While he enjoys avidly at second hand the representation of the woman's acquiescence, the clerical practicum of letter writing insures no follow-through.

In this gap between the master's doctrine of women and the disciple's discipline we can detect what Bourdieu calls the double-edged privilege of domination.^[22] In both these narratives, the disciple is motivated by the desire to prove his mastery through his letter. Yet insofar as that writing can never guarantee domination of the one persona that eludes him—his woman reader—he as much as she risks being dominated. The paradox

lies in the disciple's stubborn determination to prevail. By trying over and over again to put the master's lessons about women into textual use, the disciple becomes spellbound, caught in the grip of a desire that is never fully satisfied. As a consequence, he too is subject to the immense pressure of a discursive system that can turn intellectual authority into a form of domination. He too can be imposed upon.

In recognizing this paradoxical position of discipleship, we should not discount the fact that the disciple remains a prominent and respected figure in French medieval narrative. The story of his trials contributes indispensably to the notion that women can be known and that some disciples can indeed graduate to the station of magister . But to the degree that the disciple is represented as so overwrought, his writing bears the signs of mastery's limits. To the degree that his authority over women is never confirmed, the symbolic dominance that his writing should put into place is, in the end, a doubtful affair.

3—
The Master at Work:
Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour

Aestho-autogamy with one unknown quantity on the male side has long been a commonplace. For fully five centuries in all parts of the world epileptic slavies have been pleading it in extenuation of uncalled-for fecundity. It is a very familiar phenomenon in literature.
Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

If the disciple wavers indefinitely when faced with women interlocutors, what then of his superior, the master? At the apex of the scholastic institution of mastery, the magister appears in a nearly invincible position. In Thomas Aquinas's own portrait, "Like the mountains, the masters are elevated above the earth and thus first illuminated by the rays of the sun."^[1] On ground level, the master presides over a network of pedagogical and intellectual relations. He is its guarantor, as the miniature from the Bestiaire d'amour depicts it, orchestrating the labor of writing and supervising his disciples (Figure 6). He is thus responsible for the continuity of mastery. In Aristotelian terms (as indeed in Flann O'Brien's playful ones), the master's charge involves a type of reproduction: replicating the masterly persona and his system through his own work.^[2]

In the literature of the magistri , any extended dealings with women were represented as a threat to this process of replication. In fact, so threatening did this appear that the idea of dialogue with women—of colloquium mulierum —was classified as a sin.^[3] In pastoral manuals and treatises on linguistic arts, this sin was numbered together with cursing or bad language (turpiloquium ) and buffoonery (scurrilitas ). All three were considered to express a desire for the filthy and foul; a desire, if we translate literally, to disfigure (ex insolentia feditatis ). This conception of disfigurement gets to the heart of the problem of any dealings between clerkly figures and women interlocutors. First of all, by dint of speaking with them the

clergy risks defiling their privileged languages of learning. When their words are directed toward personae identified by scholastic thought in base, material terms, the words themselves are debased; so too the subjects under discussion. It is as if all that clerks represent through their exchanges with women could be befouled. The world of learning itself could be disfigured.

Such a conception of the colloquium mulierum may well have been ritualistic—a sin in name only. Its definition in these thirteenth-century treatises smacks of the clerical habit of creating fantastical categories for the sake of analysis. Yet the fact that it was formulated at all and recurred in scholastic writing signals just how problematic the dialogue between clergy and women was taken to be. For the powerful figurehead of the clergy, the magister , it posed the gravest problems of all.

Nowhere is this threat more clearly dramatized than in the Lamentations of Matheolus . Not only does the masterly protagonist brave the interdiction against colloquium mulierum , but he consorts with a woman as a bigamist. The consequences for his identity are devastating: "I used to be a master" (Iamque eram magister).^[4] From the opening line, the Lamentations traces a story of degradation. It narrates what is another expulsion from Eden: a clerical fall from grace. This time a woman is shown to cause an exile from the mountains of masterly dominion. The so-called lamentations that follow are in fact a powerful diatribe against women. Because of the demoted master's desire to disfigure, he is reduced to speaking nothing but a disfiguring language: slander, blasphemy, expletives.

Matheolus is the alter ego—the dark shadow—of the master. As such, he provides the counterexample against which we can best study how the master undertakes dialogue with a woman. Matheolus's disgrace represents the position the reputable master figure must avoid at all costs. Although they both break the taboo of colloquium mulierum , the reputable master must find a way of maintaining his formidable authority while pursuing dialogue with women interlocutors. My test case will be Maître Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour .^[5] This thirteenth-century text is exemplary on two counts. In the framework of a master's address to a woman interlocutor, it casts the narrator in the double role of pedagogue and lover. While he is more intelligent than the disciple figure, he approaches the woman in a similarly amorous way. And this combination of roles raises the question of his masterly control, a question that becomes all the more charged because it is associated with the signature of "Maistre Richard de Fournival." A celebrated polymath of the high Middle Ages, Fournival exemplifies the magister 's intellectual command.^[6] Indeed, his farranging philosophical, literary, and scientific learning suggests the model

6. The master's work in progress: from writing to book production.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, fol. 90 verso.
By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

of Aristotelian mastery coalescing in Parisian university circles during the mid-thirteenth century.^[7]

These two aspects of Fournival's Bestiaire , structural and biographical, will focus our inquiry on the master's relations with women. Examining how the Fournival master's intellectual authority is established will help chart the dynamic of mastery—what it is that separates and does not separate Richard's master from his alter ego Matheolus. It will also lead to the overarching issue of the symbolic domination of women created by the master's discourse.

Laying the Groundwork

The Bestiaire master allies himself straightaway with the intellectual leaders of the day through the Aristotelian language he invokes.^[8] His subject is a favorite of scholastic disputation and commentary. Beginning with the incipit, he teases out the principal concepts of Aristotle's Metaphysics :

All men desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.

By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced in some of them, though not in others. And therefore the former are more intelligent and apt at learning than those which cannot remember.

The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings.^[9]

Rationality, knowledge, memory: the Bestiaire master works through the very traits that distinguish men and women from animals, and more importantly, that explain men's rule over all.^[10] In his address to the inscribed woman reader, he uses these Aristotelian terms to suggest his rule over her. This rule the alter ego Matheolus squanders. Whereas the Bestiaire narrator works to secure his rule through such formidable scholastic reasoning, Matheolus bewails the loss through invective: one goal, two counterbalancing rhetorics.

The Metaphysics subtext also raises the issues of irrationality and knowledge based on the senses. As the corresponding opposites of the ruling traits, they are implicitly aligned, in the master's schema, with "woman."^[11] If he claims the powers of rational knowledge, she, then, is allotted all that is irrational and purely sensory.^[12] In the most extreme terms, woman is thus limited to an animalistic existence. Such a theorem is crucial for the Bestiaire 's composition of a series of bestiary exempla. The master's letter to a woman reader involves various lessons concerning animals that, given this implicit conception of woman, are meant to be adopted easily by her.^[13] The presumption is that one beast should recognize another.^[14] By reading the master's commentary on the hedgehog or the crocodile, she should identify so completely with these animals that she should defer immediately to his erudition. As a result, not only is he meant to gain control over her, but his theorem on women's animalistic nature should be reinforced as well. In this, the Bestiaire master's attitude differs little from his alter ego's. It is a matter of degree. Since his authority is completely shaken, Matheolus figures a woman in the most terrifying bestial terms. Woman becomes "a hermaphroditic monster and shows herself to be a chimera" (Femme est hermafrodite monstre et pour chimere se desmonstre; Lamentations , II, lines 4127, 158) Out of his control, she turns into a wild, sexually ambiguous beast (and, we might add, into pure illusion).

