Why a Woman Can Write about Warfare
Christine de Pisan (c. 1365-c. 1434) was one of the West's first professional writers, best known today for her Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, works that aimed to provide women with an honorable and rich history and to combat generations of institutionalized misogyny. But in her own time, Christine was probably best known for the work excerpted here, The Book of the Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, a manual of military strategy and conduct written at the height of the Hundred Years' War, in 1410.
S boldness is essential for great undertakings, and without it nothing should be risked, I think it is proper in this present work to set forth my unworthiness to treat such exalted matter. I should not have dared even to think about it, but although boldness is blameworthy when it is foolhardy, I should state that I have not been inspired by arrogance or foolish presumption, but rather by true affection and a genuine desire for the welfare of noble men engaging in the profession of arms. I am encouraged, in the light of my other writings, to undertake to speak in this book of the most honorable office of arms and chivalry. . . . So to this end I have gathered together facts and subject matter from various books to produce this present volume. But inasmuch as it is fitting for this matter to be discussed factually, diligently, and sensibly. . . and also in consideration of the fact that military and lay experts in the aforesaid art of chivalry are not usually clerks or writers who are expert in
Language, I intend to treat the matter in the plainest possible language. . . .
As this is unusual for women, who generally are occupied in weaving, spinning, and household duties, I humbly invoke. . . the wise lady Minerva [Athena], born in the land of Greece, whom the ancients esteemed highly for her great wisdom. Likewise the poet Boccaccio praises her in his Book of Famous Women, as do other writers praise her art and manner of making trappings of iron and steel, so let it not be held against me if I, as a woman, take it upon myself to treat of military matters____
O Minerva! goddess of arms and of chivalry, who, by understanding beyond that of other women, did find and initiate among the other noble arts and sciences the custom of forging iron and steel armaments and harness both proper and suitable for covering and protecting men's bodies against arrows slung in battle-helmets, shields, and protective covering having come first from you-you instituted and gave directions for drawing up a battle order, how to begin an assault and to engage in proper combat. . . . I n the aforementioned country of Greece, you provided the usage of this office, and insofar as it may please you to be favorably disposed, and I in no way appear to be against the nation from which you came, the country beyond the Alps that is now called Apulia and Calabria in Italy, where you were born, let me say that like you I am an Italian woman.
Source: From The Book of the Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, ed. Charity Cannon Willard and trans. Sumner Willard (University Park, PA: 1999), pp. 11-13.
Questions for Analysis
1. Christine very cleverly deflects potential criticism for her "boldness" in writing about warfare. What tactics does she use?
2. The Greco-Roman goddess Athena (Minerva) was the goddess of wisdom, weaving, and warfare. Why does Christine invoke her aid? What parallels does she draw between her own attributes and those of Minerva's?
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
Rummaging through some old books in a cathedral library, an Italian bureaucrat attached to the papal court at Avignon was surprised to find a manuscript of Cicero’s letters—letters that no living person had known to exist. They had probably been copied in the time of Charlemagne, but had then been forgotten for hundreds of years. How many other works of this great Roman orator had been lost to posterity? Clearly, thought Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), he was living in an age of ignorance. A great gulf seemed to open up between his own time and
PETRARCH'S COPY OF VIRGIL. Petrarch's devotion to the classics of Roman literature prompted him to commission this new frontispiece for his treasured volume of Virgil's poetry. It was painted by the Sienese artist Simone Martini, who (like Petrarch) was attached to the papal court at Avignon. It is an allegorical depiction of Virgil (top right) and his poetic creations: the hero Aeneas (top left, wearing armor) and the farmer and shepherd whose humble labors are celebrated in Virgil's lesser-known works. The figure next to Aeneas is the fourth-century scholar Servius, who wrote a famous commentary on Virgil. He is shown drawing aside a curtain to reveal the poet in a creative trance. The two scrolls proclaim (in Latin) that Italy was the country that nourished famous poets and that Virgil helped it to achieve the glories of classical Greece. ¦ How does this image encapsulate and express Petrarch's devotion to the classical past?
That of the ancients: a middle age that separated him from those well-loved models.
For centuries, Christian intellectuals had regarded “the dark ages” as the time between Adam’s expulsion from Eden and the birth of Christ. But now, Petrarch (the name by which English-speakers call Petrarca) redefined that concept and applied it to his own era. According to him, the Middle Ages was not the pagan past but the time that separated him from direct communion with the classics. Yet this did not stop him from trying to bridge the gap. “I would have written to you long ago,” he said in a Latin letter to the Greek poet Homer (dead for over 2,000 years), “had it not been for the fact that we lack a common language.”
Petrarch was famous in his own day as an Italian poet, a Latin stylist, and a tireless advocate for the resuscitation of the classical past. The values that he and his followers began to espouse would give rise to a new intellectual and artistic movement in Italy, a movement strongly critical of the present and admiring of a past that had disappeared with the fragmentation of Rome’s empire and the end of Italy’s greatness. We know this movement as the Renaissance, from the French word for “rebirth” that was applied to it in the eighteenth century and popularized in the nineteenth, when the term medieval was also invented. It has since become shorthand for the epoch following the Middle Ages—but it was really part of that same era.
Talking about “the Renaissance,” then, is a way of talking about some significant changes in education and artistic outlook that transformed the culture of northern Italy from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries and that eventually influenced the rest of Europe in important ways. The term has often been taken literally, as though the cultural accomplishments of antiquity had ceased to be appreciated and therefore needed to be “reborn.” Yet we have been tracing the enduring influence of classical civilization for many chapters, and we have constantly noted the reverence accorded to the heritage of antiquity, not to mention the persistence of Roman law and Roman institutions.
That said, one can certainly find distinguishing traits that make the concept of “renaissance” newly meaningful in this era. For example, there was a significant quantitative difference between the ancient texts available to scholars in the first thousand years after Rome’s fragmentation and those that became accessible in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The discovery of “new” works by Livy, Tacitus, and Lucretius expanded the classical canon considerably, supplementing the well-studied works of Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero. More important was the expanded access to ancient Greek literature in western Europe. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as we have seen in Chapters 8 and 9, Greek scientific and philosophical works became available to western Europeans thanks to increased contact with Islam, via Latin translations of Arabic translations of the original Greek.
Still, no Greek poems or plays were yet available in Latin translations, and neither were the major dialogues of Plato. Moreover, only a handful of western Europeans could
World History
