SYMHC Classics: Christine de Pizan

This 2018 episode covers Christine de Pizan, who wrote verse, military manuals, and treatises on war, peace and the just governance. She was the official biographer of King Charles V of France and wrote about Joan of Arc in her lifetime.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. One of our previous episodes that got a
very quick name drop in our most recent installment of
Unearthed was Christine de pisign so I thought we would
bring out our episode on her as Today's Saturday Classic.
This originally came out September fifth, twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome

(00:24):
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
iHeartRadio Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Christine de Pisan pretty much
frequently summed up as a late medieval writer, but the

(00:45):
word writer just does not encompass everything that she did
at all. She wrote all kinds of verse. She wrote
military manuals and treatises on war and peace and the
just governance of a nation. She wrote an autobiogra in
the form of an allegory. She was the official biographer
of King Charles the Fifth of France, and she wrote

(01:06):
the only popular piece of writing that praised Joan of
Arc while Joan of Arc was still living. She also
wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, which is
a compilation of notable women from history, literature, and mythology.
That was one part of her very active participation in
an ongoing debate in medieval France about the nature of

(01:27):
women and their representation in history and literature, something we
still discussed today, and until Christine got involved, this argument
had mostly been more exclusively really been going on among men.
So she was pretty great, we're gonna talk about it today.
Christine de Paizsan was born in Venice, Italy, in thirteen

(01:48):
sixty four. Her father was Tamaso di Benvenuto di Pazzano,
or Thomas of Pissan, who was a government advisor and
a professor there and not long after Christine was born, though,
he was a pointed to the court of Charles the
fifth of France to serve as the king's medical adviser
and astrologer, or his medical astrologer. These two things were

(02:09):
pretty tightly connected at that point. When Christine was three
or four, she and the rest of the family joined
her father in France. Her father was a humanist and
a highly educated man, and he made sure all of
his children were educated. He gave Christine the same education
that he gave to his sons. Growing up in the
court of Charles the fifth also gave Christine and her

(02:31):
siblings access to extensive libraries and numerous prominent scholars. Charles
the Fifth was nicknamed Charles the Wise, and he surrounded
himself with cultured, educated people, and he assembled an incredible
library at the Louver. So by her early teens, Christine
was well read and well educated, and the breadth of

(02:51):
her reading was just incredible. It set her up to
write about everything from love to military strategy later in
her life. When she was about fifteen, a marriage was
arranged for Christine. It was to court notary Etienne Duquestell,
who was about twenty five. The same year that they
got married, Etienne was appointed court secretary in spite of

(03:13):
her youth when they got married and the difference in
their ages, Christine described this marriage as a very happy one.
They had three children together, two sons and a daughter,
and Etienne encouraged Christine to continue her studies after she
got married and became a mother. But things started going
downhill for Christine and her previously happy family. In thirteen eighty,

(03:35):
Charles the Fifth died of an abscess at the age
of forty two, and he was succeeded by his son,
Charles the sixth. We actually did a podcast on Charles
the sixth in August of twenty seventeen. He was the
one who initially showed a lot of promise as a leader,
but then developed cycles of terrifying and violent psychosis when
he reached his early twenties. When Charles the fifth died,

(03:58):
though Charles the sixth was only a lie, so his
uncles were doing most of the actual ruling and all
the political back and forth in court, Christine's father lost
his position at Tienne still had his post as secretary,
but he was being paid a lot less, so the
family fell into financial difficulty, and that was compounded when

(04:19):
Christine's father died sometime in the late thirteen eighties. Then
Christine's husband died suddenly in thirteen ninety, possibly due to
plague while he was away from home on a mission
for the crown. So at the age of twenty five
or twenty six, after ten years of marriage, Christine was
a widow with children to support because of her father's death.

(04:40):
She also needed to support her elderly mother, and the
family had taken in a niece as well. It does
appear that in all of this Christine had inherited some property.
She was entitled some of her late husband's salary as well,
but actually getting any of this became this really complicated
legal tangle that was exacerbated by the fact that she

(05:00):
was a woman, which made it a lot harder for
her to advocate for herself in all of these matters.
Was eventually resolved after about fifteen years, but that did
not help her at all in the meantime. Yeah, fifteen
years is a long time to have financial struggles while
you try to get what is due to you, right,
That's a long time to have to deal with them.