This series of associations—the animalistic/the feminine/the deference to man's rule—brings us to the issue of mastery's dynamic. Our question then becomes: how is the Bestiaire narrator to command the

favor of his woman reader? The sequence of bestiary exempla derived from an authoritative Aristotelian tradition is used to create a dynamic of domination and subordination between the master and his female correspondent. Given his erudition, the master starts off from a dominant position. And his disputational commentary on the exempla exaggerates that dynamic. For one thing, his account of human erotics shifts between bestiary exempla for different types of aggression or servility. It moves back and forth between figures for predatory and passive behavior, between, for instance, the viper who attacks the unsuspecting, and the careless monkey captured at once. Furthermore, the gender coding of the master's exempla fluctuates. Far from using exempla systematically to assert the case of masculine dominance, the master comments upon types for masculine passivity, as indeed for feminine aggressiveness. The viper signifies for the Bestiaire narrator a feminine tendency to lash out at the lover, while the monkey is a lover too easily beguiled by women. This alternation of gender types maps the master's effort to prescribe the woman reader's reaction. Each time he shifts from an exemplum detailing masculine traits to one exemplifying those that are feminine, we glimpse the master-narrator working to ordain the woman's response. If he can use his gendered learning to dictate to her, then his intellectual mastery will be confirmed in the process.

This strategy is hardly implemented without a hitch. The more the Bestiaire master alternates between masculine and feminine exempla, the more complicated his goal of commanding the woman becomes. This alternating pattern signals the master's difficulty in projecting relations of pliancy onto her. And that uneasiness comes through in a second pattern. The Bestiaire narrator is liable to change the gendered lessons of the exempla. An animal conventionally read as masculine can metamorphose in the space of the master's commentary into a feminine one and vice versa. Such semantic mobility, coupled with a structural one, suggests how checkered his campaign to induce the woman's yielding is. His tendency to revise the gendered sense of his own material is symptomatic of the larger problem of the master's intellectual authority. To understand this trouble in relation to the woman reader, it is as important to trace the sequence of change in bestiary exempla as it is to examine what each exemplum entails.

Take the case of the tiger exemplum. Introduced to describe the master's seduction, it signifies a creature mesmerized by its own image in a mirror. Medieval bestiaries conventionally treat the tigress and not the male of the species.^[15] In the framework of the master's teaching, this animal should lend itself "naturally" to interpreting the woman's behavior. It

conveys perfectly notions of feminine vanity and self-absorption. In the master's rendition, however, its conventionalized gender is recast to represent his predicament:

Oïl, miex fu je pris par mon veoir ke tigres n'est al mireoir, ke ja tant ne sera corchie de ses faons, s'on li emble, ke s'ele encontre un mireoir qu'il ne li covingne ses iels aerdre. Et se delite tanta regarder la grant beauté de sa bone taille, k'ele oblie a cachier chiax ki li ont emblé ses faons, et s'areste illuec comme prise.
(Segre, 40–41)

Yes, I was better seized through my sense of sight than the tiger in the mirror. For however enraged she is when one has stolen her cubs from her, if she encounters a mirror, she has to fix her eyes upon it. And she delights so much in looking at the great beauty of her good form that she forgets to hunt those men who stole her cubs. She stands there as if seized.

What of this subtle shift, where the master assumes the feminine position himself? On one level, the masculine and feminine coding of his exempla appear interchangeable.^[16] Little does it seem to matter whether an animal is typed by one gender or another, since the master's erudition empowers him to manipulate the interpretation as he sees fit. On a still deeper level, however, such a switch should alert us to just how tricky it proves for the master to wield his authority over his woman correspondent. The fact that he identifies subjectively with the tigress betrays a certain narcissism. Like the Freudian subject fascinated with women depicted as "beasts of prey," the master-narrator exhibits his own feminine weakness; his attraction is an expression of his feminized narcissistic impulses.^[17] Drawn toward what he is trying desperately to overcome, the Bestiaire narrator exemplifies the male subject enthralled and repulsed by the self-absorbed, indifferent woman.

Herein lie the initial signs of the master's difficulty in imposing his intellectual authority on the woman reader. At the very juncture where the Bestiaire could use the tigress exemplum to set up the woman's obliging response to him, instead it collapses so-called feminine experience and the master's together. The bestiary commentary becomes a mode of autoreflection (or in Flann O'Brien's terms, of aestho-autogamy, of replicating the male self via a feminine persona). Furthermore, it comprises the place where the master scrutinizes himself obsessively via the woman. Not only is she the screen for his reveries, but she is supposed to be titillated by them. His learning becomes more and more self-engrossed.

This narcissism informs the narrator's revision of a number of exempla. The wolf, described as a timorous creature paralyzed by a man's gaze,

is introduced to represent the first phases of attraction. Following bestiary tradition, the master considers the animal feminine, thus highlighting her silence: "She then lost the courage to refuse [him]" (elle a puis perdu le hardement d'escondire; Segre, 11). Yet once again the master applies the exemplum to his own predicament:

Mais pour chu ke jou ne me puc[h] tenir ne souffrir de vous dire men corage avant ke je seüse riens del vostre, m'aveis vous eschivé. Che vous ai oï dire aucune fois. Et puis ke je sui primerains veüs, selonc le nature del leu j'en doi bien perdre le vols.
(Segre, 11–12)

But since I cannot bear and fail to tell you my intimate feelings before I know of yours, you have rejected me. I have heard you say this once. And since I am the first one spotted, according to the nature of the wolf, it is fitting that I lose my voice.

Claiming a feminine type of speechlessness for himself can be a self-serving gesture. The master is quick to assume "feminine" silence insofar as it contributes to his own self-reflection. By adopting the weaker, feminine position, the master also tries to persuade the woman to follow suit. Yet at the same time, playing the she-wolf is a gamble for the master. His conversion of a "feminine" trait into a "masculine" one unsteadies his authority. The fact that the master is suspended by such specular moments suggests that his own control is weakening. At times the game of feminizing the self is more fascinating to the master than the task of taking charge of the woman reader. He is caught also by a self-canceling gesture.

When this play with the gendered significance of an exemplum accompanies a change in the sequence of masculine and feminine types, the tensions over the master's command intensify. The case of the wolf is particularly interesting in this respect because it marks the transition from portraits of a suffering lover to those of a self-defensive and, of course, predatory woman. In other words, it is reintroduced at a point where the narrator endeavors to project the woman reader's response:

Et ne vous mervelliés mie se j'ai l'amor de feme comparé a le nature del leu. . . . Et selonc le tierce nature si est ke s'elle va si avant de parolle ke li homme se perchoive k'ele l'aint, tout ausi ke li leus se vaingne par sa bouce de son pié, si set elle trop bien par force de paroles recovrir et ramanteler chu k'ele a trop avant alei. Car volentiers voet savor d'autrui chu k'ele ne veut mie c'on sache de lui, et d'omme k'elle quide k'il l'aint se set elle tres fermement garder. Ausi comme li wivre.
(Segre, 15–17)

And you should not wonder that I have compared woman's love to the nature of the wolf. . . . And according to its third nature, if the woman

goes so far with her words that the man realizes she loves him, just like the wolf who avenges herself biting the foot with her mouth, so too the woman knows how to recover and retrieve herself through her word when she has gone too far. For she wishes greatly to know of another what she never wants known of herself, and she knows how to protect herself stoutly against a man whom she believes to love her, like the viper.

