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Abstract
As a rhetorical figure, the example is constitutively split between the structural vocations of the Greek paradeigma (emphasizing illumination and belonging) and the Latin exemplum (emphasizing detachment and exclusion). This bifurcation enables the example to function as a strategic resource of ambiguity. Christine de Pizan exercises this ambiguity in her 1405 letter to the Queen of France. In particular, she develops a rhetoric of exemplary figures, the aim of which is to legitimate and effect the Queen's intervention in a hazardous political conflict, without in turn violating established codes of deference. Close inspection of this minor epistolary text demonstrates the utility of the example for purposes of rhetorical prodding, political judgment, and social transformation.
Portions of this essay were delivered at a 2007 meeting of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Interdisciplinary Program at Purdue University and the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference.
Portions of this essay were delivered at a 2007 meeting of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Interdisciplinary Program at Purdue University and the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference.
Notes
Portions of this essay were delivered at a 2007 meeting of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Interdisciplinary Program at Purdue University and the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference.
1. See, for instance, Gerard A. Hauser, “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric: Bifurcation or Contradiction?” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 78–90; Scott Consigny, “The Rhetorical Example,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 41 (1976): 121–34; William Lyon Benoit, “Aristotle's Example: The Rhetorical Induction,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 182–92; Michael McGuire, “Some Problems with Rhetorical Example,” Pre/Text 3 (1982): 121–36; James C. Raymond, “Enthymemes, Examples, and Rhetorical Method,” Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, ed. Robert J. Connors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 140–51; Gerard A. Hauser, “Aristotle's Example Revisited,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18 (1985): 171–80; William L. Benoit, “On Aristotle's Example,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 20 (1987): 261–67; and Gerard A. Hauser, “Reply to Benoit,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 20 (1987): 268–73. A noteworthy escape from Aristotle's authority is John Arthos, “Where There Are No Rules of Systems to Guide Us: Argument from Example in a Hermeneutic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 320–44.
2. A more thorough treatment of the Greek and Latin etymologies may be found in John D. Lyons, introduction to Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Exemplum in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
3. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9–10; Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Paradigm?” (lecture, The European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, August 2002), http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-what-is-a-paradigm-2002.html/.
4. A more extensive treatment of ambiguity as the basis for transformation may be found in Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945).
5. For an extensive biographical study of Christine de Pizan and her writings, see Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984).
6. See Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 56.
7. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Three Tall Women: Radical Challenges to Criticism, Pedagogy, and Theory” (2001 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture) (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2003), 4–5.
8. Samuel McCormick, “The Artistry of Obedience: Kant's Correspondence with the King,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38 (2005): 302–27.
9. See, for instance, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin Books, 1988); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
10. See Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 20–48.
11. Reliable accounts of the number dead vary from one to four members of the king's procession. See R. C. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI 1392–1420 (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 207–8, n15.
12. See Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337–1453 (New York: Atheneum, 1978), 143; Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 4–6.
13. A more detailed account of this arbitration may be found in Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 25.
14. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 28.
15. A Parisian Journal, 1405–1449, trans. Janet Shirley (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 48.
16. Alexander Gelley, introduction to Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, ed. Alexander Gelley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 5. See also Hegel's discussion of “pragmatical” history in The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 6.
17. Earl Jeffrey Richards, introduction to The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), by Christine de Pizan, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1998), xxxiv.
18. Christine de Pizan, “An Epistle to the Queen of France,” in The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, with An Epistle to the Queen of France and Lament on the Evils of Civil War, ed. and trans. Josette A. Wisman (New York: Garland, 1984), 71, 73. Throughout this essay, I work with the French and English texts of Christine's letter based on the 1838 Thomassy edition of B. N. French 580(A). Raymond Thomassy, Essai sur les écrits politiques de Christine de Pisan, suivi d'une notice littéraire et de pièces inédites (Paris: Debécourt, 1838). An indispensable resource on ms. 580(A) is Charity Cannon Willard, “An Autograph Manuscript of Christine de Pizan?” Studi Francesi 27 (1965): 452–57. Other available manuscripts of her epistle to the queen include B. N. French 604(B), 605(C), and Oxford, All Souls MS 182.
19. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 73, 75.
20. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 75–81.
21. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 81, 83.
22. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 75. See also Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, II.34.1.
23. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 77. See also Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, II.32.1.
24. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 77.
25. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 77. See also Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, I.13.2.
26. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 77. See also Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, II.49.5.
27. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 81.
28. For a more thorough account of intertextuality in Christine's era, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
29. See Willard, Christine de Pizan, 135.
30. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 59–60.
