Walters' research is helping us see that the Middle Ages were not so dark…and that our modern times, by contrast, are not so modern.

Lori Walters

Professor, Modern Languages and Linguistics

When Lori Walters, Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, began her lifelong study of Christine de Pizan (1365 - c. 1430), scant light had been cast on this historical figure from the Middle Ages.

No longer, now that Walters has focused her passion and research skills on the life of Christine and revealed a remarkable story. The story, which Walters has rendered through numerous articles and books, will find its fullest revelation in her forthcoming book, provisionally titled From the City of God to the City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan, Augustine and Jean Gerson.

When most women were personae non gratae in the royal courts of yore, Christine became the voice of France's body politic and helped seed France to grow into a modern nation. She advised King Charles VI and became, Walters explains, " France's memorialist of the times, the shaper and keeper of the collective memory of the nascent nation-state."

To participate in the creation of France as nation-state, Christine overcame obstacles none before her had: her own gender and her foreign birth. She did so by furthering the monarchy's project of adopting French, rather than Latin, as the official language of the time. "These," Walters says, "were issues concerning who could speak and what voice or language others would listen to."

Walters has had little trouble having her own voice heard: She has presented a plenary address at the Fifth International Christine de Pizan conference in Salzburg, Austria, and has been invited to do another at the Sixth International Conference, to be held in Paris in 2006. She's recently delivered lectures at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (in England) and St.-Quentin-enYvelines (in France).

Although, as Walters remarks with ironic satisfaction, "medievalists are very modern, and use the most current Internet technology to view and collaborate on documents that are centuries old," she began her research while in residence at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the British Library, and still travels to Paris frequently.

The more Walters engages with Christine's life, the more Walters finds a woman who inhabited unimaginable roles for her times, or even modern times. In addition to court advisor and historian, Christine was also a literary critic, a defender of women, and, using her pen and poetic sensibilities, the sole supporter of her family after both her father and husband died.

Christine, Walters explains, took on the literary establishment by criticizing such canonical works as The Romance of the Rose, a long 13th-century French poem that portrays outspoken women as suspect. Christine similarly critiqued male portrayals of female literary figures from Medea to Dido, all the while making herself vulnerable to the ridicule of her contemporaries.

Similarly, Walters has defended this heroic personage against criticisms. Why, some have asked, did Christine support the royal court and Charles VI and help to solidify a nation-state built on assumed power?

"Christine was using her position within the system to change it," Walters explains. "It was, really, the best—in fact the only—position and role a woman who wanted to expand the rights of the people could take. If she had written from outside the system, no one would've listened. We likely would never have heard of Christine de Pizan if she had not been a part of the court."

Christine's writings were crafted by hand into books that queens and other female royal figures used to educate future monarchs in their formative years. "So," Walters says, "in a very real way, Christine was helping construct the future of the kingdom."

Walters' research is helping us see that the Middle Ages were not so dark…and that our modern times, by contrast, are not so modern.