In returning to the feminine gender of the wolf, the master focuses on a type of self-protective aggressiveness in the woman. No matter how authoritatively he comments on this trait, his commentary reveals his fear, for it raises the specter of women's vengeance. All the bestiary portraits here accentuate a violence in women that is cause for his alarm. The pattern is becoming clearer: the master-narrator first shows signs of weakness when he identifies narcissistically with the feminine; that weakness emerges full-blown when he complains of the destructiveness of women.

If we look closer at this pattern, the master's anxiety over control and his concern over a feminine violence are both linked to the woman's desire to know. "For she wishes greatly to know of another what she never wants known of herself, and she knows how to protect herself securely against a man whom she believes to love her, like the viper": a woman's appetite for knowledge is assessed as dangerous. And given the snake image, it can be fatally dangerous. By extension, the reader is figured as one who seeks knowledge in a savage manner. She is deemed wily and obstructionist because she aspires to her own self-knowledge. To portray women's "wish to know" in this negative light betrays the narrator's nervousness about its effects. The animus behind such a portrait is his urge to consider any knowledge acquired by women as a threat to his own. His desire involves limiting their knowledge. The aggressiveness he imputes to women thus increases in proportion to his fear over his ultimate sovereignty. The image of feminine harmfulness is commensurate with his own dread.

The Aristotelian character of the Bestiaire commentary suggests one further aspect of women's desire to know, namely, their rational potential. With the wolf/viper exemplum the master ruefully admits such a potential. In so doing, the distinctions between the Aristotelian metaphysical and biological understanding of rationality are brought to the fore. The incipit with which the master begins does not differentiate between women's and men's capacities. It defines the appetite for knowledge as a common human venture. By contrast, the biological theories informing the Bestiaire mark those differences. The distinctions between a rational man and a sensate

woman imply that while she may possess the faculties, she is incapable of developing them.^[18] Biologically speaking, women's possibility of knowing is an exclusively sensory affair. This Aristotelian discrepancy runs straight through the Bestiaire . And the tensions it generates place the master's power over controlling the woman reader in jeopardy. That is why the biological learning, with all its exempla, must override the metaphysical. That is also why his admission of women's rational potential is the place where he must labor to prove his authority. In this sense, the master's formula—"For she wishes greatly to know of another what she never wants known of herself"—refers as easily to himself. The affirmation of his authority entails barring women from the practice of knowledge, just as it targets them as its privileged object. The Bestiaire master subscribes, in effect, to Capellanus's elimination of a female clergy. One of the conditions for exercising intellectual mastery in clerical discourse is canceling out its female counterpart—a move displaced onto the woman herself.

It is worth underlining the crucial link between the shifting gendered valence of the bestiary exempla and the narrator's concern over his intellectual mastery. The extent to which he revises the significance of his material through gender intimates his increasing struggle in securing his dominant position. At times this struggle is configured narcissistically: the master grapples with the woman's resistance by filtering it through myriad self-reflections. At times the full brunt of the struggle is acted out and displaced through various representations of the predatory woman. Whichever, the anxiety over his authority grows steadily until in the second part of the Bestiaire it reaches a crisis point:

Dont sui je mors, c'est voirs. Et ki m'a mort? Jou ne sai, ou vous ou jou, fors ke ambedoi i avons coupes. Ausi com de cell cui le seraine ocist, quant elle l'a endormi par son chant. . . . Si me samble ke le seraine i a grans coupes quant elle l'ocist en traïson, et li hom grans coupes quant il s'i croit. Et si je sui mors par itel ockoison, et vous et jou i avons coupes. Mais je ne vous ose susmetre traïson, si n'en metrai les coupes se sour moi non, et dirai ke je mismes me sui mors.
(Segre, 29–31)

So I am dead, it's true. And who has killed me ? I don't know, either you or I, we are both guilty. Just as when the siren killed the man whom she has lulled to sleep by her song. . . . It seems to me that the siren is culpable for killing the man treacherously, and he as well for having been so trusting. And if I am dead through such a murder, both you and I are guilty. But I do not dare to put the treason on your account, so I shall assume the guilt myself and I'll say that I have killed myself.

With the trope of the lover's death, the master's dread over the limits of his authority is transformed into dread of his failure to maintain control. This fatal lapse is figured by none other than the siren. Half woman, half beast, such a hybrid being displays a human capacity of reasoning together with the most powerful senses. This combination places the Bestiaire master's control in the severest jeopardy.^[19]

The siren is the only bestiary exemplum in the entire narrative identified explicitly as a human female. Herein lies her double importance: at a pivotal point in seducing the woman reader, the siren emblematizes the master's endeavor to convert his dread into an instrument of control. The identification of the siren with a woman enables him to reinforce biologically the link between the feminine and the noxious. It thereby creates the circumstances for blaming the woman reader. With the usual strategy of taking the weaker position, the Bestiaire narrator is shown to shift the burden of culpability (read: fear) away from himself, toward the woman. And this transfer involves another measure of narcissism. No sooner does he confess a joint guilt than he pretends to take it all upon himself. In an extravagantly servile gesture, he claims to have killed himself. So enormous is the anxiety of losing control that clerical discourse depicts man, narcissistically, as woman's willing victim. In the Aristotelian terms of the Bestiaire , not only is woman typed a nefarious creature, but man is represented succumbing to her animalistic and sensorial impulses.

This process of converting anxiety into a form of control culminates with the exemplum that represents splitting open the female body.

Si m'en avés ochis de tel mort com Amours apartient. Mais sevous voliés vostre douc[h] costé ouvrir, tant que vous m'eussiés arousé de vostre bone volenté, et douné le biau douc[h] cuer desirré qui dedens le costé gist, vous m'ariés resuscité. Quar c'est la sovrainne medechine de moi aidier que de vostre cuer avoir.
(Segre, 56–57)

Thus you have killed me with the kind of death belonging to Love. But if you wanted to open your gentle side so that you sprinkled me with your good will and gave me the beautiful, gentle, and desired heart that lies in your side, you would have resuscitated me. For the sovereign medicine to help me is to have your heart.

The figure of the lover's death is countermanded here by that of a woman's bodily sacrifice. Having complained at such great length about feminine violence toward him, the master transfers that danger onto a female body, depicting how she suffers division. What's more, that division is figured as freely chosen. In the master's scenario, it is the woman who offers herself

up physically to the lover. Like the pelican who feeds others with its own flesh, the woman is to submit to vivisection as proof of her desire to save the lover. As a rule, this pelican exemplum was interpreted theologically. Its image of breaking the body for others and of resuscitation was linked to Christ's sacrifice.^[20] And yet as this exemplum is deployed in the master's scheme of things there is nothing charitable or life-giving about it. On the contrary, it signifies the most acute malaise over surrendering physically to women. Moreover, it signals the effort to displace the threat of scission onto her. In order to avoid his death, the master endeavors to persuade his woman reader to undergo it willingly herself.

Danielle Régnier-Bohler has argued that the figure of the dissected female body demonstrates the power it exerts upon the imagination of medieval clerisy.^[21] Confronted with it, a clerkly persona such as the Bestiaire master proceeds to divide and conquer. By portraying the division and even dismemberment of the female body, he attempts to reestablish authority over it: he dehumanizes it as a brute form. Few images could better reveal the clerical determination to control his woman reader than that of the broken female body with its heart extracted.

