Earl Jeffrey Richards
Bergische Universität Wuppertal
David Joseph Wrisley
American University of Beirut
Liliane Dulac
Université de Montpellier III
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan
An Initial Stylometric Analysis
Abstract
This article attempts to identify the different styles employed by Christine de
Pizan in all of her works using empirically based stylometric analysis. The
results, at once heuristic but also statistically significant, suggest as well that
besides Christine de Pizan, other medieval French authors such as Jean de
Meun, Froissart and Gerson, have at least two, if not more, stylometric foot-
prints. The methods employed and the ramifications of the results are discussed
briefly as well.
Résumé
Il s’agit d’un essai d’identifier les différents styles employés par Christine de Pizan
dans l’ensemble de sa production littéraire à partir d’une analyse stylométrique
empirique. Les résultats, à la fois heuristiques mais aussi statistiquement signi-
ficatifs, suggèrent aussi qu’en plus de Christine de Pizan, d’autres auteurs fran-
çais médiévaux comme Jean de Meun, Froissart et Gerson, possèdent au moins
deux « empreintes » stylométrique, sinon encore plus. Les méthodes employées
et les ramifications des résultats obtenus sont brièvement discutés.
Le Moyen Francais, vol. 78-79 (2016), p. 187-206 doi: 10.1484/J.LMFR.5.111478
188 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los,
weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben.
Nietzsche1
In this paper we wish to identify Christine de Pizan’s various
styles, in verse and in prose, with the help of stylometry and to
comment briefly on what each of these styles may mean2. Hitherto,
following traditional stylistic and rhetorical approaches, scholars
have identified what they have called clerical, allegorical, legal-juridi-
cal and courtly styles in her different writings, styles that have more
to do with critical idiosyncrasy than empirically detectable evidence3.
One of the major issues under discussion is the relationship between
verse and prose in her œuvre, whether for instance, the prose passage
in the Mutacion de Fortune regarding the history of the Jews has a
different epistemological status (in other words, whether it is some-
how « truer » by having been written in prose)4. Christine wrote
in different styles: the issue is whether these styles can be detected
computationally, that is, quantitatively, and repeatedly over a very
large number of words. Christine’s writings constitute a corpus of
over one million words, composed in different genres. The challenge
is to understand the relationship among her different styles which
hitherto traditional stylistics has failed to do.
1
Gotzen-Dämmerung oder, wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, « Die Vernunft
in der Philosophie », in Fr. Nietzsche, Werke, ed. K. Schlechta, vol. 2, Munich,
Hanser, 1954, p. 959.
2
Some five years ago, Liliane Dulac assembled a small team of colleagues, including
Christine Reno, Claire Le Ninan and Jeff Richards, to collaborate on an edition/
translation of the Lai leonime in the festschrift for Danielle Bohler (« Jeux d’amour
et de rimes : le Lai leonime de Christine de Pizan. Édition (provisoire), traduction
et commentaire », in Fl. Bouchet et D. James-Raoul (ed.), Desir n’a repos,
Hommage à Danielle Bohler, Bordeaux, Eidôlon, 2015, p. 25-55). The Lai leonime
could, mutatis mutandis, be termed (with apologies to Raymond Queneau) a
veritable medieval Exercices de style, and the reflections in this paper on stylistics and
its limits, go back to this happy collaboration. At the same time, the different styles of
the Lai leonime anticipate the multiplicity of styles throughout Christine’s writings.
3
J. D. Burnley, « Christine de Pizan and the so-called style clergial », The Modern
Language Review, 81 (1986), p. 1-6 ; A. Strubel, « Le style allégorique de
Christine », in L. Dulac et B. Ribémont (ed.), Une femme de lettres au Moyen
Âge. Études autour de Christine de Pizan, Orléans, Paradigme, 1995, p. 357-372 ;
M. Curnow, « La Pioche d’inquisicion : Legal-Judicial Content and Style in Christine
de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames », in E. J. Richards et al. (ed.), Reinterpreting
Christine de Pizan, Athens, U. of Georgia P., 1992, p. 157-172 ; D. Demartini,
« Style et critique du discours courtois chez Christine de Pizan, Le livre du duc des
vrais amants », in Ch. Connochie-Bourgne and S. Douchet, Effets de style au
Moyen Âge, Aix-en-Provence, PU de France, 2012, p. 315-325.
4
E. J. Richards, « Poems of Water without Salt and Ballades without Feeling, or
Reintroducing History into the Text. Prose and Verse in the Works of Christine
de Pizan », in E. J. Richards, Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric,
Gainesville, UP of Florida, 1998, p. 206-230.
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 189
Christine studies have in many ways pioneered different approaches
to digital humanities and medieval French. The « Making of the
Queen’s Manuscript » project at Edinburgh created TEI-compliant
XML digital editions of much of her writing5. In the realm of literary
geography, D. J. Wrisley has suggested in another topical form of ana-
lysis, that of toponymic frequency across her œuvre, resulting in the
digital mapping project « The Geographies of Christine de Pizan »6.
