Allegorical spade in hand, Christine began to dig.
So deeply she wished to delve as to threaten the very foundations of patriarchal pedagogy; the established and enforced educational and literary traditions that dictated cultural mores. Traditions which reinforced male supremacy by way of female subjugation and denigration. Christine de Pizan sought not only to raze structural misogyny as ideology to the ground but uproot entirely the deeply biased paradigms such dogmas produced.1 With three omnipotent women lending her emotional, educational, and physical support, Christine dug.
As she disturbed the bedrock of cultural consciousness—the insisted naturality of male supremacy and implicit feminine inferiority—so too did Christine unearth that hating women had been a socially encouraged institutionally supported personal choice since the inception of patriarchy.2 Building from Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, Christine de Pizan composed an allegorical Cité in which women were free to present their human-selves—possessing real and recognized authority—in the public realm without the repercussions of male dominance reimposing its ignored will. By constructing this allegorical city within la Cité des Dames (1405), Christine de Pizan created a permission structure for the other voice, not just to possess space within the cultural consciousness, but to question the very imposition of the first voice and the violent domination it normalized through unchallenged, compounding misogyny.3 From Christine’s allegorical city rose hundreds of years of multi-level proto-feminist thought.4
Welcome to episode 5 of the Women of the Hundred Years War, by Kate Wagner, the 15th Century Feminist. Be sure to subscribe to be notified of all future posts as we continue to explore the countless patriarchy confronting women of the past. If your brain requires words on a page—fear not, a written version of today’s episode and references are available via the 15th Century Feminist Substack. Though each episode is written to stand alone, I do recommend listening along in order as each builds upon the prior.
This is episode 5 - Pro-choice in the Middle Ages.
When Christine’s husband died in 1389, she possessed, for the first time in her twenty-five years, legal autonomy of her own person. Yet this status of self-sovereignty widowhood allowed was very much conditional, affirmed by her treatment within debtors court, as briefly discussed last episode. Determined to craft her own narrative in the face of unrelenting misogynistic prejudice, the humanity that was denied to Christine through patriarchal-exclusive spaces became weaved within the pages of her writing, breaking centuries of silence by asserting authority over the very cultural system “through which relationships of power are produced and maintained,” as identified by Danielle Clarke within The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing.
The written word held power and this Christine knew as a reader herself.
Following contemporary traditions Christine’s corpus is often in direct dialogue with the most influential voices in Western thought.5 Her deviation from tradition, however, lies not just in the otherness of her voice but the authorization she grants herself by way of literary precedence to cast a lasting image, through the written and visual medium of manuscript production, of women explicitly contributing in both thought and action to the development of culture and civilization6—something patriarchal thought wholly denied.
Recalling Ovid’s Metamorphoses through themes of transformation within L’Avision (1405), Christine marks her writing transition from “pretty things”—her courtly love poems—into topics that were ‘noble’ and mentally ‘profitable’ as occurring in 1399.7 By this time, Charles VI, the son of Christine’s idealized monarch, was thirty-one and had suffered at least three prolonged mental health crises.8 The king’s uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, were quarreling over the power possessed by the king’s brother, Louis of Orleans, in allyship with queen Isabeau, and were inching ever-closer to instigating civil war to tend perceived personal grievances.9 This quarreling between the highest ranking men of the realm threatened the vestiges of stability imposed by a wavering monarchical regime and it was in the presence of this cultural crumbling Christine chose to assert herself and her visions of a new world order.10
L’Epistre d’Othéa, written amidst this tumult of 1399, positions women as consequential in the paradigm Christine wished to realize within the Cité walls—a paradigm in which women possessed the capacity to be shepherds of a cultural reckoning, dislodging presuppositions of male supremacy while correcting collective consciousness to recognize and anticipate women’s contributions to civilization. Othéa, a goddess of Christine’s own invention meant to represent prudence, addresses and delivers her letter to prince Hector of Troy, hoping to positively influence his behavior through her gift of foresight.11
These literary lessons conceived in a court environment hell-bent on the masculinization of the body politic, written by a woman in the popular specula principum genre—mirror of princes—confront the maintenance of male supremacy perpetuated by institutions gendered and biased under patriarchy. Christine’s Othéa, in her explicitly feminine form, guides Hector—as both an individual and ruling body—much in the same way the author hoped to influence the political body informing her reality—a political body which had allegorically been made male within the cultural consciousness.12 It was an intertextual realignment of realized authority. In that moment, Christine, through Othéa, established literary precedence for a feminine body of power; a body politic in which women could dictate the terms of their own reality; a feminine body divinely equipped with personal authority.
Beyond boldly identifying (and defying) the harm perpetuated through prescriptive literary traditions, the sheer breadth of Christine’s literary exposure would have been perceptible by contemporary court readers of all literacy levels. To a university educated reader, wide-ranging exempla lent authority to her words while the courtly reader engaged with text written in the vernacular full of familiar themes, allowing it to be read aloud and jointly considered.13 For the reader without words, the included imagery sought to evoke specific mental images of a well-read woman able to assert influence over the body politic, reaffirmed through illustrations produced under Christine’s direct management and copied at her insistence.14 —Both the intentionality and materiality of these actions will remain important throughout.