It is worth noting that all three animals used to illustrate woman's necessary self-sacrifice are identified as male. "The father lion resuscitates his young"; "The father pelican pierces his side and sprinkles the young with the blood of his side" (Segre, 54, 55–56). With the third beast, the masculine identification is especially glaring: "You should give me your heart to be freed from my torment, as the beaver does. This is an animal with a member containing medicine . . . well it knows it is being hunted only for that member, so it sets upon it with its teeth, tears it off and drops it in the middle of the path (Segre, 57–58). What would be the effect of this figure of castration?^[22] If we cannot fathom the medieval receptions of such a figure, particularly by women, at the very least we can acknowledge the masterly reflex to dictate women's behavior according to male types. The pressure brought to bear here is not only gendered, but fundamentally sexualized. That the image of torn male genitalia is the high point of the Bestiaire 's commentary bespeaks the depths of clerical insecurities. It also conveys this master's willful insistence to overcome them by imagining a woman's physical submission.

Lest there be any doubt about this aim, we need only look at a passage toward the end of the text:

Et pour c[h]ou dist Ovides que amours et segnourie ne puent demourer ensanlle en une caiere. Et li poitevins qui en sievi Ovide si dist: "Non pot l'orgueill od l'amour remanoir"; et li autres qui redist: "Non pos poiar s'el non descen," il le dist pour c[h]ou que puis qu'ele estoit plus

haute et il plus bas, que a c[h]ou que il fuissent ouni il couvenoit que ele descendist et il montast. Et la raisons de ceste iveleté si est prise de c[h]ou que c[h]ou est un meïsmes chemins qui va de Saint Denis a Paris et qui vient de Paris a Saint Denise.
(Segre, 88–89)

Wherefore also Ovid said that love and mastery cannot remain together on a single throne; and the Poitevin who followed Ovid in this, said, "Pride cannot coexist with love." And that other for his part said, "I cannot ascend if she does not descend" meant that, since she was higher and he lower, she must descend and he ascend to be one. The reason for this equality is to be found in the fact that the same path goes from St. Denis to Paris as from Paris to St. Denis.
(Beer, 31)

In the proverbial formulation "I cannot ascend if she does not descend," the Bestiaire master discloses the unspoken constant of much medieval vernacular literature. While the majority of personae and poets proceed on this basis, they invert the roles and simulate a woman in ascendancy, with the lover, correspondingly, down and—often—out. By sharp contrast, our narrator acknowledges the dialectic animating representations of the inferior male persona. In order to insure the master's authority, the dame must be brought down. The image of the master/lover on the rise confirms the objective of his ultimate dominance.

Nevertheless, this precept is phrased in the diplomatic terms of parity. Quoting no less than the magister amoris , Ovid, the Bestiaire narrator maintains that erotic relations between men and women are not compatible with the idea of sovereignty—a phrase Jeanette Beer translates in terms of mastery. Her choice is well founded, for if we continue to the end of the passage, an Aristotelian order of intellectual mastery reasserts itself. Equality means establishing each persona in his/her rightful station. It involves a hierarchy that necessarily places the woman in a lesser and beholden relation to the master.

Following directly after this analysis of equality/mastery is the one and only first person plural of the text: "And so I say that if you desire that we love each other . . ." (ausi di jou ke se vous voliés ke nous nos entramissiesmes; Segre, 89). That the master presumes the woman's longing for their love demonstrates just how this equality is to be understood. This is a virtual prescription. The woman is represented in a position in which she is not to interpret her equality as she so desires but rather according to the master's design of their common purpose. His speaking for her illustrates the desired outcome of the master's work—that his intellectual mastery hold the ultimate power over the woman's reactions.

As it is, the Bestiaire does not substantiate that power. Such masterly narratives do not, in the end, yield any sign of the woman reader's compliance. The course of the master's learned commentary leads to a hiatus. No matter how subtle or comprehensive his analysis, the impetus to realize his authority through the woman's action is interrupted. His massive advantage in learning does not enable the master to bring every subject and every interlocutor under his control. When it comes to women interlocutors, the vernacular master is not ready to make a determinatio (determination)—that concluding stage in scholastic disputation where every question is finally resolved and every interlocutor falls into line behind the magister . Ironically, he is situated in much the same unsettling position as the disciple. The difference is that the disciple internalizes his insecurity while the master externalizes his. The first traces of the master's anxiety appear in the vacillating gender types of his bestiary lessons. It breaks through explicitly in the expression of his own death. Faced with this unnerving picture, the master struggles with his sense of loss of control by projecting it onto the woman interlocutor.^[23] The image of her fractured body offers a spectacular instance of his externalized fears.

Forcing the Issue of Women

If the idea of mastering women intellectually is left hanging in the balance, masterly narratives such as the Bestiaire continue to force the issue. As a whole, they suppress the problems of achieving such mastery by persisting in the attempt to do so. Even in the most precarious moments, the master resorts to shows of intellectual force—to attempting to overpower a subject such as women when it threatens to defeat him. While the Bestiaire does not explicitly represent such force, there are other, related didactic narratives that give us a clear sense of what it might involve. The Commens d'amour , often attributed to Richard de Fournival, offers the following account as part of a master's commentary on man's erotic life:

Si avint une fois ke, par nuit, il entra el gardin de la chambre ou s'amie gisoit, et attendi tant k'ele issi bors pour li deporter; dont fist il tant par carnins et par enchantemens, dont il savoit assés, qu'il le fist endormir emmi liu del gardin. Et chil qui desirans estoit et escauffés, jut a li carnelment pour chou ke se volentés fust acomplie; et puis si fist .I. petit d'escrit, et en cel escrit estoient escrit tell mot: "Chis chastiaus qui lonc tamps a esté assegiés par grant force d'engien, a hui esté brisiés"; et puis prist .I. petit de sa robe a enseignes et le mist avoec l'escript, et

mist l'escript deseure le cose qui tant avoit esté desiree, et le laissa toute descouverte dusques a le poitrine, et s'en parti. Et quant li carnins fu passés, et ele s'esvilla, et se trouva ensi descouverte et trouva l'escript mis desus le fleur de ses membres, si le liut, et vit bien ke chils i avoit esté a sa volenté; adont dist ele: "En .VII. ans vient aighe a son caneil; tant cache on le cerf ke on le prent; et j'ai esté prise, et chils a eu le merchi qu'il queroit, ne mie par mon gré ne par ma volenté; et de ceste premiere merchi ne me seit il gré si adroit, et de la seconde, s'il l'avoit par ma volenté, il m'en saroit gré; dont li couvient il avoir."^[24]

And so it happened one time that at night, he entered the garden of the room where his lady was lying, and he waited for her to come out to enjoy herself. Through various charms and spells, about which he knew a great deal, he put her to sleep in the middle of the garden. And he, who was most desirous and excited, took carnal pleasure in her until he accomplished his will. And then he made a little text and in his writing were written the words: "This castle that was so long under siege by great force of cunning was finally broken." And then he took a small bit of her dress as a sign and placed it with the writing and he put the writing on the very thing so long desired. Leaving her uncovered up to the chest, he departed. And when the spell broke and she awoke to discover herself nude and with the written note placed on the flower of her body, she read it and saw that he had had his way with her. So she said: "In seven years, water finds its channel; the stag is chased for so long that he is finally taken. I have been taken and he who had the favor he sought, had it neither with my pleasure nor consent. Of the first favor, if he had the right, he is not grateful to me for it; of the second, if he had it with my consent, he would have been grateful to me for it; so it is fitting for him to have it."