Besides two articles in French currently in press by E. J. Richards7,
to our knowledge, there are only three other applications of stylo-
metry to medieval French. First, Brian Reilly and Moira Dillon
have used quantitative analysis on a single romance by Chrétien de
Troyes in order to assess the historically attributed shift in author-
ship in Lancelot8. Maciej Eder has applied a computational process of
supervised machine-learning classification known as « rolling stylo-
metry » on three individual texts with dual authorship: the Roman
de la Rose, a 15th-century Polish translation of the Bible known as
Queen Sophia’s Bible, and The Inheritors, a novel by Joseph Conrad
and Ford Maddox Ford written jointly in 19019. D. J. Wrisley has also
taken on the question of large corpus stylometry in the context of
Guillaume de Tignonville’s Dits Moraux des philosophes, a traveling
text of Arabic origin that served as one of Christine’s sources in the
Epistre Othea10. Stylometry has been applied primarily in questions
of authorial attribution or other literary forensics, and secondarily to
assessing discursive proximity among different authors. In this paper,
after first discussing the difference between stylistics and stylometry,
5
J. Laidlaw et al., « Christine de Pizan. The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript
(London, British Library Harley Ms. 4431) », on line [http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.
uk/index.html].
6
Available at http://djwrisley.com/maps/cdep/.
7
E. J. Richards, « Jean de Meun mis en réseau : une analyse stylométrique de la
Querelle de la Rose, réponse de tentative à la question ‘le style clergial, existe-t-il ?’
(A. Strubel) », in Jean de Meun et la culture médiévale : littérature, art, science et
société aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (Orléans, mai, 2014), forthcoming and « À
la recherche des communautés discursives au Moyen Âge : un regard numérique sur
la connectivité dans la culture vernaculaire et le rôle des traductions dans l’évolution
de la prose en moyen français », in Les états de langues à l’heure du numérique (Paris,
novembre 2014), ed. J. Ducos.
8
Br. J. Reilly et M. R. Dillon, « Virtuous Circles of Authorship Attribution
Through Quantitative Analysis : Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot », Digital Philology, 2
(2013), p. 60-85.
9
M. Eder, « Rolling stylometry », Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30 (2015),
online [http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/digitalsh/early/2015/04/06/llc.
fqv010.full.pdf ].
10
D. J. Wrisley, « Modeling the Transmission of al-Mubashshir Ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār
al-h. ikam in Medieval Europe : Some Initial Data-Driven Explorations », Journal of
Religion Media and Digital Culture, forthcoming April 2016.
190 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
we will, aided by stylometry, next try to detect stylistic « commu-
nities » in a corpus of Christine’s writings, first separate from the
writings of her contemporaries, and second along with them.
In medium corpus stylometry, that is, when we are analyzing many
dozens of authors together, it is normal to observe affinities between
the works of the same author. In observing distances among authors
within a network of calculated distance metrics, it may be possible to
see clusters of single authors. This finding has been observed for the
case of an ad-hoc corpus of ancient Greek prose, poetry and drama11. In
medieval French, however, it turns out that the works of authors wri-
ting in both prose and verse are not close textual neighbors: beyond the
case of Christine, we have determined that Jean de Meun’s part of the
Rose does not cluter with his prose translations, Froissart’s verse com-
positions do not cluster with his prose chronicles, nor do the French
poems of Jean Gerson cluster with his prose works. For this reason,
in this article we will examine whether the communities found in a
stylometric network for Christine’s works in prose and verse persist
when we scale up the corpus to include writings of her contemporaries.
Finally, we will comment on the potential significance of our findings.
Stylistics vs Stylometry
At the risk of recapitulating certain facts all too well known to adhe-
rents of stylistics, on the one hand, and practitioners of stylometry on
the other, it might be useful to recall the salient differences between the
two approaches to the problem of style in texts. Traditional stylistics
in Romance Studies, as epitomized and inspired by the works of Leo
Spitzer, Charles Bally and Helmut Hatzfeld12, to name only a few of its
most famous representatives, invokes the notion of an unquantifiable
11
M. Eder, « Larger-Scale Stylometry Using Network Analysis », Qualico 2014 : Book
of Abstracts, Olomouc, Palacky University, p. 38-39.
12
Ch. Bally, Traité de stylistique française, 3rd ed., Genève, Georg & Cie, 1951 ;
L. Spitzer, Die Wortbildung als stilistisches Mittel exemplifiziert an Rabelais, Halle,
Niemeyer, 1910 ; id., Aufsätze zur romanischen Syntax und Stilistik, Halle, Niemeyer,
1918 ; Stilstudien, Munich, Hueber, 1928, 2 vol. For a survey of the hermeneutic
circle, see M. Wallace, « The Hermeneutic Circle and the Art of Interpretation »,
Comparative Literature, 24 (1972), p. 97-117. Martin notes (p. 98) : « For Heidegger
and his followers (notably Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emil Staiger) interpretive
circularity is ontological rather than methodological : it is an inescapable part of
any act of perception ». Stylometrics seeks to break out of this circle by objectifying
stylistic distances rather than focusing on subjective affective stylistic effects. See
Romanistische Stilforschung, ed. H. A. Hatzfeld, Darmstadt, WBG, 1975, and
E. J. Richards’ review of this collection in Romance Philology, 34 (1981), p. 212-
218. Hatzfeld, unlike most practitioners of stylistics, sought to objectify the subjective
affective his Munich dissertation (Über die Objektivierung subjektiver Begriffe im
Mittelfranzösischen Ein Beitrag zur Bedeutungslehre, Leipzig, Noske, 1915).
