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Christine de Pisan


Christine de Pisan (ca. 1365–1429) was perhaps the most articulate and prolific female voice of the European Middle Ages. Being widowed at the age of 25 without an inheritance and with three children, she was obliged to earn her living as a writer. She was commissioned as biographer of Charles V. Her patrons included King Charles VI of France, King Charles of Navarre, and two dukes of Burgundy. Her publications, which were translated into English, Italian, and other languages, included Epistle of the God of Love (1399), where she impugned the misogynistic portrayals of women and the dearth of morality in the popular French work Roman de la Rose, an allegorical love poem written by Guillaume de Lorris and expanded by Jean de Meung. The controversial quarrel surrounding these texts was known as the Querelle de la Rose, with Christine and Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, allied against the esteemed humanist royal secretaries Jean de Montreuil and Pierre Col. In a further work, Christine’s Vision (1405), she complained against her fortune as a female writer and scholar burdened by the conventional obligations of womanhood. Another work produced in the same year, Livre des Trois Vertus (Book of Three Virtues), concerns the status and role of women in society. Her most renowned work was The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), which was influenced by Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women (1361), as well as by the linguistic and allegorical theories of Quintilian, Augustine (to whose book City of God Christine’s title alludes), Hugh of St. Victor, and Dante. Almost uniquely among women of her time, Christine was enabled to obtain a fine education through her family’s connections to the royal court; her father, Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, was appointed court astrologer by Charles V, and her reading may well have included Ovid, Boethius, and John of Salisbury, as well as the figures mentioned above.1 Christine also published a poem on Joan of Arc, Ditie de la pucelle (1429).

De Pisan ranks among the most important intellectuals of her day and certainly the most noted woman writer of the medieval period. In her philosophical writings and commentaries she was resolute in her support of a woman's right to pursue education and attain prominence within society in relation to her accomplishments. Her many poems, essays, and books, widely distributed and read during her lifetime, have influenced readers throughout Europe and Britain through the many translated editions that have since been produced. Among her most notable works in defense of women's role in medieval European society, de Pisan's La cité de dames recounts for readers the accomplishes of women from history, providing medieval men and women with a sense of the possibilities that can be attained by women when allowed education and social freedoms.

An Education At Court
Born in Venice in 1363, de Pisan was the daughter of Italian scholar Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, a highly educated man who had been appointed astrologer to the court of Charles V of France. In 1369 the five-year-old de Pisan traveled from Venice to the French court, where she was educated by her father in such academic subjects as literature, Greek, and Latin, as well as becoming schooled in the habits of the French court. Because of her father's many intellectual interests, the y oung de Pisan had full run of a vast family library that included books on not only literature, history, classics, and astrology, but also scientific advancements, religion, and works engaged in the philosophical arguments underway in France at the time.

In 1380, the same year France's King Charles V died, fifteen-year-old de Pisan married Étienne du Castel, a 24-year-old notary and member of the French court who had been reared in Picardy. The couple, who had three children, enjoyed a relationship in which mutual respect played a large part; Castel encouraged his y oung wife's intelligence and penchant for poetry and self-expression, while she appreciated his gentle demeanor and loyalty. Tragically, during a wave of bubonic plague that was then ravaging Europe, in 1389 Castel died while on a trip to Beauvais with the king, leaving twenty-five-year-old de Pisan to raise her daughter and two sons on her own. Unfortunately, de Pisan's responsibilities did not end there: she also had to shoulder her husband's financial debts, which were the subject of a prolonged dispute, as well as support her now-widowed and debt-ridden mother and a niece. Because her father's death in 1386 had severed family ties to the new French monarch, King Charles VI, there was little family support to draw on. Although English monarch Henry IV and Milanese ruler Galeazzo Visconti both offered de Pisan a place within their courts, the poetess had no wish to leave her beloved France. Instead, she decided to rely on her wit, her intelligence, and her love of words and write poetry, becoming in the process one of France's first professional writers.

Patronage
Fortunately for de Pisan, many in positions of power knew of and respected her talents, and she was able to gain the patronage of the French queen, Isabella of Bavaria, and several nobles, among them the earl of Salisbury and Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, which enabled her to support her family. For Philip—who was rearing her eldest son as his own offspring—she penned the moral guidebook Le livre des faitz et bonnes moeurs du Saige Roy Charles. This work, while appropriate for its time, did not prove as useful to subsequent generations due to its overt moralizing and intricate style. More popular was her Le livre de paix, which discusses the proper manner in which princes should be educated. The medieval view of society was that, rather than upward mobility, people were born into a particular station, and their duty was to fulfill the duties that particular station required. De Pisan believed in an orderly society and, unlike the vision Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli would put forth in The Prince a century later, argued that men of power—particularly princes—have an obligation to lead an honest and moral life, support the Catholic Church, and otherwise maintain the status quo. Other long writings include a biography of Charles V published in Paris in 1404 as Le livre des faicts et bonnes meurs du sage roi Charles V.

During her lifetime, de Pisan gained renown throughout Europe and England for her writings in verse, such as the long poem "Le livre des mutations de Fortune," "Le chemin de longue etude," and "Le livre des cent histoires de Troie." Intricate, heavily stylized, and verbose, these longer works were eclipsed in popularity by the many shorter poems, ballads, and rondeaux she penned during her early career, most between 1393 and 1400. Expressing her emotions—particularly the sadness, uncertainty, and desolation she endured after her beloved husband's death—many of de Pisan's shorter works have been republished for successive generations of new readers in the centuries following her death.

In the longer, more broadly focused verses de Pisan wrote during her writing life, she gained in sophistication where she lost in popular appeal. She experimented with literary themes and style, creating multi-layered poems with meanings often obscure to a reader unschooled in the social milieu and intellectual issues of her day. Pisan's prose is not for the general reader; it is stylistically intricate, intellectually challenging, and reflects her wide-ranging knowledge and interests. In contrast, her prose histories, her biography of Charles V, and her political essays have been praised by generations of critics. Among her contemporaries, de Pisan was often compared to the classical authors Virgil, Cicero, and Cato due to her technical ability and the intelligence that is revealed throughout her body of work.

In the eyes of modern feminist scholars, de Pisan is most remembered for her Trésor de la cité des dames, published in 1405 and translated into English by London publisher Wynkyn de Word as The City of Ladies. La cité des dames has preserved for modern readers and historians the life story of a number of women from both history and mythology; for de Pisan's contemporaries it provided women with inspiration. In this work she also examines the source of women's diminished social status and includes advice for readers regarding how to improve education and social standing. Now considered one of the foundational works of feminist literature, the book has served as a source for all those who would argue that women deserved the same right to educational opportunities as men because they were capable of attaining similar accomplishments. For some, her argument that women were socially and intellectually the equals of men was seen as a threat, and efforts—eventually discredited—were made to show that La cité des dames was a plagiarized rewrite of an earlier work by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio titled De claris mulieribus.

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