That the lover is figured as having sex with his unwitting female partner is the least surprising element of this scene. Though veiled by dreams, the commonplace of a woman's sexual yielding is barely occulted. The narration sets it up as something inevitable, even banal. What is out of the ordinary here is the conjunction of the violated female body and the lover's writing. Her sexual anatomy is entwined with his textualization of it: "and he put the writing on the very thing for so long desired." The inscription of sex gains a carnal dimension, so much so that the commentary of the masterful lover seems to rival the act itself. Moreover, what is written represents a quintessential allegorical formulation. The lover's message is cast in those familiar Ovidian terms of an assault on love's castle. As such it epitomizes a widely used clerical discourse on women, one that is the particular privilege of the elite magistri .

Is this not a masterful show of force—this time depicted physically?

Unlike the Bestiaire master, the Commens persona exercises his control over the woman carnally and then, as if to confirm it definitively, he leaves a written trace. The outstanding sign of his authority is the ability to textualize his experience, to turn it into learning. The work mentioned by the Bestiaire narrator at the end of his letter—"but if you had kept me in your service, I would show you through my work" (mais se vous m'avies retenue, je vous monsteroie bien per ovre; Segre, 102)—is doubly achieved here. The Commens masterly figure enjoys the fruits of his labor both physically and intellectually.

I single out the Commens scene for two reasons. First of all, it offers an emblem for the clerical tendency to transform intellectual mastery over women into a form of domination. Indeed, it makes clear how such a dominance is represented invariably in carnal terms. The man's allegorical writing affixed to the woman's sex illustrates the way in which masterful exegesis can slip into the domination of women by representing their physical submission. Learning is proven masterful insofar as it considers the issue of women's sexual yielding. Such scenes reveal how closely the clerical practices of disputation and writing are bound up with figures of subordinating woman. To dispute is to argue the case for women's necessary and proper deference. And what passes for textual knowledge is a wealth of material on women as carnal entities. In fact, if we look back over the various didactic narratives we have surveyed, they all promote a final lesson of disputing and commenting authoritatively on women's bodies. From didactic texts to allegories, the task of entering the masters' ranks involves knowing women in a physical sense. Although such knowledge does not comprise carnal knowledge strictly speaking, it is no less powerful. Therein lies the potential for symbolic domination. Representing masters and disciples disputing the subject of sex with women can be a domineering form of discourse. Whether this domination is consistent throughout medieval vernacular narrative is unclear. The Bestiaire , as well as the narratives of discipleship, would suggest otherwise. But the principal aim underlying the spectrum of didactic works is nonetheless to establish such symbolic domination.

The Commens scene is telling for a second reason. By representing the woman's reaction to her rape, it introduces the issue of a woman's response in general. Within the narrative, the woman's reaction is largely complicitous. Speaking a proverbial language of popular wisdom, she confirms the master's allegorical sententia : it is fitting that women be taken. While this woman is figured regretting her unaccounted-for pleasure, at the same time she envisages her likely consent and the man's gratitude. In this master's rendition, the woman comes around to acknowledging how her consent ratifies the fait accompli of a man's will.

Beyond the narrative, however, this issue of a woman's response raises questions about the impact of the master's authoritative learning about women. No matter how uniformly such learning is relayed through the didactic and allegorical narratives we have been studying, the very idea of women responding challenges it. From an oppositional position—even according to the master's criteria—the woman's response implicitly disputes the sexualized learning about women. The woman's response thus raises a still larger question about the symbolic domination created by the vernacular discourse of mastery. How extensive is this pattern of domination in high medieval French narrative? If we begin to think in terms of responses not as individual speech acts, but as distinct texts, that pattern may not persist uncontested. Conceptualizing the discourse of mastery from the point of view of respondents other than the male disciple may open up a different picture.

2—
PROLIFERATING RESPONSES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Respond?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Respond?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naming Names

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Is Responding?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-curseher

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

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

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

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

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

These scruples pave the way for a show of remorse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cutting Off His Nose to Spite His Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Imperfect Conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Insult to Injury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visionary Advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards the Sapiential

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sting of Verbal Injury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Literary Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liable for Libel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Matter of Fiction and Treason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correcting the Master

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correcting the Woman's Response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Question of Identification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1— Ovidian and Aristotelian Figures

2— The Trials of Discipleship:Le Roman de la poire and Le Dit de la panthère d'amours

3— The Master at Work: Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour

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

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

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

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

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

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INDEX

A

Abelard, Peter, 28 , 29 , 226 n33, 227 n34;

Sic et Non , 28

Acrostics, 64 -66, 72 , 73 , 76 , 234 n17

Adam de la Halle, 69 , 75 , 242 n45

Agacinski, Sylviane, 50 , 51

Alan of Lille, 257 n16

Albertano of Brescia, 12

Allegory, 40 -41, 61 -62, 74 -75, 151 , 166 -167

Andreas Capellanus, 2 , 4 , 29 , 32 , 36 -42, 45 , 62 , 71 , 87 , 108 , 124 , 188

Animality, 23 , 82 -83

Aquinas, Thomas, 79 , 235 n1, 238 n16;

Commentary on Metaphysics , 235 n2, 238 n15;

Summa Theologica , 222 n49

Archiloge Sophie , 220 n31, 227 n34

Aristotle, 2 , 34 , 50 , 52 , 57 -60, 81 -82, 103 , 104 , 106 , 187 , 228 n47, 230 n61, 232 nn70-72;

Ethics , 24 , 157 , 164 , 171 -173, 216 , 251 n20, 267 n40;

Metaphysics , 1 , 81 -82, 228 n46;

On the Generation of Animals , 50 ;

and Phyllis, 23 ;

Politics , 52 , 232 n72

Art d'amors , 42 -45;

of Guiart, 229 n57

Astrology, 169 -170

Augustine, 24 , 149 , 153 , 184 , 185 ;

City of God , 184 , 185 , 248 n37, 250 n8, 250 n11

Authenticity, textual, 211 -212, 213 , 265 n13, 265 n20

B

Badel, Pierre-Yves, 160 , 252 n24

Beer, Jeanette, 90 , 238 n13

Beguines, 128 , 243 n54

Belle Dame sans merci , 16 -17, 177 , 178 , 180 -184, 186 , 187 , 193 , 195 , 197

Bestiaire d'amour , 79 -94, 99 , 101 -103, 114 , 118 , 129

Bestiary, 4 -5, 66 , 82 -83, 182 ;

and gender types, 82 -87, 111 -114

Blanchard, Joël, 170 , 254 n41

Blasphemy, 13

Bloch, R. Howard, 218 n18, 219 n21, 219 n28, 266 n30

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 188 , 244 n3, 252 n24, 260 n27

