(ca. 1364–1430)
Often known as the first professional woman of letters, Christine de Pizan (or Pisan) was born in Venice but as a child moved to the court of Charles V of France, where her father was invited to be court physician and astrologer. Under her father’s tutelage, Christine was taught to read and write, and was schooled in the arts of rhetoric and philosophical discourse. She was uncommonly well educated for a woman at this time, and her learning supported her later in life when her father’s death in the 1380s, followed by her husband’s death in 1390, left her to care for three children, her widowed mother, and a niece. After working for some years as a copyist for manuscript workshops in Paris, in the late 1390s Christine chose to earn her living by writing her own original works commissioned by various members of the aristocracy and royal family.While her skill at writing lyric verse first brought her renown and reputation, her later works concerning moral issues, the position of women in society, politics and government, chivalry, and a well-received biography of Charles V, established her as the foremost female writer of her time, and one of the most remarkable literary figures, male or female, in medieval Europe. Christine was an essential part of the intellectual and literary culture in late 14th- to early 15th-century Europe, yet she remained essentially French and wrote only in that language. Her works were translated into other languages and sometimes ascribed to male authors by those who could not, for example, accept that a woman could write so knowledgeably about the arts of chivalry (Le Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalrie, 1410).After her early success with lyric poetry for the aristocracy, she turned her attention to works of moral, social, and political import until civil war in France forced her retreat to a convent in 1418, where she died sometime in the 1430s. The extant manuscripts of her work testify to her popularity and influence as they range from the most sumptuously illuminated, commissioned by the aristocratic patronage she enjoyed, to considerably less elegant manuscripts intended for a broader audience.Christine’s L’Avision or The Vision (1405) is an important source of biographical information framed in a DREAM VISION and peopled with allegorical figures.
Christine’s literary endeavors were vast and various in genre and subject matter: She produced courtesy and devotional books, literary debates, biographies, lyric poetry, chivalric manuals, dream visions, and defenses of women. This last, in particular, marks Christine’s bold vision and her lifelong concern with the pervasive literary and social anti-feminism of her time and culture. Interestingly, the first full, written expression of her attempts to revise literary and cultural understandings of women are in the form of an exchange of letters debating the merits of the ROMAN DE LA ROSE, an exchange that came to be known as the quarelle, and may have been the first literary quarrel of its kind.
The Roman de la Rose was a widely read and extraordinarily influential dream ALLEGORY in which the dreamer Amant (the lover) goes in quest of a forbidden “rose,” and allegorical figures help or hinder his “pilgrimage.” Begun by GUILLAUME DE LORRIS around 1230 and greatly expanded and completed by JEAN DE MEUN more than 40 years later (it is generally around the often sexually explicit Jean de Meun section that the quarelle revolved), the Roman de la Rose influenced most dream narratives that followed it, including CHAUCER’s, who also translated the allegorical vision into MIDDLE ENGLISH.Variously read as Christian allegory, secular ROMANCE, or a combination of the two genres, the allegorical characters personify or introduce ideas such as sex outside of marriage, sensual love, clerical hypocrisy, and instructions concerning relations between the sexes. One aspect of Jean de Meun’s poem that disturbed Christine was the author’s pervasive and generally negative view of women and his portrayal of them as fickle, untrustworthy, immoral, debauched, bestial, and legitimate prey for men who are justified in using even physical force to fulfill their pursuit. These and other misogynist views of women were ubiquitous in medieval literature and culture, but it was not only the anti-feminist misrepresentation of women that offended Christine.
Christine’s strongest criticisms of Jean de Meun’s narrative concerned what she saw as the author’s immoral and un-Christian view of marriage and the relations between the sexes. Christine’s concerns with virtue, morality, rationality, and the soul, and the ways in which the sexes share vices and virtues, are the basis for her critique of the poem’s misogynist representation of women. The actual debate or quarelle began with Christine’s disagreement with Jean de Montreuil’s (provost of Lille) favorable opinion of the poem. The disagreement developed into an exchange of letters that included, among others, Jean Gerson (chancellor of the University of Paris), Gontier Col (first secretary and notary to Charles VI), and Pierre Col (canon of Paris and Tournay). Literary and political leaders alike joined in the debate, but Christine easily held her own with literate and articulate arguments concerning Jean de Meun’s moral perversities, his attacks on sacred institutions such as marriage, and his condemnation of all women on the basis of a few examples. After the quarelle Christine wrote what would be the first and most famous of her book-length defenses of women against literary and cultural misogyny, The BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES, in which she challenges male authors’ misogynistic generalizations about women. Responding again to texts such as the Roman de la Rose and authors as diverse as Matheolus, Ovid and BOCCACCIO, Christine’s City of Ladies is a sustained allegorical vision in which she is enlisted by three Virtues—Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—to build a city in which all virtuous women will live free from the constraints of misogyny. Modeled on Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women, the City of Ladies contains stories of famous women and in true allegorical fashion, their stories are the bricks and mortar, the walls and foundations, the towers and the inhabitants of the city itself. Radical in its revision and selective readings of famous women’s lives and deeds, Christine’s work directly challenges male authorities and their misrepresentations of women. Nonetheless, modern reception of the City of Ladies is varied and contentious, and in this, it represents modern critical response to Christine’s work in general.
While Christine de Pizan’s stature as a learned woman of letters is unassailable, her feminist credentials have been variously supported, contextualized, and challenged. Some critical writings (mostly early feminist movement writings) laud Christine’s corrective writings and her overt challenge to patriarchal definitions of female roles and behaviors. Later critics are slightly more cautious, and locate Christine’s feminist ideology in the contexts of medieval European culture. Critical writings in this category generally credit Christine for writing against tradition, and for giving voice to female perspective and erudition. The ideological position of many of these assessments is that given the prevailing wisdom and cultural strictures of the medieval period,Christine does much to revise misogynist views of women. Finally, those who challenge Christine’s status as “feminist” writer generally acknowledge her erudition and literary productivity, yet they charge her with a form of social conservatism that belies “true” feminist ideologies. There is much evidence, indeed, for Christine’s conservatism: She believes in a hierarchical social structure, advocates wifely obedience to husbands, and espouses the ideology of separate spheres of endeavor for men and women. Indeed, Christine’s The Book of the Three Virtues (1405), a sequel text to the Book of the City of Ladies, is a “courtesy book” for women, in which she seeks to instruct and advise them in moral and appropriate behaviors, and much of the advice is conservative in tone and substance. Yet these aspects of Christine’s thinking and writing are less severely judged by some who argue that we cannot evaluate her in 21st-century contexts, that her historical and social contexts of a necessity inflect her thinking and writing, and that to expect her writings to reflect modern feminist sensibilities is to misinterpret and devalue what she does accomplish in her work. It is only fitting that the author who began a literary quarelle over one of the most influential works of the medieval period should herself be the subject of an ongoing and lively debate. Christine’s extraordinary career as a woman of letters, her productivity and originality, her rhetorical and moral acuity, continue to intrigue and excite all who read her works.
Bibliography
■ Brown-Grant, Rosalind. Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defense of Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
■ Christine de Pizan. The Writings of Christine de Pizan. Edited by Charity Cannon Willard. New York: Persea Books, 1994.
■ ———. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
■ ———. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea Books, 1981.
■ Delany, Sheila. “ ‘Mothers to Think Back Through’: Who Are They? The Ambiguous Example of Christine de Pizan,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, edited by Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987, 177–197.
■ Desmond, Marilyn, ed. Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
■ McLeod, Enid. The Order of the Rose: The Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976.
■ Quilligan,Maureen. The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Elisa Narin van Court