• 1 Edition is A. Tarnowski, ed., Le Chemin de longue étude, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2000 (...)
• 2 On Dante’s influence, see Y. Batard, “Dante et Christine de Pizan”, Missions et démarches: Mélange (...)
• 3 The historical identity of “Jean Mandeville” is not known, and the name may have been invented. Th (...)
• 4 See the comments of N. Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan, Gainesville, 2011, p. 19. (...)
• 5 F. Pomel, “Les métamorphoses de Christine de Pizan dans Le Chemin de Longue Étude”, Lectrices d’An (...)

1Among influences on Christine de Pizan’s Chemin de lonc estude1, Dante’s Divine Comedy2, which supplied a model for the celestial voyage of the Chemin and inspired the lonc estude of the title, is surely the best known today. In 1402-1403, however, the date of the Chemin, Dante’s writing was far from well known in northern Europe, and though itself a “travel narrative”, it was not at all like those narratives of earthly travel which in the late Middle Ages excited great curiosity. Among these was the very popular Merveilles du monde, composed in 1356 or 1357 by the elusive “Jean Mandeville”, an account that Christine knew and borrowed from for the first part of the Chemin3. Scholars have applauded Christine’s avant-garde interest in Dante (she was only the second writer in France, after Philippe de Mézières, to mention the Italian writer, and the first to use the Divine Comedy as a model for her own work), and the Italian poet’s influence on her has understandably earned critical attention. Nonetheless, the significance of opening the journey in the Chemin with an account of the Holy Land that would have recalled Mandeville’s, only to abandon it abruptly in favor of a celestial route, has been less explored. In the Chemin the Cumean sibyl leads Christine on a quest for knowledge4, visiting, like Mandeville, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and other eastern locations, arriving in the Far East; at this point, instead of continuing their earthly journey, the pair ascend the ladder of Speculacion (v. 1647) to begin their “voyage dans l’espace livresque et paradisiaque du savoir”5. To judge from the wide dissemination of copies of the Merveilles among Christine’s aristocratic contemporaries, she was writing for a readership who knew the Merveilles and they would not have missed her pointed rejection of the Mandevillian trajectory.

• 8 Higgins, Writing East, p. 12.
• 9 Tarnowski observes that the poem “débute et débute encore, avant de trouver le fil de sa narration (...)
• 10 Pomel believes that for Christine reading was a “voie de salut personnel”: “Métamorphoses”, p. 225 (...)

5To compose his travel narrative Mandeville, in I. M. Higgins’ apt term, “overwrites” his principal sources; that is, he does not merely borrow from them, he introduces alterations that make the Merveilles “an often compelling account of matters pious and profane, historical and scientific, mundane and marvelous”8. Christine does not take advantage of that cornucopia, representing Mandeville’s narrrative only partially and secondarily as a beginning respectful of the Holy Land to be followed by the celestial journey that is the real heart of the Chemin. If for Mandeville the road to be followed is clear, the very structure of the Chemin suggests a plotting and re-plotting: roads are taken or avoided, in a repeated triage of paths (v. 884-958), and the poem itself begins more than once9, re-directing both itself and the re-presented material of its sources. The narrator’s initial passage through holy sites creates a spiritual ground for the intellectual quest to follow, and her subsequent choice of a literally and metaphorically higher path than Mandeville’s earthly one recalls the literary type of the voie de paradis, a moral either/or requiring the traveler to select the correct road10.

• 11 Deluz, Merveilles du monde, p. 89-90; see also Higgins, The Book of John Mandeville, p. 4, n. 6.
• 12 The name Mandeville should therefore be understood throughout this article as a pseudonym.
• 13 His principal source was another Livre des Merveilles, by Jan de Langhe of Ypres, a monk of Saint- (...)
• 14 On this see J. Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, New York, Modern Language Associat (...)

