Pizan, Christine de
1364–1430

Christine de Pizan, a late medieval French author, wrote more than twenty texts, many of which address issues of sexuality and desire within the structures of late medieval culture. Often considered the first professional woman of letters in French literature, Christine was born in Venice in 1364 but moved to Paris as a young child when her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was recruited to serve as court astrologer to Charles V, the king of France from 1364 to 1380. At age fifteen, Christine was married to a royal secretary, Étienne du Castel; in her autobiographical text Christine's Vision (1405), she recounts that the ten years of her marriage were happy. When Christine was twenty-five, Etienne died suddenly, leaving Christine the responsibility of supporting her three young children and her widowed mother. Rather than remarry, Christine took up her pen and pursued a life of letters under royal and ducal patronage. Her initial compositions were a series of poems, composed in the 1390s, many of which deal with the topic of her bereavement. These verses brought her recognition as a poet, and over the next two decades she produced a series of texts in verse and prose, many of which take up questions of gender. A large number of Christine's texts survive in illustrated manuscripts; because Christine was involved in the production of these illustrated texts, the visual programs in the manuscripts of her works offer additional witness to her concern with the representation of gender and sexuality.

Each of Christine's texts approaches the topic of gender differently. Othea's Letter to Hector (1399) offers the male chivalric reader a lesson in identity and desire. In text and images, the Othea rewrites classical mythology in order to tutor the implied male viewer in chivalric ethics. Although it ostensibly endorses the heteronormative values of late medieval Christianity, the Othea nonetheless promotes a vision of masculinity that disavows misogyny and violence against women. In 1401 and 1402 Christine participated in an epistolary debate on the ethics of reading Jean de Meun's portion of the Romance of the Rose. Christine's three letters in this debate characterize the Romance of the Rose as a misogynist text that has the potential to encourage domestic violence. This debate on the Rose provoked a later debate about the cultural and social roles of women that came to be known in the early modern period as the querelle des femmes (the debate on women).

In her Mutation of Fortune (1403), Christine metaphorically describes herself becoming a man in order to take up the demands of authorship. This work, a verse narrative of universal history, offers a historical account of the rise and fall of ancient cities and civilizations, a traditional view of world history that left little room for attending to the place of women in history. By contrast to the masculinist Mutation of Fortune, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) focuses exclusively on women. As a prose treatise in defense of women, City of Ladies creates an allegorical city to house and defend the women of myth and history, including the Christian saints, who are omitted from the standard structures of history. As her most sustained critique of the cultural constructions of gender, City of Ladies is the most purposefully feminist text of the entire Middle Ages. City of Ladies, however, was followed by The Book of Three Virtues (1405), a conduct book addressed to women that offers an entirely conventional set of instructions for female comportment within marriage and heterosexual desire, although it does criticize courtly love for the unworkable position in which it situates women.

In addition to the texts that explicitly address topics of gender, Christine also composed works on political, courtly, and devotional themes. While Christine produced a body of work that frequently criticizes the masculine bias of literary and historical traditions, she did not develop an alternative to the reproductive, heterosexual norms of the late medieval world. For that reason, she is not generally considered to be a radical—or even a subversive—literary figure. Yet despite her conventional attitudes toward sexuality, her work nonetheless presupposes gender to be a construction that emerges from—and responds to—cultural dynamics. Christine's view that gender is a construction marks a significant departure from the late medieval assumptions regarding gender, and her approach to gender as a cultural construct constitutes an important aspect of her literary legacy.

see also Literature: I. Overview; Queering, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, ed. 1997. The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee. New York: Norton.

Desmond, Marilynn, ed. Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Desmond, Marilynn, and Pamela Sheingorn. 2003. Myth, Montage and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Willard, Charity Cannon. 1984. Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works. New York: Persea.

                                             Marilynn Desmond