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 191
deviation from an implicit linguistic norm in order to ascertain an
author’s stylistic features in primarily affective terms. Bally, following
his teacher Ferdinand de Saussure, presupposed the arbitrariness of the
linguistic sign, an assumption that introduces a circularity into stylis-
tics. Spitzer’s famous « hermeneutic circle », adapted from Heidegger,
but growing out of his prior stylistic research, actually embraces this
methodological contradiction, only in the end to spiral out into witty
non-verifiability in anticipation of most post-modernist criticism. How
can one verify stylistic deviation if all language is arbitrary in the first
place? Traditional stylistics does in fact provide valuable close readings
of texts, micro-readings as it were, positing correlations between the-
matic repetition and linguistic idiosyncrasy, between individual parts
and the whole. At its empirical best, stylistics also relies on the history
of rhetoric to strengthen its conclusions, and can detect formal sym-
metry or dissymmetry, as the case may be, which stylometry does not
detect because its point of departure is purely lexical frequency from
what is known as a « bag of words » that is, without regard for syntax13.
Combining statistical and philological expertise, the Compu
tational Stylistics Group made up of Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki (both
of Krakow) and Mike Kestemont (Antwerp) have developed a pac-
kage for the programming environment R entitled « Stylometry with
R » (or « StyloR »)14. StyloR offers different functions for digital
textual analysis with user-driven parameters across a given corpus
of plain text, both on the command line and in a graphic user inter-
face. Of interest here are the programs for performing cluster analysis
and bootstrap consensus, programs that compute lexical distances
between texts across many different parameters and many thousands
of calculations. The steps involved in this calculation are presented in
detail in the documentation at the website of this group, but a brief
summary of them may suffice to explain the methodology involved.
StyloR works with plain-text electronic files formatted with
UTF-8 encoding that preserves the diacritics of the modern editions
from which they are derived. In a nutshell, StyloR tokenizes the texts,
counting all of the words they contain. The frequency of a single word
13
There have been recent calls to redefine stylistics as the study of countable linguistic
features. See J. B. Herrmann, K. van Dalen-Oskam and Chr. Schöch,
« Revisiting Style, A Key Concept in Literary Studies », Journal of Literary Theory,
9 (2015), p. 25-52.
14
E. Maciej, M. Kestemont and J. Rybicki, « Stylometry with R : A Package
for Computational Text Analysis », R Journal, 16 (2016), forthcoming ; advance
access available on line [https://journal.r-project.org/archive/accepted/eder-rybicki-
kestemont.pdf ].
192 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
is divided by the number of all the words in the corpus, yielding a
percentage of usage. These percentages are then compared across the
corpus among texts. StyloR calculates distances based on the choice
of a metric (a function that defines the differences between each pair
of texts separately). For texts in English, the metric that some digital
practitioners prefer for its statistically significant results is known as
« Delta ». Eder has developed two metrics termed « Eder’s Delta »
and « Eder’s Simple Delta ». They slightly weight the most frequent
words accommodating inflected languages. For now, the latter metric
will be used for medieval French texts.
Among the statistical analyses offered by StyloR, we have chosen
cluster analysis and bootstrap consensus. Our stylometric analy-
sis of Christine’s writings follows a two-step procedure performed
on three textbases: (1) the works of Christine except the Livre de
Prod’hommie which remains unedited, (2) a larger context of 65
works in both prose and verse from her contemporaries, and finally
(3) the two databases united as one (the Appendix lists these works
and their editions). All the files used here for Christine’s writings
are corrected or « clean » files, some come from critical editions we
digitized and others from transcriptions available from « Making of
the Queen’s Manuscript » digital project15. The files for works by
Christine’s contemporaries were digitized using ABBYY Fine Reader
12 and then corrected. Optical character recognition (OCR) quality
was generally high, and these files are less than 5% uncorrected.
For drawing generic comparisons, we added four « redundant »
files to the Christine database: the controversial section in prose on
the history of the Jews in the Mutacion de Fortune (otherwise writ-
ten in verse), the verse passages of the Othea (otherwise composed
in prose), the oraisons en vers, in order to compare these prayers with
other devotional prose works by Christine, and, as one test of the
validity of the distance measures, the lengthy (and potentially) « lyri-
cal narrative » text, the Duc des vrais amans (Œuvres poétiques, ed.
M. Roy, vol. 3, which clustered with the node « Lyric 3 » as expec-
ted). At the same time, for the purposes of comparing Christine’s
styles with those of her contemporaries, we assembled a corpus of
slightly over six million words. A full list of those works is included in
the Appendix. All the Middle French texts used here were composed
either at the royal courts of Charles V and Charles VI or in Paris, so
that dialectical differences particularly prominent in Old French play
http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/trans.html.
15
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 193
a subordinate role in our experiment. Orthographic and scribal irre-
gularities (lyon/lion, etc.) of course occur in the same text transcribed
by the same scribe, but an examination of the word list generated in
the second step of our digital analysis shows these variants are statis-
tically insignificant.
Cluster analysis produces a series of dendrograms depending on
the most frequent word (« MFW ») settings. These dendrograms
differ among each other, and in order to generate a statistically robust
result for the varying distances between texts, another analysis ter-
med bootstrap consensus is performed which provides a consensus
across many calculations with differing parameters. StyloR generates
a comma separated value (.csv) file of the distance calculations that
can be visualized as a network. Furthermore, a number of statistical
measures can be derived from these stylometrics. In particular, in a
network of dense interrelationships of nodes (which are here the
individual texts), we can calculate modularity, by which we mean
the ability of a network to be divided into statistically significant
sets of nodes called clusters or communities. We used the so-called
« Louvain method » community detection algorithm built-in to
the Gephi platform in order to explore our stylometric network16.
