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(Sponsor: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship)

"Je n'i fais riens fors reciter": Christine de Pizan's Contradictory Critique of Citation in Le Débat sur le Roman de la rose -- Monica Antoinette Sokol, Univ. of Virginia

(Ok, this is going to be really really solidly post-modernist. Deep breath.)

Translation: So this misogynistic medieval author is all "hey, don't blame me -- I'm just working from woman-hatin' sources" and Christine is all "hey, I'm a woman, so you should listen to my experience, not some old dusty sources" but then she's all "here are some other examples of woman-hatin' texts" but the paper's author is all "so, isn't she doing the same thing here? passing the buck on the woman-hatin' back to her sources while promulgating the meme?" but it's a trap, isn't it? because you can't break the paradigm if you invoke it in order to dispute it? Step outside the box, Christine! Build your own Cité, don't try to fix someone else's.

Layered Realities, Virtual Pilgrimages: Gender, Space, and Text in Christine de Pizan's Chemin de long estude -- Erin Casey, Univ. at Albany

Women's means of claiming authority in various genres and contexts. Christine as author is able to claim authority within her text simply by the act of authorship. (Lots of metaphoric rhetoric about the "path of study" and motion as purposeful action and spaces/locations as states and accomplishments, but beyond the manipulation of the metaphor I'm having trouble getting at the content.) Distinction between three spaces: the "lived world" in which the journey starts, then the allegorical world which reflects the same "reality" but isn't constrained by practicalities, then the world of divine truth. (More metaphoric rhetoric about motion and spaces.) Christine's metaphoric journey through knowledge is mapped onto a geographic journey to iconic locations in her world: Jerusalem, Constantinople, etc. By appropriating locations textually, she creates a form of geographic/allegorical ownership that side-steps the inherent violence of physical appropriation in the lived world.

A Woman's Place: Gendered Environment in The Book of the City of Ladies -- Susan Jeffers, Abilene Christian Univ.

Scratched. (Dammit. It was the most interesting looking of the three.)