The Book of the City of Ladies

by Christine Pizan

  Yet Christine was also concerned throughout these initial years of her career with matters which struck a personal chord with her: the defence of women against the misogynist claim that the female sex was, in every respect, inferior to the male. The City of Ladies undoubtedly formed the cornerstone of Christine’s critique of misogyny, but it was not an isolated work in her literary output. As early as the Epistre au dieu d’Amours (The Letter of the God of Love) (1399), Christine complained of men’s behaviour towards women. Using Cupid as her mouthpiece in this text, she accuses knights of failing in their chivalric duty to protect women, claiming that they go around slandering ladies’ good names after having tried unsuccessfully to seduce them. She similarly attacks authors such as Ovid and Jean de Meun for condemning the entire female sex as unfaithful and unstable purely on the basis of a few bad examples. Adopting a rhetorical strategy which she would apply more systematically in the City of Ladies, Christine here counters these negative views by citing examples of virtuous women of the past, such as Penelope, Dido and Medea, whom she presents as a credit to their sex. In the Epistre Othea (The Letter of Othea to Hector) (c.1400), a courtesy book which provides young knights with lessons in good behaviour and in spiritual conduct culled from pagan tales of classical mythology, Christine also gives the lie to misogynist stereotypes. Unlike the author of the Ovide Moralisé, who often draws an anti-feminist moral from his tales of female characters, Christine interprets her stories in the Letter of Othea exclusively for their general relevance to the human soul, irrespective of the sex of the person portrayed in them.

  Christine’s main challenge to anti-feminism before she wrote the City of Ladies was contained in a series of letters on the subject of Jean de Meun’s Rose which she exchanged between 1400 and 1402 with other leading intellectual figures of her day: Jean de Montreuil, Provost of Lille; Gontier Col, first secretary and notary to King Charles VI; and his brother Pierre Col, canon of Paris and Tournay. For her opponents, the Rose was a work of the highest literary merit, a moral text which skilfully satirized and condemned the pursuit of sensual love. In Christine’s opinion, by contrast, the Rose was a pernicious text, the work of an immoral and foul-mouthed author whose views of women were vicious and vitriolic in the extreme. She took particular exception to the way in which its male characters, such as Friend and Genius, attack women for their supposed lasciviousness, fickleness and inability to keep secrets whilst counselling the would-be lover to continue pursuing his lady by any means necessary, even by trickery or physical force. Christine also condemned the Rose for the way in which it portrays female characters, such as the debauched and unprincipled Old Woman who is supposed to act as the lady’s chaperone but instead gives the lover access to her mistress in exchange for a bribe. However, Christine’s main criticism of Jean de Meun’s text was that it presented an un-Christian view of relations between the sexes, one based on mutual mistrust and antagonism rather than on love and charity. To her mind, the Rose’s talk of the traps and snares which men need in order to catch their sexual prey encouraged its male readers to think of women as somehow less than human, as almost bestial. Instead, Christine sought to prove misogynists such as Jean de Meun wrong by arguing that what unites men and women as human beings – their rationality and possession of a soul – is more important than what divides them as sexes.

  At the heart of Christine’s defence of women, both in her letters on the Rose and in the City of Ladies, was her profound conviction that it is a human – and not a specifically female – trait to be prone to sin. However, she also believed that if men and women are alike as sinners, they are equally capable of adopting rational forms of behaviour and of making informed moral choices. It is here, in defending women by replying to the misogynists’ assault on female virtue, rather than in demanding the same rights for both sexes, that Christine’s brand of feminism in the City of Ladies differs most markedly from that of the twentieth century. Instead of campaigning for causes which would have been completely unthinkable in her day, such as universal suffrage or equal opportunities, Christine focused on what she saw as the single, most crucial issue: proving to misogynists and to women themselves that neither virtue nor vice is the prerogative of one sex to the exclusion of the other. Moreover, unlike those modern feminists who exhort women to valorize sexual difference and to celebrate female sexuality,22 Christine was in flight from the body in favour of the spirit. This is because, in her day, it was the misogynist tradition in all its manifestations – scientific, theological and literary – which aligned the female sex with corporeality and sensuality in order to justify their claims about women’s social, juridical and psychological inferiority to men.

  How then did Christine create the necessary authority for herself in the City of Ladies to attack the accepted truths of her age? What examples and arguments could she take from the misogynists’ sources in her efforts to beat them at their own game? How were Christine’s illustrious heroines meant to inspire her female readers to pursue virtue in their actual daily lives?