The resulting communities can be visualized in an online interactive
network graph, a static, colorless version of which is reproduced here
(fig. 1)17. The final features g enerated from our stylometric analysis,
including a most frequent word list from the combined text base, is
available for download18.
16
See the brief introduction (based on the somewhat earlier beta version 0.6 than the
beta version 0.8.2 used here), M. Bastian, S. Heymann and M. Jacomy, « Gephi :
An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks », International
AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, online [https://gephi.org/
publications/gephi-bastian-feb09.pdf ]. The community detection algorithm is
that of V. Blondel, J.-L. Guillaume, R. Lambiotte and E. Lefebvre, « Fast
Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks », Journal of Statistical Mechanics.
Theory and Experiment, 10 (2008), p. 1000. Community detection is not a process
without controversy. For discussion of these algorithms, see M. E. J. Newman,
« Modularity and Community Structure in Networks », Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103 (2006), p. 8577–8696,
online [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1482622/] as well as
Br. Karrer, E. Levina and M. E. J. Newman, « Robustness of Community
Structure in Networks », Physical Review E, 77 (2008), online [DOI : 10.1103/
PhysRevE.77.046119].
17
An interactive network graph of Christine de Pizan and her contemporaries is
available online [http://djwrisley.com/networks/CdeP&Co/].
18
The data generated by StyloR (the table with distances, 1000 MFW list) and the
Gephi project file for the combined corpus of Christine de Pizan and her contem
poraries are available on-line [http://djwrisley.com/networks/CdeP&Co/data/].
194 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
Fig. 1 A network visualization of bootstrap consensus calculations based on
the corpus of Christine de Pizan and her contemporaries19.
Christine de Pizan’s Styles
To repeat, our stylometric analysis of Christine’s works with three
textbases: (1) the works of Christine includes all of Christine’s works
except the Livre de Prod’hommie, in corrected files; (2) 65 works
in both prose and verse from her contemporaries; and (3) the two
databases united as one (the Appendix lists these works and their edi-
tions). Many, but not all the files of Christine’s contemporaries have
been corrected to less than 5% error, an error resulting from optical
character recognition software “correcting” medieval orthography to
modern norms. As a test of the reliability of our digitized files, we
compared the results from an uncorrected file of Nicolas de Baye’s
Journal (100 000 words, including many modern French footnotes)
to those from the corrected file (80 000 words), that is, the « dirty »
file had 20% error. In the network visualization produced by the sty-
lometric analysis, the corrected file of Baye’s Journal barely moved
from where the « dirty » file had clustered.
The practice of stylometry relies upon the statistical comparison
of most frequent words, which perhaps explains the insignificance of
the textual error mentioned above. It might seem counter-intuitive to
This network is available in interactive form, and in color, online [http://djwrisley.
19
com/networks/CdeP&Co/].
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 195
compare words that largely do not have semantic weight as the pri-
mary means of comparing authors, and yet, in practice, the MFW of
any text are function words that, in the specific statistical distribu-
tion, allow us to generate empirically a stylometric profile.
Working within RStudio, and using our corpus of Christine’s
works, we ran version 0.6.0 of the Stylo package iteratively across num-
ber of parameters, varying the settings for minimum and maximum
MFW as well as the increment. We performed bootstrap consensus
analysis, which, as the name implies, establishes a consensus among
these different cluster analyses. As we increased the MWF and the
intervals, modularity in the network stayed relatively consistent and
either four or five communities were detected (see Fig. 2):
Min. & max MFW, Number of
Modularity
interval communities
10‑200‑10 0.514 5
20‑200‑20 0.544 5
50‑500‑50 0.55 4
100‑1000‑100 0.529 5
Fig. 2 Iterative experiments on the corpus of Christine’s work, resultant
modularity and communities
Since five communities were generally detected, we list them
below. These clusters remain largely stable when Christine’s works
are placed into corpus #3 along with her contemporaries, but there
are some interesting shifts that take place, which in fact exhibit
somewhat more suggestive patterns.
Group One Group Two Group Three Group Four Group Five
Lyric 1 Othea Advision Mutacion Juifs Epistres Rose
Lyric 2 Othea verse Charles V 7 Psaumes Epistre
Reyne
Lyric 3 Mutacion Cité Fais d’Armes Prudence
Duc des Vrais Chemin Trois Vertus Oroisons en vers Lamentacion
amans
Ditié Policie Heures Prison
Paix
Fig. 3 The five communities of Christine’s writing detected by stylometric analysis.
Works that cluster differently in the larger network are marked with an asterisk
196 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
These results are preliminary and heuristic, and they raise new
questions for future research. The most striking thing is that the
Ditié de Jeanne d’Arc, the last of Christine’s works, should cluster
with lyrical works written almost thirty-five years earlier. Our very
preliminary conclusion: since the Ditié has a very low lexical diver-
sity, after so many years away from writing in verse, it seems that
Christine returns to the highly conventional linguistic register as in
her earlier works.
Stylometric analysis suggests linguistic affinities between
Christine’s lyric works and those of Machaut and Deschamps, but to
different degrees over her lifetime. Given that Roy’s edition is chro-
nological, our analysis suggests affinity in the case of volume one with
Froissart/Deschamps, for volume two with Deschamps/Machaut
and for volume three with Machaut. Further research is needed to
assess these findings.
