Around 1143 Peter abbot of Cluny wrote to the ‘venerable and greatly beloved’ Heloise, “it is not altogether exceptional among mortals for women to be in command of men, nor entirely unprecedented for them even to take up arms and accompany men to battle.”1 Within the pages of Orderic Vitalis’ eleventh and twelfth century chronicle Historia Ecclesiastica, Isabel de Conches is preserved as having faced war “armed as a knight…and she showed no less courage among the knights in hauberks than did the maid Camilla.”2 Likewise, William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum documents a countess of Leicester, Petronella, as ‘a woman with a man’s spirit.’ While Fantosme’s Chronicle informs us the same Petronella counseled her husband and was captured alongside him donning armor.3
Common among the chroniclers was an adherence to a prescriptive topos, mnemonically ingrained by way of patriarchal pedagogy, which sought to make inherent the association of maleness with the language of domination and war. Petronella was in possession of a manly spirit while, perhaps more famously, Elizabeth I had the ‘heart and stomach of a king’—the latter being self-prescribed. This topos served to make exceptional those who qualified for such designations both within their gender and because of their gender under the terms of patriarchy. Though a bit more subtle than behavioral guides such as Geoffrey de la Tour Landry’s which insisted no good woman should even turn her head to observe her environment, this topos meant to affix action to a specific gender while affirming patriarchy’s hierarchy in its absence.4
Through this literary device patriarchy claimed dominion over the language of domination itself.5
Boccaccio’s fourteenth century De Mulieribus Claris (On Famous Women) houses many examples of this topos in use: Martesia and Lampedo had the ‘strength of men,’ ‘Penthesilea and women like her were much more manly in arms than those who were made men by Nature,’ while Hypsicratea’s ‘manly spirit’ allowed her to follow her husband into battle convincingly disguised as a man.6 In addition to preserving stories of real women outside of hagiographies and moving beyond the idealized woman, Boccaccio’s formulaic language was translated into the vernacular across Europe modeling the way in which women were chronicled.7 Spanning centuries, this topos solidified the association of war-craft with masculinity while displacing the legitimacy of feminine displays of power by firmly affixing them to man.
Building upon this patriarchal precedent, historians have failed to distinguish reality versus topos, instead insisting power had the capacity to re- or de- gender its wielder should they be female.8 Aside from ignoring historical evidence, this paradigm renders power static, fixed to a gendered position as opposed to a fluid influence dictated by circumstance, character, and culture.9 As Susan M. Johns identifies, “this is explicable if we accept that male reaction to female power shows that it is historically often defined as illegitimate, unusual or unnatural.” But as Peter made quite clear, it was not even all together exceptional.10
What is disregarded through this paradigm is the reality of actualized feminine power. That it would be women, guided by a strict gender performance realized through enforced expression, wielding visible and viable power that was not only accessible to them but expected of them.11 These women were more than just names on vellum pages. Captive to the necessary (and inevitable) passage of time to develop such skills, this paradigm disregards the countless nameless witnesses involved in the management and execution of such an education. Generally, to assume recognized and respected leadership in wartime required one to have previously been a student of war-craft.12 To confidently wield a sword, don any amount of armor and mount a horse with the intent to ride into the crucible of war necessitated a level of time-intensive proficiency often not recognized.
Though art can act as a mirror, the overall inability—or perhaps unwillingness—of historians to parse out their own presuppositions of male supremacy within the narratives has deeply distorted the perceived image. A literary topos propagated from the pages to further dichotomize human behavior into gender-associated attributes. This appropriation of realized power reinforced men’s domination over women, assigning all aspects of active personhood to ‘man’ while rendering ‘woman’ passive, linguistically detached from legitimate forms of power under patriarchy.13
Under such social conditions assumptions abound of women’s inability to contribute meaningfully to the development of civilization as defined by patriarchy. Denied access to the language of power, women of the medieval world became obscured behind the iron curtain of the domestic sphere and retroactively removed from the public one by those historically benefiting from such erasure. Essentially, historians constructed an ideal society under patriarchy and christened it the Middle Ages.
Welcome to episode 4 of the Women Written Out: 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/essay is written to stand alone, I do recommend listening in order as each builds upon the prior.
This is episode 4 - Christine de Pizan and the power to craft one’s own narrative.
