Christine de Pizan

Show Notes

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In the summer of 1429, an old woman was living in a convent outside Paris. She'd been there for eleven years, sheltering from a civil war that had torn France apart, and in all that time she had published nothing. She was in her mid-sixties, which by medieval standards made her ancient, and her long, remarkable career seemed to be over.

Then news arrived that a teenage peasant girl in armour had just led the French army to victory at Orléans. And the old woman picked up her pen one last time, and wrote one of the earliest poems ever composed about Joan of Arc — while Joan was still alive, still winning, about two years before her execution.

The woman was Christine de Pizan. And to understand why that moment mattered so much to her, you have to understand what she'd spent her whole life arguing: that women were capable of far more than her world was willing to admit.

Christine was born in Venice around 1364, and she was raised at the French royal court in Paris. Her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was a physician and astrologer — in the fourteenth century those were respectable, overlapping professions — and he was so good at it that King Charles the Fifth of France recruited him personally. So Christine grew up inside the royal court, surrounded by scholars, and crucially, close to the king's library, one of the finest collections of books in the Western world.

And here's the first stroke of luck in her life. Her father believed girls should be educated. Her mother, by Christine's own account, disagreed, thinking a girl should stick to spinning and household skills. Her father won that argument. Christine learned to read, she learned French and Italian, some Latin, and she devoured history, poetry, and philosophy. Almost no girl in fourteenth-century Europe got an education like that.

At fifteen she was married to Étienne du Castel, a young royal secretary. And by her own testimony — which we should trust, because she wrote about it with real tenderness — the marriage was genuinely happy. He supported her studies. They had three children. Life was comfortable and secure.

Then, over the space of a few years, everything collapsed. The old king died, and with him went her father's position and salary. Her father died not long after. And then, in 1390, the plague swept through and killed Étienne. Christine was twenty-five years old, a widow with three children, her mother, and a niece to support. And almost no money.

What she discovered next radicalised her, in a quiet, fourteenth-century way. As a widow, she had to untangle her husband's estate — and she was cheated at nearly every turn. She spent years dragging lawsuits through the courts to recover money that was owed to her, and she later wrote about how men treated a woman alone: dismissed, patronised, preyed upon. She said that fortune had, in effect, turned her into a man — because she now had to do everything a man did, in a world built to stop her.

Most widows in her position would have remarried, or entered a convent. Christine did something almost without precedent. She decided to earn her living by writing.

Now, this is a genuinely strange career choice for the 1390s. There was no publishing industry. Printing hadn't been invented yet. Every book was copied by hand. A writer survived on patronage — you wrote something beautiful, presented it to a duke or a queen, and hoped for a gift in return. Christine started with love poems, ballads, many of them shot through with her grief for Étienne, and they found an audience. The great patrons of France — including the Duke of Berry, the Duke of Burgundy, and Queen Isabeau — began commissioning her work.

And Christine didn't just write. She ran what was effectively a small production studio, working closely with scribes and illuminators — including, scholars believe, a woman artist she praised by name, Anastasia — to produce gorgeous manuscripts. There's a famous illustration of Christine presenting an enormous collected volume of her works to the Queen of France, both women surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, with the author at the center of the picture. She is often called Europe's first professional woman of letters, and the title fits: writing was how she paid the bills, for decades.

Then, around 1401, she picked a fight that made her famous.

The most celebrated poem in France at the time was the Romance of the Rose, a long allegory about love, and its second half — written by Jean de Meun — included sharply misogynistic commentary about women: that they were deceitful, greedy, and untrustworthy. This was standard stuff. Educated men had been recycling these jokes since antiquity, and everyone treated the poem as untouchable.

Christine attacked it. In open letters that circulated around Paris, she argued that the poem was crude, that its portrayal of women was slander, and that its author's fame didn't excuse it. Prominent male scholars fired back, some of them condescending, some genuinely angry. The exchange became known as the Quarrel of the Rose, and it's often described as an early debate in European literary history about how literature portrays women — with a woman leading one side. Christine made copies of the correspondence and sent them to the queen. She understood publicity perfectly.

Out of that fight came her masterpiece. Around 1405 she wrote The Book of the City of Ladies. It opens with Christine sitting in her study, depressed, having just read yet another learned book explaining that women are wicked by nature. She wonders, painfully, why so many great men would say it if it weren't true. And then three crowned figures appear — Reason, Rectitude, and Justice — and instruct her to build a city: an allegorical fortress constructed entirely from the stories of great women. Warriors, queens, inventors, scholars, saints. Each life is a stone in the wall. The message is simple and, for 1405, quietly explosive: the record of what women have actually done disproves what men keep writing about them.

She followed it with a practical sequel offering advice to real women, from princesses down to labourers' wives. And she kept widening her range — a biography of King Charles the Fifth, treatises on politics and peace, and even a manual on warfare and military strategy, which soldiers genuinely used. A woman writing the standard book on siege tactics. Christine simply refused to accept that any subject was closed to her.

But France was disintegrating around her. The king was intermittently insane, rival royal factions slid into assassination and civil war, and in 1418 one faction seized Paris in a massacre. Christine fled to the convent at Poissy, where her daughter was a nun. And there she fell silent — until Joan of Arc, in 1429, when she wrote that final jubilant poem in praise of Joan. A girl, she marvelled, had done what no man could do. It must have felt like the City of Ladies had come to life. Christine died soon after, probably in 1430, before Joan's execution in 1431.