When we scale up from the Christine-only corpus to the combi-
ned corpus of Christine and her contemporaries, several interesting
realignments in the communities take place. Group Two of the
Christine-only corpus (Othea, Mutacion de Fortune, Chemin de
longue estude) stays together, but in the combined corpus now aligns
with the Cité des dames. Group Three of the Christine-only corpus
basically remains stable. Group Four of the Christine-only corpus is
quite difficult to assess since the works which are found in that tex-
tual community do not bear thematic or generic resemblance. Seen
in the context of her contemporaries, some initial comments can be
made on the discursive groupings that stylometry suggests. The larger
picture of literary history, in short, helps us understand the MFW
linguistic comparisons made by stylometric analysis.
In the combined corpus of Christine and her contemporaries
there are « crossovers » between verse and prose in Christine’s
works, that is, community alignment does not always group texts of
similar form. She had definitely developed a « lyrical » style for use
in fixed-form poems (as Group Ten of fig. 4 suggests). On the other
hand, her religious lyric is revealed to be linguistically separate from
her secular lyric, as it clearly clusters with other her religious works in
prose such as the Sept psaumes allégorisés and the Heures de contem-
plation and other contemporary religious works in prose such as the
Passion Isabeau, Courtecuisse’s Passion or Gerson’s translation of
the Pseudo-Bede account of the Passion (Traictié). It is striking that
the Othea, Chemin de longue estude, Mutacion de Fortune and Cité
Group One Group Two Group Three Group Four Group Five
Anon_MirDames Anon_Echamour Anon_PassIsab Courtecuisse Serm CdP_Advision
Bouvet_Arbre Anon_OvideMorl Anon_NBSauv Gerson Canti CdP_CharlesV
CdP_EpisRoyne Deguilleville_Pel CdP_7Psaumes Gerson Tignon CdP_FaisArmes
CdP_EpisRose Froissart_Buissn CdP_Heures Gerson Homelies CdP_Paix
CdP_Lament Froissart_Meliadr CdP_OroisVers Gerson JeanPetit CdP_Policie
CdP_Prison Froissart_Paradys Courtecuisse_Pas Gerson Mont CdP_3Vertus
CdP_Prudence Gervais_Fauvel Gerson_Traictie Gonesse Plut Presles_Cite
Courtecuisse_Ps-Seneque Machaut_RoiNav Legrand Archil Presles_Dignete
Foulechat_Poli Machaut_Oeu1 Legrand Moeurs
Gerson_Œuvres Machaut_Oeu2 Porete Mirouer
Premierfait_Viell Machaut_Oeu3
Tignonville_Dits Machaut_Prise
Tremaugon_Song
Group Six Group Seven Group Eight Group Nine Group Ten
CdP_Chemin Anon_BourParis Anon_Veg1380 Mezieres_EpLam CdP_VrAmans
CdP_Cite Anon_GrChron1 Conty_Harmonie Mezieres_Passio CdP_Lyrique1
CdP_Mutacion Anon_GrChron2 Conty_ JeuEschec Mezieres_Songe CdP_Lyrique2
CdP_Othea Anon_GrChron3 Oresme_Divin CdP_Lyrique3
CdP_OtheaVers Anon_GrChron4 Oresme_Ethiques Cdp_Ditie
Collectif_EvQue Baye_Journal Oresme_Ciel
Deschamps_Oe1 CdP_Mut_Juifs Oresme_Polit
Deschamps_Oe2 Froissart_Chron1 Oresme_Ycon
Deschamps_Oe3
Deschamps_Mirr
ErReims_Visions
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 197
Gerson_Poemesfr
Mezieres_Griseld
Premierfait_Dec
Fig. 4 The ten communities detected in the combined corpus of Christine and her contemporaries by stylometric analysis
198 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
des dames make up a community of stylometric similiarity; while it
is true these works were written at roughly the same time, they are
highly disparate works. Is it possible that the signal picked up by sty-
lometric analysis here is purely temporal, or is additional thought
required? Furthermore, most of her later prose clusters with the works
of Raoul de Presles, no doubt a rich subject for future research. It is
also striking that Christine’s prose passage on the history of the Jews
in the Mutacion de Fortune aligns with the chronicles of Froissart, the
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, the Journal de Nicolas de Baye and
with the Grandes Chroniques de France, works in which the French is
significantly simpler and less burdened with subordinate clauses than
the prose found in the works of Oresme or of the other humanists at
the royal court. Stylometry indeed is suggestive of many possible new
lines of inquiry in Christine studies for future research.
Christine was particularly conscious of register, as her remarks to
Eustache Deschamps reveal: Te suppliant que a desplaisance / Ne te
tourt se adés plaisance / Ay qu’em singulier nom je parle / A toy, car je
l’ay apris par le / Stille clergial de quoy ceulx usent / Qui en science leurs
temps usent (Epistre a Eustache Morel 20). Stylometric analysis of the
literary production of her contemporaries who passed their time en
science reveals that Christine’s prose works were very much at the core
of stille clergial. However, even this stille clergial was hardly homoge-
nous. Traditional stylistics identified four styles for Christine – clerical,
allegorical, legal-juridical and courtly styles – whereas stylometrics
strongly suggest the inadequacy of these labels. A brief comparison
of Groups Four and Eight reveals that Gerson’s prose has an affinity
with that of Jean Courtecuisse, Nicolas de Gonesse and Jacques de
Legrand, all clerics like he, whereas Oresme’s influential works clus-
ter with those of Évrart de Conty, the personal physician of Charles V,
and with the anonymous translation of Vegetius done in 1380. The
latter group suggests closeness in space, time and intellectual orienta-
tion: they were both at the royal court, writing between 1370‑1380
and participated in the revival of Aristotle. This conclusion, above
all, calls for more digital textual research on medieval French texts,
in particular in order to understand better the nature and evolution
of French prose in the late 14th and early 15th century. It is above all
important that future research recognizes the possibility that a single
author can exhibit widely disparate styles.
