The Book of the City of Ladies
I first came across the name of Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430) a decade ago in an old library book by Enid McLeod called The Order of the Rose, inherited from my mother, who had bought it in a sale.
I was trying to organise bookshelves in a new flat; I wasn’t sure whether this was ‘travel’ or ‘history’ or, perhaps, something on art. It turned out to be a charming biography of Christine de Pizan. It had nearly become the immediate neighbour of The Name of the Rose under ‘fiction’. I was amazed that I had never heard of this extraordinary medieval writer.Taken from her birthplace in Venice at the age of three to join her father at the court of Charles V in Paris, Christine experienced both faces of fortune. Her father, Tommaso, was wealthy, influential, indulgent and a humanist; her mother loving. The former insisted on his daughter being educated, against the objections of the latter. At the age of fifteen Christine was married to an apparently perfect man: gentle, chivalrous, intelligent and faithful. She was raised among the courtiers of the admirable King Charles V, mixing comfortably with the great nobles of France at its most glorious medieval height, towards the end of a tumultuous century of persecution, inquisition, warfare, plague and revolt.
The deaths of Charles in 1380 when she was sixteen, her father by about 1385 and her husband, Etienne, in 1389, and a decade of devious machinations by venal lawyers, reduced Christine and her family – a daughter, who chose life in a convent, and two sons, one of whom took service with the Earl of Salisbury in England – to poverty, misery and a long period of self-reflection that turned her, first, to poetry…
Like the mourning dove I’m now all alone,
And like a shepherdless sheep gone astray,
For death has long ago taken away
My loved one whom I constantly mourn.
It’s now seven years that he’s gone, alas
Better I’d been buried that same day.
Like a mourning dove I’m all forlorn.
For since I have such sorrow borne,
And grievous trouble and disarray,
For while I live I’ve not even one ray
Of hope of comfort, night or mourn.
Like the mourning dove I’m now all forlorn.14
From such beginnings, Christine built a thirty-year career in writing, campaigning and self-education, which has produced one of the outstanding corpora of medieval literature, moral philosophy and political theory. Her targets were weak governance, moral laxity and men’s failure to treat women as equals, the fruits of which were warfare and social instability, misery and unhappiness. She was not the last to argue that women’s lack of education and accomplishment was a matter more of nurture than of nature; nor was she unique in attracting opposition to her views. She was quick to fight back. When told that it ‘did not become a woman to be learned, as so few are’, she replied that ‘it did not become a man to be so ignorant, as so many are’.
In the opening years of the fifteenth century she produced a number of substantial works of allegory: Le Livre de la mutacion de fortune (‘The Book of Mutability of Fortune’), Le Livre du Chemin de longue estude (‘The Book of the Path of Long Study’) and L’Avision de Christine (‘Christine’s vision’) – each of which contains important autobiographical passages – and a biography of Charles V (Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V) commissioned by his brother, which won her considerable praise and the rewards of royal patronage.
Christine’s most famous work, the epic fantasy called Le Livre de la cite des dames, (The Book of the City of Ladies) (1405), is distinguished not so much by its scholarly merits as by its confidence and sense of moral authority. In it, she rejects the misogynist rhetoric of both classical and contemporary literature, aiming her darts at the so-called chivalric romances and, in particular, at the hugely popular Roman de la Rose, which fictionalised the affair between Heloïse and Peter Abelard and created of the former a weak, passive, foolish victim.
To Jean de Montreuil, secretary to Charles VI (1380–1422), Christine had already written, during a notorious public argument:…I wish to hold, proclaim, and sustain publicly that, with all due respect, you are entirely in error and without justification in giving such accomplished praise to the aforesaid work, which were better called utter frivolity than any profitable book, in my opinion.15
Another member of the royal circle, Gontier Sol, also weighed in against her; she gave him short shrift:
You insult me still further because I am a woman, which according to you makes me fickle, mad, and pretentious, for daring to correct and reprimand such a reputable scholar as you claim this author to be…16
Christine began to realise that the debate she had sparked required a more substantial response, no less than a defence of womanhood. She decided to fight rhetoric with polemical allegory, and imagined herself constructing, from the biographical bricks and mortar of the great women of history, a city (a beguinage, if you will) defended by Reason, Rectitude and Justice, within which women might realise their potential. The City of Ladies would become a mirror into which both women and men might look to see reflections of their true selves, their faults and virtues, and find examples to help them make a better world.
