The Book of the City of Ladies

by Christine Pizan

  Christine’s answer to this problem is to present her heroines as role models whose moral qualities, rather than their literal deeds, are offered to her readers for emulation. Instead of being encouraged to harden their bodies for battle like the Amazons of Part I or to suffer the pains of physical torment like the martyrs of Part III, Christine’s audience are meant instead to imitate the resourcefulness of the former and the steadfastness of the latter. And it is the women of Part II who provide the readers of the City of Ladies with the clue as to how this should be done. These wives, mothers and daughters of past and present themselves perform deeds which ‘translate’ into their own domestic sphere of influence the qualities shown by warriors and by saints in the public and spiritual domains.

  A classic instance of this process of ‘translation’ at work is provided by those examples of women who used language to benefit humankind in a variety of different domains. Thus, in Part I, Reason celebrates the fact that, in the public sphere, pagan women such as Nicostrata invented the alphabet and facilitated learning and communication between people (I.33), whilst others, such as Isis, devised written laws which replaced barbarism with order (I.36). Then, in Part II, Rectitude transposes women’s use of language for the good of human civilization into moral and domestic terms. For example, she commends Antonia for persuading her husband Belisarius to accept the difficult military mission which the king has given him (II.29), praises the Sabine women for begging their husbands and fathers to call off their battle with each other (II.33) and applauds Veturia for imploring her son, Marcius (Coriolanus), to spare the city of Rome (II.34). In Part III, Justice exults in the deeds of those women whose language performs the spiritual function of rescuing the souls of unbelievers from damnation. Virgin-martyrs such as Saint Martina (III.6) are kept alive by God precisely in order to convert as many people as possible through their preaching. In the case of Saint Christine, the martyr miraculously continues to speak and to proselytize even after having had her tongue cut out (III.10).

  The women of Christine’s medieval audience would obviously be unable to establish new laws or to convert pagans to Christianity like the heroines of Parts I and III of the City of Ladies. Nevertheless, they could still be expected to emulate the women of Part II who ‘translated’ this moral use of language into virtuous deeds such as offering words of comfort and advice to their loved ones. Christine’s concept of role models as moral exemplars therefore has nothing in common with that of modern feminism, with its emphasis on female pioneers striving to break down the bastions of male power and privilege. However, her aim was not to demand reform of the social order but rather to show how the qualities exhibited by extraordinary women in the past could also be demonstrated by women of the present acting in their more ordinary roles of daughter, wife and mother. It was, after all, in this private domain that the women of Christine’s day could in fact aspire to playing an influential role in medieval society.

  After 1405, when she had finished writing the City of Ladies and its sequel, the Three Virtues, Christine turned her attention back towards wider political concerns. As the king, Charles VI, became increasingly subject to bouts of madness and the royal princes battled for control of the crown, France began to slide inexorably towards a state of civil war. Christine initially responded to this state of affairs by writing treatises in favour of peace and stability in the body politic. However, she became an increasingly marginalized figure in Parisian political circles and, after 1418, she is thought to have withdrawn altogether from the court and taken refuge at the convent of Poissy outside Paris, where her daughter was a nun.

  Yet, towards the very end of her life, Christine took up her pen one last time in defence of women. This time it was to add her weight in support of Joan of Arc, the maiden-warrior, as leader of the French troops against the English enemy. In the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (The Poem of Joan of Arc) (1429), Christine presents the Maid of Orleans as the embodiment of all the virtues that she had extolled in the women of the City of Ladies: like the Amazons, Joan is valiant and brave; like the Virgin Mary, she is chaste and pure; and like the heroines of the Old Testament, she is a saviour sent by God to rescue her people in their darkest hour. Fortunately, Christine appears not to have lived to see the Maid suffer her terrible end at the stake two years later. It is the Joan covered in glory from her victory at Orleans and from her part in the coronation of Charles VII at Rheims cathedral who thus provides a most fitting final chapter for Christine’s celebration of women.