(05:22):
Christine did have other family that she could have gone
to live with, or she could have remarried. Either of
those would have been the typical course of action for
a woman in her situation, but she didn't want to
do that, in part because she was so heartbroken following
the death of her husband, so she decided to try
to earn a living as a writer. This is kind

(05:43):
of a theme on the show. We've done a number
of previous episodes about women who decided to earn a
living by writing. This is because for big chunks of history,
writing has been one of a very few available options
for women from the more affluent social classes to try
to earn their own money. At the same time, writing
wasn't necessarily totally acceptable, and sometimes it was only possible

(06:06):
while writing under the name of a man. But for
a particular social class it was one of a very,
very few options. But there is a really big difference
between Christine de Paizan and other women that we've talked
about on the podcast who decided to earn their own
money as writers. She lived before the invention of the
printing press. There were multiple printing methods in use in

(06:29):
Asia long before this, but in the West, Johann Gutenberg
is credited with developing a press that used movable type
sometime in the early to mid fourteen hundreds. Christine died
long before Gutenberg printed his Bible and long before the
printing press revolutionized the way publishing worked in the West.
So unlike the other women that we've talked about on

(06:50):
the show who made their living by writing, she was
not writing books to sell to the masses or through subscriptions.
There wasn't a mass distribution method that was efficient at all.
To sum it up, Christine de Pizon was going to
try to make a living as a writer of medieval
illuminated manuscripts. The very few people who earned a living

(07:13):
writing at this point were doing so by writing commissioned
works for wealthy patrons. It was virtually unheard of for
a woman to go out seeking patrons, but Christine did.
It definitely helped that she had so many connections from
having grown up connected to the royal court and from
being the widow of a court secretary. It also helped
that she started out writing the kinds of pieces that

(07:35):
were really popular at the time, including lyric poems and allegories.
Love poems were especially popular, and Christine had a lot
to draw from. She really channeled her grief over her
husband's death into a lot of her early work, and
she called her happier love poems written during this time,
singing joyously with a sad heart. Her first commissions were

(07:57):
short pieces for members of the French nobility, or she
would dedicate a poem to someone who would then give
her a gift as a gesture of thanks. In less
than a year, her work was being passed around and
read outside of France. By fourteen oh three, she had
written enough poems to turn them into a collection that
was one hundred ballad verlais erndou and those are three

(08:19):
different poetic forms. She also made ends meet by doing
transcriptions and illustrations of other people's work. In May of
thirteen ninety nine, while she was still writing the poems
that would later become that first collection, she also wrote
an eight hundred and sixty verse poem called The Letters
of the God of Love or the Letters of Cupid,

(08:39):
written in the form of a letter to Cupid during
a spring festival. Although sometimes it's translated as a letter
from Cupid. There's a lot of variety in how people
approach her work and translating it. In this work, women
from a range of social classes, married and unmarried, describe
a number of insults and degradations that they have experienced

(09:00):
in their lives. And these insults and degradations are not
just from knights and nobles and other real life men,
or from the general expectations of society. They're from works
of literature, including Roman de la Rose or The Romance
of the Rose. Roman de la Rose was a very long,
incredibly popular, and widely read poem about love. According to

(09:25):
the Letters of Cupid, it was one of the things
that was causing offense to women. The conclusion of this
poem wasn't about love at all. It was about deception
and unscrupulous men taking advantage of women's trust. Letters of
Cupid seems to have spawned a literary quarrel, Or if
it didn't start that quarrel, it was at least written
two years before the quaral started in fourteen oh one.

(09:48):
And we're going to get to that after we first
pause for a little break from one of the sponsors
that keeps us going. When GUILLLM. De Laurie started writing
Romando la Rose in the late twelve thirties, it was

(10:08):
supposed to explore the whole art of love, so poem
that was deeply connected to the traditional poetic forms and
the themes of courtly love that were a huge part
of medieval European literature. If you have read medieval European literature,
you will recognize these things. This poem is a dream
allegory that tells the story of a man in a

(10:29):
walled garden who's trying to get to a rose, and
that rose symbolizes love. Along the way, he meets characters
like beauty and generosity, and honesty and chastity. He's also
shot by Cupid's arrows and the rose is given more
and more protection, and those allegorical characters like beauty and
generosity coach him in a very courtly way in the