31. On the iterative function of the example, see Lyons, Exemplum, 26–28.
32. See Irene E. Harvey, “Derrida and the Issues of Exemplarity,” Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 193–217.
33. Concise accounts of medieval misogyny may be found in Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 231–44; R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1987): 1–24; and Eileen Power, “Medieval Ideas about Women,” Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1–26.
34. See Earl Jeffrey Richards, “‘Seulette a part’—The ‘Little Woman on the Sidelines’ Takes Up Her Pen: The Letters of Christine de Pizan,” in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 139–70.
35. On the ancestry of this medieval belief, which stretches back to ancient articulations of marriage, the household, and the state, and finds its most explicit pronouncement in the first book of Aristotle's Politics; see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 254–57.
36. See Lyons, Exemplum, xi; and Gelley, ‘introduction,’ 12.
37. See Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 1.
38. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 29–30.
39. See Lyons, Exemplum, 28–31.
40. Lyons, Exemplum, 31.
41. This notion of contamination is developed more fully in Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph: Textual Studies 7 (1980): 202–29.
42. An illuminating account of this Hellenistic line of thought may be found in Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between in Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 227–64.
43. Gelley, introduction, 14.
44. This distinction between determinant and reflective judgments is developed more fully in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), §4.
45. One noteworthy exception was the ability of elite medieval women to rule as regents. However, because the courtiers of Charles VI were often unable to distinguish fits of lunacy from saner moments in his kingship, it was impossible to institute a stable regency in early fifteenth-century France. On the various attempts and failures to do so, see Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 23–37. On the rule of medieval women as regents, see Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of Her Sex: Women's Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11–14; and Edith Ennen, The Medieval Woman, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 238, 268.
46. Cf. note 45.
47. Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 241.
48. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 77.
49. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 73.
50. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 81.
51. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 79.
52. See Lauren Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 237–59. For a more extensive history of the complaint, see Nancy Dean, “Chaucer's Complaint, A Genre Descended from the Heriodes,” Comparative Literature 19 (1967): 1–27.
53. As translated in Linda Leppig, “The Political Rhetoric of Christine de Pizan,” in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 143.
54. See Margarete Zimmermann, “Vox Femina, Vox Politica,” in Politics, Gender, and Genre, 113–27.
55. Isa. 25:8; Rev. 7:17, 21:4. On the history of tears, see Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).
56. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 75.
57. Dante as quoted in John MacQueen, Allegory (London: Methuen, 1970), 55.
58. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 75, 83.
59. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 18.
60. Kenneth Burke develops the concept of socioanagogy in A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950): “In brief, the socioanagogic sense notes how the things of books and the book of Nature ‘signify what relates to worldly glory’” (220).
61. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 73–75.
62. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 73.
63. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 75, 77.
64. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 79–81.
65. Pizan, “Epistle to the Queen,” 81.
66. This conception of the future anterior is developed more fully in Bernard Comrie, Tense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 69–75.
67. See Hans-Jost Frey, “On Presentation in Benjamin,” in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 139–64.
68. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927–1940), trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), [Q°, 21], 867.
69. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1962), 374.
70. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 74. Paul develops this conception of typos in 1 Cor. 10:6 and 10:11.
71. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [N3, 1], 463. This line of thought is developed more fully in Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109–31.
72. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. George Steiner (London: Verso, 1998), 45.
73. Richards, ‘introduction,’ xlix.
74. Accounts of this ongoing project, especially as it finds expression in the field of rhetorical studies, may be found in Michaela D. E. Meyer, “Women Speak(ing): Forty Years of Feminist Contributions to Rhetoric and an Agenda for Feminist Rhetorical Studies,” Communication Quarterly 55 (2007): 1–17; Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Difference(s), and Rhetorical Studies,” Communication Studies 46 (1995): 106–17; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Sound of Women's Voices,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 212–20; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak For Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, Vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 1989), 1–16; and Karen A. Foss and Sonja K. Foss, “The Status of Research on Women and Communication,” Communication Quarterly 31 (1983): 195–204.
75. See Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–61; and Carole Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, “Women in Communication Studies: A Typology for Revision,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 401–23.
76. See A. Cheree Carlson, “Creative Casuistry and Feminist Consciousness: The Rhetoric of Moral Reform,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 16–33; Kristin S. Vonnegut, “Listening to Women's Voices: Revisioning Courses in American Public Address,” Communication Education 41 (1992): 26–40; Campbell, “Sound of Women's Voices,” 212–20; and Valerie A. Endress, “Feminist Theory and the Concept of Power in Public Address,” in Women and Communicative Power: Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Carol A. Valentine and Nancy J. Hoar (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988), 100–7.
77. See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 184.