Making a living as a writer is a hard business. Producing quality, timely work on a regular basis. Overcoming writer’s block. Collecting payments. Constant networking to gain even more clients. Not to mention keeping up with the latest trends and having to always outperform your competition. Imagine doing all this as a woman in fifteenth-century Europe, with three children to raise on your own, in a society that scorned women who took up a pen rather than the sewing needle. Few writers have grafted as did Christine de Pizan (1394–1430), who’s widely considered to be the first professional woman of letters in Europe.
Italian-born, intrepid, talented, and superbly well-educated, Christine held the unique honor of being a female court writer for King Charles VI of France and a handful of the most powerful French nobles of the day. She was the daughter of a man who also knew how to hustle. Thomas de Pizan, originally Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, was a doctor and politician in the Republic of Venice and later the astrologer for Charles V of France. Christine had her own family with a French royal secretary named Etienne du Castel. When Etienne died in 1389, he left behind an estate rife with monetary and legal complications. Like many single mothers throughout history finding themselves without a safety net, Christine took up a job.
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As a court writer, Christine enjoyed unusual freedom. Besides producing the typical popular romances, she also had the space to venture into the male-dominated subjects of history, philosophy, and religious debate, writes Christine Moneera Laennec. She approached every topic from a woman’s angle, rhetorically positioning herself as weak before undermining her opponents’ positions. According to scholar Nadia Margolis, the key to Christine’s success with her various projects lay in her acute awareness of existing in a men’s world with a dramatically unfair power imbalance.
“One of Christine’s admirable qualities lay in her selection of heroically moral literary and philosophical sources with a nonetheless pragmatic eye,” Margolis writes in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Christine’s
conviction as both author and narrator-heroine was that one learns from “within the system” and by serving “the enemy” before liberating oneself from it. […] If her erudite pursuits had taught her anything, it was that men, and often evil men, ran the world as she knew it because they held the secrets of learning. It was this arsenal of knowledge that Christine attempted to penetrate in order to win her place in the Parisian intellectual milieu.
A page from the illuminated manuscript The Book of the Queen features Christine kneeling before her protector Queen Isabeau of Bavaria (wife of Charles VI) while presenting her best-known text, The Book of the City of Ladies (c. 1405). Creating something resembling fanfiction, Christine gathered on her pages well-known women and goddesses from history—Sappho, Isis, Minerva, and Semiramis, to name just a few—and gave them their own city to rule. Sandra L. Hindman writes that, in The Book of the City of Ladies, “three [V]irtues, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, appear to Christine to help her build a city wherein women can find refuge.” Through dialogue, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice help Christine construct the physical form of the sanctuary city while arguing through allegory against the misogyny entrenched in French society and literature.
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Simultaneously an autobiography and a biography of the women who came before Christine, The Book of the Ladies makes clear the contributions women had made to society as well as the potential for even more benefits if they were allowed to study and to govern. A daring feat from a medieval freelancer and her “lance” of choice, her pen.
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