Christine de Pizan

Christine de Pizan (Venice, 1364 - around 1430) was a writer who worked for the French court and for several princes, and she is considered one of the first women in Europe to live by her pen. She is placed at the beginning of the so-called Querelle des Femmes, a literary debate about the condition of women. Her work mixes poetry, biography, political treatises and moral writing. She matters because she was an early voice defending women's education and dignity in the late Middle Ages.

She was the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, a physician and astrologer from the area of Bologna who had served the Republic of Venice. When her father was called to the court of Charles V as royal astrologer, the family moved to Paris. There Christine grew up surrounded by books, and her father insisted that she study philosophy, history, literature and science, which was unusual at the time. She married young to Étienne du Castel, a notary and royal secretary, and they had three children. After her father and husband died, she was left a widow responsible for her mother, her children and a niece, and she had to pursue lawsuits to recover the salaries owed to her husband.

To support her household she began writing ballads and love poems, which found an audience among the nobility. Her patrons included dukes of Burgundy, Orléans and Berry, and Queen Isabeau of Bavaria. She wrote biographies, such as her account of King Charles V, and advice books such as the Epistre d'Othéa, in which the goddess of wisdom instructs the Trojan hero Hector in political virtue. She believed France descended from the Trojans and that hereditary monarchy came close to the Aristotelian ideal of good government. Her writing also reflected the crises of the realm, including the mental illness of Charles VI and the war with England.

Her best known quarrel was the dispute over the Romance of the Rose, the poem by Jean de Meun that portrayed women as seducers and deceivers. Christine answered with prose texts that challenged that image and argued that women should have access to learning. In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) she gathered stories of heroines from the past to imagine a city where feminine virtue could find shelter, and in The Book of the Three Virtues she offered advice to a young princess. Around 1418 she withdrew to the Dominican convent at Poissy, and in 1429 she wrote her last poem, on Joan of Arc. Today she is read as a forerunner of writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir, although her thought remains rooted in the Christian and courtly traditions of her time.