Christine de Pizan and the Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan is often described as a late-Medieval writer. But just “writer” does not really sum up everything she did. She wrote  verse, military manuals, and treatises on war, peace and the just governance of a nation. She was the official biographer of King Charles V of France and wrote the only popular piece in praise of Joan of Arc that was penned during her lifetime. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Christine de
piece On pretty much frequently summed up as a late

(00:21):
medieval writer, but the 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 autobiography in the form of an allegory. She
was the official biographer of King Charles the Fifth of France,

(00:42):
and she wrote 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
anticipation in an ongoing debate in medieval France about the

(01:04):
nature of women and their representation in history and literature,
something we still discussed today, and until Christine got involved,
this argument had mostly been or exclusively really been going
on among men. So she was pretty great, we're gonna
talk about it today. Christine de Poison was born in Venice, Italy,

(01:24):
in thirteen sixty four. Her father was to Mazzo di
ben Venuto de Pazzano, or Thomas of Possan, who was
a government advisor and a professor there, and not long
after Christine was born, though, he was appointed to the
Court of Charles the fifth of France to serve as
the king's medical adviser and astrologer, or his medical astrologer.

(01:45):
These two things were 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. Did he
gave Christine the same education that he gave to his sons.
Growing up in the Court of Charles the fifth also

(02:06):
gave Christine and her 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

(02:27):
the breadth of 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 du Castell, who was about twenty five. The
same year that they got married, Etienne was appointed court

(02:48):
secretary in spite of 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

(03:10):
happy family in thirty 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 two
thousand 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.

(03:34):
When Charles the Fifth died, though Charles the sixth was
only eleven, so his uncle's were doing most of the
actual ruling and all the political back and forth in court.
Christine's father lost his position. Etienne still had his post
as secretary, but he was being paid a lot less,
so the family fell into financial difficulty, and that was

(03:54):
compounded when Christine's father died sometime in the late thirteen eighties.
Then Christine's husband died suddenly in thirteen nine, 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

(04:16):
father's death. 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. It was exacerbated by

(04:37):
the fact that she was a woman, which made it
a lot harder for her to advocate for herself. And
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.

(04:59):
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 then, 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

(05:20):
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

(05:43):
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 Paison 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

(06:06):
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

(06:27):
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 Pisan was going to
try to make a living as a writer of medieval
illuminated manuscripts. The very few people who earned a living

(06:50):
writing at this point we're 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

(07:12):
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

(07:34):
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 o three, she had
written enough poems to turn them into a collection that
was one ballad vile and those are three different poetic forms. Uh.

(07:58):
She also made ends meet by doing transcriptions and illustrations
of other people's work and may 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, written in the form of a letter
to Cupid during a spring festival. Although sometimes it's translated

(08:22):
as a letter from Cupid. It's a lot of variety
and 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 in their lives. And these insults and
degradations are not just from knights and nobles and other

(08:44):
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. Romando la Rose was
a very long, incredibly popular and widely read him about love,
according to the Letters of Cupid, was one of the
things that was causing offense to women. The conclusion of

(09:07):
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 quarrel started, in fourteen oh one.
And we're gonna get to that after we first paused
for a little break from one of the sponsors that

(09:29):
keeps us going. When Gilmed and Laurie started writing Romando
la Rose in the late twelve thirties, it was supposed
to explore the whole art of love. It's a poem
that was deeply connected to the traditional poetic forms and

(09:50):
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
walled garden who's trying to get to a rose, and
that rose symbolizes love. Along the way, he meets characters

(10:12):
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
pursuit of love. Gium died around twelve seventy eight, and

(10:32):
about forty years later Geen de Muine 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 gen de Muine's addition,
the narrator goes on a lengthy battle before calling on Venus,
who represents carnal love, to set fire to the castle

(10:53):
where the rose is being sheltered and then pluck it.
There is a lot of violence and deception involved, and
it is basic the opposite of the tone in the
first part of the poem Jen de muns ending to
the Roman de la Rose was at the heart of
a multi year literary quarrel among the French court. Two
years after Christine de Pizzan criticized it in her Letters

(11:16):
of Cupid, another Geen Jehan de Montroy wrote an essay
praising the body violent ending. So it's not a 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
not survived until today, but concurring with his opinions were

(11:40):
Gontier Cole and his brother Pierre. Jean de Montroy and
Gantier Cole were both secretaries to Charles the sixth and
Pierre was the canon of Notre Dame. After reading this
essay in fourteen o one, Christine wrote Jean a lengthy
letter taking apart all of his points. She pointed out
not only the poems graphic, fake, suggestive language, and its

(12:01):
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 ramand 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 with this. Here is something she wrote in this letter. Quote,

(12:23):
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
conduct and for living religiously and wisely. On the contrary,

(12:46):
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 suspicion and distrust, a source of shame to many people,
and perhaps a seed of heresy. This led to a

(13:08):
whole series of exchanged essays and letters, Lejon Chancellor of
the University of Paris, taking Christine's side in the debate.
Although a lot of the debate was about the poems
more graphic content and its treatment and depiction of women,
it was also connected to overall concerns of poetic style
and language and whether it was appropriate for a formal

(13:30):
work of verse to include that kind of subject matter.
Christine's argument also connected to the idea that gen de
mun 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 also thought that writers

(13:50):
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 that seems accurate to me.

