The prime of their lives, or middle age, was a concept often discussed in the Middle Ages. One of the authorities frequently quoted in this context is Giles of Rome, who in his handbook on the conduct of rulers, De regimine principum of 1279, defines the “prime of their lives” in the Aristotelian vein as follows:

Whatever praiseworthy qualities there are in the old and young are found altogether in people in their prime, and their blameworthy qualities are completely absent from them. For, as has often been remarked before, extremes are always to be blamed and the mean to be praised.(2)

And Philippe de Novare, a Lombard writing a moral treatise on the Quatre âges de l‘homme around 1265 (when he was seventy) sees middle age, i.e., from forty to sixty years of age as ‘parfez de tous les bien.’(3)
 
The definition of middle age, of course, varies enormously, depending on which treatise or scheme we consult.  Were there seven ages of man, or six, or four? And what about the times of day, the seasons, the ages of the world? All of these divisions were adduced to make some sense of the human life cycle.(4)

But in surveying these widely known schemes, we begin to realize that we are dealing mostly with the ages of man. As Simone de Beauvoir put it in her classic work on aging, La Vieillesse: ‘Un autre fait saute aux yeux: il s’agit là d’un problème d’hommes. En tant qu’expérience personnelle, la vieillesse concerne autant les femmes et même davantage puisqu’elles vivent plus longtemps. Mais quand on en fait un objet de spéculation, on considère essentiellement la condition des mâles.’(5)  Indeed, most of the  normative texts on the ages focus almost exclusively on men.

In order to understand how women themselves see their own aging process, especially in relation to their creativity, we have to turn to literary texts, not theoretical treatises on aging. Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-1430), the first professional woman writer in Europe, is a good example since she reflects explicitly on questions of age and literary creativity.

In the tradition of Cicero (whose De senectute was first translated into French by Laurent de Premierfait in 1405) and Dante,(6)  -- whom she revered – Christine frequently considers youth and old age from a moral perspective. One of the most extensive theoretical reflections on (male) youth and old age can be found in Christine’s moral biography of the French king Charles V (d. 1380).(7)  Three entire chapters of the first part are devoted to remarks on youth, while two address what she calls ‘le bel âge’ and ‘maturité.’ Like Cicero, who wrote his treatise on old age at age sixty-nine in part as a plaidoyer for retaining aged senators, Christine views youth as a period of dangerous impetuousness and lack of wisdom. Youth is hot-blooded, prone to foles amours and rioting. Young people’s lack of foresight leads to reckless spending and the impoverishment of their parents. Only education can make a difference, and maturation is finally nothing but an apprenticeship in reasoning that will lead to the perfection of the mature age. This age Christine locates in the fifties.(8)  Here is how she sees this stage of life:
 

Il faut maintenant parler du temps où le fruit mûr est cueilli et mis à l’abri pour qu’on puisse en profiter: c’est-à-dire quand l’homme est entré dans la cinquantaine; c’est alors que celui qui possède un jugement sain et sage a engrangé les trésors d’une compréhension réelle de tout ce qui peut lui être salutaire; c’est alors aussi qu’il faut en profiter par un juste usage de la raison; c’est alors enfin qu’il se sont refroidis en lui les ardeurs impétueuses qui caractérisent la jeunesse, ainsi que les désirs enflammés qui enchainent ses sens. (Le livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V, le sage, p. 61)

Looking back on past follies, the mature man repents and benefits from experience. This is the ideal, but Christine concedes that she has encountered various men who somehow do not revel in the fact that their sensual desires have left them. She comments:

Comme je leur demandais de s’expliquer sur ce point (that is, that they weep for their lost youth), ils me disaient qu’il restait en leur coeur l’envie des désirs qui attisent la jeunesse, alors qu’ils n’avaient plus la force de s’y adonner. Comme ils préféraient les plaisirs passagers de la chair à la perfection de l’entendement, j’en déduis que malgré leur grand âge, ils étaient encore des ignorants dépourvus de la faculté de jugement, et que par conséquent ils ne méritaient pas le nom de sages. (Charles V, p. 63)

