Manifestações do divino em A cidade das damas: as fronteiras do gênero em Christine de Pizan a partir do diálogo com Julian de Norwich e Margery Kempe nos séculos XIV-XV

Abstract

This research consists of a gender analysis of the female representations deconstructed in the literary work of the Italian/French Christine de Pizan, The City of Ladies (1405). The aim of analyzing these deconstructions was to expand understanding of gender identity, based on Judith Butler's theory, established in this historical context from medieval literature. So this understanding helped us to perceive these possibilities also in the works of the English works Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (1390) and Margery Kempe, The Book of the Margery Kempe (1440). This dialogue, which we treat as the points of intersection between the narratives, as we compare the narratives of the English authors, today considered mystics, with Christine's. This dialogue, therefore, enabled us to see a favorable context for the development of these works in this period of transition from the end of the Middle Ages to the Modern period. Weaving from the manifestations of the divine, which we use Chartier's concept to understand as representations, we can elucidate subjective processes of identity constitution based on experiences with the divine, which the characters describe to us throughout their narratives. In this way, when we analyze Christine's Divine Ladies as new proposals for a divine, we can point out how the works of Julian and Kempe also manage to justify thinking of the divine as feminine. We recognize the limits of women's actions in this Christian context and it was precisely this limitation that led to our investigation. In this work, we sought to use a gender analysis to demonstrate these imperative structures that individuals need to perform, established in the processes of gendering individuals. Therefore, the social and cultural boundaries that gender can help are found in understanding how subjects perceive within this dichotomous dynamic of man and woman and how they relate, based on this assumption, to their social reality.