Christine de Pizan, Œuvres poétiques, ed. M. Roy, op. cit., v. 2, p. 296 ; v. 13-18.
20
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 199
Appendice
Primary Sources Used for Stylometric Analysis (including the
abbreviations used in network visualisations)
Anon_BourgeoisdeParis.txt
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris de 1405 à 1449, ed. C. Beaune, Paris,
LGF, 1990 (Lettres gothiques).
Anon_Eschecsamoureux
Die Liebesgarten-Allegorie der échecs amoureux. Kritische Ausgabe und
Kommentar, ed. Chr. Kraft, Berne, Lang, 1976.
Anon_GrandesChroniques1.txt
Anon_GrandesChroniques2.txt
Anon_GrandesChroniques3.txt
Anon_GrandesChroniques4.txt
Les grandes chroniques de France, selon que elles sont conservées en l’église
de Saint-Denis en France, ed. P. Paris, Paris, Techener, 1836‑1838,
6 vol. [Here only the first four volumes have been used.]
Anon_Miroir des dames.txt
Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne, Édition critique du
ms. 11203‑04 (2305) de la Bibliothèque Royale de Bruxelles, ed. Kr. de
Bois, Bruxelles, ULB, 1986, mémoire de master inédit.
Anon_NostreBenoitSauveur.txt
La Vie de Nostre Benoit Sauveur Ihesuscrist and la Saincte Vie de
Nostre Dame, ed. M. Meiss and E. H. Beatson, University Park,
Pennsylvania State UP, 1990.
Anon_OvideMoralise.txt
Ovide moralisé, poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, ed. C. de
Boer, Amsterdam, Müller, 1915‑1938, 5 vol. [The first two volumes,
1915 and 1920, covering the translation of Metamorphoses I-VI have
been used here].
Anon_PassionIsabeau.txt
La Passion Isabeau, une édition du manuscrit Fr. 966 de la Bibliothèque
Nationale de Paris, ed. E. E. DuBruck, Berne, Lang, 1990.
Anon_Vegece_1380.txt
Le Livre de l’art de chevalerie de Vegece, traduction. anonyme de 1380,
ed. L. Löfstedt et al., Helsinki, Finnish Academy of Sciences, 1989.
200 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
Baye_ Journal.txt
Journal de Nicolas de Baye, greffier du Parlement de Paris, 1400‑1417,
ed. A. Tuetey, Paris, Renouard, 1885‑1888, 2 vol.
Bouvet_Arbre.txt
Honoré Bovet, L’arbre des batailles, ed. E. Nys, Brussels, Muquardt,
1883.
Christine de Pizan
CdP_Lyric I
CdP_Lyric II
CdP_Lyric III
Christine de Pizan, Œuvres poétiques, ed. M. Roy, Paris, Didot,
1886‑1896, 3 vol.
CdP_Oraisons en vers
Oroyson Notre Dame, XV Joyes Nostre Dame, Oroyson de Nostre
Seigneur, ibid., vol. 3, p. 1‑26.
CdP_Chemin
Christine de Pizan, Le chemin de longue étude, ed. A. Tarnowski,
Paris, LGF, 2000 (Lettres gothiques).
CdP_Advision
Christine de Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. Chr. Reno
and L. Dulac, Paris, Champion 2001 (Études christinennes 6).
CdP_DucVraisAmans
Le livre du duc des vrais amans, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. M. Roy, op. cit.,
vol. 3, p. 59‑208.
CdP_Othea
Transcription of the manuscript London, BL, Harley 4431,
fol. 95a-141c, online (The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript [http://
www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/]).
CdP_Othea Verse
Transcription of the manuscript London, BL, Harley 4431,
fol. 95a-141c, online (The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript [http://
www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/]).
CdP_Epistres Rose
Transcription of the manuscript London, BL, Harley 4431,
fol. 237a-254a, on line (The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript [http://
www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/]).
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 201
CdP_Mutacion
Christine de Pizan, Le livre de la mutacion de Fortune, ed.
S. Solente, Paris, Picard, 1959‑1966 (SATF), 4 vol.
CdP_Mutacion/Juifs
Ibid., IV, xix Item, des Juifs, vol. 2, p. 156‑170.
CdP_Charles V
Christine de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy
Charles V, ed. S. Solente, Paris, Champion, 1936‑1940, 2 vol.
CdP_EpistreRoyne
A. K. Kennedy, « Christine de Pizan’s Epistre a la reine 1405 »,
Revue des langues romanes, 92 (1988), p. 253‑264.
CdP_Cité
Christine de Pizan, La Città delle Dame, ed. P. Caraffi and
E. J. Richards, Milan, Luni, 1997 [5th ed. 2010].
CdP_Trois Vertus
Christine de Pizan, Le livre des trois Vertus, ed. Ch. C. Willard
and É. Hicks, Paris, Champion, 1989 (Bibliothèque du xv e siècle 50).
CdP_Prudence
Transcription of the manuscript London, BL, Harley 4431,
fol. 268a-287c, online (The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript [http://
www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/]).
CdP_Policie
Christine de Pizan, Le livre du corps de policie, ed. A. J. Kennedy,
Paris, Champion, 1998 (Études christiniennes 1).