6Jerusalem after the crusades had come to be portrayed as the center of the world; it was, in the words of the Merveilles narrator, the terre de promissioun … qe est en my lieu de mounde11. From Jerusalem, the Merveilles goes further east and recounts a journey through Turkey, Armenia, Tatary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Chaldea, Ethiopia, Amazonia, the islands around India, and China. The narrator, claiming to be old and arthritic after thirty-five years of travel, says he was forced into a sedentary existence and wrote his travel book from memory. But in fact, the circumstances surrounding composition of the Merveilles are a persistent mystery. The name Jean (de) Mandeville (or John Mandeville) and the author’s travels have long been deemed a fiction12. The book is based on the writings of others, many of whom did visit the places they described, and Mandeville may have consulted an extraordinary three dozen or so sources13. This in turn suggests that he had access to a large and wealthy library such as might be found in a northern French monastery or at St. Albans Abbey in England, but whether the Merveilles was first written in England or in France, in Anglo-Norman or in a continental French, remains a matter of speculation14.

• 15 Seymour, “Mandeville in England”, p. 15.
• 16 For the corrected Hebrew script in Charles’s manuscript and Christine’s possible acquain-tance wit (...)
• 17 D. Jeannot, Le mécénat bibliophilique de Jean sans Peur et de Marguerite de Bavière (1404-1424), T (...)
• 18 See J. Camus, «Les “Voyages” de Mandeville copiés pour Valentine de Milan», Revue des Bibliothèque (...)
• 19 Higgins, Writing East, p. 57. C. W. R. D. Moseley comments, but without specifics, that many of th (...)

7The Merveilles, one of a small number of travel resources in French as opposed to Latin, was widely enjoyed in France. In Paris, it had become a staple of the stationers who supplied the needs of students and others15. The first dated copy, 1371, is the one Raoul d’Orléans made for King Charles V at the request of Gervais Chrétien, the king’s physician16. Charles marked this book as a favorite, and a little more than two decades later, his son, King Charles VI, borrowed it from the Louvre library. It remained popular through the period when Christine was writing the Chemin: Jean sans Peur, who would become Duke of Burgundy in 1404, and whose library contained history and travel books in numbers sufficient to show his interest in the East, commissioned a luxury manuscript of eight texts about the East which included Mandeville’s, along with the travel narratives that served as sources for the Merveilles17. The duke’s first copy of the Voyages d’Outremer (the Merveilles du monde) was one he inherited from his mother, Marguerite de Mâle, herself a book collector with an extensive library. Valentina Visconti, the bibliophile wife of Louis, Duke of Orleans, Charles VI’s younger brother, had a copy which she brought with her from Italy to France; it was probably made in northern Italy from Michael Velser’s German translation18, which is dedicated to “any lord, knight, and lady”19. Isabelle of France, daughter of King Charles VI and Queen Isabelle of Bavaria and second wife of Richard II of England, also owned a copy. Possession of the Merveilles by each of these great continental families argues for the book’s status and influence.

• 20 The first translation of the French Merveilles into modern English appeared a few years ago: I. M. (...)
• 21 C. Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville: une «géographie» au xiv^e siècle, Louvain-la-Neuve, Univ (...)

8The Merveilles’ crusading message and its depictions of the world’s wonders also earned it a considerable readership in England, if the number of its translations into Middle English from Anglo-Norman can serve as a guide20. In modern scholarship, the enthusiasm for the Travels displayed by anglophone researchers reflects the medieval world’s delight in Mandeville’s text; in France, however, apart from C. Deluz’s painstaking edition and her important monograph21, major studies of the Merveilles are noticeably fewer. The history of the Merveilles in medieval France, to which Christine’s Chemin contributes an important, though perhaps idiosyncratic, chapter remains largely to be explored.

• 22 C. Le Ninan, Le Sage Roi et la clergesse: l’écriture du politique dans l’œuvre de Christine de Piz (...)

10The Cumean sibyl (Almathea) arrives and, after recounting the events of her own life, observes that Christine would much rather be pursuing studies than spending her time among people (v. 640-642). The description of the fontaine de Sapience (v. 984-985) completes the first thousand or so lines. What follows lies at the philosophical core of the Chemin: a debate between the personified ladies Wisdom, Nobility, Chivalry and Wealth, held to decide the qualities of the ideal ruler, which in turn would determine the nature of the French government. As C. Le Ninan has stated, “la question du bon gouvernement formait l’apogée de la formation de la narratrice du Chemin de longue étude”22. But no firm resolution is reached in the celestial debate and the decision is referred to the French court on earth, where Christine, who has recorded the arguments, will present them for adjudication. She and the Sibyl return, and the dreamer awakens.