Boethius, 164 , 170 , 253 n31, 254 n37

Book burning, 161 , 194 , 262 n48

Bourdieu, Pierre, 5 , 34 , 77 , 230 n58, 238 n6, 255 n49

Bowden, Betsy, 40 , 41

Boyle, Leonard E., 226 n29

Brabant:

duchy of, 30 , 124 -129, 227 n36, 241 n42;

duke and duchess of, 29 -31, 126

Braudy, Leo, 119

Burns, E. Jane, 231 n68

C

Cadden, Joan, 231 n65

Casagrande, Carla and Silvana Vecchio, 220 n33, 235 n3, 246 n18

Castration, 90 , 143 -144, 246 n21

Catherine of Alexandria, 242 n48

Cato, 23 , 24 , 136

Censor , 155 , 251 nn15-17, 254 n37

Censorship, 199 , 204 -206, 263 n61

Cerquiglini, Bernard, 121 , 240 n27, 265 n20

Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, 67 , 245 n7, 255 n46

Champion des dames134 , 135 , 147 , 178 , 179 , 232 n76

Charles V, 169

Charles VI, 257 n14

Charles VII, 177

Chartier, Alain, 177 , 178 , 181 , 182 , 184 , 186 , 188 -190, 194 , 195 , 198 , 203 -205, 207 , 257 n15

Chastoiement des dames , 27

Chastoiement d'un père à son fils , 28 , 99

Chemin de long estude , 156 , 164 -171, 173

Christine de Pizan, 15 , 16 , 18 , 25 , 26 , 122 -124, 147 , 151 -175, 188 , 198 , 213 -214, 256 n9

Cicero, 155 , 159 , 174 , 184 , 250 n10, 250 n11, 255 n47;

De inventione , 220 n31;

De re publica , 153

Cité des dames , 247 n28

Cixous, Hélène, 105 , 224 n12

Clef d'amours , 229 n57

Clerc , 4 , 29 -31, 116 ;

and chevalier debates, 30 -34, 247 n29;

training of, 27 -28;

and women, 29 -34, 57 -60, 77 , 79 -81

Cligés , 65

Clotilde de Surville, 203 -216

Col, Gontier, 154 , 156 , 163 , 168 , 170

Col, Pierre, 159 -161, 187

Colloquium mulierum (dialogue with women), 79 , 80

Commens d'amour , 91 -93

Commonwealth (res publica ). See Public domain

Concilium Romarici montis , 31 , 33 , 33

Consaus d'amours , 30 , 31 , 47 , 48 , 50 , 51 , 53 , 57 -59, 230 n61, 231 n63, 232 n75

Contraries and contrariety, 67 , 102 -105, 107 , 113 , 139 -140, 234 n12;

woman as contrary, 68 , 109 , 110

Conversion, 144 -147, 247 n24

Cornell, Drucilla, 215

Cour Amoureuse , 191

Courtly discourse, 5 , 54 -56, 182 , 204 -205

Courtly society, 127 , 178

Coutumes de Beauvaisis , 192

La Cruelle Femme d'amour , 195 -197, 263 n59

D

Damoiselles d'honneur , 178 -179, 256 nn8-9, 264 n5

Dante, 5 , 167 , 168 , 203 , 254 n36;

De vulgari eloquentia , 5 ;

Inferno , 203 ;

Paradiso , 168

De amore , 36 -42, 46 , 108 , 122 -124, 201 ;

condemnation of, 42 , 229 n54

Débat des deux fortunés d'amours , 186

De Disciplina scholarium , 27 , 226 n24

Defamation, 15 , 56 , 57 , 131 , 132 , 151 -153, 178 , 179 , 257 n12, 262 n46;

and contumelia , 148 , 149 , 222 n49;

and feme/diffame couplet, 131 , 133 , 148 -150, 176 , 190 ;

law of, 152 , 154 , 177 , 178 , 180 , 182 , 184 , 196 ;

and masterly writing, 56 , 132 -135, 137 , 143 -145, 153 , 162 , 164 , 174 ;

public, 152 -153, 161 -162, 185 .

See also Libel; Slander

Derrida, Jacques, 239 n22

Deschamps, Eustache, 145

Desire, 140 -42

Des vilains , 120

Dialogues de Salemon et Marcoul , 98

Disciple, 18 , 27 -28, 42 , 47 , 54 , 55 , 61 -79, 226 n24, 233 n3

Disciplina clericalis , 223 n4

Disputatio /disputation, 10 , 11 , 13 , 28 , 29 , 33 -38, 67 -69, 152 ;

and determinatio , 91 , 163 ;

and opponens , 62 ;

and quaestio , 28 , 84 ;

and respondens , 62

Distiches Caton , 245 n11

Dit , 66 , 67

Dit de la panthère d'amours , 64 , 66 -72, 74 -77

Domination, 34 , 40 , 41 , 56 -58, 77 ;

symbolic, 6 , 34 , 47 , 48 , 55 , 58 , 59 , 63 , 78 , 93 , 101 , 115 , 135 , 142 , 175 , 178 , 198 , 201 , 206 ;

theories of, 24 -25

Dragonetti, Roger, 239 n20

Dronke, Peter, 8

Drouart La Vache, 32 , 38 , 47 , 69

Duby, Georges, 3

Durkheim, émile, 218 n11, 225 n19

E

Education, 11 ;

clerical, 27 -28;

lay, 11 , 125 -27

Enders, Jody, 226 n27, 226 n29

Enseignemens que une dame laisse  . . ., 174

Enseignements (didactic works), 27 , 34 , 65 , 98

Epistolary, 9 , 76 -77;

and the Ars dictaminis , 64 , 77 , 233 n5

Epistre au Dieu d'amours , 151 , 254 n38

Essentialism, 17

Ethics, 164 , 170 -171, 173

Eve, 6 , 100 , 105 , 106

Excusacion aus dames177 , 183 -187, 189 , 196 , 259 n22

F

Fama , 15 , 149 , 152 , 248 n35, 248 n37, 250 n8

Farce du maître Pathelin , 193

Femininity, 17 -18, 24 , 180 ;

and knowledge, 28 -29;

romantic definition of, 212

Ferrante, Joan, 219 n29, 242 n46

Fiction, 159 , 162 , 168 , 170 , 171 , 185 , 188 ;

ontological status of, 189 , 195 , 196 , 198

Fighting words, 11

Figura , 4 , 188

Figuration:

and domination, 33 -34, 91 -93, 110 , 114 -116, 162 ;

and women, 156 -158;

of women, 2 -5, 13 , 18 , 33 , 48 -51, 123 -124, 129

Florilegia , 36 , 171 , 229 n50, 248 n37

Forgery, 207 -212, 247 n24

Foucault, Michel, 24 , 26 , 224 n6, 225 n17, 254 n41

La France (allegorical figure), 257 n15

Franchise , 40 -41, 180 , 181 , 199 , 257 n14

Free Speech, 170 , 185

Furr, Grover, 154 , 251 n14

G

Gauvard, Claude, 152 , 221 nn41-42, 249 n7

Gender roles, 18 , 29 , 35 , 82 -86, 147 , 180 ;

and writing, 17 -18, 101 -102, 121 -124, 211 -212

Genesis, 6 , 105 -106, 120

Gerson, Jean, 191 , 192

Gilson, étienne, 250 n10

Glorieux, Palémon, 219 n28, 226 n29, 234 n14

Grabmann, Martin, 26 , 219 n28, 225 n18

Gradus amoris , 39

Gratian, 148 , 149 , 177 ;