On September 29th, 1364 the Breton war of succession came to a decisive close on the sloping fields of Auray, an important port city in the political landscape of medieval Brittany. Amidst dwindling forces and a final surge by those defending their claim to the city and duchy beyond, one standard was “seen to waiver above the crowd and fall to the ground.”14
Earlier that day, prior to the cacophony of steel on flesh, Charles of Blois and his Breton compatriots approached walls to a city they had once occupied and were met with two unavoidable truths: First, they were significantly outnumbered by an Anglo-Breton alliance fronted by de Clisson and de Montfort—son and husband of la tigresse et la flamme, respectively. Second, the battle was to be decided that very same day. As negotiations were drawn out with obvious stalling from Charles, what little confidence his travel-weary camp possessed evaporated entirely. Unsteady leadership compounded with the weight of the knowledge that they were to receive little assistance from an otherwise occupied—and increasingly disinterested—French king. They were on their own and to retreat would be to forfeit their claim to the duchy of Brittany.15
Moments before the two forces collided a significant number of Charles’ men deserted, turning already poor odds towards unavoidable defeat.16 As Charles’ standard began to falter so too did the remainder of his compatriots’ resolve and bodies began to pulsate away from the melee at rapid speed. Eight-hundred of their comrades died upon those fields with roughly 1,500 captured and imprisoned as they frantically fled.17
On that day in 1364, a leadership of Brittany contingent upon English support was secured.18 Jeanne de Penthièvre—who we met in the last two episodes—lost her right of inheritance alongside the loss of her husband Charles, though she was afforded the consolation prize of retaining dominion over Penthièvre lands per the rights of widowhood.19
Twenty-seven years had passed since the start of the overarching conflict we call the Hundred Years War. In that time, more than twenty-five battles took place across land and sea; battles which often resulted in mass civilian displacement events, permanently altering French -held and -allied lands, trade, and culture. A generation ravaged by war exacerbated by outbreaks of devastating plague and the inhumane, long lasting ramifications of scorched earth practices.
When the lacking king Jean II of France died in 1364, the ascension of his son the duke of Normandy, now Charles V of France, brought with it the hope of a more favorable revolution of Fortune’s wheel. Jean’s reign had been poxed by chaos and a lack of clear leadership after his defeat and capture by Edward, prince of England, at the battle of Poitiers in 1356. Though Charles wouldn’t see an everlasting peace the stability and prosperity of his reign was marked by the reacquisition of territories lost under prior Valois kings and an astute political maneuvering between greedy barons and brothers, alike.
Elsewhere in 1364, far removed from the tumult of the French and English crowns in easterly Venice, Tommaso da Pizzano and his wife welcomed a healthy baby girl into their landed gentry family of five.20 Shortly after the baby’s birth Tommaso received an illustrious job offer that promptly sent him to France under the employment of Charles V as court physician and astrologer. After three years of impressive service, becoming a personal favorite of Charles’, Tommaso was able to move his young family from Italy to join him permanently.21 It was there, in the court of French king Charles V, that Tommaso’s young daughter, Christine de Pizan, would receive an early humanist education from the manuscripts available to her through the royal library, the court at large, and most importantly, her father, Tomasso.22
As Tomasso gained favor the family would experience good fortune beyond his salary in the form of gifts, books, and court connections.23 So too would France see a relative prosperity followed by many years of peace as Charles sought to re-establish royal power while simultaneously creating a court “where intellectual exchange took place and where he could construct and embody his ideal of kingship.”24 While England was distracted by civil unrest, plague, and a child king, France sought to position itself ahead of Italy as the home of preeminent Latin scholarship and classical debate: Paris was in its ascendancy. This was the environ in which Christine would spend her formative years, observing the actualized power dynamics of an influential kingdom, and it would be here in the court of Charles V that Christine would meet her husband, Etienne de Castel, which she would describe as “a happy result of the hierarchical system of reciprocal obligation.”25
Christine’s marriage to Etienne in 1379 at the age of fifteen brought them three children, though only two would survive to adulthood. We of course can’t know the day-to-day of Christine and Etienne’s marriage, but this partnership would go on to inform her position on the institution in primarily positive ways for the remainder of her life. It would also catalyze within her a desire to encourage other women to possess full knowledge of their own family’s finances and broader interests for the sake of their personal livelihood and longevity beyond the scope of wedlock. However, this ‘golden period’ which marked the early years of Christine’s life came to an abrupt end when Charles V died in 1380, leaving his eleven year old son, now Charles VI, to inherit the weight of a barely stabilized crown.26
The elder Charles’ death brought with it the fall from favor of Christine’s father as suspicion of astrologers was stoked for personal gain, used as fodder for the most powerful landed men of the kingdom to volley for authority over the new young, impressionable king. When Tomasso died in 1388 after suffering ill health followed too quickly by Etienne in 1389, Christine’s world was plunged into chaos.27 These compounding losses would place Christine into the liminal space oft required of medieval widowhood: Obliged the responsibility of maintaining the domestic sphere while wholly representing the public interests of the family. Christine was suddenly accountable for not just the financial livelihood of her extended family, but the outstanding debts of the men who had been entrusted to provide and protect. For nearly a decade following these tremendous losses Christine utilized the skills she had cultivated from her father and husband to support her familial community as a copyist, and possibly another occupation within a manuscript workshop.28 She was also emerging as a respected court poet amongst those surrounding the young Charles VI.