This harsh judgment resurfaces in the Livre de la cité des dames of 1404-1405 where Ovid’s misogyny is explained by the fact that impotence forever removed women from his grasp. Similar views on youth and old age can be found in the didactic Livre du corps de policie, begun around the same time as the Cité des dames. For her male target audience, then, Christine inscribes herself into a long-standing tradition of moral and didactic writing which, in the Ciceronian mold, values the wisdom of old age over the follies of youth, especially for princes and other rulers. But what about Christine herself?
 
Like Dante, Christine writes the most sophisticated account of her life and the life of her times – from both a historical and intellectual perspective – at the moment when she has reached the ‘midpoint’ of her life: ‘Ja passé avoye la moitié du chemin de mon pelerinage’ ( I had already reached the half-way point of my pilgrimage), this is how her elaborate three-part allegory L’advision Christine (Christine’s Vision) opens.(9)  She has a marvelous vision, a reenactment of her birth, in which Nature pours matter into a mold (much like a Parisian waffle-iron), bakes her in the belly of Chaos, and releases her into a strange landscape: the world (pp. 11-14). I have dealt elsewhere with this strange creation myth, which reverses the Aristotelian scheme of the role of male and female in human creation: here the female Nature gives the form to the embryo while the male Chaos serves as a kind of incubator.(10)  In the maturation process Christine is fed a sweet and nourishing liqueur so that her understanding grows. She goes off on her migrations and finally ends up with the Crowned Lady of France who offers her the job of being her antigrafe or chronicler. Christine has been chosen for this purpose because of her ‘don d’amour d’estude’ (gift of love of learning; p. 16). But Christine had not always been able to follow the inclinations for which this gift prepared her.
 
After a fascinating overview of French history and intellectual life in Paris, Christine arrives at part 3, where, in a Boethian mold, she complains to Lady Philosophy about the misfortunes of her life so far. Here we find a moving lament detailing how she was forced to waste her youth in non-intellectual pursuits. She skillfully adapts the moral tradition she had laid out so clearly in a (male) didactic context in her Charles V  to her own life and gender. For while in the Charles V the foolish pursuits of (male) youth are, as we saw, rioting, spending excessive amounts of money, and giving oneself over to one’s passions, Christine’s youth was spent in a loving marriage and with the birth and raising of three children. Nonetheless, thinking of this youth, she cries out: ‘Ha! Fortune, quel tresor tu me tollis (Oh Fortune, what a treasure you took away from me; p. 108). She uses the image of a puddle evaporating in sun light to explain how the little bits of learning she acquired from her father before her marriage just vanished. She did not have enough sense to hold on to this precious knowledge throughout her early years. The true tresor of her youth – the one she lost -- was thus (male) learning and not her children.
 
It was not until she had reached middle age that she could return to her early love of learning. Here is how she describes this stage of her life: ‘Ainsi en cellui temps que naturellement estoit pervenu mon aage au degré de congnoissance, regardant derriere moy les aventures passees et devant moy la fin de toute chose… me tiray au chemin ou propre nature et constellacion m’encline, c’est assavoir en amour d’estude’ (At the time when I had naturally arrived at an age that brings with it a certain degree of understanding, looking back at my past adventures and ahead to the end of things (…) I embarked on the path to which nature and the stars inclined me, that is, the love of learning; pp. 109-110; my emphasis). Aging is seen here in purely intellectual terms, the age when you have reached sufficient understanding to know what matters. It is when you look back on your past adventures and see ahead of you the end of things. Twice in this part 3 of the Advision it is spelled out what ‘les aventures’ were that prevented her from following the path of learning. First, in her complaint to Philosophy Christine states: ‘Car, non obstant que naturellement et de nativité y fusse encline, me tolloit vaquier l’occupacion des affaires que ont communement  les mariees et aussi la charge de souvent porter enfans’ (For although I was naturally and from my earliest youth inclined to learning, the preoccupation with the duties common to married women and also frequent childbearing prevented me from devoting myself to it; p. 108).

