April 24, 2020 • 27 mins
This 2018 episode is about Christine de Pizan who 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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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, listeners. This episode is part of our new playlist
to help everybody get through these times we're living in.
It's our host faves playlist. Yeah, these are just some
of our personal favorites, ones that we had a particular
affinity for, and because these are stressful and trying times,
we tried to stick to the ones that weren't quite
(00:22):
as dour. So hopefully they'll give you a little lift.
Stay safe. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
(00:45):
Christine de Pison pretty much frequently summed up as a
late 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.
(01:07):
She was the official biographer of King Charles the fifth
of France, 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 participation in an ongoing debate in medieval
(01:31):
France about the 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 Poisson was
born in Venice, Italy, in thirteen sixty four. Her father
(01:54):
was Tomazzo die ben Venuto de Pisano, or Thomas of Poison,
who was a government an 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 advisor and astrologer, or
his medical astrologer. These two things were pretty tightly connected
(02:16):
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 siblings access to extensive
(02:38):
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 her reading was just incredible. It
(02:58):
set her up to right 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
secretary in spite of her youth when they got married
(03:20):
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 thirt eighty, Charles the fifth died of
(03:42):
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. When Charles the fifth died, though Charles the
(04:04):
six 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 compounded when Christine's father died sometime in
(04:26):
the late thirteen eighties. Then Christine's husband died suddenly inte
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. She also needed to support her elderly mother,
(04:48):
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
the fact that she was a woman, which made it
a lot harder for her to advocate for herself. And
(05:09):
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.
Christine did have other family that she could have gone
(05:30):
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
of a theme on the show. We've done a number
(05:50):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:55):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:40):
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 set ad heart. Her first commissions
(08:02):
were 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 ver and those are three different
(08:25):
poetic forms. Uh. She also made ends meet by doing
transcriptions and illustrations of other people's work and may I.
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
(08:45):
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 and how people approached her work
in 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.
(09:07):
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.
Romand de la Rose was a very long, incredibly popular,
and widely read poem about love. According to the Letters
(09:30):
of Cupid, 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
(09:50):
the quarrel started in fourteen oh one. And we're gonna
get to that after we first pause for a little
break from one of the sponsors that keeps us going.
When gilm Di and Laurie started writing Romando la Rose
in the late twelve thirties, it was supposed to explore
(10:13):
the whole art of love. It's a 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 walled
(10:34):
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
(10:54):
coach him in a very courtly way in the Pursuit
of Love. Gilm died around twelve seventy eight, and about
forty years later Jean de Muin 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 Muin's addition,
(11:15):
the narrator goes on a lengthy battle before calling on Venus,
who represents Carnel 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. Gen de Muens ending to
the Roman de la Rose was at the heart of
(11:37):
a multi year literary quarrel among the French court. Two
years after Christine de Pizzan criticized it in her Letters
of Cupid, another gen Jean Demontroy, wrote an essay praising
the body violent ending. So it's not a hud clear
whether he had read the Letters of Cupid, but she
(11:58):
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 Guntier Cole
and his brother Pierre. Jean de Montroi and Gantier Cole
were both secretaries to Charles the sixth and Pierre was
the canon of Notre Dame. After reading this essay in
(12:21):
fourteen o one, Christine wrote Jean a lengthy letter taking
apart all of his points. She pointed out not only
the poems graphics, 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 Rouse was worth the giant
(12:43):
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, It truly seems
to me that, in view of the aforementioned arguments and
many others, this work should morph fittingly be engulfed in
a shroud of flame than crowned with Laurel. Even though
(13:05):
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, 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
(13:29):
suspicion and distrust, a source of shame to many people,
and perhaps a seed of heresy. This led to a
whole series of exchanged essays and letters, le Jean Gerson,
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
(13:51):
of women, it was also connected to overall concerns of
poetic style and language and whether it was appropriate for
a formal work of 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
(14:12):
bunch of misogyny into a work. Under the trappings of
formal poetry and courtly love. Christine 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
(14:32):
the Internet over and over for the last entire history
of the Internet. Yeah, that seems that seems accurate to be.
