Content area
Full Text
Hagiography is propaganda. According to Jacques de Vitry "the aim of the saints' life is to strengthen the faith of the weak, instruct the unlettered, incite the indolent, provoke the devout to imitation and confute the rebellious and the unbelievers."1 Hagiography is nothing less than a "discours d'éloge, de persuasion ou de preuve." It seeks to convert the unbelievers through the exemplary nature of the saints' lives and the power of their posthumous miracles.2 Thus it makes sense that Christine de Pizan chose the powerful discourse of hagiography for the culmination of the Livre de la cité des dames (1405) whose goal it is to convert those who maintain that women are inferior to men in every respect.' Book 3 of the Cité opens with the arrival of the third allegorical lady, Justice, who, through hagiographie discourse, will complete with Christine what her sisters Rayson and Droitture had begun: the construction and population of a city designed as a refuge for women, a fortress that will defend them against their attackers, the many generations of misogynist authors evoked by Christine in the opening scene and throughout the Cité.4 The rebuttal of misogynistic accusations is the thread that holds the Cité together. Christine's innovation with respect to her source for book 3, Vincent of Beauvais's Miroir historial (in its French translation by Jean de Vignay) is a thorough repositioning of the lives of the early martyrs and other saints: Vincent's historical framework is replaced by a polemic pattern that introduces each group of saints as a direct response to the standard misogynist reproaches Christine articulates explicitly in books 1 and 2 of the Cité.5
This new continuity between pagan women, Christian secular women, and Christian saints sets Christine's work off from that of one of her principal auctores, Boccaccio, who had stated in his Concerning Famous Women that Hebrew and Christian women had no place next to the pagans in his work and that female saints in particular "have been described in special books, as their merits required, by pious men outstanding for their knowledge of sacred literature and for their venerable greatness."6 By contrast, one of Christine's unnamed sources, Jean Le Fèvre's Livre de Leesce, a late-fourteenth century text in praise of women,7 had introduced...