And as Philosophy points out somewhat later in her consolation:  had Christine’s husband lived longer (he died when she was twenty-three) she would not have been able to give herself over to study because household chores (occupacion de mainage, p.123) , and, Philosophy adds, we both know what is the thing in the world ‘qui plus te delicte et te plaist a avoir, c’est … le doulx goust de science’ (that delights you most and pleases you most to possess: the sweet taste of knowledge; p. 123; my emphasis). This sweet taste is Christine’s true ‘delectacion’ (p. 123; my emphasis). Indeed, earlier in her complaint Christine had described how Nature had comforted her when she finally took up her course of study again: ‘Fille, solace toy quant tu as attaint en effait le desir que je te donne’ (Daughter, comfort yourself when you have effectively attained the desire I gave you; p. 110; my emphasis). In this context the famous childbirth metaphor appears. Reversing the old topos of writing as ‘plowing,’ sowing etc. (i.e., phallic terms), Christine reveals that nature wanted her to give birth to ‘nouvelles lectures’ (new books).(11)  Just like Nature forges new human beings on her anvil (in the Roman de la Rose, for example), Christine is charged to forge new works. And just like a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth as soon as she holds her baby in her arms, Christine will forget the pain of writing when she hears ‘la voix de tes volumes’ (the voice of your volumes; p. 110). As Barbara Newman suggested recently, Christine by using childbirth as a metaphor for writing not only reverses Alain de Lille, who had used writing as a metaphor for sex, but also invokes the ‘long monastic tradition that contrasted the pains of carnal childbirth with the joys of spiritual motherhood.’(12)
 
The choice of words is remarkable here: delight, pleasure, sweet taste – these are very sensual terms.(13) And let us consider the substitution of literary creation for childbirth. Surely we have reached a threshold here; at age forty-one Christine puts into words what for her are the compensations of aging: a new pleasure, a new delight, new children, laid down in ink on parchment instead of in swaddling cloths into a cradle.

The discourse of desire, usually reserved for courtly literature in the Middle Ages (but also for some mystic texts, as we all know) acquires a new function for Christine. I know of no male writer who couches his love of learning in such sensual terms. For her ‘the change of life’ (‘fut l’estat de mon vivre tresmué en autre disposicion’; Adivision, p. 111; my emphasis) is the new ‘vie speculative et solitaire’ of her scholarship (p. 111).

Let us go back a few years to the works just preceding the Advision to see how the theme of the love of learning and the discourse of desire function here. A while ago Kevin Brownlee suggested that Christine sets up her authorial self as that of the a-sexual virtuous widow, a posture that requires the ‘erasure of sexual desire.’(14)  While this is true, I would modify this judgment and emphasize the substitution rather than the renunciation of the object of desire. Thus we find in the Livre de la mutacion de Fortune of 1402 this passage where she laments her inability to draw learning from the fountain of wisdom. For the sole reason ‘que fille fu nee’ (that I was born a girl; l. 413) ‘la costume mauldicte’ (the damnable custom; vv. 437-438) prevents her from satisfying her desire:

Si suis comme les amoureux
Bien ardans et bien desireux,
Qui ne pevent voir ne ouyr
Ce dont desirent a jouir;
De ce leur ressemble en ce pas,
Car je desir ce que n’ay pas,
C’est le tresor de grant savoir (ll. 439-445; my emphasis)

(I am like the ardent and desirous lovers who cannot see or hear that which they
desire to enjoy; I resemble them in this respect, for I desire that which I do not
have, that is, the treasure of great learning.)