CdP_Sept Psaumes
Christine de Pizan, Les sept psaumes allégorisés. A Critical Edition
from the Brussels and Paris Manuscripts, ed. R. R. Rains, Washington
D.C., Catholic U. of America P., 1965.
CdP_Fais d’Armes
Chr. M. Laennec, Christine Antygrafe. Authorship and Self in the
Prose Works of Christine de Pisan, with an Edition of B.N. Ms. 603 « Le
Livre des Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie », PhD Dissertation, Yale UP,
New Haven, 1988.
CdP_Lamentacion
A. J. Kennedy, « La Lamentacion sur les maux de la France de
Christine de Pisan », in Mélanges de langue et littérature françaises
202 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance offerts à Monsieur Charles Foulon,
Rennes, Université de Haute-Bretagne, 1980, vol. 1, p. 177‑185.
CdP_Paix
Christine de Pizan, The Book of Peace, ed. K. Green, C. J. Mews
and J. Pinder, University Park, Pennsylvania State UP, 2008.
CdP_Prison
Christine de Pizan, The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, with
an Epistle to the Queen of France, and Lament on the Evils of the Civil
War, ed. J. Wisman, New York, Garland, 1985.
CdP_Heures
Les Heures de la Contemplation de la Passion de Notre Seigneur, trans-
cript from the forthcoming edition by L. Dulac, R. Stuip and
E. J. Richards Paris, BnF, nafr. 10059, fol. 114r-144v.
CdP_Ditie
Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, ed. A. J. Kennedy and
K. Varty, Oxford, Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and
Literature, 1977.
Collectif_EvangilesQuenoilles.txt
Les évangiles des quenouilles, ed. M. Jeay, Paris, Vrin, 1985.
Conty_Harmonie.txt
Évrart de Conty, L’harmonie des sphères. Encyclopédie d’astronomie
et de musique extraite du commentaire sur « Les echecs amoureux » (xv e
s.), attribué à Évrart de conty, ed. R. Hyatte and M. Ponchard-
Hyatte, Berne, Peter Lang, 1986.
Conty_JeuEschecs.txt
Évrart de Conty, Le livre des eschez amoureux moralisés, ed.
Fr. Guichard-Tesson and Br. Roy, Montréal, CERES, 1993.
Courtecuisse_Passion.txt
G. Hasenohr, « Le sermon sur la Passion de Jean Courtecuisse », Le
moyen français, 16 (1985).
Courtecuisse_PsSeneque.txt
Seneque des iiii vertus. La « Formula honestae vitae » de Martin de
Braga (pseudo-Sénèque) traduite et glosée par Jean Courtecuisse, ed.
H. Haselbach, Berne, Lang, 1975.
Courtecuisse_Sermons.txt
Jean Courtecuisse, L’œuvre oratoire, ed. G. Di Stefano, Turin,
Giappichelli, 1969.
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 203
Deguilleville_Pelerinage.txt
Guillaume de Deguileville, Le pelerinage de vie humaine, éd.
J. J. Stürzinger, Londres, The Roxburghe Club, 1893.
Deschamps_Œuvres1.txt
Deschamps_Œuvres2.txt
Deschamps_Œuvres3.txt
Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Queux de Saint-
Hilaire and G. Raynaud, Paris, Didot, 1878, 9 vol. [We have used
the first three volumes, all published in 1878, in our network visuali-
zation: vol. 1 Balades de moralitez ; vol. 2 Balades de moralitez, Lays ;
vol. 3 Chançons royaulx, Balades amoureuses].
Deschamps_miroir
Le miroir de mariage, poème inédit d’Eustache Deschamps, ed.
Pr. Tarbé, Reims, Brissart-Binet, 1865.
ErmineReims_Visions .txt
Entre Dieu et Satan. Les visions d’Ermine de Reims (+1396), recueillies
et transcrites par Jean Le Graveur, ed. Cl. Arnaud-Gillet, Florence,
Galluzzo, 1997.
Foulechat_PolicratI_III_1372.txt
Denis Foulechat, Le policratique de Jean de Salisbury, 1372, livres
I-III, ed. Ch. Brucker, Genève, Droz, 1994 (Publications romanes
and françaises 209).
Froissart_Chroniques1.txt
Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Livre III (du Voyage en Béarn à la cam-
pagne de Gascogne) et Livre IV (1389‑1400), ed. P. F. Ainsworth and
A. Varvaro, Paris, LGF, 2004 (Lettres gothiques).
Froissart_BuissondeJonesce.txt
Jean Froissart, Le joli buisson de jonece, ed. A. Fourrier, Genève,
Droz, 1975 (Textes littéraires français 222).
Froissart_Paradysdamour.txt
Jean Froissart, Le paradis d’amour. L’orloge amoureus, ed.
P. F. Dembowski, Genève, Droz, 1986 (Textes littéraires français 339).
Froissart_Meliador
Jean Froissart, Méliador, roman comprenant les poésies lyriques
de Wenceslas de Bohême, duc de Luxembourg et de Brabant, ed.
A. Longnon, Paris, F. Didot, 1895‑1899 (SATF), 3 vol.
204 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
Gerson_Œuvresfrancaises.txt
Jean Gerson, Œuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux, Paris, Desclée,
1960‑1973, 10 vol. [Œuvres françaises, vol. 7/1 (1966) and vol. 7/2
(1968)].
Gerson_Canticordium.txt
Jean Gerson, Canticordium du pèlerin, in Œuvres françaises, op. cit.,
vol. 7/1 (1966), p. 112‑139.
