From Venice to Paris
Christine de Pizan was born in Venice around 1364. Her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was a scholar and astrologer who took a post at the court of King Charles V of France, and the family moved to Paris when she was a small child. She grew up in a household close to the royal library and the learned men who used it, and she received a better education than most girls of her time, though much of it seems to have come through her father and her own reading.
She married a royal secretary, Etienne du Castel, in her mid-teens. By her account it was a happy marriage. Around 1389 he died, and shortly before that her father had also died and the family’s court income had dried up. Christine was left a widow with children, a mother to support and legal disputes over money to fight.
Writing as a livelihood
What makes Christine unusual is what she did next. Rather than remarrying or entering a convent, she turned to writing. She began with love lyrics and short poems, found patrons among members of the French and Burgundian courts, and over time produced a very large body of work in verse and prose. She is often described as one of the first women in western Europe to make a living as a professional author, and while “first” is a claim that is difficult to prove, her financial dependence on her pen is well documented in her own writings.
She also became involved in the book trade. Her works were copied in workshops that she appears to have supervised, and several manuscripts survive with illustrations tied to her direction. This links her to the world of illuminated manuscripts and to the practical business of getting a book made, circulated and paid for.
Major works
Her range was wide. A few of her best-known titles:
- The Letter of the God of Love and her part in the early fifteenth-century quarrel over the Romance of the Rose, in which she criticized the way a famous poem portrayed women.
- The Book of the City of Ladies, written around 1405, which imagines building an allegorical city out of examples of admirable women from history and legend.
- The Treasure of the City of Ladies, a companion book of advice for women of different ranks.
- The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, a manual on warfare and knightly conduct drawing on earlier authorities.
- The Life of Charles V, a prose biography of the king who had employed her father.
Her last known poem, the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, dates to 1429 and celebrates the early victories of Joan of Arc. It is among the few contemporary writings that praise Joan while she was still alive. Christine seems to have died not long afterward, though the exact date is uncertain.
Her argument about women
In The City of Ladies, Christine answers the common medieval view, found in many clerical and satirical texts, that women are naturally weak or wicked. She argues by example, collecting stories of capable and virtuous women, and she insists that women’s reputation suffers because most writers have been men. This line of thinking connects directly to broader questions about women writers and rulers and about the portrayal of women in art and literature.
Is “feminist” the right word?
The word is sometimes attached to her in book titles, including this page’s, because it is a quick label for her defense of women. It needs caution. The term and the political movements behind it belong to a much later period, and Christine did not call for equal political rights or a change in the social order. She accepted many assumptions of her time, including the importance of rank, marriage and religious duty, and she often advised women to be modest and obedient within their station.
What she did was challenge the idea that women were inferior by nature and argue that they deserved education and respect. Historians sometimes call this “proto-feminist” or simply describe it as a defense of women. Either way, it is more accurate to explain what she wrote than to rely on a modern label.
Later years and legacy
In her later years she withdrew to a convent at Poissy, where her daughter was a nun. Her works kept circulating in manuscript for some time and then received relatively little attention until modern scholars rediscovered them. Today she is widely studied as a witness to the intellectual life of the Paris court in the years of the Hundred Years War, and as an example of a woman who found a way to speak in a world that rarely let women do so.