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Senior Honor's Thesis
in the
Department of History
Sweet Briar College
Defended and Approved 17 April 2006
The
Politics of Virtue:
Christine de Pizan's Gendered
Body
Politic
and
its
Practical Applications
Margaret E. Loebe
Professor
Lynn Laufenberg, Thesis
Professor Tracy
Professor
Chapman Hamilton
Andrew Walkling
Project Faculty Advisor
Date
'
_
.
Date
Date
Senior Honor's Thesis in the Department of History
Sweet Briar College
Defended and Approved
The
1
7 April
2006
Politics of Virtue:
Christine de Pizan's Gendered
Body
Politic
and
its
Practical Applications
Margaret E. Loebe
Professor
Lynn Laufenberg, Thesis Professor Tracy
Professor
Project Faculty Advisor
Chapman Hamilton
Andrew Walkling
8
LOEBE
Table of Contents Introduction
2
Chapter
I:
1
Chapter
II:
Chapter
III:
Virtue as a foundation of Christine's gendered pohtical theory
The Queen's Power
in the
High and Late Middle Ages
The Application of Political Theory
to Politics
36
49
Conclusion
58
Works Cited
61
Appendix: Key
Political Figures
66
LOEBE Medieval
women
are
Because men had
fathers.
most commonly described
however, scholars are finding that
pawns of
the
this portrait
apply, as can be seen in the case of the
husbands and
and economic power over them,
legal, political
frequently seen as having been the
in relation to their
two
late
men
in their lives.
women
are
More and more,
of weakness and malleability does not
medieval
women
discussed in this paper;
Christine de Pizan (1365-1430), a fifteenth century writer, and Isabeau de Baviere (1370-
1435), the French queen in
Had would have enjoyed.
due
it
whcse
court Christine wrote.
not been for a confluence of circumstance, both Christine and Isabeau
lived out their lives in the relative obscurity that
Both
clearly intelligent
to the support of
encouraged her
and
politically adept, they only
and then absence of
intellectual
most of
their husbands.
their
contemporaries
became unusual
figures
Christine's husband and father
study and early exposure to humanism.
Their influence,
along with Christine's early widowhood, prompted her writing career, which constitutes
perhaps the
first
instance of a
family through writing.
woman
in
Western Europe supporting herself and her
Similarly, the effective absence of Charles
VI of
the Valois
(r.
1380-1422), caused Isabeau's unusual position. Charles empowered his wife's control of the French
government
in his stead.
While
it
is difficult
to say
how much
the royal court had over Christine's political theory, one can see
how
the influence
Christine applied
her political theory to the