Sea Voyage and the Ship as Poetic Metaphors for Pre-Modern Women Poets Reflecting on Their Own Life and on Love: Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg

Since antiquity, poets have regularly referred to the voyage, to shipwrecks, and to the danger of the wild sea. In that context, the dominant voices have been those of male writers, but female poets have equally been interested in and dedicated to this topos. Through a comparative analysis of the works of the late medieval French poet Christine de Pizan and the sonnets of the German Baroque poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, this study argues that the disastrous experience of a ship being crushed at sea and the notion of sailing itself served these women well when reflecting upon their uncertain and changing life destinies with all the implied catastrophes, conflicts, and challenges. This paper might well be the very first analysis of the texts by these two women poets in tandem who indirectly communicated with each other across the centuries and addressed very similar concerns by means of relying on the same or closely related metaphors. However, the purpose here is not to probe possible connections, such as Catharina perhaps having had available a copy of Christine's writings, which might be rather unlikely, although the former was certainly well educated. Instead, the emphasis rests on the commonly shared topoi and tropes related to the ship, the voyage, and the dangers at sea, which proved to be relevant to these female poets since the metaphors associated with these themes served particularly well for deeper reflections on the problems in life. To undergird this argument, we can also draw from the evidence in some of the lais of Marie de France where the voyage brings about a fundamental change in the protagonists' lives. Marie even includes the topic of the near shipwreck that mirrors the emotional catastrophe emerging at that moment.