And in the Chemin de longue étude, written around the same time, Christine again ‘desires’ (l. 855) knowledge that she acquires in part with the aid of the Sibyl. But complete satisfaction will always elude her since she came to the life of study too late.

In the Mutacion de Fortune Christine describes her change of life initially as a transformation into a man. Basing herself on Ovid, who legitimizes the idea of metamorphosis, and drawing on a number of mythological stories of gender transformation,(15) Christine describes in detail how her body grew stronger, her voice deeper, how, in sum, she became the captain of her family’s ship. In the later Advision she reprises this transformation in less poetic terms when Philosophy reminds her of that ‘fust mesmes converti ton corps foible et femmenin en homme pour estre transmuee de condicion’ (your weak, feminine body was even transformed into a man because its condition had changed; p. 129). The coming to writing, then, is on the one hand couched in terms of amorous desire, and on the other, in terms of a gender transformation.

Christine has become the woman that Colette so aptly calls ‘une femme qui échappe à l’âge d’être une femme.’(16)  Like Christine Colette – five hundred years later -- almost always presents us with an intricate mixture of fiction and autobiography.(17) ‘C’en est donc fini de cette vie de militante’ (p. 27), Colette has her main character ‘Colette’ exclaim at the beginning of her novel of renunciation, significantly entitled La Naissance du jour and written in 1928 when Colette was fifty-five.(18) This ‘militant life’ refers to the life o f love and men. Just as Christine escaped from her metaphorical shipwreck (i.e., the death of her husband and financial ruin), ‘Colette’ (the character, not the author) leaves behind her sexual past: ‘Tu regardes émerger d’un confus amas de défroques féminines, alourdie encore comme d’algues une naufragée (…), tu regardes émerger ta soeur, ton compère: une femme qui échappe à l’âge d’être une femme’ (p. 34; my emphasis). Like Christine, she ‘turns into a man,’ even using the same shipwreck metaphor. She becomes an almost genderless being that exchanges love for writing. At the moment when the author Colette found the last love of her life (the much younger Maurice Godeket who became her third and last husband) her character Colette says good-bye to all that. Her young fictional admirer Vial serves the sole purpose of reaffirming her resolution to ‘prendre [mon] congé’ from the life of love (p. 39). Almost ten years later, in her novel Bella Vista of 1937,  Colette states explicitly that renouncing love opens the door to literary creativity: ‘c’est folie de croire que les périodes vides d’amour sont les “blancs” d’une existence de femme. Bien au contraire,’ and the editor, Claude Pichois, paraphrases ‘Dans la femme, alors, perce avec vigueur l’écrivain.’(19)

In La Vagabonde, the first novel Colette wrote after her divorce from the dominating Willy (who had taken all the credit for Colette’s early and very successful Claudine novels) in 1910, the main character Renée, chooses a precarious career in variété theater over marriage to a rich and kind suitor. She wants to return to the ‘luxe d’écrire’ (p. 15) that she had refused herself for too long at the beginning of La Vagabonde. Looking back on her early literary career Renée/Colette remembers writing in sensual terms: ‘Pourtant j’avais savouré, en mettant celui-là au monde (i.e., her second book – note the childbirth metaphor reminiscent of Christine), la volupté d’écrire…’ (p. 31). This voluptuous pleasure of writing in her early career, later on will provide the perfect compensation for the loss of sensual pleasure in love. Thus, in La Vagabonde the most remarkable result of the main character’s renunciation of marriage is her newfound literary creativity: ‘j’écris avec une abondance, une liberté incroyable. J’écris sur des guéridons boiteux…jécris, un pied chaussé et l’autre nu, … j’écris devant la fenêtre … Je me sens chez moi’ (p. 233). This feeling of ‘being at home in the world’ is what Simone de Beauvoir posited in Le deuxième sexe as the most important precondition for female independence and self-sufficiency. Colette describes this flight into creative solitude as ‘une dérobade préméditée [qui] s’organise là-bas, très loin, au fond de moi… Ne suis-je pas redevenue ce que j’étais, c’est-à-dire libre, affreusement seule et libre?’ (La Vagabonde, p. 238). This fictional solitude resurfaces in the most interesting way in La Naisssance du jour almost twenty years later: ‘Colette’ muses on her solitude after Vial’s departure and realizes that she has now caught up with her own previous fictional creations: ‘j’étais désormais pareille à celle que je décrivis maintes fois, vous savez, cette femme solitaire et droite, comme une rose triste qui d’être défeuillée a le port plus fier’ (p. 158).