(10:53):
Pursuit of Love. Guillum died around twelve seventy eight, and
about forty years later Jean de Muenz decided to add
to the poem, and it's this additional material that was
at the heart of the quarrel of the Rose. Written
in a very body suggestive style in Jean de Mouen's edition,
the narrator goes on a lengthy battle before calling on Venus,

(11:15):
who represents carnal love, to set fire to the castle
where the rose is being sheltered and then pluck it.
There is a lot of violence and deception involved, and
it is basically the opposite of the tone in the
first part of the poem. Jean de Muen's ending to
the Roman de la Rose was at the heart of
a multi year literary quarrel among the French court. Two

(11:37):
years after Christine de Pisan criticized it and her Letters
of Cupid, another Jeanne Jean de Montroyx, wrote an essay
praising the body violent ending. So it's not one hundred
percent clear whether he had read the Letters of Cupid,
but she definitely made this point before he wrote his
defense of this poem. The text of the essay has

(12:01):
not survived until today, but concurring with his opinions were
Gontier Cole and his brother Pierre. Jean de Montroux and
Gontier Cole were both secretaries to Charles the sixth and
Pierre was the canon of Notre Dame. After reading this
essay in fourteen oh one, Christine wrote Jean a lengthy
letter taking apart all of his points. She pointed out

(12:24):
not only the poem's graphic, suggestive language and its violence
and deception, but also the fact that a lot of
the most negative allegorical characters were depicted as women. She
made it very clear that she did not think that
the second part of Roman de la Rose was worth
the giant heaps of praise that he had given it
in this essay. Really, she did not pull any punches

(12:45):
with this. Here is something she wrote in this letter quote,
It truly seems to me that, in view of the
aforementioned arguments and many others, this work should more fittingly
be engulfed in a shroud of flame than crowned with laurel.
Even though you call it quote a mirror of the
good life, an example to all classes for political self

(13:06):
conduct and for living religiously and wisely. On the contrary,
begging your pardon, I say that it is an exhortation
to vice that encourages a dissolute life, a doctrine of deceit,
a path to damnation, a purveyor of public defamation, a
cause of suspicion and distrust, a source of shame to

(13:28):
many people, and perhaps a seed of heresy. This led
to a whole series of exchanged essays and letters, with
Jean y'osson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, taking Christine's
side in the debate. Although a lot of the debate
was about the poem's more graphic content and its treatment
and depiction of women, it was also connected to overall

(13:50):
concerns of poetic style and language and whether it was
appropriate for a formal work of verse to include that
kind of subject matter. Christine's argument also connected to the
idea that Jean de Muen had a responsibility as a
writer with an audience, and that was a responsibility not
to go sneaking a bunch of misogyny into a work
under the trappings of formal poetry and courtly love. Christine

(14:14):
also thought that writers should be creating work that would
improve society, not make it worse, and they especially shouldn't
be making society worse by using respectable poetic forms to
degrade women. I feel like I have lived through this
exact same argument on the internet over and over for
the last entire history of the Internet. Yeah, that seems

(14:35):
accurate to me. By the time this was all said
and done, Christine had written almost as much on the
subject as all of the other people involved combined. She
wrote in a very self deprecating, self effacing way, and
as with her other works, she wrote in Middle French
while the men were writing in formal Latin. Her tone
was often like, I know, I'm only a woman, and

(14:58):
I'm not nearly so learned as you, sir, but I
think I have some experience with this, and here is
why the end of Romando la Rose is sexist garbage,
deserving no praise at all. She also collated all the
exchanged letters in fourteen oh two, and she delivered them
to the Provost of Paris and Charles the sixth wife
Isabeau of Bavaria. Asking for their support. She brought the

(15:20):
receipts directly there she did. The Quarrel of the Rose
also led to Christine writing her most famous work, The
Book of the City of Ladies. Like Romandela Rose, this
is a dream allegory. It's one with Christine as a character.
It begins with the character Christine studying and she finds

(15:40):
book after book, all of them written by men, describing
women as wicked and full of vice. The character Christine
finally becomes convinced if so many great and educated men
have written so many negative things about women, then surely
those things must be true. She goes so far as
to ask God God, how he could have made something