  Christine de Pizan’s achievement as a defender of her sex lies not in her anticipation of the strategies which later feminists would employ, but rather in her critical engagement with the dominant ideology of her own day. Though many of her arguments in favour of women, such as her stress on the moral equality of male and female, have been superseded by other ideological and pragmatic concerns, they none the less commanded a great deal of authority in their own time. We need to pay Christine’s critique of misogyny the respect it deserves and to see it as a dialogue with the society and culture of the late Middle Ages, rather than judging it by the standards of the late twentieth century. Christine’s voice in defence of women is utterly different from our own, but it was in its time a dissenting voice and one which spoke out to its audience with as much urgency and vigour as that of any modern feminist.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  My primary aim in translating Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies has been to make this fifteenth-century Middle French text as readable as possible for a modern audience. Christine was writing at a time when intellectuals in France were trying to increase the prestige of the vernacular because they felt that it was inferior to Latin. They therefore attempted to replicate the complexities of Latin syntax in French and frequently used linked pairs of synonyms or near-synonyms in the hope that two French words would express all the nuances that they thought a single word in Latin could do. In line with many of her contemporaries, Christine’s syntax in the City of Ladies is often tortuous and she rarely gives just one word when two or three could be used. These features of writing in this period do not make for easy reading, nor do they make literal translation desirable. In the interests of readability, I have altered Christine’s word order considerably and shortened her sentences. Groups of near-synonyms have been respected but I have dealt with pairs of exact synonyms in different ways, depending on grammar and context. Where two verbs are strictly identical in meaning and would be completely redundant in English, I have tended to reduce them down to one: for example, ‘ars’ and ‘bruslé’ have become simply ‘burnt’. Where Christine has two identical nouns, I have often changed one of them into an adjective which reinforces the other noun: for instance, ‘congié’ and ‘licence’ have been translated as ‘express permission’. I have, however, attempted to remain faithful to the legalistic style of her original text and to render as much of its polemical tone as possible.

  One important feature of Christine’s style in the City of Ladies deserves a special mention here as it touches on the key issue of gender. When she wants to make a particular point about men as opposed to humankind in general, Christine is careful to distinguish between, on the one hand, the specific term ‘les hommes’, meaning simply the male sex, and, on the other hand, generic terms such as ‘les gens’, which refer to both sexes, or sex-neutral terms such as ‘la personne’, which can indicate either sex. Moreover, Christine is equally concerned not to subsume the female pronoun ‘elles’ under the male pronoun ‘ils’ in those cases where she wants to highlight the moral equality of men and women, as in, for example, the pursuit of virtue. In this respect, if in few others, she is ahead of her time in anticipating many of the arguments that modern feminist linguistics has raised about sexist language. I have therefore endeavoured to respect Christine’s usage throughout and have used ‘people’, ‘humankind’ and ‘humanity’ as generic terms, ‘person’ and ‘individual’ as sex-neutral terms, and ‘men’ exclusively to refer to males. W
here Christine differentiates between male and female pronouns, I have done the same, and in those cases where a sex-neutral pronoun is appropriate, I have given either ‘he or she’ or ‘they’, depending on the context.

  I have followed Maureen Cheney Curnow, who edited the City of Ladies in 1975, in taking Bibliothèque Nationale, f. fr. 607 as my base manuscript. Christine herself closely supervised the execution of this text and of the three miniatures which illustrate each of its three parts. Ms 607 is a deluxe item, forming part of a collection of Christine’s works which she presented after 1405 to one of her noble patrons, John, Duke of Berry. Like Curnow, I have also consulted British Library, Harley 4431 as a control. This manuscript, which contains a later version of the City of Ladies, was part of a lavishly illustrated collected volume of her works modelled on that previously given to the duke, which Christine offered to the queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, after 1410.

  As a catalogue of famous women, the City of Ladies contains literally hundreds of references to places, people and other works. I have therefore provided the reader with additional information and explanations at the end of the text in two different forms: a substantial glossary, which can be consulted at the reader’s leisure; and notes on biblical references and aspects of medieval culture, which have been kept to a minimum so as not to interfere unduly with the reader’s enjoyment of the work. There is also a bibliography which gives details of editions and translations of both Christine’s primary works and those of her medieval counterparts. This bibliography also offers a selection of secondary studies of the City of Ladies as well as suggestions for further reading on its historical and literary background.

  NOTES

  1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1928), 76.

  2. See, for instance, Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Katharina M. Wilson, Medieval Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and Carolyne Larrington, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

  3. For standard studies of the life and works of Christine de Pizan, see Enid Mc Leod, The Order of the Rose: The Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976); and Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984).

  4. For an anthology of Christine’s works translated into English, see Charity Cannon Willard, ed., The Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: Persea Books, 1994).

  5. For an excellent sourcebook of works in the misogynist tradition, see Alcuin Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

  6. For editions of Christine’s works, see the bibliography below.

  7. See Glenda K. Mc Leod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogues of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

  8. For editions of works by Matheolus and other authors cited in this introduction, see the bibliography below.

  9. See, for example, Sheila Delany, ’“Mothers to think back through”: Who are they? The ambiguous case of Christine de Pizan’, in her Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 88–103.

