Christine de Pizan
Italian-French writer (c. 1364–c. 1430), born in Venice and moved as a small child to the court of Charles V of France, where her father served as royal astrologer, raised in a courtly environment exceptionally literate for a woman of her time. Widowed at twenty-five with three children, the family in debt and without financial support, she made the unprecedented decision to earn her living as a professional writer, becoming probably the first woman in Europe to live by her pen, first with courtly poetry and later with prose works of a moral, political and historiographical character for royal and noble patrons. Her most celebrated work, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), is an allegory in which three personified female figures — Reason, Rectitude and Justice — help the narrator build a fortified city populated by illustrious women from history and mythology, in direct response to the misogynistic medieval tradition, particularly the Roman de la Rose, against which Christine had already polemicised openly in the literary dispute known as the Querelle du Roman de la Rose (1401–1402), one of the earliest documented public debates on the representation of women in literature. She also wrote The Book of the Three Virtues, a practical guide addressed to women of every social condition, and The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, a treatise on military art and the law of war remarkably systematic for the work of an author who had never fought. Her last known work, the Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc (1429), is the first poem dedicated to Joan of Arc written while she was still alive. Rediscovered and championed since the late twentieth century as a forerunner of European proto-feminist thought, Christine de Pizan continues to be studied both for her reasoned defence of women's intellectual dignity and for her extraordinary literary versatility.
8 works
- L'art de chevalerie selon Vegece
- L'avision de Christine
- Le trésor de la cité des dames de degré en degré et de tous estatz
- Les cent histoires de Troye L'epistre de Othea deesse de prudence envoyee a l'es
- Oeuvres poétiques Tome 1
- Oeuvres poétiques Tome 2
- The Book of the Duke of True Lovers
- The epistle of Othea to Hector; or, The boke of knyghthode