(16:02):
as terrible as women, and to wish that she had
instead been a man, since, according to all this literary
evidence in front of her, women were worthless and men
were great. The character Christine is then visited by three
ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who offer her comfort and
reassurance that all these things she has been reading against

(16:22):
women are indeed false. They say that they have been
charged with traveling the earth to help people get back
on the right path. They charge Christine with building a
city quote, so that from now on, ladies and all
valiant women may have a refuge and defense. Christine and
the Three Ladies go on to build a city together,

(16:43):
along the way, picking apart various attacks on women and
pointing out hypocrisies, like, for example, how Avid's portrayal of
women was degrading, but the man himself was a vain philanderer.
And while building this city, Christine and the Three Ladies
talk about a long list of mythical and historical women,
including the Amazons, Zenobia, Sappho, and the biblical figures of Sarah, Rebecca,

(17:08):
and Ruth. The Three Ladies go on to tell Christine
about queens and princesses, and women's scholars and poets. The
book's third section is all about saints and other holy women,
and they also talk over a lot of more general questions,
like why there aren't women arguing in the courts of
law and whether a woman has ever invented anything new.

(17:29):
The Book of the City of Ladies was a work
of literature created intentionally to offer a positive portrayal of
women and to offset widespread depictions of women as weak, deceptive,
and moral. To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and unfaithful.
It offers examples of chastity, constancy, and faithfulness in love.

(17:50):
To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and dishonest, it
offers examples of integrity, honesty, and good It also points
out in numerous places is how there are fewer examples
of women as scholars and leaders because women had fewer
opportunities to get the education that they needed to become
scholars or the experience they needed to become leaders, and

(18:11):
among other things, the book explicitly advocates for girls to
get the same education as their brothers. The Book of
the City of Ladies wasn't the first book to compile
the biographies of real and mythical women into one volume.
Giovanni Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women was written about thirty years
before that and was the only major work at the
time to do so. Concerning Famous Women was one of

(18:34):
Christine de Paisan's inspirations, but The Book of the City
of Ladies was Europe's first book of this type to
be written by a woman from a woman's perspective. Christine
de Paisan took a copy of this book to Isabe
of Bavaria, just like she had all of those letters.
There's an illustration of that encounter of Christine delivering her

(18:55):
book to Isabee. In fourteen oh five, Christine wrote a
follow up to the Book of the City of Ladies
that was called The Treasure of the City of Ladies,
also sometimes known as the Book of the Three Virtues.
It's a conduct manual for women, which in some ways
is really conventional as the Book of the City of
Lady was when it comes to things like the treatment
of marriage and gender roles. It assumes that marriage and

(19:18):
motherhood are how the world works for women, and it
advises women on how to get the best and most
satisfying lives for themselves within that world. There is a
lot about duty and virtue, but at the same time,
the Book of the Three Virtues also points out that
expectations placed on women were impossible to live up to,

(19:39):
and rather than being framed as this is how you
should conduct yourself because it's what God wants and what
your husband expects, it's more like, this is how you
should conduct yourself to get the best possible place for
yourself in the situation that you're in. It's more about
women improving their quality of life than about women living
up to social expectations. And there's also a lot of

(19:59):
encouragement for women to be self sufficient, whether they are
a widow pondering remarriage or a married woman considering how
much of a role to play in the management of
her household. I read one description of this book as
I was researching this that called it Machiavelli for medieval
French women. Like Christine's other writing, the Book of Virtues

(20:22):
is steeped in a sense of Christian virtue and piety.
This probably offered her some protection as an incredibly outspoken
woman who was pointing out and contradicting sexism and misogyny
over and over and over again. That made it kind
of hard to criticize what she was doing without also
looking like you were criticizing Christian values. I mean, she

(20:43):
did get criticism, but this buffered it a little. Christine
de Paisan didn't only address women in her writing about conduct.
Her Moral Teachings was a collection of advice written in
verse for her son Jean Duquastell as he was leaving
to go to England to be fostered, and she also
wrote a lot of advicement for kings and nobility, and
we're going to talk more about that after a quick

(21:05):
sponsor break. By the time Christine de pisign wrote the
Book of the City of Ladies, she had become well
known enough that she was getting commissions for work that
were well outside of those popular poetic forms that we

