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WorkChristine de Pizan

The Vision of Christine de Pizan

In a dream of 1405, France complains of her children, Opinion boasts of her power over philosophers, and Philosophy hears the author tell her own life.

by Christine de Pizan219 passages held

  • French, the original language
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Original title
L'avision de Christine
First published
(aged 41)
Original language
French

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Overview

A crowned lady tells a dreamer that her own children are tearing at her, and asks to have the complaint written down. The lady is France, called Libera in the dream. The year is 1405, when King Charles VI had suffered attacks of madness for more than a decade and the princes of his family were contesting the government. The dreamer is the author, Christine de Pizan, who appears under her own name. Her complaint is the first of three encounters. In the second she comes among the scholars of Paris and meets a great shadow, Dame Opinion, who claims to have driven every philosopher since antiquity toward what he took for truth, and who tells Christine that her own books will be disputed too. In the third she lays her troubles before Philosophy, and the allegory becomes a life story: her father brought from Italy to serve King Charles V, her marriage at fifteen, her husband's death, which left her at twenty-five with three children and her mother to support, and years of suits in four courts to recover what she was owed. Philosophy answers as she answered Boethius, the Roman statesman who wrote his Consolation of Philosophy in prison: the losses were what turned Christine to study, and what study gave her is worth more than what was taken. By the end the comforter is revealed as Theology. The book applies that old argument to a kingdom and a widow at once: misfortune, rightly used, teaches, and France in 1405 had not yet learned from hers. It survives in three known manuscripts and was first printed in 1932. No other document says so much about her life.

Key concepts

What does opinion mean in the Vision?

Opinion is the mind's restless guessing, the state of holding something true without being sure. She enters every person as soon as understanding begins and drives each toward what they are inclined to, study, arms, a trade. She can be right or wrong: Caiaphas spoke a truth about Christ's death while meaning something false. Her own definition is that she is never certain, and where certainty is, she is gone.

What is the giant figure that swallows the dreamer at the start?

It is an image of the world into which every creature is born. The dreamer sees a man whose head pierces the clouds, fed by a crowned female shadow who mixes matter, pours it into moulds like waffle irons and bakes it in his mouth. Christine's spirit falls into a mould and is swallowed as a small body. She notes that the mixer, and not the mould, made her female.

What is Fortune, and what does Philosophy put in her place?

Fortune is the name Christine gives to whatever raised her family and then stripped it: a king's favour, a husband, an income. Philosophy removes the name. What looks like Fortune's spite is God's own cup, given to test patience, and the goods Fortune hands out were never worth the grief of losing them. The complaint is answered by changing who is held responsible and what counts as a good.

What is the river where a lamb wades and an elephant swims?

It is Christine's closing image for theology, taken from Gregory the Great. The same teaching is shallow enough for a simple person to find footing and deep enough that the proudest intellect cannot touch bottom. It explains why Philosophy could appear to her in the form of Theology: one wisdom shows itself to each seeker according to the path they take, and to a troubled widow it came as plain comfort.

Themes of the book

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

France, torn by her own children

What does a country owe itself when its rulers fight over it? The crowned lady's complaint asks whether a kingdom's troubles are bad luck or a judgement it has earned.

The crowned lady, named Libera, tells her history as that of a shoot from a golden tree, then turns to the present: her own lawful children arm against each other and ride over her when she steps between them. The Sabine women, she recalls, were heard when they did the same. Her charge goes past the princes to the vices loose in the realm, fraud and greed above all, and scripture's fallen kingdoms are her warning. Punishment is coming unless the country mends, and the dreamer is asked to write it down.

  • political power
  • corruption
  • war
  • divine justice
  • allegory
  • scripture
  • justice
  • virtue

Enter a dialogue

Opinion, the shadow behind every search

How much of what scholars call knowledge is belief that has not yet been corrected? Dame Opinion claims the credit for philosophy and the blame for its errors in the same breath.

Dame Opinion appears among the disputing scholars of Paris as a great shadow surrounded by smaller coloured ones, one colour for each science. Daughter of Ignorance, begotten by the desire to know, she made Adam bite the apple and then set him to study plants. Every philosopher's account of how the world began was hers, and so are the alchemist's hopes and the heretic's error. Christine grants her power: used well she leads toward truth, though she is never certainty. Opinion then judges Christine's own books, which some say clerks wrote for her.

  • opinion
  • knowledge
  • epistemology
  • truth
  • natural philosophy
  • causation
  • matter
  • reason
  • authorship
  • philosophy

Enter a dialogue

What misfortune gave back

Was the worst thing that happened to her also the making of her? Philosophy answers a widow's complaint against Fortune by counting what the losses bought.

Christine tells Philosophy her life as a case against Fortune: a father's standing lost with the old king's death, a husband dead young, lawsuits, debts, gossip that she had a lover. Philosophy smiles and calls her ungrateful. Had her husband lived, the household would have kept her from study, the good she herself ranks above every gift of fortune. Suffering is the goldsmith's fire, in which straw burns and gold comes out clean. By the end the comforter is revealed as Theology, and patience has become a way of knowing.

  • fortune
  • suffering
  • patience
  • divine providence
  • providence
  • widowhood
  • family
  • education
  • wealth
  • theology
  • faith
  • patronage

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
219
distinct concepts
379
by passages held, corpus-wide
#330

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: “divine providence” and “suffering”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 14 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine providencesuffering7
fortuneopinion3
fortunevirtue3
knowledgeopinion3
sufferingvirtue3
divine providencejustice2
fortunesuffering2
divine justicesuffering1
divine justicevirtue1
divine providencevirtue1
justicesuffering1
justicevirtue1
knowledgevirtue1
opinionvirtue1

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.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 1405 The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la cité des dames)

    The book she is most read for today, finished by 1405. It gathers the arguments of her earlier poem and letters against Jean de Meun into a single allegory, and its three ladies return in the sequel.

     EN
  5. 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
  6. 1405 The Vision of Christine de Pizan (L'avision de Christine) you are here FR
  7. 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
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