ABSTRACT
A few scholars, notably Charity Cannon Willard, have devoted their talents to keeping Christine’s reputation alive. The women’s movement has inspired important discoveries among women writers of early periods, each year’s crop of bibliographies bears witness to new editions, translations, and fresh research about Christine’s life and work. The slighting of Christine is symptomatic of that very disregard meted to women of ability that Christine herself censured in her day. As a beneficiary of the corpus of courtly love literature that had been developing since the troubadours, Christine explored every possible angle of the man and woman in and out of love: the advances and retreats, the pleas and rejections, praises, joys, partings, reunions, and inconsolable losses. Christine uses epistolary forms for the sake of addressing humanist and feminist issues in a public voice that proffers advice and consolation.