(14:12):
By the time this was all said and done, Christine
had written almost as much on this 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 I'm not nearly

(14:33):
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 exchange letters in
fourteen o two, and she delivered them to the Provost
of Paris and Charles the sixth wife Isabella of Bavaria,
asking for their support. She brought the receipts directly there

(14:57):
she did. The qua Earl of the Rows also led
to Christine writing her most famous work, The Book of
the City of Ladies. Like Romando la Rose, this is
a dream allegory. It's one with Christine as a character.
It begins with the character Christine studying and she finds
book after book, all of them written by men. Describing

(15:18):
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 how he could have made something as
terrible as women, and to wish that she had instead

(15:40):
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 women are indeed false.
They say that they have been charged with traveling the

(16:02):
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, along the way, picking
apart various attacks on women and pointing out hypocrisies, like,

(16:23):
for example, how Ovid'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 Amazon's Zenobia, Sappho,
and the biblical figures of Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth. The

(16:44):
Three Ladies go on to tell Christine about queens and
princesses and women scholars and poets. The book's third section
is all about Sates and other holy women, and they
also talk over a lot of more general questions, like
why there aren't women arguing in the court of law
and whether a woman has ever invented anything new. The

(17:04):
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 immoral. To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and unfaithful,
it offers examples of chastity, constancy, and faithfulness in love.

(17:25):
To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and dishonest, it
offers examples of integrity, honesty, and good It also points
out in numerous places 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. Among other things,

(17:47):
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.

(18:08):
Concerning famous women was one of Christine Depaison'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 Pisan took a copy
of this book to Isabella of Bavaria, just like she
had all of those letters. There's an illustration of that
encounter of Christine delivering her book to Isabella. In fourteen

(18:32):
o 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 it's 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 motherhood or how the world works

(18:55):
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, and rather than being framed as this

(19:15):
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 encouragement for women to be self sufficient,

(19:36):
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. So 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 is steeped in a sense of

(19:58):
Christian virtue and hiety. 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 did get criticism, but this this buffered

(20:20):
it a little. Christine de Pisan 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
de Castel 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 sponsor break. By the

(20:49):
time Christine de Pison 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 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 o four.

(21:10):
The Hundred Years War was going on during the entirety
of Christine's life, and much of her work turned towards
issues of war and peace. After the death of Philip
the Bold in fourteen o four, his son, John, also
known as John the Fearless, became the Duke of Burgundy,
and his ongoing dispute with Louis, Duke of Orleans prompted

(21:31):
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 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

(21:52):
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 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

(22:14):
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. 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 it's only attainable through war. She fills out

(22:37):
her discussion of all of this with examples from military history.
She also walks through the idea of just war, a
war fought 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,

(22:58):
it was incumbent on the ruling asked to rule the
people in a just way. In spite of the questions
about whether Christine, who after all was a mere woman,
had 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

(23:18):
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.
Between thirteen 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

(23:41):
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 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 we're not literate.
Outside of the world of her writing, she was also

(24:04):
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 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

(24:25):
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 Convent at Poissy 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

(24:49):
whole complicated negotiation with King Henry the Fourth to get
her son back after John Montague 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

(25:12):
were at war throughout Christine's entire life. The Battle of
Agincourt in fourteen fifteen was a massive defeat for France,
and not long afterward Christine joined her daughter at the
convent in Pois E. 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

(25:33):
known piece of writing was about Joan of Arc and
it was written to honor her after the French victory
at Orleans in fourteen 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 four thirty one in Poisi, France. I find

(25:55):
the whole idea of building a whole city where the
ladies can find comfort and refuge to be very comforting,
and I am glad that Christine did it. I want
to make a joke, but I think it's the little things,
so I'm gonna refrain. Okay, do you have a spot
of listener mail for us? I do. This is from

(26:17):
Tim and Tim says Tracy and Holly. I enjoyed your
episodes on Dread Scott versus Sanford. As you mentioned, Dread
Scott is buried in St. Louis. Several years ago. I
had the opportunity to visit Calvary Cemetery to visit Scott's grave.
It has become a tradition for people to leave Lincoln
pennies on the headstone. I've attached photos of the front

(26:37):
and back of the headstone, complete with pennies It's also
worth noting that the same cemetery is the final resting
place of General William to comes to Sherman and Tennessee Williams. Tim.
Thank you, Tim, so I had never seen this headstone before.
On one side, it says dread Scott, subject of the
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in

(26:58):
eighteen fifty seven in which denied citizenship to the negro
voided the Missouri Compromise Act, became one of the events
that resulted Dennis Civil War. And then on the other
side says dread Scott born about seventeen nine, died September
sevent eighteen fifty eight, freed from slavery by his friend
Taylor Blow. And then there is also a smaller stone
set into the ground that says in memory of a

(27:20):
simple man who wanted to be free, dread Scott, dedicated
by the African Historical and Genealogical Research Society, donated by
the Eddie Randall and since funeral home. So thank you
so much for sending that note and those pictures. Tim.
You can write to us about this or any other
podcast at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com,
and we're all over social media at Missed in History.

(27:42):
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(28:03):
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