Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines Christine de Pizan’s mode of self-fashioning in her 1403 dream vision Le livre du chemin de long étude, both in the ways she undermines the performance of femininity, and in the ways she uses and deviates from the prophetic mode by which some of her contemporaries used to attempt to influence their social superiors during the Great Schism. In order to secure herself a royal patron like her own father had with King Charles V, Christine establishes a relationship of mentorship between narrative self and the Cumaean sibyl, with whom she imbues astrological knowledge, an addition of her own invention, and one that fuses the traditionally-masculine mode of learned knowledge with the traditionally feminine mode of received knowledge. Under the sibyl's tutelage, Christine the narrator both masters astrology and fulfills the sibylline function as "mouthpiece of God," roles that she uses to present herself as an ideal advisor to her earliest royal readers.
Keywords
Christine de Pizan, The Path of Long Study, Chemin de long etude, astrology, sibyl, feminism
Recommended Citation
Anderson, Kimberly T. "Becoming the Sibylline Astrologer: Invention, Inheritance, and Identity in Christine de Pizan’s "Le livre du chemin de longue étude"." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 60, No. 2 (2025)