  The prologue of the City of Ladies opens with a secular version of the Annunciation as recounted in Luke 1:38.23 On being informed by the three Virtues that God has chosen her to build a city in which all virtuous women would be invited to dwell, Christine accepts her mission with humility. Echoing the Virgin Mary’s reply to the angel Gabriel, she states: ‘Behold your handmaiden, ready to do your bidding. I will obey your every command, so be it unto me according to your word’ (I.7). Christine uses this rather bold comparison between herself and the Virgin Mary as a rhetorical device to help her out of the acute dilemma that she faced both as author and as champion of her sex. Being the first woman to raise her voice against the misogynist tradition, Christine certainly had originality on her side. Yet, in being original, she necessarily lacked the authority which a male writer such as Jean de Meun enjoyed by following in the footsteps of an Ovid or a Theophrastus. In the absence of a prestigious female forerunner whose arguments she could cite as a precedent, Christine turned to the most obvious and unchallengeable source of womanly authority that was available to her: the Virgin Mary. Since Mary’s exceptional status as a virgin mother means that she is an impossible model for other women to follow, this choice may seem rather surprising on Christine’s part. However, it is Mary’s qualities of meekness and mildness which – even anti-feminists had to concede – women are capable of imitating, on which Christine draws in her prologue. In allying herself with Mary as a humble creature who has been chosen to perform a difficult task, Christine also alludes to the biblical commonplace by which God elects ‘the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty’ (I Corinthians 1:27). Women’s very meekness thus becomes the most potent weapon in their armoury which they can wield against their misogynist enemies. In the City of Ladies, Christine exploits the rhetorical charge of this argument to the full, claiming that if women have been weak in might, they have been strong in right. As Reason declares to Christine:

  Out of the goodness and simplicity of their hearts, women have trusted in God and have patiently endured the countless verbal and written assaults that have been unjustly and shamelessly launched upon them. Now, however, it is time for them to be delivered out of the hands of Pharaoh (I.3).

  Christine reinforces this paradoxical idea that women are empowered by their own powerlessness by adding a strong legalistic flavour to her text.24 This particular rhetorical strategy is introduced in the prologue of the City of Ladies where Reason cites a proverb which states that ‘even the most undeserving case will win if there is no one to testify against it’ (I.3). Christine thus contrasts the moral rectitude of womankind with the unscrupulousness of anti-feminists by conjuring up the image of a court-room in which women are being tried in absentia as the misogynist plaintiff launches accusations at an empty dock. The City of Ladies is Christine’s opportunity to put the case for the defence and throughout the text there are innumerable references to ‘slander’, ‘proofs’ and �
�evidence’. The dialogues between Christine and the three Virtues frequently take the form of a cross-examination in which, ironically, she plays the part of devil’s advocate. No sooner does Christine herself put forward the case for the misogynists than her argument is summarily dismissed by Reason, Rectitude or Justice, all of whom deliver their counter-arguments with the oratorical flourishes of a lawyer. For example, Christine quotes the opinion of the Roman orator, Cato, who asserts that ‘if woman hadn’t been created, man would converse with the gods’. In her reply, Reason points out that it is precisely thanks to a woman, the Virgin Mary, that Christ was born, not simply to redeem the sin of Adam and Eve but also to save humankind from worshipping those pagan gods whom Christians regard as devils. Reason sums up by sarcastically agreeing with Cato that ‘it’s definitely true to say that men would be conversing with the gods of hell if Mary had not come into the world!’ (I.9).

  Christine also calls upon a further rhetorical strategy with which to boost her authority. By using the building of a city as the key metaphor of her text, she exploits its multiple connotations.25 Firstly, this image connects Christine’s text to Saint Augustine’s influential treatise the City of God, in which the city represents the Christian faithful both on earth and in heaven. Christine explicitly alludes to this text towards the end of the City of Ladies when she declares, ‘Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, civitas Dei’ (III.18), and she follows Augustine’s lead in using the city as a symbol of the ideal community held together by its common pursuit of virtue. In Christine’s case, however, her city is populated by female warriors, good wives and saintly women. Secondly, Christine’s use of the symbol of the city underpins one of the central arguments of her text, namely that women have contributed to the moral and spiritual development of civilization as epitomized by the urban community.26 She thus cites women such as Nicostrata and Isis for their vital role as city-builders or law-givers (I.33 and I.36 respectively). Finally, the image of a walled and turreted city is frequently used in medieval literature as a symbol of defence and, more specifically, of defence of one’s chastity. In Jean de Meun’s Rose, for example, the chastity of the lady is represented as a fortress in which Jealousy, the allegorical figure who personifies her self-restraint, has locked her up in order to protect her virtue. When the lover finally consummates his desire for the lady, he does so by killing Jealousy and storming the fortress itself. The Rose thus implies that, despite putting up a fight, women in fact collude with the loss of their own virtue, a suggestion which was one of the mainstays of misogynist thought. Christine explicitly rejects this view in Part II of the City of Ladies, where Rectitude refutes the charge that women take pleasure in being raped (II.44–6). Moreover, the whole of her text is as much an impregnable fortress of female virtue as it is a community. As Christine exclaims at the end of Part III:

  Most honourable ladies, praise be to God: the construction of our city is finally at an end. All of you who love virtue, glory and a fine reputation can now be lodged in great splendour inside its walls, not just women of the past but also those of the present and the future, for this city has been founded and built to accommodate all deserving women (III.19).

