The God of Love's Letter

The poem is drafted as a royal letter. Cupid, king of lovers, writes to his subjects from his court, and the letter carries a date: May 1399. Women of every rank, he reports, have petitioned him about men who court them with oaths, abandon them, and then boast of it in company. Christine de Pizan uses that fiction to make a charge of her own: the low opinion of women found in books comes from the men who wrote the books, and it does not describe women. She names two authors. Ovid, the Roman poet of the Art of Love, taught seduction as a set of tricks. Jean de Meun, who completed the Romance of the Rose around 1275, spent thousands of lines on the capture of one girl, and the poem turns that against him: women so weak and fickle would not need so long a siege. Had women written the books, Cupid adds, the books would read differently. He closes by ordering the slanderers out of his court. The poem runs to a little over eight hundred lines and was her first long work; until then she had written short lyrics. Two years after writing it, she carried the same complaint against Jean de Meun into an exchange of letters with his admirers in Paris. The poem itself travelled quickly. In 1402 Thomas Hoccleve, a clerk in the English royal administration, turned it into English as The Letter of Cupid, and in 1532 his version was printed among the works of Chaucer. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, described the poem as the first time a woman took up her pen to defend her sex.