Christine de Pisan’s City of Women

Christine de Pisan’s Le Livre de la cité des dames or City of Women would not be published until 1405.  The title of the book is derived from St. Augustine’s City of God and Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, and it anticipates Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516.  Fellini satirized it in La Città delle donne (City of Women), his film of 1980 starring Marcello Mastroianni.  Christine de Pisan would have hated it.

Although she was born in Venice (and not Pisa), she spent almost all her life in Paris.  By the age of 25 she had lost her husband and was left with three small children and a household to manage, so she had valid reasons for taking offence at the way women were portrayed in literature.  This extended to both the courtly love poetry of Eleanor’s era and the sarcastic mockeries of the century that followed, both of which can be found in the famous courtly love poem The Romance of the Rose. 

She was a versatile and prolific writer, which is how she managed to make ends meet financially.  No shrinking Rosamond, throughout her life she was as interested in the laws of war, including how to conduct a siege and what to do with prisoners-of-war, as she was in childhood education.  Toward the end of it she wrote in patriotic praise of Joan of Arc (1429).