Embroidering “Hir Word”: The Assembly of Ladies, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Écriture Féminine

The authorship of the anonymous Middle English poem, The Assembly of Ladies, has been a locus of long-standing critical contestation, and amidst this debate, medieval feminist scholars have continuously and cogently advocated for the poem’s female authorship. Building on these feminist scholarships and simultaneously aiming to move beyond the scope of existing studies, whose discussion has often been limited to whether the poem was written by a woman, this article makes a deliberate and experimental decision in assuming The Assembly’s female authorship and provides a particular feminist reading of the poem enabled by this assumption. This article places the Assembly author alongside her foremother, Christine de Pizan, in their shared struggle to conceptualize and claim for themselves the authorship by and for women, or in other words, to establish a fifteenth-century equivalent of what twentieth-century feminists termed the écriture féminine. In particular, this article focuses on the Assembly author’s employment of clothes-related imagery as a signifier of women’s sexual difference and argues that within her metonymic use of embroidering (the crafting of the textile) to signify literary endeavor (the crafting of the textual), we can find an emulative inheritance of Christine de Pizan’s pro-feminist literary undertakings, whereby Christine utilized the idea of clothmaking as a specifically feminine mode of storytelling to reframe the male-dominated literary culture of the Middle Ages in feminine terms.