  Yet all of Christine’s efforts to give her text authority would have come to nothing if she had not been able to derive the bulk of her pro-woman material from well-known and authoritative sources. To be sure, she does sometimes quote from her own experience in the City of Ladies, for example when she attacks the misogynist claim that women are prone to gluttony or avarice by stating that she knows plenty of abstemious and generous women whose example disproves these charges (I.10 and II.66 respectively). However, Christine was well aware that the oral testimony of one woman would not be enough to outweigh the written testimony of countless male authors. The only way that she could offer a persuasive defence of her sex was by showing that selective quotation was a game that two could play. Christine therefore plunders the misogynists’ favourite scriptural and classical authorities in order to come up with a mass of examples that support her thesis against theirs. For instance, she counters their theological trump card, Eve, with more positive models of Old Testament women: Judith, the brave and resourceful widow who kills Holofernes, the general who besieged the city of the Jews (II.31); Esther, the valiant queen who saves her people from persecution (II.32); and Susanna, the chaste wife who is ready to be stoned to death rather than submit to the lecherous advances of two corrupt priests (II.37). Moreover, unlike her main source, Boccaccio, whose catalogue barely touches on contemporary women, Christine brings her series of heroines right up to date, citing the queens and princesses of France in tones just as favourable as those she employs in her portraits of Biblical heroines (I.13, II.68).

  Christine’s selectiveness towards her sources even extends to modifying them, where necessary, in order to highlight the good rather than the bad qualities of her heroines.27 For example, Boccaccio’s version of the story of Medea, the Greek princess and sorceress, tells how, when Medea runs away from her father’s court with her lover Jason, she kills her younger brother and scatters his dismembered body along the road in order to distract her father from pursuing her. Not surprisingly, in the City of Ladies, Christine omits all mention of this brutal act, emphasizing instead how Medea uses her expertise in sorcery to help Jason win his quest for the Golden Fleece and how she shows exemplary fidelity to him, even when he eventually abandons her for another woman (I.32, II.56). Christine also takes liberties with her sources in those cases where she feels the need to clarify or justify an aspect of her heroines’ behaviour which might otherwise appear to be blameworthy. For instance, she is at pains to explain why the Babylonian queen Semiramis, whose story is the first ‘stone’ to be laid in the foundations of the City of Ladies, decided to marry her own son, Ninus, after the death of her husband.28 In an attempt to absolve her heroine for committing an act which would have offended medieval sensibilities, Christine has Reason cite Semiramis’s own political rationale:

  firstly, she wanted no other crowned lady to share her empire with her, as would have been the case if her son had married another woman; and secondly, in her opinion, no other man than her son was worthy of her (I.15).

  However, in her eagerness to exonerate the queen still further, Christine also feels honour-bound to add a rather more speculative explanation. Reason thus also claims that Semiramis was so proud and honourable that ‘if she had thought she was doing anything wrong or that she might be subject to criticism for her actions, she would have refrained from doing as she did’(I.15).

  Not content simply to cite examples from classical and scriptural authorities which counter those of her misogynist opponents, Christine demonstrates that whole arguments from one set of sources can be played off against those from another. For example, she refutes the scientific view that woman is a defective male by citing the theological commonplace that not only was Eve born in a nobler place than Adam, since she was formed in paradise and he outside, but also that the actual matter from which she was made, a rib, was nobler than the earth from which he was created (I.9). In the City of Ladies, Christine even manages to make positive capital for women out of some of the anti-feminists’ opinions. For instance, she accepts the fact that the female sex is not as physically strong as the male, but she rejects the misogynist deduction that women therefore also have weaker minds. On the contrary, she claims that women are in fact morally advantaged by being physically frailer than men on the grounds that what Nature takes away with one hand, she gives on the other. As Reason declares:

  if Nature decided not to endow women with a powerful physique, she none the less made up for it by giving them a most virtuous disposition: that of loving God and being fearful of disobeying His commandments (I.14).

  In putting the case for women against the misogynists’ accusations, Christine also seeks to empower her female readers by persuading them that, as members of the human race rather than of some lesser species, they too have the moral capacity to
shun vice and pursue virtue. Indeed, they themselves have a duty to realize this potential and so refute anti-feminist slanders through their own praiseworthy actions. Addressing her audience directly, Christine exclaims:

  My ladies, see how these men assail you on all sides and accuse you of every vice imaginable. Prove them all wrong by showing how principled you are and refute the criticisms they make of you by behaving morally (III.19).

  Yet, given the restrictions which their own society placed on them, could Christine’s contemporaries actually be expected to imitate her heroines of the pagan or Judaeo-Christian past by becoming teachers or artists, let alone warriors or political leaders?