Français 606, a preserved manuscript of Othéa produced sometime between 1406 to 1408 which currently resides within la Bibliothéque National de France, contains no less than 101 miniatures including depictions of The Amazons, Minerva, Ceres, Isis and Diana. Regardless of when the reader meets the text, they’re met with an image of Christine presenting her book—this book—to Louis of Orleans. The author and her prestigious patron precede not just the imagery of the text’s divine subject, Othéa, but the entirety of the text itself. The position and perception of this miniature follows the structure of the text, as Christine explicitly establishes narrative authority within the prologue:
“Please do not show contempt for my work My respected lord, humane and wise, Because of the lack of merit of my ignorant person, For a little bell makes a great sound, Which, very often, wakes up the most wise And advises them to study hard. For this reason, most praiseworthy and benign prince, I, named Christine, unworthy woman…”
The little bell appears to ring a resounding anti-feminine tune, after all, she was but an “ignorant woman, of little importance.”15 However, the rhetorical irony visually articulated explicitly defines the author as a reader, mollifying cultural expectations regarding the relationship between medieval reader, writer and material.16 ‘Ignorant’ and ‘inconsequential’ directly contradicted the reality of a woman—a member of the non-dominant, non-privileged group—receiving patronage from a prince of the realm and his high-ranking, extravagantly-accessorized entourage in the form of an illustrious artifact.
Bleeding through the parchment of the prologue is a miniature of Othéa performing a similar action as Christine, without the necessity of fealty. Othéa, positioned above Hector by way of divine hierarchy, reaches from the heavens to provide guidance to the young prince through the gift of her wisdom; her words. Where the visual demarcations are apparent between the men—Louis is partially framed by a rich blue fabric donning gold stitched fleur de lis, set apart by an abundance of gilded accessories while the men around him, dressed to represent their wealth and status, contain tiny idiosyncrasies establishing their identities including distinct facial-hairstyles amongst Hector’s men—there are far fewer visual differences between Christine and Othéa. This juxtaposition of gendered preservation, both representing and requiring patriarchal preference, allows for the apotheosis of the author.
Regardless of literacy level, the imagery was clear: An educated woman could do more than participate, she could elevate herself; she could contribute; she could influence; she could even lead.
Christine would go on to produce additional copies of Othéa—equal in depth of illustration—for Phillip the Bold in 1403, Jean duke of Berry in 1404, and the king of England, Henry IV, the same year—each with unique prologues crafted specifically for the intended patron.17 As Deborah McGrady identifies, “throughout Christine’s career, she offered copies of her texts to many other royal figures, such as Charles VI, Jean of Berry, Marguerite of Burgundy, Louis of Guyenne, Marie of Berry, the seneschal of Hainaut, John of Bourbon, the duke of Milan, the earl of Salisbury, King Richard II, and King Henry IV.”18
Recognizing that gendered prejudices were culturally shaped Christine hedged her bets as a contributor of said culture, asserting authority not just over the body of her texts or the political body she hoped to influence, but the very proliferation of her paradigms within the shallow halls of institutionalized misogyny. This was authority over outcomes—outcomes which allowed for the development of proto-feminist polemics to proliferate cultural consciousness.
It is hard to adequately capture the collective cultural upheaval England and France were experiencing at the turn of the fifteenth century. The schism of the Western church had long been fragmenting societal allegiances with a papacy each in Rome and Avignon. This meant France and its vassals were oft at odds with neighboring kingdoms loyal to a Roman papacy all while England continued to act as aggressor over territorial losses on the continent. 1396 saw a marriage between the two kingdoms and with it the hope for a perpetual peace. However, just three years into the marriage, the king of England, Richard II, was usurped by his cousin Henry IV, straining familial loyalties to an already unpopular and unstable crown. Between 1391 and 1403 plague ravaged both kingdoms with up to a quarter of France’s population perishing to the pestilence.19 In his Historia Anglicana 1272-1422, Thomas Walsingham captured the continental scale of grief experienced:
“In 1390 a great plague ravaged the country. It especially attacked adolescents and boys, who died in incredible numbers in towns and villages everywhere. The epidemic was soon followed by the death of foodstuffs, so that in some places a measure of grain sold for 23d. In 1391 such a great mortality arose in Norfolk and in many other counties that it was thought as bad as the great pestilence. To take only one example, in a short space of time 11,000 bodies were buried at York.”20
Death was abundant and a culture of domination perpetuated through patrilineal primogeniture legalities, the slow loss of the commons, and the rapid destruction of physical bodies to produce labor and fight wars allowed for a vigorous reinforcement of patriarchy; of an institutional assertion of women as an absent center of their own bodies; of a cultural acceptance of the devaluation of women’s personhood. Women were positioned as but means of reproduction for a declining population, locked to the possible biological function of their body.
And though reproduction may be a biological mechanism our species is capable of, so too is it a political one.
