About this Event
Christine de Pizan & Gender in the Late Middle Ages
This interdisciplinary seminar will be an interactive forum for thinking about the work of the French author Christine de Pizan (d. 1429/30) in anticipation of a forthcoming exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France to commemorate the 600th anniversary of her death. Speakers will give short presentations followed by group discussion.
Please see below for abstracts & readings.
MT 2026 / / Wednesdays, 2 - 4:45 pm, Horton Room, Weston Library
***note that attendees will require a Bodleian card to access the Horton Room and that space is limited: please sign up via Eventbrite for each session**
Seminar 2: Wednesday, Nov 4 (week 4): Christine de Pizan in Context
*Estelle Guéville (Yale), “How Exceptional Was Christine de Pizan? Scribal Practices and Women’s Book Production in Late-Medieval Europe”
*Prof. Sophie Marnette (Oxford), “How Exceptional Was Christine de Pisan? Writing Women in 12th and 13th centuries”
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RECOMMENDED READINGS
Seminar 2: Wednesday, Nov 4 (week 4) Christine de Pizan in Context
*Estelle Guéville (Yale), “How Exceptional Was Christine de Pizan? Scribal Practices and Women’s Book Production in Late-Medieval Europe”
Christine de Pizan is often presented as an exceptional figure: a professional author, a productive scribe, and a workshop manager whose autograph manuscripts survive in remarkable numbers. But how exceptional was she within the broader landscape of medieval women’s scribal activity? Drawing on the Unknown Hands database of women scribes, we will look at Christine alongside hundreds of other female copyists and manuscript producers to understand what was genuinely unique about her career and what reflected wider patterns of women’s participation in book production. We will then turn to Christine’s workshop as a case study in collaborative manuscript production, showing how traditional paleography can be combined with computational approaches to identify individual scribes, reconstruct collaborative practices, and explore the transmission of scribal habits within a late-medieval scriptorium.
*Prof. Sophie Marnette (Oxford), “How Exceptional Was Christine de Pisan? Writing Women in 12th and 13th centuries”
Christine de Pizan has become an iconic figure of female authorship in the later Middle Ages. But how exceptional was she when compared with earlier women writers such as Marie de France and the Occitan trobairitz? These women are named and sometimes pictured in manuscripts, reflect on their own craft, and are mentioned by other medieval authors. Yet modern scholars continue to debate their identities and the relationship between female first-person voice and female authorship. Bringing lyrical and narrative texts by these earlier writers into conversation with Christine’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame and Cité des dames, this paper asks how medieval women construct and authorize a writing voice. What does it mean for a woman to say “I” in a medieval text, and does reading Christine alongside her predecessors change our understanding of her exceptional status?
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A special seminar series co-organized by Charlotte Denoël (Bibliothèque nationale de France) & Nancy Thebaut (Oxford) // generously supported by TORCH
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Event venue & nearby stays
Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford, United Kingdom
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