Gerson_ContreTignonville.txt
Jean Gerson, Discours au roi contre Guillaume de Tignonville – Diligite
justitiam, in Œuvres françaises, op. cit., vol. 7/2 (1968), p. 598‑614.
Gerson_Homelies.txt
Jean Gerson, Œuvres françaises, op. cit., vol. 7/2, passim.
Gerson_JeanPetit.txt
Jean Gerson, Discours au roi contre Jean Petit – Rex in sempiternum
vive, in Œuvres françaises, op. cit., vol. 7/2 (1968), p. 1005‑1030.
Gerson_Montaigne.txt
Jean Gerson, La Montaigne de contemplation, in Œuvres françaises,
op. cit., vol. 7/1 (1966), p. 16‑54.
Gerson_Poemesfrancais.txt
Jean Gerson, Œuvres françaises, op. cit., passim.
Gerson_Traictie
Jean Gerson [?], De la mort et passion de Notre-Seigneur Iesuchrist,
in R. Thomassy, Jean Gerson et le grand schisme d’Occident, Paris,
Librairie catholiques de Périsse Frères, 1852, p. 338‑369.
Gervais_Fauvel.txt
Le roman de Fauvel, ed. A. Strubel, Paris, LGF, 2012 (Lettres
gothiques).
Gonesse_PlutarqueRemede.txt
G. Di Stefano, « La découverte de Plutarque en France au début
du xve siècle (traduction du De remediis irae ajoutée par Nicolas de
Gonesse à sa traduction de Valère Maxime) », Romania, 86 (1965),
p. 463‑519.
JLeGrand_ArchilogeSophie.txt
Jacques Legrand, Archiloge Sophie et Livre des bonnes moeurs, ed.
E. Beltran, Paris, Champion, 1986 (Bibliothèque du xv e siècle 49).
The Different Styles of Christine de Pizan 205
JLeGrand_BonnesMeurs.txt
Ibid.
Machaut_Œuvres1.txt
Machaut_Œuvres2.txt
Machaut_Œuvres3.txt
Guillaume de Machaut, Œuvres, ed. E. Hoepffner, Paris,
Champion, 1908‑1921 (SATF), 3 vol.
Machaut_Navarre.txt
Guillaume de Machaut, The Judgment of the King of Navarre, ed.
R. Barton Palmer, New York, Garland, 1988.
Machaut_PrisedAlexandrie.txt
Guillaume de Machaut, La Prise d’Alixandre. The Taking of
Alexandria, ed. R. Barton Palmer, New York, Routledge, 2002.
Mezieres_EpistreLamentable.txt
Philippe de Mézières, Une epistre lamentable et consolatoire, adres-
sée en 1397 à Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne, sur la défaite de
Nicopolis (1396), ed. Ph. Contamine and J. Paviot, Genève, Droz,
2008 (SHF).
Mezieres_Griseldis.txt
Philippe de Mézières, Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage,
ed. J. B. Williamson, Washington D.C., The Catholic U. of America
P., 1993.
Mezieres_Songe.txt
Philippe de Mézières, Le Songe du Vieil Pelerin, ed.
G. W. Coopland, Cambridge, UP, 1969, 2 vol.
Oresme_Divinacion
G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers. A Study of His
« Livre de divinacions », Liverpool, Liverpool UP, 1952.
Oresme_Ethiques
Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de Ethique d’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut,
New York, Stechert, 1940.
Oresme_ Ciel
Nicole Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, ed. A. D. Menut and
A. J. Denomy, Madison, U. of Wisconsin P., 1968.
206 Earl Jeffrey Richards, David Joseph Wrisley & Liliane Dulac
Oresme_Politiques
Nicole Oresme, Le livre de politiques d’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society NS 60 (1970).
Oresme_Yconomique
Nicole Oresme, Le livre de yconomique d’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society NS 47 (1957),
p. 783‑853.
Porete_Mirouer.txt
Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples ames, ed. R. Guarnieri,
Turnhout, Brepols, 1986.
Premierfait_Boccace.txt
Laurent de Premierfait, Traduction du Decameron de Boccace
(1411‑1414), ed. G. Di Stefano, Montréal, CERES, 1998 (Biblio
thèque du moyen français 3).
Premierfait_Viellesse.txt
Laurent de Premierfait, Livre de vieillesse, ed. St. Marzano,
Turnhout, Brepols, 2009 (TCC 6).
Presles_Cite.txt
La Cité de Dieu de saint Augustin traduite par Raoul de Presles
(1371‑1375), Livres I à III. Édition du manuscrit BnF, fr. 22912, ed.
O. Bertrand, Paris, Champion, 2013, vol. 1/1.
Presles_Dignete.txt
M. Goldast, La question est telle, assavoir se la dignité pontifical et
imperial ou royal… [Quaestio inter clericum et militem], in Monarchia
Sancti Romani Imperii, Hannover, Conrad Biermann, 1611 [repr.
Graz, Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1960, vol. 1, p. 34‑57].
Tignonville_DitzMoraulx.txt
R. Eder, « Tignonvillana inedita [Les ditz moraulx des philosophes] »,
Romanische Forschungen, 33 (1915), p. 851‑1022
Tremaugon_SongeduVergier.txt
[Évrart de Trémaugon], Le songe du vergier, édité d’après le manus-
crit Royal 19 C IV de la British Library, ed. M. Schnerb-Lièvre,
Paris, CNRS, 1982, 2 vol.
Earl Jeffrey Richards