Jane Chance
Re-Membering: The Refiguration of Isis as Io in Christine de Pizan
One of Christine de Pizan’s most innovative myths in La Cité des Dames (1405) involves the refiguration of Isis and Io into a single woman with two different pasts: the myth of Isis as queen of Egypt worshipped as a goddess by the Egyptians is identified as the same figure as Io, daughter of the Greek king Inachos, who journeyed to Egypt with her brother Phoroneus to demonstrate to the people the art of horticulture and grafting and to construct a legal system for the Egyptians. There Io married Apis (Osiris; Christine does not mention his name)(1.36). Although the Ovidian story of Io transformed into a heifer by Jupiter to conceal his adultery from Juno and then given to his wife at her request appears very early on in Christine’s writing, in Ballade 61, by the time of L’Epistre Othéa (1399), Isis is entirely distinct from Io: as goddess of plants and cultivating, morally, Isis represents the increase of virtues, while allegorically, she represents the conception of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mary (fable 25). Io, in fable 29, is a gentlewoman who invented letters of the alphabet; it is the integument of the fable that depicts her as a cow providing the sweet and nourishing milk of letters to the understanding, allegorically signifying the writings that teach the soul to ascend to heaven through good works and contemplation.
Why does Christine conflate the two different women in Cité? While it is true both figures appear together in the same myth in classical mythology, as the note in Rosalind Brown-Grant’s Penguin translation indicates, in the Middle Ages they rarely did so in medieval mythographic manuals and commentaries until Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (chap. 8). Clearly Christine was familiar with Boccaccio’s interpretation of Isis/Io because, as Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsky points out, neither mentions the Ovidian detail of Io’s revelation of her identity to her father by means of writing her name with her hoof; this missing detail, nevertheless, provides the basis for Christine’s gloss on Io as inventor of the alphabet in the Othéa.
The major difference between the treatment by Boccaccio and Christine is its appearance within the narrative frame of Christine’s education by Raison. It is at this point (1.37) that Christine fully realizes how greatly the intelligence of women has contributed to the good of the world, and how the ignorance of men has led them to mock and denigrate women as bearers of children and spinners of wool; it is also at this point that Raison declaims on the genius of women as inventors, particularly (in extension of the role of Isis as inventor of letters) in her citation of Carmentis as inventor of the Latin alphabet. This epiphanic moment for Christine’s persona signals the equivalent Boethian moment when Boethius recalls through Philosophy’s tutelage that he is a man: Christine here remembers she is a woman.
The signal role of Isis as inventor of letters suggests the need to remember both the identity of oneself and the collective history of those like oneself, whether by sex or by nationality. Christine’s elision of Apis as Osiris, who was annually dismembered and then re-membered by Isis in her role as his sister, and Christine’s focus on Isis as the genius of Egypt responsible also for the raising and falling of the Nile waters—for the cultivation, in fact, of vegetation and crops in Egypt—explains why Christine has placed this myth here in the education of her persona. Conscious of other medieval glosses on Isis (the First Vatican Mythography, Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus), Christine reconstructs Isis’s role as re-memberer of the scattered pieces of her husband Osiris through Raison’s memorial role in healing her persona. Just as Isis for the First Vatican Mythographer represented the genius (generative god, daemon, even memory, although usually ingenium in that sense), the recollection of Isis restores Christine to her senses and allows the subsequent memorialization (re-membering) of women in the Cité. To “remember” women is to recover the dismembered and scattered pieces of their history and gather them in one fascicle, as Isis did for the severed parts of Osiris. Christine’s own putting together of parts into a whole, then, reflects the identical process involved in Io’s tracing of the two sounds that make up her name through the creation of the letters I and O. As Mary Carruthers has noted in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), “the Latin verb used for `to read’ is lego, which means literally to ‘to collect’ or ‘to gather,’ referring also to a memory procedure (the re-collection of `gathered’ material)” (30). Christine’s brilliant point in her ellipsis here is to argue that reading her book will allow all women to re-member their contribution to civilization and thereby, like Boethius and Christine, to make whole selves dislocated by despair over the injustice of fortune and misogyny.