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
(14:54):
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
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
(15:15):
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
she did. The Quarrel of the Rose also led to
Christine writing her most famous work, The Book of the
City of Ladies. Like Romando La Rose, this is a
(15:37):
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 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
(16:00):
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 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,
(16:21):
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
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
(16:45):
on to build a city together along the way, picking
apart various attacks on women and pointing out hypocrisies, like,
for example, how Ovid's portrayal of women was degrading, but
the man himself was a vain philanderer. And while building
the city, Christine and the Three Ladies talk about a
long list of mythical and historical women, including the Amazon's Zenobia, Sappho,
(17:09):
and the biblical figures of Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth. The
Three Ladies go on to tell Christine about queens and princesses,
and women scholars and poets. The book's third section is
all about states 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
(17:29):
whether a woman has ever invented anything new. 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 immoral.
To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and unfaithful. It
offers examples of chastity, constancy, and faithfulness in love. To
(17:54):
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,
(18:16):
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 Bocaccio's Concerning
Famous Women was written about thirty years before that, and
was the only major work at the time to do so.
(18:37):
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 Pison took a copy
of this book to Isabelle of Bavaria, just like she
had all of those letters. There's an illustration of that
encounter of Christine delivering her book is about. In fourteen
(19:01):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:45):
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 thing up to social expectations. And there's also
a lot of encouragement for women to be self sufficient,
(20:05):
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. That 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
(20:27):
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 did get criticism, but this this buffered
(20:49):
it a little. Christine de Poisson didn't only address women
in her writing about conduct. Her Moral Teachings was a
collection of advice written in verse for her son, Jehan
du 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
(21:19):
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.
(21:41):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:22):
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
(22:44):
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
(23:07):
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,
(23:28):
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 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
(23:48):
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
pro fick. 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
(24:11):
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
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,
(24:33):
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
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
(24:54):
providing for the future of your children in this world.
She had no dowry for her her 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,
(25:14):
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 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
(25:38):
to get her son to return to France. As we
noted earlier, England and France where 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 poise E. She
mostly stopped writing, at least for public view. Around that
(25:58):
same time, she did had 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 victory at Orleans in four
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
(26:19):
Christine died, but it was sometime around 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, 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, thank you
(26:48):
so much for joining us today for this classic. If
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(27:09):
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Hey, listeners. This episode is part of our new playlist
to help everybody get through these times we're living in.
It's our host faves playlist. Yeah, these are just some
of our personal favorites, ones that we had a particular
affinity for, and because these are stressful and trying times,
we tried to stick to the ones that weren't quite
(00:22):
as dour. So hopefully they'll give you a little lift.
Stay safe. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
(00:45):
Christine de Pison pretty much frequently summed up as a
late 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.
(01:07):
She was the official biographer of King Charles the fifth
of France, 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 participation in an ongoing debate in medieval
(01:31):
France about the 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 Poisson was
born in Venice, Italy, in thirteen sixty four. Her father
(01:54):
was Tomazzo die ben Venuto de Pisano, or Thomas of Poison,
who was a government an 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 advisor and astrologer, or
his medical astrologer. These two things were pretty tightly connected
(02:16):
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 siblings access to extensive
(02:38):
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 her reading was just incredible. It
(02:58):
set her up to right 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
secretary in spite of her youth when they got married
(03:20):
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 thirt eighty, Charles the fifth died of
(03:42):
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. When Charles the fifth died, though Charles the
(04:04):
six 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 compounded when Christine's father died sometime in
(04:26):
the late thirteen eighties. Then Christine's husband died suddenly inte
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. She also needed to support her elderly mother,
(04:48):
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
the fact that she was a woman, which made it
a lot harder for her to advocate for herself. And
(05:09):
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.
Christine did have other family that she could have gone
(05:30):
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
of a theme on the show. We've done a number
(05:50):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:55):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:40):
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 set ad heart. Her first commissions
(08:02):
were 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 ver and those are three different
(08:25):
poetic forms. Uh. She also made ends meet by doing
transcriptions and illustrations of other people's work and may I.
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
(08:45):
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 and how people approached her work
in 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.
(09:07):
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.
Romand de la Rose was a very long, incredibly popular,
and widely read poem about love. According to the Letters
(09:30):
of Cupid, 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
(09:50):
the quarrel started in fourteen oh one. And we're gonna
get to that after we first pause for a little
break from one of the sponsors that keeps us going.
