The coolest medieval woman you've never heard of

Christine de Pizan on Circe, Medusa, and other virtuous ladies

Christine de Pizan (and her dog)

Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430), born Cristina da Pizzano, was an Italian-born Parisian scholar who is widely regarded as Europe’s first professional female writer.

Christine’s father, a learned man employed by the Venetian aristocracy, took on the task of providing her with a classical education—something not conventionally afforded to women of the 14^th century. She moved to France with her family at the age of four when her father accepted a position as King Charles V’s court astrologer and lived there for the rest of her life.

After losing her father and husband within a year of each other, Christine, then 25 years old, was left without any means to support herself, her three children, and her mother. In an unprecedented move, she refused to remarry, and took up a position as a court writer for King Charles VI. Her literary career lasted over 30 years and she produced poetry and prose works for numerous members of the French monarchy. A fervent French nationalist, she maintained close ties with each branch of the royal family even as tensions grew between the different factions and the country was plunged into civil war.

Christine de Pizan presenting her book to Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France.

Christine’s oeuvre includes some of the first known poetry about widowhood. She also published love ballads and guides to political theory, war strategy, and social conduct, though she is best known for her writings about misogyny, some of the first of their kind. Her 1405 allegorical prose piece The Book of the City of Ladies is her most significant work on the matter and has led some modern scholars to call her the world’s first known feminist.

Written as an allegorical dream dialogue, the story opens with Christine alone in her study as she begins to read the work Lamentations by the venerable, renowned author Mathéolus. Though she has not yet read this particular work, she is excited because she has heard that it contains passages about respect for women. No sooner does she open the book, though, than does she begin to realise that the opposite is true. Upset and frustrated with the endless stream of literature written by men to criticise women, Christine begins to fall into a pit of self-pity and despair as she struggles to reconcile what she has read with the virtues of her female associates and her own self worth.

I considered other women whose company I frequently kept […], hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realize how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women. Yet I still argued vehemently against women, saying that it would be impossible that so many famous men—such solemn scholars, possessed of such deep and great understanding, so clear-sighted in all things, as it seemed—could have spoken falsely on so many occasions.

Christine lamenting in her study

As she grows more and more convinced that womanhood is nothing but a curse and burden, Christine appeals to God to tell her why she has been put into such an abominable body. Suddenly, the room is bathed in bright light and three beautiful women appear to her, introducing themselves as the Ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice.

Lady Reason chastises Christine gently for her unwillingness to think more independently and tells her that women of history have suffered because there has been no one to defend them against their assailants. Like a castle without walls, they’ve been left exposed to the cruelty of the other sex. She comforts Christine and affirms her value as a woman and her commitment to the truth. We learn, then, that the three sisters aren’t just here to cheer Christine up: they have a mission for her. She’s going to create the defence for women that has been lacking for so long. She’s going to build the City of Ladies. 

Leading Christine to the Field of Letters, where her edifice will stand, Lady Reason implores Christine to take up the ‘pick of [her] understanding’ and the ‘trowel of [her] pen’ to begin their work. A rhetorical city as much as a literal one, it is to be constructed of Christine’s written responses to the treatment of women in society and literature. In each part of the book, a different virtue compels Christine to build a new part of the city, providing her with materials in the form of discourse on famous women of history and the merits of womanhood.

Christine and Lady Reason at work

The structure is repetitive and highly typical of its genre, but over a few hundred pages Christine tackles a remarkable range of topics. Through the voice of the three Ladies, she asserts women’s equal intellectual abilities and skill in the arts, sciences, and leadership. She speaks frankly and fiercely about domestic abuse, sexual assault, emotional neglect, and other hardships suffered by women. She denounces notions that women are capable of deserving or enjoying rape and accusations that women wear beautiful clothing to attract male attention. She names 165 praiseworthy women from history and mythology, perhaps half of whom are pagan or Hebrew, including the Amazons, Sappho, Penelope, Esther, Judith, and 37 female martyr saints. She denies that women are by nature more unfaithful, cowardly, greedy, and cruel than men, presenting examples of men who displayed those traits and virtuous women who did not. The Book of the City of Ladies is deeply personal, too, with frequent references to the virtues of French and Italian women, widows, female writers, and Saint Christine, the author’s patron saint.