Though Christine’s grief is evident within her earliest writing:
Alone am I and alone would I be Alone by my lover left suddenly. Alone am I, no friend or master with me, Alone am I, both sad and angrily, Alone am I, in languor wretchedly, Alone am I, completely lost doubtlessly, Alone am I, friendless and so lonely.
So too is her prerogative to self-authorize perpetually in the state of widowhood: ‘alone would I be.’29 To achieve this Christine would rely on a trusted topos, one that would allow her to shed characteristics which societally placed her into domestic servitude. In 1403 Christine wrote of her changed fortunes, “I awoke and found/ That immediately, without doubt,/ I felt changed all over.”30 Utilizing a literary device to express what had been required of her to navigate and engage with the public sphere, Christine was qualifying the characteristics recognized to receive patriarchy’s patronage. It was the very parable of patriarchy; of the maintenance of male supremacy—a necessary demarcation distancing oneself from an espoused otherness while likewise associating the characteristics of virility and success to the masculine:
I found myself with a strong and hardy spirit, Which astonished me. Now I will prove that I became a real man.
This is what widowhood required of Christine, with her success of the endeavor marked by the chancellor of the university of Paris addressing her as “insignis femina, virilis femina.”31 For him, her learned state had made her a “distinguished female,” a “manly female.”32
The social order Christine was obliged to navigate on and off the page sought to define women through their reproductive function and roles of servitude to men—a locos of identity established entirely outside of one’s self. Lacking any longstanding histiographic tradition, Christine was required to acquiesce to the established literary conventions to legitimize her polemics and soften her reception from an audience well versed in the ways of male supremacy. Ultimately, she was writing for patriarchy’s wages. If we view Christine’s success at self-authorization through a capacity to de- or re- gender herself as Duby so insisted, we overlook both the advantages of novelty and the isolation of experience possessing a feminine form in such spaces yielded. As Christine so highlighted:
“It is true that as talk arose, especially among princes, of the order and manner of my living, that is of my studies (for this was revealed to them even though I wished to hide it), I presented them with some of my volumes as novel things, small and insignificant as they were, which through their grace as benign and humble princes, they read willingly and received joyfully, and more so, I believe, because it was not usual for a woman to write, and it was something that had not happened for a long time.”33
In her deployment of a literary topos, which aptly captured the contemporary anti-feminine sentiments of prominent patriarch-exclusive circles, Christine leveraged the precedence of misogyny to gain authority to critique the foundations and formulations of those exact attitudes. But one must never overlook that it was Christine—a woman following strict gender performance rules—who possessed enough authority to present her work to princes, plural. 34
Around 1399, Christine began to strategically engage with topics of public discourse she perceived primed to be challenged; topics abundant within the illustrated pages of the manuscripts surrounding her: Women as an amalgamation of man’s most depraved projections and the implicit harm of a society built upon mnemonic foundations derogating members of one’s own species.35 Catalyzed by the abhorrent misogyny found within the popular texts of her time—with a particular emphasis on Jean de Meun’s portion of Roman de la Rose—Christine’s challenge went significantly beyond identifying gender-based discrimination, offering women an opportunity to rightly perceive the source of their oppression while proposing an entirely new foundation for intellectual evolution to be rebuilt upon. Early evidence of this can be found within The God of Love’s Letter, written May of 1399:
“But the above-mentioned ladies complain of several clerics who accuse them of blameworthy conduct, composing literary works, lyric poems, works in prose and in verse, defaming their behavior with a variety of expressions; then they give these materials to beginning students—to their new, young pupils—to serve as a model and as instruction, so that they will retain such advice into their adulthood. They say in their poetry, “Adam, David, Samson, and Solomon, along with a mass of others, were deceived by women morning and night. What man will manage to protect himself from this?” Another cleric says that they are most deceitful, wily, treacherous, and of little value. Others say that they are exceedingly mendacious, fickle, unstable, and flighty. Others accuse them of several serious vices and blame them ceaselessly, never excusing them for anything. It is in this manner that day and night clerics compose their poems, now in French, now in Latin, and they base themselves upon I don’t know what books that tell more lies than a drunken man.”36