‘Voluntary motherhood’ became a rallying paradigm for suffragists of the nineteenth century, but as Angela Davis identified, to credit them anything more than language is to overlook past populations forced to make devastating reproductive decisions under oppressive supremacist paradigms—populations that had long been countering control through naturally sourced contraceptives and abortifacients.21 Further, while the concept of choice in relation to bodily autonomy is firmly rooted in modern vernacular, what becomes diminished by this enforced linguistic time-line is the continued preservation of proto-feminist material which sought to subvert the imposed subjugation of sex necessitated to uphold a patriarchal world order.
Christine de Pizan provided women of the fifteenth century alternative pathways to progress upon within—yet, unencumbered by—the socially perpetuated paradigms of the contemporary church and literary culture, alike. She provided women a choice that allowed them to transcend the suppression of their gendered reality, to forgo the physical act which cast women as objects of pleasure, potentially entrapping them into servitude to the species.22 Within the Cité virginity, “through the practice of chastity if not celibacy,” was positioned as an act of self-discipline which allowed women to move beyond reproductive- care- roles to pursue personal andro-coded achievements.23
“When their womenfolk saw that they had lost all their husbands, brothers and male relatives, and that only very young boys and old men were left, they took great courage and called together a great council of women, resolving that, henceforth, they would lead the country themselves, free from male control.”
“She was extremely well versed in both the arts and the sciences and was so proud that she never condescended to take a husband nor wanted any man to be at her side.”
Much like within the Mirror tradition, the Cité offered readers moralizing tales to encourage virtuous living. Where the mirror was a reflection of one man, the prince, the Cité imagined beyond the individual, constructing an ideal image for women within a collective:
“You can all see yourselves here…” 24
However, virginity as an authoritative position over the self wasn’t what made one virtuous, instead it was what allowed for the cultivation of multidisciplinary accomplishments. Through the assertion of celibacy/chastity, women could erect a physical boundary—in the shape of Cité walls—between body and the sacrifices the body politic required, allowing for the time and energy to pursue intellectual endeavors. In the Cité, knowledge was might and the strongest amongst them reinvested their virtues enriching culture and civilization: Nicaula “established laws and good customs;” Nicostrata “wished to transmit her own wisdom and learning to future generations” through the development of the Latin alphabet; Minerva cloaked the masses in armor and fabric; Ceres gave us agricultural; Isis taught us cultivation.25
Through literary construction of a Cité, Christine de Pizan identified the oppressive cultural structures responsible for the depreciation of the feminine body. By virtue of choosing virginity and elevation through education women’s bodies became a site for social revolution to be realized through. It was a new creation story, rectifying the cultural crucifixion of women; a reversal of the fall. Here and henceforth, women would rise.
Enthralled with Christine de Pizan? Join me for a close-read of City of Ladies starting at the end of July for paid patrons! Close readers will get access to sectioned overviews, deep dive discussions with a read-along chat for community connection, additional research, and more! Consider upgrading today.
Enders, Jody. “The Feminist Mnemonics of Christine De Pizan.” Modern Language Quarterly, Duke Univ Press, 1994.
L’Épistre au Dieu d’amours, Christine de Pizan translated by
Here I am applying the first voice theory from Jacqueline Jones Royster’s in When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 47, no. 1, 1996, pp. 29–40. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/358272.
The University of Chicago Press has a fantastic series titled The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, which I highly recommend!
Kelly, Joan. Early Feminist Thoery and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400-1789.
“In 1972, Paul Zumthor introduced the concept of mouvance: the idea that in the Middle Ages, each text was in constant dialogue with those that before it and those that were yet to come, and that a work was never stable but rather in continual transformation.” - Pollock Reneck, Anneliese. Female Authorship, Patrongae, and Translation in Late Medieval France: From Christine de Pizan to Louise Labé. Brepols Publishers, 2018.
Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, p. 507.
Hindman, Sandra. Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa”: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI, 1986.
Trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, 1997.
Hindman, Sandra. Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa”: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI, 1986.
Adams, Tracy. Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, 2014
Kelly, Joan. Early Feminist Thoery and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400-1789.
Trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, 1997.
John of Salisbury’s Policraticus is often credited with this body allegory, though as Medieval Muslim Mirror for Princes (2022) makes quite clear, this literary tradition existed before then.
Christine self-identifies this regarding her use of French in The Three Virtues
I could site a few sources here, but Sandra Hindman’s research into the paintings of Othéa and Susan Groag Bell’s study of Christine in her study imagery are perhaps most relevant.
Trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, 1997.
Pollock Renck, Anneliese. Female Authorship, Patronage and Translation in Late Medieval France, 2018.
Desmond, Marilynn. Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, 1998.
McGrady, Deborah. “What is A Patron?” Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, 1998.
Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War IV: Cursed Kings, 1990
Trans. Ed. Horrox, Rosemary. The Black Death. Manchester University Press, 1994.
TW captures male supremacy in action within his particular language of ‘adolescents and boys.’
Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class, 1982.
Bornstein, Diane. Ideals for Women in the Works of Christine de Pizan. Michigan Consotium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Ibid.
Three quotes provided by: Trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, 1999
Ibid.
