of the earliest society, that they should choose a prince to settle disputes
and punish crimes, and to ‘divide his people into different estates’,
appointing some to work the land, some to learn jurisprudence and help
princes make laws which would ensure a just order in the chose
publique, and some to cultivate the sciences of the causes behind natural
appearances. Aristotle’s authority is invoked for the need of people of a
middling condition between the very rich and the very poor if ‘the state
of society’ is to be kept in balance. The office of the king was ‘closest to
God in the order of estates’ because on earth he was ‘the first cause’.^68
By the time she wrote her ‘Book of the Body Politic’ (Le Livre du
Corps de Policie) in 1406–7, Christine could no longer maintain that
the foundations which Charles V laid to ‘the most brilliant kingdom
ever seen’ remained unshaken despite his successor’s tragic malady, for
the new duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, had moved to seize
control of the dauphin and was about to have the duke of Orleans
murdered in a Paris street. She now resorts to the organic metaphor to
recall the estates to their responsibilities to each other. The prince is the
head and ‘sovereign’ and from him should come particular ‘establish-
ings’ (to borrow a word used by an English translation of the work
made about 1470), just as from any person’s mind come the external
works which the body’s members achieve. The second part deals with
the knights and nobles who are the hands and arms and should defend
the chose publiqueand correct the commons, the third part with the rest
of the people who make up the belly, feet, and legs. Remarkably,
Christine places the clergy here and makes them the first of three estates
of townsmen, above the merchants and the craftsmen and labourers. All
are necessary to the body, the labouring feet most of all. In this work
sympathy is shown for the burdens le menu peuple bear, and the
‘murmuration’ that once (i.e. in 1358) occurred between the belly and
the members, causing the limbs to waste away, is partly blamed on the
failure of the great of the land to do their duty.^69
Christine de Pisan’s third major political treatise, Le Livre de la Paix,
was begun to celebrate a peace patched up in the summer of 1412
between the Burgundians and their opponents, and again its first part
concerns the king, in particular in his relations with his councillors, who
France as l’état monarchique 279(^68) P. S. Lewis, ‘Society and Sovereignty in Fifteenth Century France’, in his Essays in Later
Medieval French History, 12, 24–5; Cazelles, Société politique... sous Jean le Bon et Charles
V, 48–51; Christine de Pisan, Le Livre des Faits et Bonnes Moeurs du roi Charles V le Sage,
introduced by E. Hicks and T. Moreau (Paris, 1997), 111–15 (part 1, caps. 2, 3), 204–6 (part
2, cap. 6), 210, 212, 296 (part 3, cap. 63).
(^69) Christine de Pisan, Le Livre des Faits, 142–3, 207–10; Le Livre du Corps de Policie, ed.
R. H. Lucas (Geneva, 1967), 1–3, 103, 166–76, 191–2, 199; The Middle English Translation
of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, ed. D. Bornstein (Heidelberg, 1977), 40, 166;
cf. The Book of the Body Politic, tr. K. L. Forhan (Cambridge UP, 1994); Lewis, Later
Medieval France, 89 n., 103 n., 267, 284, 289; Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 219–20.