Christine’s willingness to question the authority of patriarchal voices past moved from page to public conversation when she sought out the secretary to the king, Jean de Montreuil, regarding his open admiration and emphatic treatise uplifting the aforementioned Roman in 1401—a polemical dispute we know as la querelle de la rose.37
Engaging directly with de Montreuil, Christine had felt called to “maintain publicly” a position opposing any moral posturing naturalizing prejudice against all women, framing it as inherently amoral, regardless if other lessons could be drawn from the text.38 Through referencing her own ‘feminine weakness’ and ‘meager intellect’ she went on to prove the antiphratic possibilities of such formulaic language, advocating by example against arguments that insist both as an inherent state of womanhood as opposed to the imposition that is purposefully withholding formal education from certain populations.39 As David Hult identified, “more than a verbal protest against obscenity or misogyny (which it certainly is), the debate is an active counterassault against an entire intellectual establishment to which women were solely the object of discussion, and which greatly limited their ability to take up the subject position in speech.”40
Anti-feminine literary tradition, through ‘rote repetition and rare intervention,’ had leapt from ancient pages to inform the very political and cultural practices Christine was required to maneuver within.41 Indeed, it would be Christine’s own experience of widowhood that would spark within her a desire to realize a social order where women could wield power in public spaces without fear of degradation and objectification.42 The debate thus provided a site to self-authorize through establishing precedence denied by institutionalized pedagogy.43
By instigating a scholarly sparring match in a culture that fancied itself a new Rome, a new home for intellectual debate, Christine was able to showcase her command of language and rhetoric, asserting authority through exempla and experience to break into the “intellectual hierarchy of the Parisian intelligentsia.”4445 Within the confines of enforced patriarchy, Christine contrived to produce literary precedence—sans the intentionally imposed mnemonic burden of misogyny—to better reflect her lived experience of noble women influencing the body politic through expected and experienced engagement. Beyond audacious, Christine’s argument was a complete ideological disruption of the way patriarchy had thus far evolved, an attempt to adjust its trajectory by linguistically linking power to intelligence as opposed to maleness and domination:
“For even if he and all his accomplices had solemnly sworn that this was the truth, may it not distress any of them when I declare that there already have been, are, and will be many women more worthy, more honorable, better trained, and even more learned, and from whom greater good has resulted in the world than ever he accomplished in his person—women very well educated, particularly with regard to conduct in the world and virtuous morals; and there are many who have been responsible for the resolution of their husbands affairs, and who have borne their difficulties, their secrets, and their illnesses patiently and confidentially, however much their husbands might have been brutal or lacking in love. One finds ample proof of this in the Bible and in other ancient histories, such as those of Sarah, Rebecca, Esther, Judith, and many others. And even in our times we have seen in France a number of worthy women, our greatest ladies of the realm and many others—the holy devout Queen Jeanne; Queen Blanche; the duchess of Orleans, daughter of the king of France; the duchess of Anjou, who is now called the queen of Sicily—all of whom, along with a host of others, possessed great beauty, chastity, dignity, and wisdom. And there are worthy gentlewomen of a lesser rank, such as the very praiseworthy Madame de la Ferté, the wife of Monsieur Pierre de Craon, and numerous others about whom it would take too long to say any more.”46
But to create a lasting, established precedence in hopes to effect cultural consciousness, Christine had to ensure her words would be preserved beyond that moment; beyond her own lifetime.47
In a literary world which fused action to maleness, to what extent could a woman dictate the outcome of her own story? To what extent could she craft her own narrative?
Next time on The Women Written Out.
Translated by Betty Radiche, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (115), p. 217, Revised edition publish, 2013
Jeans, Susan M., Power and Portrayal: Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 13–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jbk1.7.
Jeans, Susan M., Noblewomen, Aristocracy and power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm, 2003
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;view=toc;idno=KntTour-L
Dominate is borrowed from Latin domināt. Dominus was the lord of/master, the -us suffix denoting masculine subject. Dominae was the wife of the one with power, or dames/ladies.
