The Book of the City of Ladies

Three ladies help the author build a walled city out of the stories of women, read here in the English of 1521.

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Le Livre de la cité des dames
First published: 1405(aged 41)
Original language: French

Overview

Henry Pepwell, a London printer, issued The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes in 1521. Bryan Anslay, yeoman of the wine cellar to Henry VIII, had translated it from a French book then more than a century old, and no printer in France or England had issued the work before. The text here is Anslay's English, in the spelling of 1521; a modern translation, by Earl Jeffrey Richards, followed in 1982. Christine de Pizan had finished the French original by 1405. It opens in her study, where she picks up the Lamentations of Matheolus, a thirteenth-century complaint that wives make men wretched, and begins to wonder whether so many learned authors can all be wrong about women. Three crowned ladies appear: Reason, Rectitude and Justice. They tell her to stop trusting books over her own experience, and to build a walled city where women of merit will be safe from slander. The building is the argument. Each stone is a woman's story: a ruler, a warrior, an inventor, a scholar, a faithful wife or a saint. Most are taken from On Famous Women by the Italian writer Boccaccio and retold so that the praised woman is no longer an exception to a rule. Reason states the central claim: women seem to know less than men because they are kept at home and left untaught, and a daughter schooled like a son would learn as well. The authorities Christine had been reading, on this view, were reporting a custom and calling it nature. The book answers Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose as much as it answers Matheolus; she had already disputed that poem in a public exchange of letters. Twenty-seven manuscripts of the French survive, and a Flemish translation was made about 1475.

Key concepts

Who are Reason, Rectitude and Justice?

They are three crowned ladies, daughters of God, who direct the building, and each carries the tool of her office. Reason holds a mirror in which anyone who looks sees what they truly are. Rectitude holds a shining ruler that separates right from wrong. Justice holds a vessel of fine gold with which she measures out to each person what they deserve. Each presides over one of the book's three parts.

What is the Field of Scriptures where the city is founded?

It is the ground of everything written, described as a flat and fertile country where all fruits and sweet waters are found. Building there means the defence of women is made out of books and against books. Reason marks the line of the walls, Christine digs, and Reason carries the earth away on her own shoulders: each load is one of the false beliefs about women, removed by a question and its answer.

Why did learned men write against women, according to Reason?

For reasons that lie in the writers and not in women. Reason goes through cases. Ovid, she says, turned to blaming women once his own excesses had been punished and he could no longer live as he had. Cecco d'Ascoli, an Italian author, simply held all women in hatred. An opinion repeated by many famous names, on this account, can still come down to private grievances.

What does the book claim about women as inventors?

That the arts civilisation rests on were found by women. Reason names Carmentis, also called Nicostrata, who devised the Latin alphabet, Minerva, who found many sciences and the way of making armour of iron and steel, and Ceres, who first taught the tilling of the earth and the taming of oxen. The point is debt: men who despise women's minds read, fight and eat by means of what women discovered.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Custom mistaken for nature

If learned men agree that women are lesser, must a woman believe them against what she knows of herself? Reason's answer is that the authors described an upbringing and called it a nature.

The book opens with Christine half persuaded by Matheolus and the rest that God made a poor thing in making woman. Reason compares her to the fool dressed in women's clothes while he slept, who believed the mockers over the certainty of his own being. Then comes the claim: if little girls were sent to school like boys they would learn every science as well, for a softer body goes with a sharper mind. Women know less because they stay at home. Christine's father favoured her learning, and her mother's ordinary opinion held it back.

women
gender
misogyny
education
women and education
prudence
political power
reputation
justice

Enter a dialogue

A city whose stones are women's lives

How do you answer a slander repeated in a thousand books? By building, life by life, a place where the evidence stands together and cannot be picked off one case at a time.

Christine digs the foundations in the Field of Scriptures with 'the pickaxe of her understanding', and Reason sets Semiramis as the first stone. Rulers, warriors and inventors make the walls. Rectitude fills the houses with faithful wives and daughters, and answers the saying that women want to be raped with Lucretia. Justice brings the Virgin Mary as queen and the martyrs as her company. The stories are mostly Boccaccio's, retold so that no woman is the exception. The finished city is a refuge and a defence, open to virtuous women only.

allegory
virtue
courage
chastity
fidelity
marital love
marriage
love
martyrdom
faith
religious faith
religion
honor
persecution
charity
grief
prophecy
miracles
divine providence
deception
death

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 493
distinct concepts: 564
by passages held, corpus-wide: #150

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “virtue” and “women”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
virtue	women	18
marriage	women	13
chastity	virtue	10
gender	virtue	8
justice	women	8
marriage	virtue	8
justice	virtue	7
martyrdom	women	7
gender	marriage	6
chastity	martyrdom	5
chastity	women	5
chastity	gender	4
courage	women	4
chastity	marriage	3
courage	marriage	3
courage	virtue	3
chastity	justice	2
courage	gender	2
courage	martyrdom	2
gender	justice	2
gender	women	2
chastity	courage	1
gender	martyrdom	1
justice	marriage	1
justice	martyrdom	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1399 The God of Love's Letter (Épître au dieu d'Amours)
Her first long poem and her first defence of women, written in 1399. Its complaint returns in her letters on the Romance of the Rose and again in The Book of the City of Ladies.
FR
1402 Debate of the Romance of the Rose (Les Epistres du débat sus le Roman de la Rose)
Letters, gathered into a dossier by Christine herself in 1402 with her opponents' side included. They stand between the poem of 1399 that first attacked Jean de Meun and The Book of the City of Ladies of 1405.
FR
1404 Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V
A duke ordered this biography of the king in 1404. Her prose books of advice to princes came after it.
FR
1405 The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la cité des dames) you are here EN
1405 The Treasure of the City of Ladies (Le trésor de la cité des dames de degré en degré et de tous estatz)
The sequel to The Book of the City of Ladies, finished the same year, 1405: the first book defends women by example, and this one tells them what to do. It was the more often printed of the two in the century after her death.
FR
1405 The Vision of Christine de Pizan (L'avision de Christine)
One of three books dated 1405, with The Book of the City of Ladies and its sequel, and the last of her allegories. It is the one in which she tells her own story.
FR
1410 The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry (Le Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie)
A manual in four parts, compiled around 1410 from Roman and recent authorities on war and its law. It belongs with her late books of political advice for the French court, and it stands furthest from the subjects she is now read for.
FR

— or open another of their works