The Treasure of the City of Ladies

Margaret of Burgundy was ten when she married the heir to the French throne in August 1404, and the following year Christine de Pizan addressed a book to her on how to live as a princess. It begins where The Book of the City of Ladies stopped. The same three figures, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, find the author resting after building her city and send her back to work, this time to teach living women how to become worthy of it. The earlier book had argued from the famous dead; this one is practical. A princess is told how to order her day, how to keep peace between her husband and his barons, how to read the accounts of her own revenues, and how to guard her name among courtiers who would gladly damage it. Then the advice moves down through society: to women at court, to ladies who must run an estate while their husbands are away at war, to the wives of merchants and craftsmen, to servants, to prostitutes and to the poor. Christine assumes throughout that a woman may at any moment have to manage alone, as she herself had since being widowed at twenty-five. Her claim is that prudence protects a woman better than birth does: she must know the law, the accounts and the temper of the people around her. In manuscript the work was called the Book of the Three Virtues. Antoine Vérard, the Paris publisher, printed it in 1497 as Le Trésor de la cité des dames, the title our text carries, and Paris printers reissued it in 1503 and 1536. A Portuguese translation, made by order of Queen Isabel, was in print by 1518. Anne of France, who governed the kingdom as regent in the 1480s, drew on it for the lessons she wrote for her own daughter in 1504.