With her translation of Christine de Pizan’s long poem The Book of the Mutability of Fortune (1400–03), Geri L. Smith gives us a perfect introduction to a medieval writer who has become a superstar of sorts. The phenomenon reflects a rupture in a male-dominated history of Western literature exemplified by Gustave Lanson’s double-edge description in the first volume of his Histoire de la littérature française from 1894 of “the excellent Christine de Pisan” as a good daughter, wife, and mother on the one hand, and a writer of “universal mediocrity” on the other. This valorization, which gave female writers a special status in the history of literature until the end of the twentieth century, is typical for a canon formation informed by patriarchal norms and values, as well as by strategies to maintain this form of masculine domination. However, before feminism entered academia, Christine de Pizan’s work was read and translated among the medieval and early modern European cultural elite. Thus one of the more interesting aspects of Smith’s translation is that it highlights the importance of letting “other” voices speak and be heard in order to give modern readers a possibility to encounter a history that corresponds to the polyvalence of every discourse and, as is noted in Smith’s informative introduction, “come away with new perspectives of their own” (27). Other voices, as Christine’s, are in other words seminal for the evolution of critical thinking. Further, Smith’s description of Christine’s otherness escapes the pitfall of a binary force relation between same and other (so well analyzed by Simone de Beauvoir). What the reader gets instead is a clarification of the intriguing and always possible force of transcending and thereby changing the hegemonic order and putting history in motion.

Christine was the first professional woman author in France. Italian by birth, she was one of the first to bring humanistic thought to the French intellectual milieu, as when she argues that Dante is a greater poet than Jean de Meun, the misogynistic second author of the Roman de la Rose, the most read book in France at her time. Smith also notes that Christine’s official refutation of this canonical book in the so-called querelle de la rose was a decisive moment in her establishment as a “credible, authoritative ‘other’ voice” (1). In fact, it is Christine’s defense of women that makes her retelling and reworking of history, myth, and allegory truly subversive.

One of the more explicit explications of the centrality of this motif in Christine’s writing is when she talks about the positions and conditions of those who are lodged in Fortune’s castle in book 3, where it “is told of the misfortunes of women” (107). It is clear that Christine makes use of the allegorical figure of Fortune that was so prevalent in medieval literature not in order to explain but to criticize the powers that be, as when she apologizes for not talking about the vices of women: “I did not do that because in my opinion, whatever women’s shortcoming may be (because there is no one without vice) their greatest misdeed or malice surely does little to worsen the state of the world” (103). As women are “little involved in the essential dealings of government” (103), the evil that happens in the world does not come from them—or from Fortune—but from those who actually have the power. This view is also what makes Christine’s retelling of the big narratives in the history of Western literature, especially the Iliad and the Aeneid (books 6 and 7), so fresh. In fact, the medieval author anticipates a device used by the mid-twentieth-century novelist Jean Rhys responding to Charlotte Brontë’s story of the madwoman in the attic.

In Christine’s versions of the eternal histories of love and war and the power relationship between men and women, stereotypes oscillate. This is not a sign of mediocrity but of the relevance of this medieval author today, and thanks to Smith’s smooth translation of the book’s Middle French and helpful guide to the continually growing scholarly literature on Christine de Pizan, the mutability of her work will have good opportunities to live on in new ways.