Circe, Sappho, and the Amazons

The book exhibits Christine’s impressive knowledge of classical literature, and she often takes liberties with female figures from Greek and Roman folklore. Particularly unique is her reframing of conventional symbols of female wickedness such Medusa and Circe in a sympathetic light: perhaps the first known “reclaiming” of the female villain in an anti-misogynist work and certainly one of the only examples before the 20^th century. It’s uncannily prescient considering the recent works of Madeleine Miller and other feminist retellings of classical myths.

Similarly, Medusa (or Gorgon) was celebrated for her outstanding beauty. She was a daughter of the very wealthy king Phorcys whose large kingdom was surrounded by the sea. This Medusa, according to the ancient stories, was of such striking beauty that not only did she surpass all other women—which was an amazing and supernatural thing—but she also attracted to herself, because of her pleasing appearance—her long and curly blond hair spun like gold, along with her beautiful face and body—every mortal creature upon whom she looked, so that she seemed to make people immovable. For this reason the fable claimed that they had turned to stone.

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The Book of the City of Ladies remains Christine's best-known piece of writing today. Though relatively few people today have even heard the name Christine de Pizan, a handful of critical editions have been released in past decades as interest in her work experienced a modest 20^th century revival. From the 70s and 80s, Christine has been celebrated as an early feminist by some scholars, though an opposing front argues against using such a reductive label to describe her philosophy. After all, Christine was a woman of her times and an aristocrat who wrote from a place of extreme privilege. Though she was no stranger to financial and personal hardship, she belonged to the world of the upper class for her entire life and seems to have felt quite at home there. Even in The Book of the City of Ladies, arguably a forward-thinking work for its time, not once does she step outside of the power structures of her society. She upholds gender roles and implores ladies to remain chaste and submit to their husbands. She says that women shouldn't become lawyers, not because they aren't smart enough, but because it's just not their place.

Women being welcomed into the City of Ladies

A central figure in Christine's work is the hypothetical "noble lady", a woman defined not by noble birth but by noble conduct. It is on behalf of these women alone that Christine writes. The City of Ladies, it is made clear, is not open to women who are unchaste and unpious. These values have been left behind by much of modern feminism, and Christine's need to qualify a woman's morality before she can be invited into the fold often comes across as conservative and self-righteous to a modern reader.

Thus, Christine’s beliefs may seem to share very little with 21st century feminists. In an attempt to avoid characterising her as such, she has been awarded all sorts of other labels by modern scholars: conservative, traditionalist, monarchist. These approximations, however, gloss over the complexities of gender and social norms in the time of Christine’s life.

The Book of the City of Ladies was written in large part as Christine’s response to The Romance of the Rose, a 20 000-line love poem and arguably the most famous literary work of late medieval France. That Christine vehemently opposed the Romance and even called for it to be burned certainly seems to set her up as a conservative figure—in truth, it’s arguably one of her most sympathetic plights. The Romance of the Rose is told from the perspective of an anonymous male lover who describes courtship as his efforts to pluck the beautiful Rose. At the end of the story, the lover describes the literal deflowering of the Rose in extremely obscene terms:

Though I had to, in due course,
Scrape the bark with a little force,
Since no other means did I know
To win that which I longed for so.
And, in the end, I had, indeed,
Over the bud, spread a little seed

-The Romance of the Rose

The Lover and Rose, from The Romance of the Rose

The sexual content and secular themes of the poem could characterise it as liberal for its time. But the reduction of the female protagonist to a voiceless object and the butt of a joke, violently destroyed for the protagonist's moment of sexual gratification, was objectionable to Christine. Around the turn of the 15^th century, she instigated a fierce debate over the value of the work that raged for several years within the literary community of France. Much of Christine’s writing from this period criticises The Romance of the Rose from a religious perspective, but The Book of the City of Ladies addresses its hateful diatribes against women far more directly.

Man's life is filled with miseries,
Troubles, and ills, on every side,
Induced by the insensate pride
Of women, their demands and plaints
Such trouble cause as life attaints
With miseries manifold; alack!
Hard task hath he who striveth back
To call them to a decent sense
Of modesty and reverence.

-The Romance of the Rose

How many women are there actually, dear friend— and you yourself know— who because of their husbands’ harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens? My God! How many harsh beatings — without cause and without reason how many injuries, how many cruelties, insults, humiliations, and outrages have so many upright women suffered, none of whom cried out for help? And consider all the women who die of hunger and grief with a home full of children, while their husbands carouse dissolutely or go on binges in every tavern all over town, and still the poor women are beaten by their husbands when they return, and that is their supper! What do you say to that? Am I lying?