• 23 On this, see the observations of S. Sasaki, «Chateaumorant et Le Chemin de Christine de Pizan: à p (...)

11Some of the principal ways in which Christine alters the material borrowed from Mandeville’s Merveilles are known from Toynbee’s study and can be summarized as follows: Mandeville lavishes description on pilgrimage destinations, but Christine rejects the idea that they require further discussion; Mandeville encourages crusading, but Christine, dwelling instead on war’s destructiveness, makes no direct statement in that regard. In Constantinople she takes her time admiring its magnificent buildings but continues her lament about the destructiveness of war: she regrets that constant war has left the city in shambles and largely uninhabited (v. 1220-1228)23. Where Mandeville delights in evoking Jerusalem for his readers, Christine refuses to dwell on Judea and Jerusalem. She does say that she lingered longer in Jerusalem than she had elsewhere (v. 1257-1260), but then, abbreviating her description and seeming to object directly to the claim in the Merveilles that readers want to hear more about it, she writes:

• 24 Tarnowski, Chemin, p. 24ff.

14A. Tarnowski has rightly noted structural similarities between the Chemin and Christine’s Dit de la Rose (1402), written within a few months of each other24. Both deploy dream visions and allegorical female figures, and both are composed in segments. In the Rose, Christine attends a dinner party at the maison close of the Duke of Orleans. While the guests enjoy delicious food and engage in sparkling conversation, a sudden very bright light announces the arrival from above of a group of lovely ladies sent by Lady Loyalty. They bear roses which they distribute to the company as they sing charming melodies. At the end of the evening, Christine retires to the chamber in the Duke’s house that had been prepared for her night’s rest. She falls asleep but is awakened by the visit of Lady Loyalty herself, who has come to appoint Christine an officer of the Order of the Rose for the protection of women. In the morning Christine thinks it must all have been a dream, but the discovery of the order’s charter, in its gold and azure blue royal colors, left at her bedside, tells her otherwise. The dinner party constitutes the first section of the Rose, while the second centers on the overnight dream vision. The bedchamber scene both continues and fleshes out the message of the dinner party, which is the importance of respecting and valuing women. In the more complex Chemin, however, which evokes movement over great distances, parts are embedded within parts, to some extent reflecting the segmentation caused by the poem’s repeated debuts. But it is the dream vision, the most deeply embedded of the three “starts”, that contains the most striking of the poem’s divisions: it is the only portion in which the direction of the narrative is turned on its head.

• 25 S. C. Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450, Itha (...)
• 26 Deluz, Merveilles du monde, p. 92.
• 27 A. Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, language, and nation in the Hundred Years War, Oxford (...)

15S. C. Akbari has observed that Mandeville shows a “self-conscious determination to present himself as an Englishman”25, which is clear as early as the prologue. He introduces himself as “Johan Maundeville chivaler ja soit ceo qe jeo ne soie dignes, neez et norriz d’Engleterre de la ville de Seint Alban”26. The insistent Englishness of the Mandevillian persona may seem discordant for this point in the early fifteenth century, when conflict between the English and the French had become a matter of record. But in fact, war between the English and the French, whatever else it may have done, intensified cultural contact between the two. Discussing Chaucer’s French writing, A. Butterfield argues that “the centre of gravity in these years was precisely the space of exchange between the continent and the island” and that Chaucer himself cannot be thought either English or French. She explains that “ceaseless” crosschannel travel in the fourteenth century, battles, exchanges of various documents, aristocratic marriages and other events “radically shook up the processes of contact throughout the continent. At any town or siege or court one might find travellers, mercenaries, and exiles from north, south, east, and west”27.

• 28 See also M. J. Bennett, “Mandeville’s Travels”, and Higgins, The Book of John Mandeville, p. xvii-(...)
• 29 “Epistre au Roi Richard”, Letter to King Richard II: A plea made in 1395 for peace between England (...)

