‘I Am a Widow Lone, in Authority Arrayed’: Tears of Authorship in Selected Works by Christine de Pizan
Keywords:
Christine de Pizan, tears, crying, weeping, widows, medieval female authorship, women in the Middle AgesAbstract
This article considers Christine de Pizan, widowed female author of poetry and prose at the late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century French court, and how tears function in her works. An exploration of weeping as memorialization, inspiration, and activism in Cent balades and Rondeaux (1394–1402), Le Livre de l’Advision Cristine (1405), Une epistre a Eustace Morel (1404), and La Lamentacion sur les maux de la France (1410) contributes to understanding Christine’s authorial identity as constructed through the manipulation of social norms on widowhood and emotion. She capitalizes on private and public spaces to evoke empathy and demand political change. The very fluidity that allows her manipulation of lachrymal channels, however, also resists modern attempts to define the author.
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