For centuries she was largely forgotten. Then twentieth-century scholars rediscovered her, and she's now read as something like the first feminist writer in European history. Whether that label fits a medieval Christian widow is debatable. What isn't debatable is this: when catastrophe took everything from her, Christine de Pizan built a life — and a city — out of words. And six hundred years later, the walls are still standing.

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[warmly] Welcome to 8 Minute Lives.

[thoughtful] On a winter day in Paris in thirteen ninety-four, a woman named Christine de Pizan sat with her books, her ink, and the hard knowledge that a single death had changed everything. Her husband, Étienne du Castel, had died not long before, and suddenly the household that had once been comfortable was full of bills, uncertainty, and creditors. She was in her mid-twenties, with three children to support, and she chose the one path that almost nobody expected of a widow: she began to write for money.

That decision would make Christine the first professional woman of letters in Western Europe whose name we know. It also put her in the middle of one of the most interesting lives in medieval history, because she was not simply a writer trying to survive. She became a court author, a polemicist, a defender of women, and a sharp critic of the casual contempt that many educated men reserved for them.

Christine was born in Venice around thirteen sixty-four, in a republic of merchants and diplomats, and she was brought to France as a child when her father, Thomas de Pizan, entered the service of King Charles the Fifth. That court mattered. Charles’s library was one of the great intellectual collections of its day, and Christine grew up near a world of manuscripts, clerks, translators, and political argument. Her father wanted her educated, unusually so for a girl of her rank. She learned to read, to observe, and eventually to write in French with a clarity and confidence that would make her famous.

At about fifteen, she married Étienne du Castel, a royal secretary. For a time, life seems to have been secure. Then, within a few short years, her father died, the king died, and her husband died too. The household income vanished almost at once, and Christine found herself fighting over inheritances, collecting debts, and trying to keep her family afloat in a world where women were expected to be dependent, silent, or both.

She turned to writing because writing could be sold.

Her earliest work was lyrical and personal: ballads, complaint poems, love poetry, and memorial verse. In one poem she wrote of her grief with a directness that feels startlingly modern, even as the form is unmistakably medieval. She became a master of the courtly style, and aristocratic patrons noticed. Soon she was producing manuscripts for nobles, including elegant copies of her own poetry, illuminated and presented as luxury objects.

That mattered because books were still expensive, handmade things. A manuscript could mean weeks of labor for scribes and artists. Christine was earning not just admiration but actual support, and she was doing it in a field where women were rarely treated as serious intellectual workers. She learned how to navigate patronage, gifts, and reputation with care. She knew that a writer could survive on esteem only if esteem came attached to a purse.

Then her writing changed. Around fourteen-oh-three, Christine entered a public dispute that would define her legacy. She had read the widely popular Roman de la Rose, a long French poem with a mix of wit, allegory, and aggressive commentary on love and women. One part of it, written by Jean de Meun, treated women as deceitful and morally weak. Christine objected. Not privately. In letters and treatises, she challenged respected male authors and argued that literature was helping to train contempt into the culture.

This was not a small quarrel over taste. It was a fight over authority.

Christine’s response was brilliant because it used the tools of the very tradition she was being told to accept. She wrote with learning, with rhetorical polish, and with a confidence that refused to apologize for itself. She exchanged arguments with leading intellectuals of the day, including Jean Gerson and other clerics connected to the University of Paris. The details can get dense, but the basic point is simple: Christine stepped into a debate dominated by men and held her ground.

Her most famous answer came in thirteen-oh-five, in The Book of the City of Ladies. Here Christine imagines building a city in which great women of history and legend are given a place of honor. Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice appear as allegorical guides, helping her lay the foundations. The book is part argument, part imaginative rescue mission. Christine gathers examples of women from the Bible, antiquity, and her own era to prove that women’s capacities have been distorted by lazy male storytelling.

If that sounds abstract, it becomes more vivid when you remember what she was actually doing: writing a counter-library. The books that insulted women were already out in the world. Christine answered them by producing a work that readers could open, copy, and circulate, page by page, as a corrective.

She kept going. In The Treasury of the City of Ladies, she offered practical advice for women of every rank, from princesses to artisans. In The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, she wrote on war, strategy, and military conduct, drawing on respected authorities and translating martial knowledge into prose that could be used by rulers and commanders. At a time when many people would have gladly left women out of public life, she was writing about ethics, governance, and the rules by which societies claimed to be civilized.

One scene from her career survives with unusual force. In her own time, a manuscript page from one of her works was described in a catalog entry at the French royal library; the livelier moment is the first audience for her arguments. In manuscript culture, texts moved through copyists and patrons, read aloud in chambers and courts, discussed by a small elite who could shape reputation quickly. Christine was not shouting into a void. She was writing for people who had power, and who knew it.

Her life also carried the strain of being a widow who kept working. She had children to support. She had to negotiate patronage with widowed calculation. She had to defend her name in a culture that often viewed a woman who wrote too much as either eccentric or improper. During the civil unrest and war that tore France apart in the early fifteenth century, she also watched the country descend into political and military crisis. Eventually, after years at court and in religious houses, she seems to have withdrawn from active literary life and ended her days in the Dominican convent at Poissy. The last work commonly associated with her celebrates Joan of Arc after Joan’s victories, a remarkable closing note for a writer who had spent so long insisting that women could be agents of history.

[with quiet emphasis] Christine de Pizan died around fourteen-thirty, having spent decades proving that scholarship and female authorship were not contradictions. She was not a rebel in the modern slogan sense. She was something more precise and, perhaps, more difficult: a professional writer who used the prestige of learning to carve out space for herself and for other women inside an unforgiving world.

The books survive. So does the argument she made with them. Thank you for listening to 8 Minute Lives.