“Bad Counselors are a Threat to the State”: Ethical Imperative and Political Warning in Christine de Pizan’s “The Book of the Peace”

The article is devoted to the study of the first part of Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Peace (Livre de la paix) and explores author’s strategies for instructing the young Dauphin Louis of Guienne in the “art of statecraft” and also to warn him about “bad advisors”. Christine not only presents her own (albeit original and sometimes traditional) ethical system in a consistent and convincing manner, denouncing sycophants and flatterers and establishing a hierarchy of virtues that collectively define the ideal monarch, but also engages in “political warning”. Drawing on the rich literary tradition of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as her personal experience (it should be noted that Christine was already in her mid-fifties when she wrote this treatise), her knowledge of history, social thought, and her understanding of the “laws and cycles” of court life, party politics, and intellectual trends, de Pizan was able to create a form of “speculum regis” that was both concise and accessible to an educated reader. In fact, she was addressing the future monarch, whom she saw or wanted to see as the heir and successor to the “great cause” of Charles V. As a scholar who defied the rules of the cruel “male world”, she made a name for herself with her Book of the Peace — a complex and profound ethical and political treatise.