CHRISTINE DE PIZAN
(ca. 1364–ca. 1430). France’s first woman of letters was in fact born in Italy, where her
father, Tommaso de Pizzano of Bologna, was employed by the Venetian Republic. Soon
after Christine’s birth, her father was appointed astrologer and scientific adviser to the
French king Charles V, so the family established itself in Paris in the shadow of the
French court. Christine’s early taste for study was interrupted by marriage at sixteen to
Étienne du Castel, a young notary from Picardy, who was soon given a promising
appointment to the royal chancellery. This happy marriage was interrupted ten years later
by the husband’s unexpected death, leaving Christine to support three children and a
widowed mother. She found herself in a world that had little respect for women, where
she was cheated at every turn. She found comfort in study and in writing poetry to
express her grief and she soon discovered a talent for writing verse in the fixed forms
popular in her day.
Her writing brought her into contact with the court of Louis of Orléans, to whom she
dedicated several works, beginning with a narrative poem, the Épistre au Dieu d’Amour
(1399), which makes fun of fashionable young men who pretend to fin’amor while
reading Ovid and Jean de Meun. This work was followed by other narrative poems: the
Dit de Poissy (1401), Le Débat des deux amants, Livre des trois jugemens, and Dit de la
pastoure (1403). These eventually led to even more ambitious allegorical poems, the
semiautobiographical Chemin de long estude (1402–03), which also commented on
society’s current troubles and proposed an international monarchy, and a lengthy account
of the role of Fortune in universal history, the Mutacion de Fortune (finished at the end
of 1403).
It was also to Louis of Orléans that Christine dedicated an equally ambitious work in
poetry and prose, the Épistre Othea (ca. 1400) combining a commentary on classical
mythology with advice to a young knight. It was one of her most popular works. As the
duke was unwilling to find a place in his household for Christine’s son, Jean du Castel,
after 1404 no further works were dedicated to him. At about this same time, Christine
was commissioned by the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, to write a biography of the
late king, the Faits et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (1404), her first work entirely
in prose.
Slightly earlier, her views on Jean de Meun and the Roman de la Rose had involved
Christine in a debate with members of the royal chancellery, Jean de Montreuil and
Gontier and Pierre Col, who admired Jean de Meun’s erudition, whereas she saw his
unfortunate influence on society’s attitudes toward women. Christine did not start the
debate, as was formerly thought, but she moved it from a private theoretical discussion to
a wider audience by giving copies of the letters it inspired to the queen and the provost of
Paris (1402), a gesture that added to her literary reputation and marked her first important
defense of her sex against traditional misogynistic literature. It also inspired her to
compose three later works: the Dit de la Rose, a long poem written in the midst of the
debate; the Cité des dames, inspired largely by Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, in a
certain sense a rewriting of it from a feminine point of view; and the Livre des trois
vertus (1405), offering advice to women of all classes in an interesting commentary on
contemporary French society.
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