Decretum , 148 , 149

Gravdal, Kathryn, 234 n15

Gregory the Great, 11

Grosseteste, Robert, 12

Grundmann, Herbert, 3

Guillaume de Machaut, 14 , 15 , 145

Guillelma de Rosers, 7 -8

Gynocentrism, 132 -133, 134 -135, 145 , 147 -148

H

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24 , 224 n9

Héloïse, 201 , 202 , 209 , 266 n34

Heresy, 13 , 154 , 161 -162, 194 , 220 n36

Honor, 113 , 152 , 199 , 260 n34, 263 n58

Hostiensis, 221 n40, 248 n36

Li Houneurs et le vertus des dames , 47 , 48 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 54 -56, 123 , 143 , 230 n61, 232 n75

Hugh of Saint Cher, 12

Humanists, 154 , 168 , 170 -174, 187 , 188 , 191 , 201 , 205 , 251 n14, 252 n26

Huot, Sylvia, 227 n39, 231 n64, 233 n6, 234 n20

I

Identity, 121 -123, 213 -216, 267 n40;

and feminist thought, 214 -215;

and gender, 49 -50, 123 -124, 147 ;

and identification, 213 -216

Infamy, 16 , 157 , 194 , 262 n46, 263 n59

Iniuria. See Verbal injury

Inquisition, 12 , 220 n35

Invective, 12 , 201

Isabeau of Bavaria, 152

J

Jacques d'Amiens, 42 -46

Janeway, Elizabeth, 108

Jauss, Hans Robert, 98 , 238 n5

Jean de Meun, 13 -15, 69 , 136 , 152 , 159 , 162 , 176 , 187 , 194

Jean de Montreuil, 154 , 156 , 160 , 163 , 168 , 197 , 252 n27, 261 n40

Jeu de la Feuillée , 242 n45

John of Salisbury, 28 , 226 n30

Johnson, Barbara, 38

Jouissance (joie ), 142 , 145 , 148

Jourdain, Charles, 217 n2, 243 n51

Jugement d'amour , 31 , 32 , 33

Jugement dou Roy de Navarre , 14 -15, 247 n26

Jugement du povre triste amant banny , 197

Justinian's Code, 12 -13, 149 , 176 , 177 , 184 , 220 n38, 221 n39, 255 n2, 256 n3

K

Kay, Sarah, 236 n18

Kelly, Joan, 26

Knowledge, 28 , 29 , 31 -34, 57 , 141 -142, 171 , 236 n18, 259 n24;

and domination, 24 -25, 47 ;

and experience, 65 -66;

as gendered, 104 , 105 ;

and the senses, 82 , 86 -87;

of women, 33 , 69 -70

Krueger, Roberta, 217 n6, 219 n27

L

Lai d'Aristote , 23 -26, 59 , 70 , 222 n2, 223 n4

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 207

Lamentations of Matheolus , 59 , 60 , 81 -83, 131 -133, 135 -140, 142 , 143 , 150 , 193 , 194 , 229 n49, 261 n45

Lanfranc Cigala, 7 -8

Language, 52 -56;

deceptive, 111 , 112 , 115 , 116 ;

ethical, 155 , 170 -173;

figurative (figura ), 3 -5, 107 -111, 114 , 115 , 116 , 188 , 189 ;

injurious (iniuria ), 11 -13, 79 , 80 , 114 , 118 -120, 138 , 142 , 149 , 151 , 157 , 176 , 181 , 182 , 184 , 186 , 189 ;

and legal action, 11 -12, 185 , 189 , 198 ;

literal, 4 , 188 , 189 ;

prophetic, 166 -171

Larguèche, Evelyne, 18

Lavision-Christine , 253 n31

Law:

and allegorical courts of justice, 192 , 195 -96;

and Parisian courts, 133 , 190 , 260 n37, 262 n50;

and Roman models, 12 -13, 152 -154, 176 , 191.

See also Gratian; Justinian's Code

Le Doeuff, Michèle, 171 , 254 n42

Le Fèvre, Jean, 132 , 133 , 135 , 137 , 138 , 142 , 144 , 147 -150, 154 , 168 , 191 , 192 , 245 n6, 246 n15, 247 n27, 248 n32, 261 n45

Le Franc, Martin, 147 , 232 n76, 247 n29

LeGoff, Jacques, 225 n22, 233 n1

Legrand, Jacques, 220 n31, 264 n1

Lèse-majesté (treason), 196 -198, 263 n57

Leupin, Alexander, 101 , 121 , 246 n22

Libel, 190 , 194

Libelle , 191 -195, 198 ;

and libelle diffamatoire , 191 -193, 261 n40

Licence , 159 -160, 187

Literacy, 2 -4, 11

Littré, 210

Livre de divinacion , 254 n39

Livre de leesce , 132 , 133 , 135 , 136 , 138 -145, 147 -150, 155 , 191

Livre d'Enanchet , 27 , 29 , 99

Livre des trois vertus , 256 n9

M

MacKinnon, Catherine A., 185 , 220 n30, 258 n20

Magister , 18 , 26 -29, 34 , 61 , 62 , 76 ,

78 , 79 , 80 , 92 , 98 , 99 , 109 , 128 , 133 , 201 , 233 n2

Magister amoris (God of love), 61 , 62 , 69 , 75 , 76 , 90 , 183

Magistra , 38 , 39 , 62 , 71 , 128

Male Bouche (allegorical figure), 14

Manipulus florum , 248 n37

Manuscripts:

Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale 352: 133 , 135 , 178 , 179 ;

London, British Museum Royal 16.F.11: 200 ;

Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce 308: 81 ;

Paris, Biblioth-thèque Nationale f.fr. 95: 22 -24;

f.fr 412: 122 ;

f.fr. 836: 165 ;

f.fr. 1727: 262 n51;

f.fr 2186: 62 , 63 ;

f.fr. 19919: 174 ;

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 2609: xiv , 1 , 2 , 99 , 103 , 111 , 118 , 119 , 124 , 238 n9, 239 n21, 240 n37, 244 n58;

Cod. 2621: 30 , 48 , 50 , 53 , 57 -58, 125 , 230 n61, 231 n63, 232 n75, 240 n37

Marchello-Nizia, Christlane, 234 n21

Masculinity, 24 -25, 142 -143, 225 n14

Mastery, 1 , 2 , 18 , 26 , 27 ;

and anxiety, 86 -88;

Aristotelian, 49 -55, 56 -59, 79 , 81 , 82 , 86 , 87 ;

and the body, 33 , 40 -42, 48 -54, 86 -90, 91 -93, 107 ;

and control, 85 -91;

dynamic of, 82 -91;

feminist theories of, 25 ;

and gender, 82 -91;

Hegelian, 24 , 25 , 224 n9, 224 n11;

and hierarchy, 89 -91;

and knowledge, 32 -34, 45 , 47 , 86 , 87 ;

and narcissism, 85 , 86 , 88 , 113 ;

Ovidian, 35 -48, 57 -59, 123 ;

and women, 3 , 29 -33, 59 , 109 ;

and women's response, 42 -43, 93 , 94 , 97 -101, 109 ;

and writing, 72 -76, 79 , 80 , 93 , 101 , 134 , 153

Matter, 50 -51, 106 -107, 239 n17, 247 n28

Medievalism, 212 -14

Mesdisants/Lauzengiers , 9 , 14 , 15 , 117 , 137 , 138 , 141 , 145 , 239 n20, 256 n9