(21:25):
talked about earlier. Philip, Duke of Burgundy, commissioned her to
write a biography of his brother Charles the Fifth, in
whose court she had grown up. He made that commission
in fourteen oh four. The One Hundred Years War was
going on during the entirety of Christine's life, and much
of her work turned toward issues of war and peace.
After the death of Philip the Bold in fourteen oh four,

(21:48):
his son John, also known as John the Fearless, became
the Duke of Burgundy, and his ongoing dispute with Louis,
Duke of Orleans prompted Christine to write to both of
them to advocate for peace and to remind them to
their duty to their people not to go to war
at their expense. This, unfortunately did not work. The Armagnac

(22:09):
Burgundian Civil War started in fourteen oh seven, and that
lasted for almost thirty years. In fourteen ten, she published
a book on military leadership and tactics called The Book
of Deeds and Arms of Chivalry. This was yet another
totally unexpected thing for a woman to be doing, so
much so that people thought she might have just copied

(22:29):
an earlier military manual and other books of strategy to
do it. A later editor even edited her name out
of it and made it look like it was written
by a man. But this was Christine's own original work.
It was a product of her extensive study of history
and strategy and tactics, and all of that extensive reading
she had done in the Court of Charles the Fifth.

(22:50):
It covers all the military technology of the time as
well as tactics and strategy, and it makes a case
that peace is preferable to war, but sometimes as own
only attainable through war. She fills out her discussion of
all of this with examples from military history. She also
walks through the idea of just war, a war fought

(23:11):
to keep law and justice, to defend the people from
injury or oppression, or to reclaim stolen land. The book
discusses how the people fighting in the war should conduct
themselves justly, and then once the war was over, it
was incumbent on the ruling class to rule the people
in a just way. In spite of the questions about
whether Christine, who after all was a mere woman, had

(23:34):
just copied this book from someone else, this book was
translated into English and it became one of the first
books printed in England after William Caxton established a printing
press in Westminster. He printed it as The Fate of
Arms and Chivalry in fourteen eighty nine. We haven't really
touched on all of Christine's work because she was prolific.

(23:56):
Between thirteen ninety nine and about fourteen fifteen, she wrote
twelve major works totally more than a thousand pages. She
also worked directly with the scribes and illuminators who created
the finished manuscripts of her work. Throughout she was an
advocate for women as well as for justice and for peace.
She also paid careful attention to the need to improve

(24:17):
the lives of the poor, while also trying to encourage
a sense of charity among her readers who were likely
to be wealthy, since people in the lower class typically
were not literate. Outside of the world of her writing,
she was also very savvy. She was invited to several
royal courts outside of France, but she preferred to stay
in her adopted homeland. And she also had to be

(24:38):
very strategic to provide for her children in a world
where money and family and political connections were extremely important.
I mean, she was making the ends meet through all
of her writing, but that's not the same thing as
providing for the future of your children in this world.
She had no dowry for her daughter, but was able
to negotiate a place for her at the Royal Dominican

(25:00):
at Poissi and as a companion to Charles the sixth
daughter Marie. She also negotiated for her son to be
fostered with John Montague, the third Earl of Salisbury, with
the hope of ensuring him a political future. This second
part led to a whole complicated negotiation with King Henry
the Fourth to get her son back after John Montague

(25:21):
was a co conspirator and an uprising against him. Though
that's a whole huge drama of international intrigue in which
she had this ongoing, careful negotiation with a king to
get her son to return to France. As we noted earlier,
England and France were at war throughout Christine's entire life.

(25:41):
The Battle of Agincourps in fourteen to fifteen was a
massive defeat for France, and not long afterward Christine joined
her daughter at the convent in Poisi. She mostly stopped writing,
at least for public view. Around that same time, she
did come out of retirement for one last work, though.
Christine's last known piece of writing was about Joan of Arc,
and it was written to honor her after the French

(26:04):
victory at Orleons in fourteen twenty nine. Like we said
at the top of the show, this is the only
major work written to celebrate Joan of Arc during her lifetime.
And we don't know exactly when Christine died, but it
was sometime around fourteen thirty one in Poisi, France. I
find the whole idea of building a whole city where
the ladies can find comfort and refuge to be very comforting,

(26:28):
and I am glad that Christine did it. I want
to make a joke, but I think it belittles thinks,
so I'm gonna refrain. Okay, thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note our email addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,

(26:51):
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