-The Book of the City of Ladies

The Romance of the Rose was regarded as a comprehensive guide to courtship in medieval France and Christine saw the work and the attitudes it reflected as symptomatic of an abusive culture that allowed men to act with disregard for female wellbeing. In The Book of the City of Ladies and several earlier works, Christine describes what she sees as a widespread issue with male treatment of women. She laments the number of women who she has seen fall victim to deceptive and exploitative behaviour, abandoned thoughtlessly when a more appealing romantic prospect presented itself to their lover or even husband. She extolls the innate virtues of women, who she claims are by nature faithful, loving, and gentle: "Many times women are deceived, because they are simple, and do not think to assume the worst.” She then implores men to preserve these virtues by behaving chivalrously and protecting the weaker gender.

15th century courtship in one of Christine’s de Pizan’s manuscripts

Christine’s characterisation of women as meek and innocent parallels how she presents herself in in debates with male scholars who supported The Romance of the Rose. She seems to want them to perceive her as intellectually inferior to her male peers, even questioning why they would so much as engage with one so insignificant as she. “I do not know why you attack me so much more than others: it is hardly honourable to attack the weakest party. […] In order to eradicate everything you attack me who is nothing but the voice of a little grasshopper.”

“I am not a logician" she writes in one letter to a detractor, as if to invalidate her own argument before she even constructs it. The next paragraph contradicts this as she sets out for him a problem of logical reasoning “If you say yes, it's false. [...] If you tell me no, then you have proved true my proposition". Why was Christine so intent on undermining female authority?

Christine was acutely aware that she was seen as an intruder in the masculine domain of literature and that she could never expect men to engage with her as an equal. By anticipating and affirming their dismissiveness, she absolves herself of any perceived aggression and characterises herself as an unfairly targeted victim. Rather than embrace the role of instigator—which would open her up to even more ad hominem criticism—she slyly justifies her attacks as the self-defence of a poor, innocent woman. Thus, because any attack on her is by nature cruel and undeserved, she is fully justified in responding to her critics with the utmost zeal.

Christine de Pizan instructing men

By extending this framing of innocence and helplessness to all women, Christine invokes an image of women as martyr figures whose innocence and physical weakness—and thereby oppression—are a source of righteousness. This formed the cornerstone of one of her central arguments during the debates over the Romance of the Rose: if women are indeed as weak, flighty, and foolish as the story posits, then surely there is no need for such a lengthy discourse on how to seduce them. Because Christine has taken the stance that women are indeed weak, feeble creatures (although she denies any moral inferiority), then the only possible explanation for The Romance’s existence—and female oppression as a whole—is unprovoked and irrational male cruelty. Almost paradoxically, in characterising women who engage in sexual relationships as innocent victims rather than as guilty harlots, it could be said that she reversed the conventional narrative on female sexuality.

There’s no doubt that much of Christine’s purity politics and gender essentialism were more than mere rhetoric. In her world, female morality was synonymous with chastity and submissiveness, as it would be for centuries to follow. To describe her strictly as a “feminist” would require us to fundamentally alter the term beyond recognition. This is true of probably every woman of Christine’s day. Perhaps it is because of this that scholars have struggled to make sense of her place in the modern world, and see it necessary to qualify celebration of her virtues with condemnation of her shortcomings relative to the feminists who lived 500 years later.

But we don’t need to invite Christine into the 21^st century, where she would probably be rather horrified at what has become of romance and gender roles, not to mention the French monarchy. And though we can revisit her work to find new meanings and perspectives, we do her a disservice if, in our quest for subtext, we neglect to acknowledge that which she discussed and opposed so explicitly when no one else did: the violence, sexual assault, and emotional abuse that befell so many women around her. Perhaps, rather than tell you how to think of her or which modern term to apply to Christine de Pizan, the most honest thing I can do is leave you for now with the words of her contemporary, Eustache Deschamps:

Eloquent muse of the nine, Christine,
Incomparable as far as I know today
In acquired sense and in every doctrine,
You have your knowledge from God and no other
You follow your father in the seven liberal arts,
The only woman in your deeds in the kingdom of France.

Christine and the sibyl