In the introduction to Le Livre de la cite des dames, Christine wrote of her despair at reading Matheolus’s thirteenth-century Lamentations, a diatribe against women and marriage, which forced her into a lifelong confrontation with the courtly literati of Paris:
No matter which way I looked at it and no matter how much I turned the matter over in my mind, I could find no evidence from my own experience to bear out such a negative view of female nature and habits. Even so, given that I could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn’t devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex, I had to accept their unfavourable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions… Thus I preferred to give more weight to what others said than to trust my own judgement and experience.17
The misguided Christine of the narrative dream that frames her allegory is corrected by the beatific appearance before her of a female personification of the shining light of Reason, who tells her that…
Our wish is to prevent others from falling into the same error as you and to ensure that, in future, all worthy ladies and valiant women are protected from those who have attacked them. The female sex has been left defenceless for a long time now, like an orchard without a wall, and bereft of a champion to take up arms in order to protect it… Now, however, it is time to be delivered out of the hands of Pharaoh.18
It is as if she is responding directly to the travails of the walled-in bonded weavers of Chretien de Troyes’ Yvain;## and perhaps she is.
She may have visited a beguinage and been inspired by its citizens. But Christine was a woman of her time: she did not believe that society would benefit from having women judges, or heads of state, or professors. What she saw clearly was that men and women sinned equally and were capable of equal virtue; and that in educational and social opportunity lay the fulfilment of women’s and humanity’s creative potential. She employed an argument that might just as easily have been made in the 1920s as the 1400s:Reason: ‘Do you know why it is that women know less than me?’
‘No, my lady, you’ll have to enlighten me.’
‘It’s because they are less exposed to a wide variety of experiences since they have to stay at home all day to look after the household. There’s nothing like a whole range of different experiences for expanding the mind of any rational creature.’19
In later years, as France descended into civil war, became prey to the overseas ambitions of Henry V of England and suffered humiliation at Agincourt in 1415, Christine was socially and politically marginalised, retiring in 1418 behind the reclusive walls of a convent, in a sense admitting defeat in her hopes for a more enlightened era.
It is one of history’s choicer ironies that, in the person of Jeanne d’Arc (1412–31), a female champion should emerge for all France, celebrated in Christine’s 1429 Ditie de Jehanne d’Arc (‘Song of Jeanne d’Arc’); that she should be an uneducated peasant visionary; that she should be vilified as a sorceress and martyred at the age of nineteen after a show trial by an English military court at Rouen; and that she should become both a symbol of French womanhood and an icon of the far right. Christine wrote of this extraordinary young woman at the height of her fame. Her Song of Jeanne, in more than sixty verses each of eight lines, is the only popular contemporary portrayal of the Maid of Orleans, before her tragic betrayal and martyrdom…
XXIV
Contemplate your person now,
You are virgin, very young,
To whom God grants the strength and power
To be both woman and champion,
Who offers France the gentle breast,
The food of peace and will correct
The wicked folk who would rebel.
’Tis more than Nature could effect!
XXXIV
Aha!! What honor for the female
Sex! God shows how he loves it,
When the nobles—great, but wretched—
Who earlier the realm had quit,
By one woman were fortified,
No men could do this deed, but more:
The traitors were repaid in kind!
No one would credit this before.
XLIV
Forget, then, all heroic men,
For she alone should take the crown,
Her deeds suffice to show that God
Has handed her more valor down
Than all those who are often named,
And she has not yet finished here!
I think God granted her all this,
So through her deeds peace will appear!20
Hailed by some as the first European feminist, Christine is one of the earliest women we know of to have supported herself by writing. For some years she had earned her living as a copyist, and among her circle were other professional women, notably a gifted illustrator called Artemisia, whose work she praised and whom she employed to decorate many of her surviving manuscripts. These – each one meticulously copied, illuminated and bound with a personal dedication – survive in such large numbers that the Duc de Berry∫∫ was able to leave his daughter Mary no fewer than forty-one volumes of Christine’s works; and Le Livre de la cite des dames still exists in at least twenty-seven contemporary manuscripts. Christine was nothing less than an industry in her own right. Each copy embodies both the written testimony of her thoughts and feelings and the art and craft, equally authored, of this unquiet voice.
Neglected in France after her death in about 1430, Christine was championed in England by the printer William Caxton, who published several of her works and ensured her popularity with collections including The Morale Proverbes of Cristyne, printed in 1478:
Of these sayynges Cristyne was auctoresse
Which in makyng hadde such inteligence
That thereof she was mirreur and maistresse
Here werkes testifie the experience…
EMPRINTED BY CAXTON IN
FEVERER THE COLDE SEASON21
Christine was fearless, witty, uncompromising and impressively self-critical. Out of pain and adversity she wove a new sort of narrative and, after centuries of neglect, she takes her place among the elite of European women writers and thinkers.ΩΩ