Christine de Pizan

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1364, the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, a physician and astrologer trained at the University of Bologna ^[1]. The family name derived from Pizzano, a small town near Bologna, and Christine later rendered it in French as de Pizan. When she was still a small child, her father accepted an invitation to serve as court astrologer and physician to King Charles V of France, and around 1368 the family settled in Paris ^[2].

The move shaped everything that followed. Charles V, remembered as a scholarly king who assembled one of the great royal libraries of medieval Europe in the Louvre, presided over a court where books and learning carried real prestige ^[2]. Tommaso prospered there, and Christine grew up close to that world of manuscripts, scholars, and royal patronage. She wrote later that her father encouraged her education against the custom of the day, while her mother preferred that she keep to spinning and conventional feminine occupations ^[1]. The tension between those two expectations became one of the recurring subjects of her mature work.

At fifteen, in 1379, Christine married Étienne du Castel, a young notary and secretary in the royal chancellery ^[3]. By her own account the marriage was a happy one. The couple had three children, of whom a daughter and a son, Jean du Castel, survived to adulthood ^[1]. For a decade her life followed the settled pattern of a court official's wife in Paris.

Fortune, a force Christine wrote about all her life, turned against the family in quick succession. Charles V died in 1380, which cost her father his privileged position and income. Tommaso himself died in the mid-1380s. Then, in 1390, Étienne du Castel died of an epidemic illness while traveling at Beauvais on royal business, leaving Christine a widow at twenty-five with three young children, her mother, and a niece to support ^[3].

The years that followed were harsh. She spent more than a decade entangled in lawsuits over her husband's estate and debts owed to it, an experience she described with lasting bitterness ^[1]. In her allegorical autobiography, the Livre de la mutacion de Fortune (Book of Fortune's Transformation, 1403), she famously described how necessity turned her from a woman into a man, meaning that she had to take on the responsibilities and labors that custom assigned to men ^[4].

Her answer to necessity was unusual: she read, studied, and began to write. She started with lyric poetry in the fashionable courtly forms, ballades, rondeaux, and virelais, many of them mourning her husband. The poems circulated at court, attracted admirers, and brought commissions. Anyone asking who was Christine de Pizan in Paris around 1400 would have heard of a widow whose verses were passing through the hands of dukes ^[3].

What set Christine apart from other talented court poets was that writing became her livelihood. Scholars generally regard her as the first woman in Europe to support herself and her household by her pen, producing works on commission for the most powerful patrons in France ^[2]. Her clients included Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, his son John the Fearless, Louis, Duke of Orléans, Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, and Jean, Duke of Berry ^[3].

She did more than compose texts. Christine supervised the production of the manuscripts themselves, working with Parisian scribes and illuminators to prepare luxurious presentation copies for her patrons ^[5]. The most spectacular survivor is the so-called Queen's Manuscript (British Library, Harley MS 4431), a collected edition of her works in more than two hundred illuminated leaves that she assembled around 1410 to 1414 for Queen Isabeau ^[5]. Several images in her manuscripts show Christine herself at her desk, one of the earliest recurring author portraits of a woman in European art.

Her range was remarkable for any writer of the period. Philip the Bold commissioned an official biography of Charles V, the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, completed in 1404, which established her as a serious prose historian ^[3]. She wrote a treatise on warfare and chivalry, the Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie (c. 1410), drawing on Vegetius and contemporary military practice; it was later translated and printed in English by William Caxton in 1489 at the request of Henry VII ^[6]. She also produced moral and political works, including the Livre du corps de policie (Book of the Body Politic, c. 1407), addressed to the education of princes.

Any account of Christine de Pizan achievements begins with her intervention in what became known as the querelle des femmes, the long European debate over the nature and worth of women. Between about 1401 and 1403 she took part in a public exchange of letters, the querelle du Roman de la Rose, in which she and the theologian Jean Gerson criticized the immensely popular Romance of the Rose, particularly Jean de Meun's portion, for its crude and contemptuous treatment of women ^[7]. Debating learned men in writing, and doing so as a woman, was itself an unprecedented act; the exchange made her famous well beyond court circles.

Her masterpiece followed. Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405) imagines three allegorical figures, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who appear to the despairing author and help her build a fortified city populated by virtuous and accomplished women drawn from history, legend, and scripture ^[7]. Adapting material from Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris and many other sources, Christine argued case by case that women's supposed inferiority was a product of slander and denied education, not of nature ^[1]. The book is now widely treated as a founding text in the history of European feminist thought, though Christine herself framed it in the moral and theological vocabulary of her own century.

