Christine de Pizan

Abstract

One of the most prolific writers of the Middle Ages, Christine de Pizan penned around thirty major works as well as hundreds of shorter poems. Based at the court of France in the fifteenth century, she compiled her texts in manuscripts that were presented to patrons including the king’s brothers and the Queen of France. Christine is notable for being the first professional writer in French literature – regardless of gender – and as the first woman writer whose historical existence is attested. Over a career that spanned four decades, she wrote in a variety of literary styles, including prose, epistolary genres, lyric, and narrative poetry; her subjects were equally wide and varied, comprising not only traditional themes such as mythology, morality, religion, and devotional matters, but also some more surprising subjects, including warfare, historiography, autobiography, good governance, and the behavior of nobles. She is remembered now primarily for her work as a profeminine writer and defender of women, a theme returned to in several of her works, most notably in Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) and the letters that she exchanged with a group of leading intellectuals that she later compiled together to form Les Epistres sur le Rommant de la rose (The Epistles on the Romance of the Rose). This latter collection made literary history as the first recorded literary debate in the French language. Christine was rediscovered by early twentieth-century feminists and has enjoyed a surge in popularity ever since.