16The porousness of English-French cultural boundaries, even while the two were enemies, emerges from writing less known today than Chaucer’s, such as the translation into Anglo-Norman of a continental literature centered on anti-Muslim campaigns by Charlemagne, who does not figure as a particularly English hero. Two chansons de geste, Fierabras and its prequel, the Destruction de Rome, which celebrate victory over the Muslims and the conversion of some, along with the return of relics, appeared in England in Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century. They continued to be read there and were translated into Middle English (as romances) during the Hundred Years War28. What the Merveilles and the stories of a triumphant Charlemagne share is their advocacy of northern European defeat of “unbelievers”. In France too, some argued that a combined effort between the appropriate French and English military and political strata would be beneficial: Philippe de Mézières, for example, in his letter to King Richard II of 1395 urges strategic cooperation between the English and the French to defeat the Muslims. In the fifth chapter especially, de Mézières argues that Charles and Richard should seek peace and that they “devroient fort doubter d’espandre le sanc de leurs freres crestiens”29.

• 30 Christine registers horror at Bayazid’s power when she mentions once more the fighting between Tam (...)

18That passage is a strong but representative measure of how seriously anxious Christian northern Europe was about Islam30, a fear with the potential to unite Christians in France and England. Christine goes on to say:

• 32 Le Ninan, “L’idée de croisade”, p. 4. Châteaumorant returned to Paris in 1402 with the news that T (...)

20No direct exhortation to crusade appears in the Chemin, in spite of the narrator’s explicit hatred of Muslims, and we might presume that Christine was opposed to encouraging the initiation of military action. In a valuable discussion of her attitude toward war against Islam, however, C. Le Ninan finds that those who are capable of harming the Muslims occupy a place of privilege in the Chemin, and she argues that Christine’s condemnation of the Muslims and her praise for the knight Jean de Châteaumorant, who had been placed in Constantinople to defend the city, leave room for a more subtle interpretation of her intentions32. Nonetheless, the Chemin is a poem that steers clear of openly advocating war or crusade. This might well be expected from an author who, only three years earlier, in the Epistre au dieu d’Amours (1399), had advocated for what she called the nature de femme, a collection of conditions that made women peacekeepers and naturally fearful of war, while men’s conditions disposed them toward war. But the Chemin is not the only one of her works to articulate an ambivalence about these natures: exceptions exist, and the Chemin tells us that a Christian woman, fearing the Muslims, may wish them dead.

• 33 Higgins, Writing East, p. 28, 54.

21Higgins has observed that Mandeville’s claim to knighthood established him as a member of “a privileged stratum of the larger Christian community, whose task it was to rule and defend that community33”. As he records his memoirs, Mandeville’s narrator announces an effort at individual memory, but he also appeals to his community to participate in the text by contributing to a collective memory. He does not know everything, he says, nor does he wish to discourage others from making their own discoveries. He advocates for primary, in-person encounters with earthly phenomena even as he himself learns about it second-hand, through books. In an important statement explaining his aims in writing the Merveilles, he asks his fellow knights to corroborate, correct, or add to his report, saying:

• 35 See A. Tarnowski, “The Lessons of Experience and the Chemin de long estude”, Christine de Pizan: A (...)
• 36 Toynbee, “Christine de Pisan and Sir John Maundeville”, p. 231, 237. Christine manages to kiss the (...)

24Travel writing featured an author or narrator who could plausibly have been a visitor to the places described; seeing with one’s own eyes (or claiming to) mattered. In principle, that suited Christine well, considering her general reliance on the authority of her own experience35. Although women in the Middle Ages were known to make pilgrimages, it is unlikely that Christine would have cast herself in that role. Instead, Christine and the Sibyl, as has often been noted, are female counterparts to the male pair, Virgil and Dante. But comparison with the Merveilles reveals an additional version of female solidarity: in the Chemin, a work from which male voices are largely absent, the pair of Christine and the Sibyl does not duplicate Mandeville’s group of armored knights; it replaces them. With the help of the Sibyl, she can do what Mandeville did and, as Toynbee remarked, in some instances she implies that she can do it better36. That accomplished, however, she moves on to argue not just the value of a governing ethos that differs from Mandeville’s but one to which women – indeed, Christine de Pizan herself – may contribute.