She followed it the same year with Le Livre des trois vertus (The Book of the Three Virtues, also called The Treasure of the City of Ladies), a practical manual of conduct for women of every rank, from princesses to peasants and prostitutes ^[7]. Where the City of Ladies defended women in principle, the Treasure advised them on surviving and exercising influence in the world as it actually was. Both books circulated widely in manuscript and remained in use for over a century, with early printed editions and translations into Portuguese, Dutch, and English ^[5].

Christine never remarried, a decision she explained as loyalty to Étienne's memory, and she presented her widowhood as the crucible in which her intellectual life was formed ^[1]. Her poem Seulete suy (Alone am I), one of the most anthologized lyrics of medieval French literature, distills that grief into a refrain of solitude.

Her household remained her responsibility throughout her career. Her daughter entered the Dominican convent at Poissy near Paris, an event Christine described in the poem Le Dit de Poissy ^[3]. Her son Jean du Castel spent time in England in the household of the Earl of Salisbury; after the earl's death in 1400, Christine maneuvered carefully to bring the boy home, declining an invitation to relocate to the English court of Henry IV ^[3]. Jean later obtained a post in the French royal chancellery, the same institution his father had served.

In an age when authorship was often anonymous, Christine wrote openly in her own name and repeatedly inserted her own life into her books. The Avision Christine (Christine's Vision, 1405) mixes political allegory with one of the earliest autobiographies by a European woman, recounting her Italian origins, her education, her losses, and her decision to live by study ^[4].

The France of Christine's later career was sliding into catastrophe. King Charles VI suffered recurring bouts of madness, the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans fought for control of the government, and the assassination of Louis of Orléans in 1407 opened a civil war between Armagnac and Burgundian factions ^[2]. Christine responded as a political writer, appealing for peace in works such as the Livre de la paix (1412 to 1414) and a public letter to Queen Isabeau urging her to mediate ^[3].

The English invasion made things worse. After the French disaster at Agincourt in 1415 she wrote the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine (Letter on the Prison of Human Life, completed 1418), a work of consolation addressed to women who had lost husbands, fathers, and sons in the battle ^[3]. When Burgundian forces seized Paris in 1418, Christine fled the city and took refuge in a convent, very probably the Dominican priory at Poissy where her daughter was a nun ^[1].

She fell silent for more than a decade, then produced one final work. The Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, dated 31 July 1429, celebrates Joan of Arc's victories and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims ^[8]. It is the only substantial poem about Joan written during her lifetime by any author, and its jubilant tone suggests Christine saw in the young commander a living vindication of everything she had argued about women's capacities. Christine died around 1430, most likely at Poissy; the exact date is not recorded ^[1].

For roughly a century after her death Christine remained a widely read author. Her works survive in some 300 manuscripts, an exceptional total for a medieval writer, and early printers on both sides of the Channel issued her books: Caxton printed her Moral Proverbs in 1478 and the Book of the Feats of Arms in 1489, and Brian Anslay's English translation of the City of Ladies appeared in London in 1521 ^[6]. Thereafter her reputation faded, and for centuries she was remembered mainly by specialists in Old French poetry.

The twentieth century recovered her. Historians of political thought re-examined her mirror-for-princes writings, and feminist scholars, most visibly after Simone de Beauvoir cited the querelle du Roman de la Rose in 1949, placed the City of Ladies at the head of a long tradition of women writing in defense of women ^[7]. Earl Jeffrey Richards's 1982 English translation of the City of Ladies brought her to a broad modern readership, and her books are now standard texts in university courses on medieval literature, the history of women, and political theory ^[7]. Judy Chicago gave her a place setting at The Dinner Party (1979), the landmark feminist art installation now at the Brooklyn Museum ^[9].

Among the most cited Christine de Pizan facts is her status as Europe's first professional woman of letters, but her significance is wider than any single first. She proved that a woman could master the learned culture of her time, argue publicly with its authorities, advise its rulers, and run what amounted to a publishing operation, all while insisting that her sex was no bar to reason. Any modern Christine de Pizan biography ends where she began: with a writer who, handed ruin at twenty-five, built a city out of books.