An allegorical citadel built stone by stone by three crowned ladies — Reason, Rectitude and Justice — and peopled with virtuous women drawn from history, scripture and legend (1405)
Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, The Book of the City of Ladies
Philosophy
Christine de Pizan
c. 1364 – c. 1430 · Italian-born French
Late medieval moral and political thought; the querelle des femmes
Christine de Pizan was the first woman in Europe known to have earned her living entirely by her pen, and the first to argue at book length against the misogyny of the learned tradition. Widowed at twenty-five and left with three children, a mother and a niece to support, she wrote poetry, political counsel, military law and moral philosophy for the French court. Her allegorical defence of women's capacities, built as a walled city, is now read as the founding text of the debate over women in European letters.
How to spot them
- ▸Reason, Rectitude and Justice, the three crowned ladies who build an allegorical city
- ▸The querelle des femmes, and the earlier quarrel over a famous allegorical poem about a rose
- ▸Widowed at 25 by plague; the first professional woman writer in France
- ▸Her verse on the Maid of Orléans, finished in 1429 — the only French poem about her written in her lifetime
- ▸She supervised the copying and illumination of her own manuscripts
Key works
A practical sequel offering conduct advice to women of every rank, from queens and princesses down to peasants, servants and prostitutes (1405)
Le Livre des Trois Vertus, in English The Treasure of the City of Ladies
A verse celebration of a teenage soldier's relief of Orléans and the crowning at Reims, finished in July 1429 — the only French poem about her written while she was alive (1429)
Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, the author's last known work
A manual of warfare and the law of arms, drawing heavily on Vegetius, later printed in English by William Caxton at a king's command (1410)
Le Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie; Caxton printed it in 1489 as The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye
An exchange of letters with royal secretaries attacking a hugely popular allegorical poem about a garden and a flower for its slander of women (1401–1403)
Her part in the querelle du Roman de la Rose, aimed chiefly at the continuation by Jean de Meun
An autobiographical allegory in which Fortune's touch turns a grieving widow into a man, so that she can steer her own ship (1403)
Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune
A mirror for princes written for the dauphin, setting out the duties of a king, and the body politic as a body with head, hands and feet (1407)
Le Livre du Corps de Policie, The Book of the Body Politic
Key ideas
- Women's apparent inferiority is the result of exclusion from education, not of nature: given schooling, girls learn as quickly as boys
- The authority of learned men is not self-certifying; if their books contradict what a woman knows of herself, the books are wrong
- The city as an image of argument: each refuted slander is a stone, and the walls are built from reasoned reply
- Peace is the first duty of a ruler; her late political writing pleads against the civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Venice; her father Tommaso da Pizzano was called to Paris as astrologer and physician to Charles V
- •Married Étienne du Castel at fifteen and was widowed by plague in 1390, aged about twenty-five
- •Left with three children, her mother and a niece to support, she turned to writing and law suits over her husband's estate
- •She oversaw the production of her own illuminated manuscripts; the so-called "Book of the Queen" (British Library Harley MS 4431) was made for Isabeau of Bavaria
- •Her defence of women answers both Jean de Meun and Boccaccio's catalogue of famous women
- •She retired to the Dominican abbey at Poissy, where her daughter was a nun, around 1418, after the Burgundian seizure of Paris
- •Her death is usually dated to about 1430, shortly after the Maid's capture and execution
- •Simone de Beauvoir singled her out as the first woman to take up her pen in defence of her sex
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Sources
- Joshua J. Mark, World History Encyclopedia — Christine de Pizan
- Charity Cannon Willard — Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works