Michelet, Jules, 2 , 217 n1

Minerva, 29 , 32 , 97 , 148 , 167 , 171 , 174 , 264 n1

Miroir des bonnes femmes , 6 , 219 n20

Misogyny, 131 , 140 , 162 ;

in Lamentations , 59 , 80 , 132 , 138 ;

in Roman de la rose , 13 -14;

writing of, 110 , 136 , 139 , 141 , 142 , 144 , 148

Moi, Toril, 25 , 124 , 229 n51

Mutacioun de Fortune , 157 , 198 , 252 n22, 253 n35, 254 n42, 263 n60

N

Name/naming, 72 -73, 120 , 156

Name/reputation, 118 -120, 145 , 148 , 149 , 157 , 158 , 221 n39, 239 n23, 248 n35

Narcissism, 83 -86, 88 , 113 ;

Freudian definition of, 236 n17

Nature, 24 , 60 , 143

Nicolas de Clamanges, 255 n47

Nodier, Charles, 208 , 209 , 212

O

Oeuvrer , 74 , 75 , 234 n18

Ong, Walter, 26 , 225 n21

Oresme, Nicole, 157 , 164 , 169 , 172 , 215 , 251 n20, 252 n27, 254 n39

Ovid, 2 , 34 -36, 89 -92, 143 , 153 , 202 , 246 n21, 261 n45;

Ars Amatoria , 35 ;

Metamorphoses , 253 n33

P

Paris, Gaston, 212

Petrarch, Francis, 188 , 252 n24, 260 n27

Philippe de Beaumanoir, 192

Philippe de Navarre, 243 n49

Philology, 208 -210, 212

Placides et Timéo , 232 n70

Poetic license, 159 -160, 187

Poirion, Daniel, 218 n16, 251 n19, 260 n29

Poissance d' amours , 47 -55, 57 , 124 -126

Polemic, 15 , 151 -152, 156 , 160 , 163 , 164 , 166 , 194 , 205 -208

Porete, Marguerite, 223 n4

Prevarication, 35 , 36 , 39 -41, 43 , 46 , 229 n49

Prière d'un clerc et la response d' une dame , 8

Proverbe au vilain , 222 n2

Public domain, 15 , 17 , 18 , 117 -118,

156 , 159 -162, 166 , 167 , 172 , 174 , 175 , 177 , 199 , 201 ;

and injurious language, 152 -156, 177 , 201 ;

and the making of reputation, 119 -121, 152 , 157

Pygmalion, 71 , 75

Q

Quadrilogue invectif , 181 , 257 n15

Querelle , 11 , 15 , 135 , 152 , 163 , 191 , 201 , 204 , 249 n5

Querelle de la Belle Dame sans merci , 177 -180, 185 , 188 , 195 , 198

Querelle de la Rose , 122 , 123 , 151 -152, 153 -156, 158 , 161 -166, 173 , 174 , 177 , 187 , 194 , 221 n48, 249 n5, 259 nn23-24

Querelle des femmes , 15 , 135 , 244 n58

Quintilian , 220 n31

Quodlibet , 28 , 226 n29

R

Rationality, 52 -54, 70 , 82 , 108

Ravir , 70 -73, 234 n15

Rebours , 115 , 116 , 163

Regalado, Nancy Freeman, 234 n12, 239 n19

Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, 89 , 237 n21

Requeste , 4 , 9 , 42 , 46 , 117

Response au Bestiaire d'amour , 1 -2, 4 , 5 , 12 , 97 , 100 -104, 107 -122, 124 , 126 -130, 135 , 139 , 140 , 147 , 155 , 239 n23, 240 n36

Response des dames faicte a maistre Alain , 18 -19, 178 , 180 -190, 192 -195, 197 -199

Responsio /response, 1 , 7 , 8 , 10 , 42 , 46 -48, 58 , 163 , 237 n1;

clerical genre of, 67 , 97 , 214 ;

debate and, 99 ;

dynamic of, 97 -100;

and mastery, 42 , 46 , 57 , 98 -100

Rhetoric, 5 -6, 11 -12;

of blame (vituperatio ) 12 , 220 n31;

of praise (laus ) 12 , 119 , 220 n31

Richard de Fournival, 1 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 91 , 103 , 129 , 235 n6, 236 n10

Riley, Denise, 147 , 148 , 239 n25

Robert de Blois, 9 , 10 , 219 n27

Roman d'Alexandre , 23

Roman de la poire , 62 -70, 72 , 73 , 75 -77

Roman de la rose , 13 , 15 , 42 , 61 , 62 , 64 , 65 , 69 , 71 , 73 , 77 , 131 , 132 , 152 , 153 , 156 , 158 , 159 , 160 , 162 , 245 n10

Roman du chevalier du cygne , 127

Ruhe, Ernstpeter, 233 n5, 240 n30

S

Sainte-Beuve, Charles, 207 , 208

Saluts d'amour , 8 , 9 , 233 n5

Sapientia , 29 , 39 , 55 , 171 , 175

Sapiential writing, 171 -174

Scientia , 29

See also Knowledge

Secreta mulierum , 32

Secrets, 32 -34, 48 , 228 n42

Secretum secretorum , 32

Segre, Cesare, 240 n30

Sex difference, 48 -50, 231 n65, 246 n21

Shame, 156 -158, 251 n20, 252 n21

Sibyl, 166 -167

Slander, 137 , 138 , 141 , 143 , 145 , 148 , 187 , 222 n49, 222 n51, 255 n1;

and desire, 140 -142, 144 , 145 ;

and self-blame, 138 -140, 142 -144, 187 ;

and violence, 158 , 257 n16.

See also Defamation; Libel

Sourplus , 57

Soutilité , 4 , 116 , 218 n9

Sovereignty (seignorie ), 54 , 56 , 73 , 197

Spiegel, Gabrielle, 240 n33

Stewart, Susan, 145 , 149 , 247 n24, 265 n13

Stock, Brian, 4 , 244 n57

Subjectivity, 65 -66, 104 , 111 , 121

Summa Aurea , 221 n40, 248 n33, 248 n36

Symbolism, 4 -5, 8 , 10 , 108 -109, 110 -111

T

Tenso , 8 , 9

Tristan, 65

Trobaritz , 8

U

Universities, 10 -11, 26 -28, 80 , 260 n32

V

Vanderbourg, Charles (Clotilde's editor), 207 , 211 , 264 n4, 266 n29

Van Steenberghen, Fernand, 34

Verbal injury/iniuria , 11 -14, 47 , 114 , 117 -120, 129 , 131 , 136 , 138 , 156 -158, 174 , 177 , 180 , 182 -184, 188 , 190 , 196 , 197 , 199 , 220 n38, 221 n39;

and women, 13 -15, 149 , 180 -182, 199 .

See also Language, injurious

Verisimilitude, 188

La Vieille (allegorical figure), 246 n21

Vincent de Beauvais, 222 n51

Violence, 26 -28, 47 , 137 , 158 , 174 , 190 ;

sexual, 113 -114, 229 n56.

See also Verbal injury

Virgil, 167

Vivès, Juan Luis, 28 , 129

W

Willard, Charity Cannon, 213 , 252 n28

William of Drogheda, 258 n17

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 187

Woman:

body of, 48 -52, 88 -89, 91 -93, 107 ;

category of, 49 -52, 147 -148

Women readers, 3 -4, 73 -74, 76 -77

Women's response, 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 -8, 10 , 11 , 42 -46, 77 , 85 -86, 94 , 97 -123, 126 , 129 , 135 , 178 , 201 -202, 214 -216

Women's speech, 54 -58, 100 -102

Writing (écriture ), 64 , 72 -77, 117 , 186

Preferred Citation: Solterer, Helen. The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1t1nb1fx/