When gilm Di and Laurie started writing Romando la Rose
in the late twelve thirties, it was supposed to explore
(10:13):
the whole art of love. It's a 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 walled
(10:34):
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
(10:54):
coach him in a very courtly way in the Pursuit
of Love. Gilm died around twelve seventy eight, and about
forty years later Jean de Muin 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 Muin's addition,
(11:15):
the narrator goes on a lengthy battle before calling on Venus,
who represents Carnel 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. Gen de Muens ending to
the Roman de la Rose was at the heart of
(11:37):
a multi year literary quarrel among the French court. Two
years after Christine de Pizzan criticized it in her Letters
of Cupid, another gen Jean Demontroy, wrote an essay praising
the body violent ending. So it's not a hud clear
whether he had read the Letters of Cupid, but she
(11:58):
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 Guntier Cole
and his brother Pierre. Jean de Montroi and Gantier Cole
were both secretaries to Charles the sixth and Pierre was
the canon of Notre Dame. After reading this essay in
(12:21):
fourteen o one, Christine wrote Jean a lengthy letter taking
apart all of his points. She pointed out not only
the poems graphics, 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 Rouse was worth the giant
(12:43):
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, It truly seems
to me that, in view of the aforementioned arguments and
many others, this work should morph fittingly be engulfed in
a shroud of flame than crowned with Laurel. Even though
(13:05):
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, 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
(13:29):
suspicion and distrust, a source of shame to many people,
and perhaps a seed of heresy. This led to a
whole series of exchanged essays and letters, le Jean Gerson,
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
(13:51):
of women, it was also connected to overall concerns of
poetic style and language and whether it was appropriate for
a formal work of 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
(14:12):
bunch of misogyny into a work. Under the trappings of
formal poetry and courtly love. Christine 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
(14:32):
the Internet over and over for the last entire history
of the Internet. Yeah, that seems that seems accurate to be.
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
(14:54):
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
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
(15:15):
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
she did. The Quarrel of the Rose also led to
Christine writing her most famous work, The Book of the
City of Ladies. Like Romando La Rose, this is a
(15:37):
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 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
(16:00):
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 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,
(16:21):
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
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
(16:45):
on to build a city together along the way, picking
apart various attacks on women and pointing out hypocrisies, like,
for example, how Ovid's portrayal of women was degrading, but
the man himself was a vain philanderer. And while building
the city, Christine and the Three Ladies talk about a
long list of mythical and historical women, including the Amazon's Zenobia, Sappho,
(17:09):
and the biblical figures of Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth. The
Three Ladies go on to tell Christine about queens and princesses,
and women scholars and poets. The book's third section is
all about states 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
(17:29):
whether a woman has ever invented anything new. 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 immoral.
To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and unfaithful. It
offers examples of chastity, constancy, and faithfulness in love. To
(17:54):
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,
(18:16):
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 Bocaccio's Concerning
Famous Women was written about thirty years before that, and
was the only major work at the time to do so.
(18:37):
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 Pison took a copy
of this book to Isabelle of Bavaria, just like she
had all of those letters. There's an illustration of that
encounter of Christine delivering her book is about. In fourteen
(19:01):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:45):
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 thing up to social expectations. And there's also
a lot of encouragement for women to be self sufficient,
(20:05):
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. That 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
(20:27):
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 did get criticism, but this this buffered
(20:49):
it a little. Christine de Poisson didn't only address women
in her writing about conduct. Her Moral Teachings was a
collection of advice written in verse for her son, Jehan
du 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
(21:19):
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.
(21:41):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:22):
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
(22:44):
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
(23:07):
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,
(23:28):
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 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
(23:48):
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
pro fick. 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
(24:11):
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
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,
(24:33):
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
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
(24:54):
providing for the future of your children in this world.
She had no dowry for her her 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,
(25:14):
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 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
(25:38):
to get her son to return to France. As we
noted earlier, England and France where 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 poise E. She
mostly stopped writing, at least for public view. Around that
(25:58):
same time, she did had 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 victory at Orleans in four
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
(26:19):
Christine died, but it was sometime around 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, 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, thank you
(26:48):
so much for joining us today for this classic. If
you have heard any kind of email address or maybe
a Facebook you are l during the course of the
episode that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete
because we have changed our email address a in You
can now reach us at history podcasts at i heart
radio dot com, and we're all over social media at
missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
(27:09):
on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app,
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