Christine de Pizan also had the sense that by becoming a scholar and writer she rebecame what she had originally been (if for the briefest of times before her marriage at age fifteen): a lover of learning endowed by Nature with a special gift – the ‘authentic self’ posited by recent sociological work, marked by a ‘flowering, rather than a change in direction.’(20) Her solitary retreat into the world of the intellect is described as follows: ‘Adonc cloy mes portes, c’est assavoir mes sens… et vous happay ces beaulx livres et volumes et dis que aucune chose recouvreroie des mes pertes passees’ (Then I closed my doors, that is, my senses … and snapped up your beautiful books, volumes, and poems with the intention of making up for my past losses; p. 110; my emphasis) and at the end of the Mutacion de Fortune she defined her choice of life as ‘J’ay choisi pour toute joye/ (Quelqu’aultre l’ait), telle est la moye/ Paix, solitude volumtaire,/ Et vie astracte [et] solitaire’ (I have chosen as my sole joy – whatever joy others may have, this is mine – peace, voluntary solitude, and a retiring and solitary life; ll. 23,633-23, 636). The life of reason is the fruit of maturity that needs to be ‘engrangé’ or put into the barn, as Christine herself had stated in her Charles V, a metaphor also employed by Colette when she reflects on the ‘harvest’ maturity makes possible as ‘vendange …d’automne. Silence, retraite, sommeil du vin neuf cloîtré….’ (La Naissance, p. 49; my emphasis).

Is there not also a rejuvenation in aging?  Significantly, Colette called her novel of renunciation La Naissance du jour, a clear indication that there is a new beginning in middle age, a literary rejuvenation, as it were. And Christine closes her vast oeuvre with the idea of renewal, new-found hope, embodied in youth: the ‘pucelle,’ Jeanne d’Arc. In her Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, written when Christine was in her mid-sixties, two weeks after Jeanne’s liberation of Orléans in July 1429, the weeping Christine, enclosed in an abbey, suddenly finds herself laughing with joy and changing her language from ‘pleur en chant’ (weeping into singing; l. 13). Christine, like her beloved country of France, is rejuvenated and all of Christine’s desires are sated, for her last look shows her ‘ce que je veulx. [Ce] qu’ay desirée’ (ll. 24, 30): her final compensation of aging is going to be accomplished by ‘une vierge tendre’ (l. 86) who embodies everything Christine had hoped for in her long life.

Dr.Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
University of Pittsburgh

(1)A much longer version of this paper was delivered as a plenary lecture at a conference on aging and gender in medieval and early modern Europe at Groningen University (Netherlands) in June 2002. The original version will appear in a volume in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change.

(2)‘Quicquid laudabilitatis e[s]t in senibus vel in iuvenibus totum reperitur in hiis qui sunt in statu, et quicquid vituperabilitas est in eis totum removetur ab illis. Nam, ut supra pluries dicebatur, semper extreme sunt vituperabilia et medium est laudabile.’ Cited and translated by J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9-10.

(3)Cited by M. Newels, ‘Les Ages de la Vie dans quelques moralités françaises à la fin du moyen âge,’ in H. Dubois and M. Zink, eds., Les Ages de la vie au moyen âge (Paris, 1992), p. 263.

