Christine de Pizan
Staying on the studious side of badass medieval women, we have the writer, Christine de Pizan (c.1364-1430). Born in Italy, Christine spent most of her life in France, and became the first professional woman of letters in the history of the country. Where Hildegard, for all her talents, had the security of a convent, Christine had only the power of her words to put food on the table. She wrote a wide range of literature, from courtesy manuals to lyric poetry and literary debates. But, more than anything, Christine is the first feminist as we would recognise one in history.
‘Philosophers, poets, and orators too numerous to mention… all seem to speak with one voice and are unanimous in their view that female nature is wholly given up to vice’, she says in Book I of her 1405 dream-vision text, The City of Ladies. Through the vision that follows, Christine constructs an allegorical city in which the walls and towers are built by examples of women from the past and present superior to men in their field. The vision starts with Christine reading Matheolus’s misogynistic treatise, Lamentations, and the rest of the text serves as her cutting and convincing response.
Christine is guided through the three parts of her vision by Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice, as she sees women whose piety, skill in war, intelligence, and innovation is superior to their male counterparts’. At the end of the work, Christine addresses all women, issuing a formidable and rousing battle cry: ‘in short, all you women, whether of high, middle, or low social rank, should be on your guard against those who seek to attack your honour and your virtue… have nothing to do with such men beneath whose smiling looks a lethal venom is concealed’.
Building a city out of the stories of great women may seem an unusual thing to write about today, but in Christine’s time the city was a powerful religious image. Heaven, in the Bible, is depicted as a city, specifically the New Jerusalem (eg. Revelation), and this tradition was the basis for one of the most popular texts of the Middle Ages, Augustine’s monumental City of God, which works on a contrast between an earthly and a heavenly city. Christine’s city also manifests her central message that women have made a significant contribution to civilisation, nowhere clearer than in cities.
As a whole, The City of Ladies is bitingly satirical, and makes an effective demolition of the misogynistic views legitimised by the medieval interpretation of Christianity through giving examples of the lives of women written ironically, for the most part, by men. Reading the text now, it is simply staggering that even today women are still not quite treated as men’s equals, to varying degrees worldwide. This is to say nothing of the centuries of open oppression that women suffered, or the fact that the most misogynistic text ever written, the Malleus Maleficarum, was published barely 80 years later.