In 1488 Antoine Vérard, a Paris publisher, printed a French manual of war and presented it as the work of Vegetius, a Roman author. A woman, Christine de Pizan, had written it in 1410, and the edition did not mention her. She had by then been dead for nearly sixty years, and had spent much of her working life on the argument that this printing illustrates: what the books of her time said against women was the opinion of the men who wrote them. Those men, she held, had observed a custom and reported it as nature.
She could make that argument because she had read the books. Her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was physician and astrologer to King Charles V of France, and he brought the family from Venice to Paris when she was a small child. He taught her himself. At fifteen she married Étienne du Castel, a royal secretary, and ten years later he died, leaving her at twenty-five with three children and her mother to keep. To recover the money he was owed she fought cases in four Paris courts at once. She did not remarry. She read instead, without a teacher, and began to write for pay: lyric poems first, offered to the princes of the court in manuscripts made under her own direction. In The Book of the Mutability of Fortune, a long poem of 1403, she wrote that Fortune had turned her into a man.
Her reading brought her to the Romance of the Rose, a long French poem of the previous century, completed by Jean de Meun, in which the characters teach lovers to deceive women and describe women as faithless by nature. She attacked it in verse in The God of Love's Letter of 1399. Two years later, when a secretary of the king wrote in the poem's praise, she answered him by letter, refused a demand that she retract, and in February 1402 sent the whole correspondence to the queen. A writer, she maintained, answers for the words he gives his characters, since readers are changed by what they read.
The Book of the City of Ladies, finished by 1405, states the larger claim. Women seem to know less than men because they are kept at home and left untaught, and a daughter sent to school like a son would learn as well. The book makes the case through the stories of women who ruled, fought, invented and studied. Its sequel, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, advises living women of every rank on how to manage alone, as she had.
The court she depended on was breaking apart. The reigning king, Charles VI, had suffered attacks of madness since 1392 and his relatives fought over the government, so she wrote for them too: a life of Charles V as the model of a studious king, and the manual of war, which holds that only a sovereign seeking justice may lawfully fight. In 1418, when the Burgundian faction took Paris, she left. Her last poem, dated 31 July 1429, says she had spent eleven years enclosed in an abbey, usually taken to be Poissy, where her daughter was a nun. The poem celebrates Joan of Arc, who had relieved Orléans that May. Christine died around 1430.
Her books were copied, translated and printed for another century, and then went largely unread. Simone de Beauvoir, in 1949, called her the first woman to take up her pen in defence of her sex, and a modern English translation of the City of Ladies followed in 1982. Whether she should be called a feminist is disputed. The same writer who argued that women can learn as well as men also defended rank, and taught obedience within it.