(4)See E. Sears,  The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, 1986);  Burrow, Ages of Man; and M. Goodich, From Birth to Old Age: The Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought, 1250-1350 (Lanham, New York, London, 1989) for the different schemes. See also the essays in Dubois and Zink, Les Ages de la vie. Generally on the history see G. Minois, History of Old Age (Chicago, 1989) and especially for the discourse on aging in the Middle Ages S. Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: ‘Winter clothes us in shadow and pain’ (London, 1997).
 
(5)S. de Beauvoir, La vieillesse (Paris, 1970), p. 99.

(6)On the reception and translation of De senectute see R. Sprandel, Altersschicksal und Altersmoral (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 134-138; on Dante see J. Quillet, ‘Figures de la vieillesse selon Dante,’ Etudes philosophiques 1986 (no. 3): 407-414.

(7)See B. Ribémont, ‘Le regard de Christine sur la jeunesse (à propos du Charles V),’ Cahiers de recherches médiévales 7 (2000): 255-60.

(8)There are exceptions, however. In individual cases, like that of Charles himself and of his brother, the duc de Bourbon, both their youth and their maturity are depicted as virtuous. For the duc de Bourbon, for example, Christine states: ‘Parvenu à l’âge mûr, toute la fougue de sa jeunesse se transforma en discernement et modération, en bon conseil, fidélité et constance’ (Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V le sage, trans. E. Hicks and T. Moreau [Paris, 1997], p. 138). The exception to the rule makes the king’s and duke’s excellence stand out even more, then.

(9)All parenthetical page references are to Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de l’advision Christine, ed. L. Dulac and C. Reno (Paris, 2001).

(10)See R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Das Konzept von Frau und Mann bei Hildegard von Bingen und Christine de Pizan,’ in M. Schmidt, ed., Tiefe des Gotteswissens – Schönheit der Sprachgestalt bei Hildegard von Bingen (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1995), pp. 167-79, here pp. 173-75.

(11)See Huot, ‘Seduction and Sublimation: Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun, and Dante,’ Romance Notes 25 (1985): 361-73 and J.
Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Fondements et fondations de l’écriture chez Christine de Pizan. Scènes de lecture et scènes d’incarnation,’ in M. Zimmermann and D. de Rentiis, eds., The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan (Berlin, 1994), pp. 79-96.

(12)Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 122.

(13)As C. Le Brun-Gouanvic observes, ‘Les métaphores du miel, du doux goût de l’écriture, appartiennent à l’exégèse médiévale.’ See ‘L’écriture médecine: une relecture de L’Avision Christine (1405),’ in J.-Ph. Beaulieu and D. Desrosiers-Bonin, eds., Dans les miroirs de l’écriture: La réflexivité chez les femmes écrivains d’Ancien Régime (Montréal, 1998), pp. 9-20; here p. 18). But Christine adds the discourse of desire.

(14)K. Brownlee, ‘Widowhood, Sexuality, and Gender in Christine de Pizan,’ Romanic Review 86 (1995): 339-53; here p. 343.

(15)For details see R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Christine de Pizan and Classical Mythology: Some Examples from the Mutacion de Fortune,’ in M. Zimmermann and D. de Rentiis, eds. The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan (Berlin, 1994), pp. 3-14.

(16)Colette, La Naissance du jour (Paris, 1928),  p. 34.

(17)See R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Christine de Pizan et l’(auto)biographie féminine,’ Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 113 (2001): 7-15.

(18)On Colette and the representation of aging see B. Ladimer, Colette, Beauvoir, Duras: Age and Women Writers (Gainesville, 1999), chap. 3.

(19)La Naissance du jour, p. 11.

(20)See J. Ginn and S. Arber, ‘Only Connect: Gender Relations and Ageing,’ in Ginn and Arber, eds., Connecting Gender and Ageing: A Sociological Approach (Buckingham/Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 9 and 13 and A. M. Wyatt-Brown and J. Rosen, eds., Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity (Charlottesville, 1993), Introduction, p. 8 (in reference to Carolyn Heilbrun).