Waching daily Mar 2 2018

Hi, I'm Danièle Cybulskie, The Five-Minute Medievalist, and today I'm going to talk to

you a little bit about an awesome fifteenth-century female writer: Christine de Pizan.

Sometimes, in life, you come across something that really blows your mind and shows you

all those little bits of entrenched thinking that you've always had.

For me, that was reading Christine de Pizan.

Before I'd read Christine's work, I'd kinda gone along with that notion that we have that

because women were second-class citizens in the Middle Ages that they'd gone along with

that without much of a fuss.

Pretty much everything I've learned about women in the Middle Ages goes against that,

by the way.

Christine de Pizan was born in 1365 and she was the daughter of an Italian man who was

the astrologer of the French court.

She was brought up learning how to read and write, and had a really great background in

the classics.

Christine was happily married at fifteen years old.

She and her husband had three children together before, ten years later, he suddenly died

of illness, leaving Christine with no way to support herself, except for possibly another

marriage.

The way Christine writes about her husband, it's really evident that she truly loved him

and wasn't interested getting married right away, so she found a way to support herself

doing something she was good at and something she loved: she became a writer.

Some people have called Christine de Pizan the first professional female writer, and

while I think there's always going to be some debate about who was actually the first, being

a professional female writer in the fifteenth century was pretty much unheard-of.

And, not only that, but Christine immediately set about writing works in defense of women.

In one of her most popular books, The City of Ladies, Christine sets up all of the usual

arguments that men made against women at the time and she knocks them down one by one,

using examples from the Bible and from classical mythology.

(flick, flick, flick) With the help of three figures - Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and

Lady Justice - Christine builds a city out of women's good works to help defend them

next time they find themselves under siege by misogynists.

Although she's polite, Christine doesn't pull her punches.

Here's a discussion between Christine and Lady Reason about women's intelligence.

"My lady," says Christine, "I greatly admire what I have heard you say, that so much good

has come into the world by virtue of the understanding of women.

These men usually say that women's knowledge is worthless.

In face when someone says something foolish, the widely voiced insult is that this is women's

knowledge.

In brief, the typical opinions and comments of men claim that women have been and are

useful in the world only for bearing children and sewing."

Lady Reason answers, "Now you can recognize the massive ingratitude of the men who say

such things; they are like people who live off the goods of others without knowing their

source and without thanking anyone.

You can also clearly see how God, who does nothing without a reason, wished to show men

that He does not despise the feminine sex nor their own, because it so pleased Him to

place such great understanding in women's brains that they are intelligent enough not

only to learn and retain the sciences but also to discover new sciences themselves,

indeed sciences of such great utility and profit for the world that nothing has been

more necessary."

When I came across this book years ago, it changed my thinking about women's self-perception

in the Middle Ages.

Christine's work didn't get her into big trouble with the church or the state In fact, she

made a decent living with her writing.

Many of Christine's works also were so popular that they made it into print (in different

languages) over a century later.

Think about it: people were copying down every single word of Christine's defenses of women

so that they could read it again and pass it on.

Christine's words, written by a woman in defense of women were accepted by medieval readers.

Christine wrote many other works, poems on war, poems about widowhood, other poems in

defense of women, and even a treatise on Joan of Arc.

Her voice is strong and reasoned, or it's raw and heartbreaking depending on what she's

talking about.

If you've never read any works by medieval women, I would suggest you start with The

City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, and really get a sense of what it was like to

be a woman writing at that time.

If you want to read The City of Ladies for yourself, I'd recommened this one.

This is a translation by Earl Jeffrey Richards.

I'd highly recommend reading more of Christine's work.

Thanks for watching, everybody.

See you next time!