Browsing by Subject "Christine de Pizan"

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Open Access
Interpreting warfare and knighthood in late medieval France : writers and their sources in the reign of king Charles VI (1380-1422)
(2012) Çeçen, Zeynep Kocabıyıkoğlu
This thesis makes an analysis of different views on warfare and knighthood focusing on the late Middle Ages, though looking back to what came before, with an argument that a ‘new view’ was held by certain authors during the reign of Charles VI in France. This coincided with a certain phase of the Hundred Years’ War where the French were very conscious of their military failures. Medieval views on warfare and knighthood are examined under two basic categories: the view promoted through the romances to a lay audience, and the view developed by ecclesiastical authors, i.e. theologians, academics and canon-lawyers meant for a highly educated audience. While thesis shows that the ‘romance view’ perseveres into the early fifteenth century, it suggests a growing vogue for a ‘new view’ that is also adressed to a lay audience, but is closer to the ‘ecclesiastical view’ in many of its approaches. The new view is nevertheless different from the latter in certain respects, including the way it uses Ancient Roman sources on warfare, though these are also used to an extent in the ‘ecclesiastical view.’ It will illustrate this new view in the works of three authors residing in France at the time: Honoré Bouvet, Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pizan. While evaluating these authors’ ideas on warfare and knighthood from the point of view of the contemporary military situation, the thesis will also briefly address their relevance to humanism.
Open Access
On the outskirts of the Canon: the myth of the Lone Female philosopher, and what to do about it
(Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2015) Berges, S.
Women philosophers of the past, because they tended not to engage with each other much, are often perceived as isolated from ongoing philosophical dialogues. This has led - directly and indirectly - to their exclusion from courses in the history of philosophy. This article explores three ways in which we could solve this problem. The first is to create a course in early modern philosophy that focuses solely or mostly on female philosophers, using conceptual and thematic ties such as a concern for education and a focus on ethics and politics. The second is to introduce women authors as dialoguing with the usual canonical suspects: Cavendish with Hobbes, Elisabeth of Bohemia with Descartes, Masham and Astell with Locke, Conway with Leibniz, and so on. The article argues that both methods have significant shortcomings, and it suggests a third, consisting in widening the traditional approach to structuring courses in early modern philosophy. © 2015 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.