Christine de Pizan’s rhetorical talent lay in her ability to mimic the political thinkers, both contemporary and historical, and adapt their style to her will.

In order to lend herself authority and stake a claim for women’s rationality, in The Book of the City of Ladies, de Pizan’s writing style is heavily influenced by historical and contemporary political treatise and literature.

The tools of the oppressor

In many of her works, de Pizan adopts the mirror for princes style, providing guidelines for monarchical behaviour. This literary genre is known for collating a bibliographical catalogue of historical, mythological, literary, and biblical figures to exemplify the behaviour the text is endorsing.

She uses the mirror of princes technique within her works written for the benefit of the Dauphin Louis of Guyenne, The Book of Peace and The Book of the Body Politic, as well as within her subversive take on the genre, her ‘mirror for princesses’, The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies.

While these books all display de Pizan’s unique brand of ‘virtue ethics’, it is in her letters and poems, and The Book of the City of Ladies, that de Pizan presents her original political thought. She was an influential participant in the Querelle de la Rose surrounding Jean de Meun’s popular expansion on the poem Roman de la Rose, which insinuated that all women were inferior to men in terms of rationality and virtue.

Style and The City of Ladies

Like Machievelli’s The Prince, The Book of the City of Ladies and its companion The Treasure of the City of Ladies form an instruction manual on behaviour and inspirational stories to educate, in de Pizan’s case, princesses and ladies of every class.

The use of Plato’s Socratic dialogue adds considerable weight to de Pizan’s arguments in The Book of the City of Ladies. Christine (the character) is the student and devil’s advocate, giving voice to every negative generalisation made about women de Pizan (the author) has encountered.

Through her allegorical Virtues, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, de Pizan systematically refutes the negative stereotype she sees in print, not only providing arguments countering these accusations but also presenting the evidence needed to back their claims. Her methodical and rational defence of women is juxtaposed with the unreasonable and unnatural claims of those who slander womenp.

Like Plato’s Republic and St Augustine’s City of God, in The Book of the City of Ladies de Pizan builds a utopian vision with her words. While the Republic depicts a society beyond politics the cities of God and ladies provide their virtuous inhabitants with eternal life.

It has been built as a sanctuary not just for de Pizan’s contemporaries but as a defence for all those who follow her. The city, filled with virtuous, courageous and intelligent women, is the only arsenal a woman needs to counter negative stereotypes.

In summary

It is in The Book of the City of Ladies that de Pizan presents her most thorough and cohesive defence against claims of women’s inferiority using her rhetorical talent for mimicry to provide authority to her arguments.

Her evidence, drawn from mythology, history, scripture, and contemporary society, mirrors the literary, philosophical and theological evidence used to assert women’s inferiority.

By utilising established writing frameworks, de Pizan is able to secure a place for herself within a long tradition of political philosophy lending credibility and authority to her ideas.

When we think of early feminist theorists, Mary Wollstonecraft and other founding members of the women’s liberation movement come to mind. Feminist ideology is definitely not traditionally associated with the Renaissance.

A feminist was born

While sources argue about exact dates, Christine de Pizan (or de Pisan) was born in Venice, Italy, in the 1360s.

Her father Thomas was a physician and astrologer who took up employment in the French court under Charles V.  Unique for the age, and despite her mother’s protests, Thomas encouraged his daughter to learn under his tutelage, an education that continued when she married Etienne de Castel.

By 1390 disaster had struck: Charles V had died, her father had lost his job and then his life, and her husband succumbed to an epidemic. Faced with supporting her mother and four young children, de Pizan utilised her extensive aristocratic networks to establish a career as a court writer.

In 1418, de Pizan retired from writing and the court, joining her daughter in a convent outside of Paris. She died in 1430, after one last literary foray lending her support to the famous French heroine in The Poem of Joan of Arc.

Perhaps most important was de Pizan’s input into the Querrelle de la Rose, paving the way for the Querrelle des Femmes that followed a century later. A poem called Roman de la Rose, expanded by Jean de Meun and attacking women’s rationality and virtue, had become incredibly popular.

She wrote scathing critiques of the poem and a rational defense of women, which she sent to the Queen of France, book publishers and the like.

A place in history

While it seems that de Pizan cannot claim to have directly influenced modern feminist thought, her works were incredibly influential and well respected within the aristocracy of Europe, both during her life and in the century that followed.

Instead, her plea for respect is more subtle and, arguably, more relevant to the demands of modern feminists than those of the Suffragettes at the turn of the 19th Century.

My blog series on Christine de Pizan is a part of my goal to ensure that her contribution to feminist theory, and political thought in general, is finally given the attention it deserves. I plan to juxtapose de Pizan’s arguments for female rationality and intelligence with those of modern political thinkers to explore how far, or not, we have come in the fight for gender equality.

By ignoring de Pizan and her potential for influence, modern feminist thinkers have fallen into the same trap as the male writers who came before them. As Christine de Pizan herself argues, ignorance can be forgiven in the reader but never in a writer. My work is an attempt to counteract that ignorance.