ABSTRACT
Recent critics such as Jane Chance, Dhira Mahoney, and Jennifer Summit have claimed that Christine was repressed, ventriloquized, lost, or deauthorized in England, but considerable, interesting evidence exists to the contrary.1 (Caxton, for instance, calls Christine “the mireur and maistresse” of “Intelligence” in 1478.) While two manuscript translations in particular damage Christine’s authority, a larger body of her work in wider circulation in English print venerates her. The main culprits in her English deauthorization are Thomas Hoccleve and Stephen Scrope. Hoccleve’s translation of the Epistre au dieu d’amours has long been understood as distorting her critique of misogyny,2 and Scrope’s translation of the Epistre Othea deliberately misattributes authorship to men, as Chance shows. But other recent claims about the suppression of Christine’s voice in England are based on inaccurate or incomplete evidence. One scholar’s claim that Pynson’s imprint of the Morall Prouerbes deauthorizes Christine, for instance, ignores Pynson’s titles and running heads, as illustrated in the second section of this
chapter. Likewise, the claim that neither the manuscript nor print versions of the English Boke of the Body of Polycye acknowledge Christine’s authorship is not correct: she is acknowledged in both, as quoted and explained below, though not as obviously or effusively as in Caxton’s Morale Prouerbes of Crystyne and not as lengthily as in the preface to one of the English versions of her Fais D’Armes.3 This chapter, then, seeks in part to adjust the record and in part to reflect on what it means that Christine actually comes out better in English print among increasingly non-French-speaking, nonaristocratic readers than she did in a bilingual English courtly manuscript context.
