Christine de Pizan

Quick Facts

• Name: Christine de Pizan
• Lived: 1364-c. 1430
• Born: Venice; raised and worked mainly in France
• Language: Middle French
• Role: poet, professional writer, moral teacher, and political adviser
• Period: Late Medieval
• Known for: defending women against misogynist authorities
• Main works: The Book of the City of Ladies, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, The Book of the Body Politic, The Book of Peace

The Big Question

How should women answer a culture where respected books, teachers, and poets keep saying that women are naturally foolish, weak, or morally dangerous?

In One Minute

Christine de Pizan was a late medieval French writer born in Venice. After her husband died, she supported her household by writing for royal and aristocratic patrons and became one of medieval Europe's best-known professional women writers.

Her most famous teaching is simple and forceful. Do not treat anti-woman literature as neutral truth. Test it against reason, Christian teaching, and women's actual deeds. In The Book of the City of Ladies, she builds an imaginary city where women's intelligence, courage, holiness, and public service are remembered instead of mocked.

Christine also wrote political advice. She taught that rulers owe justice, wise counsel, peace, and care for the common good.

What They Taught

Christine taught that authority has to answer to truth. An authority is a person, book, institution, or tradition that people trust. Medieval readers inherited many authorities that insulted women: satirical poems, moral handbooks, classical stories, and claims about female weakness. Christine asks whether those claims fit reason, experience, and Christian belief. Her answer is no.

Her basic argument is that women are capable of reason and virtue. Reason means the power to judge, learn, and give an account of what is true. Virtue means stable moral excellence, such as courage, justice, prudence, faithfulness, and self-control. Christine thinks these qualities are not owned by men. Women have shown them in history, scripture, government, learning, household management, martyrdom, and everyday life.

Education is central. Christine argues that many supposed female defects are produced by custom, not nature. If girls are kept from books and then mocked for ignorance, the test has been rigged. Learning trains memory, judgment, speech, and moral discipline. A girl who is taught history, scripture, practical wisdom, and good conduct has more room to become wise.

In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine turns this argument into a story. She begins troubled by books that attack women. Three personified virtues appear: Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. A personification is an abstract idea shown as a character. They help Christine build a symbolic city from examples of women. Each woman placed in it becomes evidence that women have always contributed to human life.

Christine writes inside medieval Christianity. She does not defend women by rejecting religion. She argues that God made women, that women saints show spiritual greatness, and that Mary gives Christian culture its highest example of honored womanhood. Her feminism is not modern equal-rights theory. It is a Christian and moral defense of women's rational and spiritual dignity.

Her political teaching uses the medieval image of the body politic. A body politic is a community imagined as one living body. The prince is the head, nobles and knights are the arms, and common people are necessary members too. The point is mutual dependence. The head cannot despise the feet and remain healthy. Good government means justice, restraint, honest counsel, fair burdens, defense of the weak, and peace where possible.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Misogyny and anti-misogyny: Misogyny is contempt for women as women. Anti-misogyny is active resistance to that contempt. Christine sees misogyny in books that call women seducers, liars, chatterers, or creatures ruled by appetite. Her reply is to ask for evidence and present counterexamples.
• Education and virtue: Education is training in reading, memory, judgment, and conduct. Virtue is a settled habit of good action. If a boy is taught Latin and history while a girl is denied them, his confidence proves social advantage, not natural superiority.
• Authority: Authority is borrowed trust. Christine respects ancient and Christian sources, but she refuses to treat every famous male author as reliable about women.
• The City of Ladies: The city is an allegory, meaning a story where people and places stand for ideas. Its walls are built from women's lives, so the book itself becomes a defense against cultural attack.
• The body politic: The body politic is society pictured as one body. If the ruler acts like a diseased head, the whole community suffers.
• Political counsel and peace: Political counsel is advice meant to guide rulers. Peace is ordered public life, not just the absence of battle. Christine tells princes to seek wise advisers, avoid greed, protect the vulnerable, and repair civil conflict.

Major Works

• The Book of the City of Ladies (1405): Christine's most famous defense of women. The book answers misogynist writing by building an allegorical city with Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. Its many examples include queens, warriors, scholars, mothers, inventors, biblical women, and saints.
• The Treasure of the City of Ladies or The Book of the Three Virtues (1405): A practical sequel. It gives moral advice to women in different ranks, from princesses to widows to working women. It shows Christine's mix of bold defense and medieval social hierarchy.
• The Book of the Body Politic (c. 1404-1407): A political treatise written for the young dauphin Louis of Guyenne. It teaches that princes, nobles, knights, clergy, merchants, artisans, and peasants all have duties in one shared public body.
• The Book of Peace (1412-1414): Advice written during French civil disorder. Christine urges the ruler to practice justice, self-command, good counsel, and peace instead of factional revenge.
• The Book of the Deeds and Good Customs of the Wise King Charles V (1404): A biography of Charles V that presents him as a model of prudent rule, learning, and royal responsibility.

Why It Matters

Christine matters because she gives one of the clearest medieval arguments against misogynist authority. She does not merely say that some women are admirable exceptions. She argues that women as a sex have been slandered by bad interpretation, bad education, and bad literary habit.

She also broadens the history of political thought. Medieval politics was not only scholastic argument in universities. It also included courtly advice, moral biography, and counsel from a widowed woman who knew the costs of war, debt, law, and patronage.

For Feminist Philosophy, Christine is important because she shows an early strategy still used later: expose the false story, explain how social training creates inequality, and recover examples that a hostile tradition erased.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Christine's immediate opponents were not one single school. They were the broad misogynist tradition behind works such as The Romance of the Rose, the writings of Matheolus, and learned claims that treated women as naturally inferior. She also pushes back against uses of Aristotle and Aristotelian biology when they are used to make female subordination look natural.

Her supporters included aristocratic patrons, women readers, and later scholars who recovered her as a major medieval author. She stands near Renaissance Humanism because she uses classical examples, biography, moral instruction, and public authorship, even though her world remains deeply medieval and Christian.

Her work belongs to the querelle des femmes, the long European debate about women's nature, virtue, education, and social role. Later writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft made more explicitly modern arguments about rights and citizenship, but Christine is an important predecessor because she already links women's condition to education and social power.

Modern readers also criticize her limits. Christine accepts monarchy, rank, class hierarchy, and many conventional Christian expectations about chastity and obedience. Her defense of women is powerful, but it is not the same as modern egalitarian feminism.

Related Pages

• Aristotle
• Feminist Philosophy
• Renaissance Humanism
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Hildegard of Bingen