  10. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and for a succinct account of medieval ideas on women, S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (London: Macmillan, 1995), 246–52.

  11. See Vern L. Bullough, ‘Medieval medical and scientific views of women’, Viator 4 (1973), 485–501; and Claude Thomasset, ‘The Nature of Woman’ in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed., A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1992), 43–69.

  12. See Blamires, Woman Defamed, 43–5.

  13. See Three Medieval Views of Women: ‘La Contenance des Fames’, ‘Le Bien des Fames’, ‘Le Blasme des Fames’, Gloria K. Fiero, Wendy Pfeffer and Mathé Allain, eds. and trans. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

  14. Norris J. Lacy, ‘Fabliau women’, Romance Notes 25 (1985), 318–27.

  15. See Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); and Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

  16. For extracts from Ovid, see Blamires, Woman Defamed, 17–25.

  17. For extracts from Theophrastus, see Blamires, Woman Defamed, 70–2. See also Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

  18. See Elizabeth Robertson, ‘The corporeality of female sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret’, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 268–87; and The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century, Brigitte Cazelles, trans. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

  19. See R. Howard Bloch, ‘Medieval misogyny’, Representations 20 (1987), 1–24.

  20. See Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman.

  21. Albertano’s Book of Consolation and Advice (1246) is a debate between the impetuous Melibeus, who wants to avenge himself on his enemies, and his sensible wife, Prudentia, who counsels him not to take any rash action. In the course of their dialogue, Prudentia refutes many of the misogynist arguments which her husband initially uses in order to belittle her advice before eventually winning him over to her point of view. For extracts from this text in English translation, see Blamires, Woman Defamed, 237–42.

  22. This type of modern feminist theory is most closely associated with French thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. For an introduction to their work, see Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981); and Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985).

  23. See V. A. Kolve, ‘The Annunciation to Christine: authorial empowerment in the Book of the City of Ladies’ in Brendan Cassidy, ed., Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 171–96.

  24. Maureen Cheney Curnow, ’“La pioche d’inquisicion”: legal-judicial content and style in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames’ in Earl Jeffrey Richards et al., eds., Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 157–72.

  25. Sandra L. Hindman, ‘With ink and mortar: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames: an art essay’, Feminist Studies 10 (1984), 457–84.

  26. See Rosalind Brown-Grant, Reading Beyond Gender: Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  27. See Patricia A. Phillippy, ‘Establishing authority: Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames’, Romanic Review 77 (1986), 167–93.

  28. Liliane Dulac, ‘Un mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan: Sémiramis ou la veuve héroïque (du De Claris Mulieribus à la Cité des Dames)’, Mélanges de philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux (Montpellier: Centre d’Etudes Occitanes, 1978), 315–43.

  The Book of the

  City of Ladies

  PART I

  1. Here begins the Book of the City of Ladies, the first chapter of which explains why and for what purpose the book was written.

  One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge. My mind had grown weary as I had spent the day str
uggling with the weighty tomes of various authors whom I had been studying for some time. I looked up from my book and decided that, for once, I would put aside these difficult texts and find instead something amusing and easy to read from the works of the poets. As I searched around for some little book, I happened to chance upon a work which did not belong to me but was amongst a pile of others that had been placed in my safekeeping. I opened it up and saw from the title that it was by Matheolus. With a smile, I made my choice. Although I had never read it, I knew that, unlike many other works, this one was said to be written in praise of women. Yet I had scarcely begun to read it when my dear mother called me down to supper, for it was time to eat. I put the book to one side, resolving to go back to it the following day.

  The next morning, seated once more in my study as is my usual custom, I remembered my previous desire to have a look at this book by Matheolus. I picked it up again and read on a little. But, seeing the kind of immoral language and ideas it contained, the content seemed to me likely to appeal only to those who enjoy reading works of slander and to be of no use whatsoever to anyone who wished to pursue virtue or to improve their moral standards. I therefore leafed through it, read the ending, and decided to switch to some more worthy and profitable work. Yet, having looked at this book, which I considered to be of no authority, an extraordinary thought became planted in my mind which made me wonder why on earth it was that so many men, both clerks and others, have said and continue to say and write such awful, damning things about women and their ways. I was at a loss as to how to explain it. It is not just a handful of writers who do this, nor only this Matheolus whose book is neither regarded as authoritative nor intended to be taken seriously. It is all manner of philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention, who all seem to speak with one voice and are unanimous in their view that female nature is wholly given up to vice.