Christine de Pizan

Christine de Pizan: Europe's First Professional Woman Writer

Widowed at twenty-five, saddled with three children, an aging mother, and a tangle of unpaid legal claims against her dead husband's estate, Christine de Pizan did something almost no woman in medieval Europe had done before: she picked up a pen and made it pay her bills. Within a decade she was writing for kings.

From Venice to the French Court

She was born Cristina da Pizzano in Venice in September 1364, the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, a physician and court astrologer. When she was four, her father accepted a post at the court of Charles V of France, and the family relocated permanently to Paris. Unusually for the period, Tommaso encouraged his daughter's education against prevailing convention, giving her a grounding in literature and learning that most medieval women, even well-born ones, were denied. In 1379, at fifteen, she married Etienne du Castel, a royal notary and secretary; the marriage produced three children and appears, by her own later writing, to have been happy. It ended in 1389 when Etienne died of plague, leaving Christine to support her family alone while fighting protracted lawsuits simply to recover salary owed to his estate.

Turning Grief Into a Trade

Financial necessity, not literary ambition alone, pushed Christine toward writing as a profession. By 1393 she was composing love ballads that caught the attention of wealthy figures at court, and rather than depending on one patron, she deliberately cultivated relationships across the fractured factions of the French royal family — the houses of Burgundy, Orleans, and Berry all patronized her at different points, even as they moved toward open civil war with each other. She dedicated early work to Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, praising her as a "powerful lady, born at a lucky hour," and over the following decades produced at least forty-one known works spanning biography, political theory, military strategy, and moral philosophy — an output the Library of Congress credits with establishing "a professional precedent for women authors" in an age when almost no woman wrote for a living at all.

Entering the Fight Over Women's Character

In 1402, Christine waded into a public literary quarrel — the Querelle du Roman de la Rose — attacking Jean de Meun's celebrated poem for what she called its misogynistic, vulgar, and slanderous portrayal of women as manipulative seducers. It was one of the earliest sustained, written feminist critiques of a major literary work in European history, and it made her reputation as a writer willing to argue publicly with the era's most respected authors. She followed with treatises styled as advice to princes and to Charles V's memory, works that doubled as arguments for her own intellectual authority: if a woman could counsel kings on governance, the old arguments about female incapacity collapsed on contact with the evidence of her own career.

The City of Ladies

Her masterwork, Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405), built an entire allegorical city populated and defended by women, constructed through a dialogue between Christine and three personified virtues — Reason, Justice, and Rectitude. She filled it with female saints, Old Testament figures, and women of pagan antiquity, deliberately excluding male authority from adjudicating women's worth, and along the way offered what may be the first sympathetic reinterpretation of Medusa in Western literature, recasting her not as a monster but, in Christine's own framing, as a woman who deserved protection from male violence rather than demonization. Her companion text that same year, Le Livre des trois vertus, gave practical guidance to women across every social rank, from princesses to peasants, on securing whatever independence and virtue their circumstances allowed. Her central educational claim was blunt and, for the era, radical: "If it were customary to send little girls to school and to teach them the same subjects as are taught boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences."

A Career That Ran on Manuscripts, Not Just Words

Christine did not merely write — she managed the physical production of her own books, collaborating closely with skilled illuminators, including a woman artist named Anastasia whom Christine praised as "the most talented of her day." In 1414 she presented Queen Isabeau with an extraordinary compiled volume now known as The Book of the Queen, containing thirty of her works alongside 130 miniatures — a lavish demonstration of how thoroughly she had mastered not just composition but the medieval book trade itself. The Library of Congress today holds a rare printed edition of her Epistre d'Othea, produced around 1499 by the printer Philippe Pigouchet, physical evidence of how her work carried on into the first decades of European print culture.

War, Retreat, and a Final Poem

As France slid into civil war between Burgundian and Armagnac factions and English forces occupied Paris, Christine withdrew around 1418 to the Dominican convent at Poissy, where her daughter had already become a nun, and her literary output largely stopped. She emerged from that decade-long silence only once more, in 1429, to write Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, a poem celebrating Joan of Arc's military triumph, published within days of Charles VII's coronation — a final, exultant public statement before her death around 1430, likely before Joan's capture and execution.

Why Christine Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a specific intellectual accomplishment: Christine did not simply defend women's virtue in the abstract, as earlier writers occasionally had, but built systematic, structured arguments — legal, theological, and historical — for why the perceived gap between male and female capability was a product of denied education rather than nature, and then embodied that argument by succeeding, unaided, in genres (military treatises, political philosophy, royal biography) reserved almost exclusively for learned men. That combination of theoretical argument and lived proof is what scholars mean when they treat her as more than a talented writer: Simone de Beauvoir herself singled her out in 1949 as the first woman to "take up her pen in defence of her sex," a judgment about originality of purpose rather than mere literary polish. The honest limitation is that Christine's prose, by modern literary standards, is dense, formal, and steeped in medieval allegorical convention that can feel remote to contemporary readers; her genius was substantially argumentative and structural — reshaping what could be claimed on women's behalf — rather than a matter of stylistic innovation that reads as effortlessly brilliant on the page today.

Legacy

Christine's influence outlived the immediate political crisis she wrote through: her advice to princesses shaped Anne of France's own guidance to royal women decades later, English translations circulated under Henry VII, and Elizabeth I owned both her books and tapestries depicting scenes from the City of Ladies. After centuries of neglect, twentieth-century scholars revived her reputation, and in 2024 Paris honored her with a gold statue among ten pioneering women recognized during the Summer Olympics opening ceremony — a strikingly public acknowledgment, six centuries on, of the widow who turned a legal crisis into the first sustained professional writing career a European woman had ever built.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Book of the City of Ladies
• Notable work: Le livre du chemin de long estude
• Notable work: The Treasure of the City of Ladies
• Notable work: Complainte amoureuse (I)