Solomon au feminin: (Re)translating Proverbs 31 in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames

In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville defines the interpres, or translator, as one situated “between two languages” as well as one who stands “between God, whom he interprets, and men, to whom he reveals the divine mysteries.” Rita Copeland points to this quote as emblematic of the conceptual inseparability of translation and glossing in the Middle Ages, where these related hermeneutic practices shaped the reception of texts and the conversation surrounding them. The interpretive “standing between” was in some sense the necessary yet problematic condition for the “carrying across” of translation. By repackaging ancient Latin texts for a contemporary French audience, medieval translators not only recoded them “word for word” or “sense for sense”; their translations brought old texts into dialogue with contemporary debates, and as such, filled an important social function. In framing that dialogue, translators did not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the texts they translated, nor were they bound by modern standards of objectivity or of “fidelity” to an “authentic” original or its presumed authorial intent. Indeed, translators who failed to properly situate controversial material within a culturally acceptable moral framework could face public backlash. For example, Jean Le Fèvre frames his late fourteenth-century Livre de Leesce, a verse-by-verse critique of Matheolus’s misogynistic Liber lamentationem, as a response to critics who read his earlier translation of the same work without commentary as an implicit endorsement of Matheolus’s vitriol against women. The medieval Bible translator, like the vernacular preacher, was doubly an interpres in Isidore’s definition, one who mediated both words and “mysteries,” or spiritual meanings, according to the perceived needs and aptitudes of a lay audience. The Bible