Thelma Fenster
L’Epistre au dieu d’Amours: un poème de circonstance?
This narrative poem of 822 rhyming decasyllabic verses, whose courtly presentation may obscure its author’s more serious underlying intentions, merits closer examination than it has hitherto received. As a defense of women, it has been overshadowed by the far more ample Cité des dames; as a poem on relations between the sexes, it has been overshadowed by the conceivably more charming debate poems and by the Duke of True Lovers’ tragic account and the Cent balades d’amant et de dame, all of which draw readers into their relatively more developed narrative frame; as a work of learning, the Epistre is overshadowed by the pithiness (and length) of such works as the Chemin de long estude, the Epistre Othea, the Mutacion de Fortune, and the Avision.
And yet, the Epistre already testifies to the complex handling of narrative voice that is one of Christine’s hallmarks, for it is a plurivocal tour de force interweaving Christine’s voice with that of the narrating God of Love, in a duet that looks forward to the author’s more complex relationship with royalty in later works. It includes as well her overwriting, in a revisionist lexicon, of the Roman de la Rose, and her étalage of biblical, patristic, and classical arguments in a “totalising,” compilational impulse. The performance that constitutes the vehicle for these is a further Christinian technique; all announce that in 1399 Christine was already a more than competent practioner of her métier as it would later evolve.