Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 1729
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Wolfthal , Diane.
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Douleur sur toutes autres: Revisualizing the Rape Script in the "Epistre Othea" and the "Cité des dames"
  • Source: Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference.  Edited by Marilynn Desmond.  University of Minnesota Press, 1998.  Pages 41 - 70.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Essay
  • Subject (See Also): Art History- Painting Christine de Pizan, Poet- Epistre d'Othea a Hector Christine de Pizan, Poet- Livre de la Cite des Dames Daphne (Mythological Figure) Illumination of Manuscripts Literature- Prose Literature- Verse Rape in Literature Women in Literatu
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: France
  • Century: 15
  • Primary Evidence:
  • Illustrations: Thirteen figures.
  • Table:
  • Abstract: This essay, which also forms a chapter in Wolfthal's book on "Images of Rape," explores Christine de Pizan's conception of rape, especially through the images of rape in manuscript versions of her "Epistre Othea." It examines Christine's interpretation of the nature and "proper" response to rape by exploring how her work negotiates the web of social and economic contexts in which she lived as a woman who was simultaneously a widow lacking the protection of a man, a resistant female reader of misogynist texts, a participant in the cultural production of the Valois courts, and a worker in the Parisian book trade. Christine, who termed rape "the greatest possible sorrow," was one of several contemporary women who both decried rape and devised strategies to combat it. Christine's voice served, at least for a moment, to disrupt the rape script that constructed women as powerless victims of male sexual aggression. [Abstract submitted by the author to the Medieval Feminist Index.]
  • Related Resources:
  • Author's Affiliation: Arizona State University
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 1998.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 0816630801