From Venice to Paris
Born in Venice, she joined her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, physician and astrologer to Charles V, in Paris as a small child.
Early French humanism · moral and political philosophy · c. 1364 – c. 1430
Christine de Pizan
Answer the authorities with reason, history and experience.
Venice · Paris · Poissy
Biography
The thread of a life.
Christine de Pizan was a Venetian-born writer at the French royal court who, widowed at twenty-five, made her living by her pen and supervised the copying of her own manuscripts. In poetry, allegory, history and political treatises she contested learned misogyny, argued for the education of women and advised princes on just rule during a civil war.
Marriage and widowhood
She married the royal secretary Étienne du Castel; his death left her to support three children, her mother and a niece.
The quarrel of the Rose
With the Letter of the God of Love and her letters on the Romance of the Rose, she contested Jean de Meun’s portrait of women.
History, allegory and counsel
The life of Charles V, the City of Ladies, the Book of the Three Virtues and the Body Politic follow in quick succession.
Writing in civil war
Amid the conflict between Armagnacs and Burgundians she wrote a lament on the ills of France and the Book of Peace, then withdrew from Paris, probably to the convent of Poissy.
Joan of Arc
Her last known work, the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, celebrates the Maid’s victories; Christine died around 1430.
Understanding a life in depth
01A Venetian at the court of Charles V
Christine was born in Venice around 1364, the daughter of Tommaso da Pizzano, a physician and astrologer trained at Bologna whom Charles V called to Paris. She grew up near a court that commissioned French translations of Aristotle and assembled a celebrated royal library. As she later recalled, her father encouraged her studies more than custom allowed for a girl. Married at fifteen to the royal secretary Étienne du Castel, she lost her protector when the king died in 1380, then her father and, in 1390, her husband. At twenty-five she faced lawsuits over debts and inheritance while supporting her household.
02Living by the pen and the quarrel of the Rose
In the later 1390s Christine began with lyric poetry, including ballads on her widowhood, and soon sought patrons among the royal princes. She oversaw the copying and illumination of her manuscripts and presented them to Queen Isabeau of Bavaria and to the dukes of Orléans, Berry and Burgundy. Between 1401 and 1402 she challenged the misogyny of the Romance of the Rose against royal secretaries and clerics who defended Jean de Meun, then gathered the letters of the debate into a dossier for the queen. Allegorical works followed, including the Book of the Mutability of Fortune, where she describes being changed into a man to steer her ship after her husband’s death.
03The City of Ladies and the Three Virtues
In The Book of the City of Ladies, written in 1404 and 1405, Christine describes herself crushed by the judgments of learned men until Reason, Rectitude and Justice appear and commission her to build a city for women of worth. Reworking Boccaccio’s Famous Women, she assembles rulers, inventors, scholars, prophets, faithful wives and saints as evidence against the authorities who disparaged women. The Book of the Three Virtues, completed in 1405 for Margaret of Burgundy, turns this defense into practical counsel for every estate, from princesses and estate managers to merchants’ wives, servants and the poor. Its realism about reputation and hierarchy has led readers to call it both shrewd and conservative.
04Counsel in a divided kingdom
As the madness of Charles VI opened a struggle between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy, Christine addressed princes directly. The Book of the Body Politic, written between 1404 and 1407 for the young dauphin Louis of Guyenne, describes the realm as a body whose prince, knights and common people owe one another care and service. She drew on Aristotle in Nicole Oresme’s translations, on Valerius Maximus and on John of Salisbury, and later wrote on the laws of war and on peace. After 1418 she fell silent, probably at the convent of Poissy, until her poem of 1429 hailed Joan of Arc. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir saw in her the first woman to take up her pen in defense of her sex.
Her works circulated in presentation manuscripts and early printed editions, with English translations printed between 1478 and 1521 and a Portuguese version in 1518. Modern scholarship has recovered her as a political thinker and as an opening voice in the long debate on women; Simone de Beauvoir saluted her in 1949, while the label “feminist” remains debated as anachronistic.
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