Throughout her authorial career, Christine de Pizan, though Italian by birth, was identified strongly with the cause of the French royal house, whose rule was challenged in the Hundred Years War by English claimants to the throne and by their Burgundian allies. Indeed, in her Diti de Jehanne dArc, composed, according to the poemsfinal stanza, on 31 July 1429 following Joan of Arc s triumphs in raising the siege of Orlans and in enabling Charles s coronation in Rheims, the English appear in a particularly negative light. Christine calls them, for instance, a treacherous lot and says to the English, Go and beat your drums elsewhere, unless you want to taste death, like your companions, whom wolves may well devour (p. 47).1 In spite of Christines anti-English attitudes, her writings were quite popular in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period in which England and France were nearly perennially at odds and in which the legacy of Joan of Arc remained a potent force in the English imagination, as the attention given to Joan in Tudor chronicles makes clear. Thomas Hoccleve translated Christines lEpistre au dieu dAmours as the Letter of Cupid in 1402. Stephen Scrope translated Christines Letter of Othea to Hector in 1450, and the Othea appears in two other English translations over the next hundred years. William Worcester drew on Christines Book of the Deeds of Arms and Chivalry in his Boke of Noblesse (which was written in 1450 and then revised in 1475 in connection with Edward IVsefforts to retake English territory in France). And, in 1521, Henry Pepwell published Brian Anslaystranslation of the Book of the City of Ladies.2
