Christine de Pizan was born sometime around A.D. 1364, in Venice, to Thomas de Pizzano. Her father was a doctor and astrologer who was held in such high esteem that he was invited to the courts of both Louis I of Hungary and Charles V of France. Thomas chose the latter for his patron, and subsequently brought his wife and children to Paris.
Christine was only an infant at this time, and came in her childhood and adolescence to view France as more her homeland than Venice – so strong was this devotion to France, in fact, that she refused an invitation back to Venice later in life.
Life in the Court of Charles V
In Charles V’s court, Christine acquired an excellent education that would serve her throughout her career, and gained familiarity with the workings of late medieval court life. At fifteen, she married Étienne de Castel and found that she loved him despite the arranged nature of the match and her lack of choice in the matter. However, while the 1370s had been comfortable and secure, shortly after her happy marriage to Étienne, Charles V died and Christine’s life took a turn for the worse.
Her father lost favor in Charles VI’s court and died shortly after the former king. Following her father’s death, Christine’s husband also died, in 1390, leaving Christine a young widow in debt, with six children to care for by herself. Despite the sorrow that this string of tragedies must have caused Christine, it was in her dealing with them that she made her name well known in the courts of her time and to historians today.
The First Woman in Europe to Support Herself by Writing
Unable to make ends meet by craft or trade, and uncertain as to how her many lawsuits would turn out, Christine turned to writing – becoming in this way Europe’s first female professional author. She wrote many well-known works, such as The City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, as well as "prose and poetry on an astonishing range of topics and in many literary forms."
Christine also participated in scholarly debates with other writers with all the gusto and confidence of any male intellectual of her time, most notably in her writing an impassioned rebuttal against the anti-feminist diatribes espoused in a popular courtly love poem by Jean de Meun called The Romance of the Rose. This rebuttal "marks the first clear instance in European history of a woman writing against the slanders that women had so long endured," and gave rise to a debate between her supporters and Jean de Meun's sympathizers that stretched into the sixteenth century.
A Truly Important Figure
At the time when Christine de Pizan died, around A.D. 1430, women’s lives had been changing since the beginning of the Middle Ages, and most of the changes had not been for the better. As easy and comfortable as it is to imagine history as a line of forward progress, women had, by the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, been barred from entering universities, been restricted in their professional pursuits, and been subjected to new intellectual and religious misogyny that belittled them and their worth to society – all trends that would only grow worse in the following century.
Earlier medieval women had some advantages, but women had nearly all of those advantages revoked by the beginning stages of the Italian Renaissance. Christine’s successes as an intellectual, then, were not a sign of her times, but in spite of them:
Christine was unique to her age, as she was highly educated, very aware of her own importance and intelligence, and active in the intellectual and literary community. She was a prolific writer of poetry and verse, covered a wide variety of subjects in her other writing – including politics and war – and debated freely against men to defend her own opinions. She is interesting in that she was the first female professional author, and in that she commanded respect from the leaders of nations, but these alone are only two facets of her complicated and sophisticated personality. She is simply, overall, an exceptional and hugely important figure of her age; one who affected the very thoughts of kings.
Sources
Bennett, Judith M. and C. Warren Hollister. Medieval Europe: A Short History (Tenth Edition). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Lawson, Sarah. Christine de Pizan: The Treasure of the City of Ladies or the Book of Three Virtues. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Robert Marcell - Robert Marcell received a B.A. in History in 2007 and an M.A. in the Social Sciences in 2008.