Boccaccio, On Famous Women
Baggio, Adriana. Italian reception, tradition and translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris. https://heliotropia.org/18-19/baggio.pdf
Clarke, K.P. “On Famous Women: The Middle English Translation of Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris, edited from Longon, British Library, MS Additional 10304.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 117, no. 2, Apr. 2018, pp. 255+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A537268252/LitRC?u=anon~900aba7f&sid=googleScholar&xid=c8894ca4
Writer’s note: Boccaccio was not the creator of this topos, but the popularity of Latin and the numerous versions within the vernacular languages across Europe made it a more accessible text than most—especially as vernacular texts were usually written with oral readings to audiences in mind.
Duby, Georges. ‘Woman and Power,’ Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe. Ed. Bisson, Thomas N., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995
Though I’m not quoting from, I see influences of Theresa Earenfight’s A Lifetime of Power: Beyond Binaries of Gender within Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power 1100-1400, 2019
see note 1
We will dive deeper into sumptuary laws and the enforcement of gender (and more!) in an upcoming guest episode featuring the fantastic Lacey Bonar Hull.
Of course, there are exceptions to this—and we’ll meet one next episode!
On top of topoi employed in popular works, the 13th century also brought Plato and Aristotle works translated into Latin, providing further ‘evidence’ for the divine nature of a gender binary.
Sumpton, Jonathan, The Hundred Years War, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, 1991
Ibid.
I, of course, am writing from a position of hindsight.
Sumpton, Jonathan, The Hundred Years War, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, 1991
Though this would not be a lasting alliance.
Sjursen, Katrin E., The War of the Two Jeannes: Rulership in the Fourteenth Century, 2014
Rosalind Brown-Grant has Christine’s birth in 1364 whereas others, such as Tracy Adams, mark it as 1365.
Adams, Tracy. Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, 2015
Christine always utilized the French spelling of her name, so I will as well.
De Pizan, L’Avision, translated by Sister Marie Louis Towner
McRae, Joan. Literary Debate in Late Medieval France, 2024
Adams, Tracy. Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, 2015
I know this language is a bit of a technical way to describe a marriage, but marriage of the middle ages served a familial function (under patriarchy) and Christine was attuned to the give/get nature of a feuding society. This does not negate the reality of love and fondness.
Adams, Tracy. Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, 2015
It could also be ‘87 and ‘88, respectively, as the sources differ here.
Willard, Charity. The Writings of Christine de Pizan, 1994
De Pizan, Autres Ballades, translated by Charity Willard
De Pizan, Mutacion de Fortune, translated by Diane Bornstein
Ibid.
Edited by Labalme, P. H. Beyond their sex: Learned women of the European past. New York University Press, 1980
Ibid.
De Pizan, L’Avision, translated by Sister Marie Louis Towner
https://dlmm.library.jhu.edu/viewer/#pizan
Enders, Jody. “The Feminist Mnemonics of Christine De Pizan.” Modern Language Quarterly, Duke University Press, 1994
De Pizan, L’Epistre au Dieu d’amours, via https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12812/pg12812.html
Willard, Charity. The Writings of Christine de Pizan, 1993
Hult, David F., Debate of the Romance of the Rose, 2010
Note: Mary Anne C. Case notes that this stance is an early example of what Catharine MacKinnon argues within Feminist Theory 202
We know she does this because she self identified this practice later within Cité. I also believe Tarez Samra Graban’s ‘irony as a rhetorical device’ lends itself well here in context of proto-feminist rhetors.
Hult, David F., Debate of the Romance of the Rose, 2010
Fantastic language courtesy: Hanley, Sarah. “Mapping Rulership in the French Body Politic: Political Identity, Public Law and the ‘King’s One Body.’” Réflexions Historiques, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 129–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41299087
“When, at the age of twenty-five, Christine was unexpectedly widowed, she found herself in a hostile world with no preparation for dealing with it. She not only suffered from the sorrow and loneliness of her widowhood, but in trying to collect funds due her from her husband’s estate, she became involved in endless lawsuits and was, in the end, defrauded by dishonest men. Even more distressing was her discovery that certain people she had thought were her friends turned a cold shoulder.” Charity Willard, Ideals for Women in the Works of Christine de Pizan
Why yes, this entire paragraph is missing from the voice-over! I do my best, but I am only human and am unable to edit it at this point.
As Kate Langdon Forhan highlights within her introduction of Christine’s The Book of Body Politic, “exempla were authoritative.”
McRae, Joan. Literary Debate in Late Medieval France, 2024
Hult, David F., Debate of the Romance of the Rose, 2010
There are so many moments within Christine’s writing where it is evident she understands the power of the word. Not just in the moment, but the long reaching power of properly preserved paradigms and their impact upon culture. The Book of Body Politic and The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry both showcase this exquisitely.
