Italian-born French author who became Europe's first known professional woman of letters at the court of Charles VI.
Christine de Pizan was an Italian-born writer at the French royal court who, widowed young and left to support a family, turned authorship into a paying profession, an almost unheard-of path for a woman around 1400.
Across poetry, political theory, biography, and moral instruction she produced dozens of works, several of them copied in luxurious illuminated manuscripts she helped supervise. Her defence of women in The Book of the City of Ladies made her a landmark figure in the long argument over women's worth known as the querelle des femmes.
Her last known poem, written in 1429, celebrated the victories of Joan of Arc, making Christine one of the only contemporaries to praise Joan in writing during her lifetime.
Christine was born in Venice around 1364. Her father, Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, was a physician and astrologer from near Bologna who, when Christine was still a small child, was recruited to the Paris court of Charles V of France. She grew up inside the intellectual world of the French crown.
Her father allowed her an unusually broad education for a girl of the period, and the royal library assembled by Charles V gave her access to the learning she would later draw on. At about fifteen she married Étienne du Castel, a notary and royal secretary; the marriage was happy and gave her three children.
Christine is one of the rare medieval writers whose personality reaches us in her own voice, because she wrote about herself constantly. She presents herself as a grieving widow forced to learn 'the craft of a man', as a self-taught scholar proud of her reading, and as a combatant unafraid to name and challenge famous male authors.
That combativeness was real. In the debate over the Roman de la Rose she took on established clerics of the University of Paris in open letters, defending women against what she saw as slander, and she gathered the correspondence herself to preserve her side of the argument. Her tone mixes genuine learning, sharp irony, and a carefully managed public image as a virtuous, industrious author.
Modern scholars generally credit her as Europe's first professional woman of letters and read her self-presentation as a deliberate strategy: by dramatising her respectability and hard work, she made it possible for a woman to sell her writing to dukes and kings without scandal.
Étienne du Castel died of plague around 1390, when Christine was about twenty-five, leaving her with three children, a mother, and a niece to support and a tangle of lawsuits over his estate. Rather than remarry, she began to write, first lyric poetry and then longer commissioned works.
She worked as a genuine professional: courting patrons among the French and Burgundian nobility, dedicating books to Louis of Orléans, the dukes of Burgundy, and Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, and overseeing the production of deluxe illuminated copies of her collected works. This makes her one of the earliest European authors, of either sex, documented living from the sale of their writing.
Christine's most celebrated book is The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), which answers misogynist writing by building an allegorical city populated by virtuous and accomplished women from history and legend, each a 'stone' in its walls. Its companion, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, offers practical moral guidance to women of every rank.
She wrote far beyond the defence of women. At royal commission she composed The Book of the Deeds and Good Character of the Wise King Charles V, a biography of Charles V of France that is also a mirror for princes. Her Book of the Body Politic and Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry addressed governance and the ethics of war, the latter drawing on military writers to instruct commanders.
Many of these works survive in richly illustrated manuscripts, including the great collected volume she presented to Isabeau of Bavaria, now a centrepiece for the study of early fifteenth-century Parisian book production.
Around 1399 Christine opened a public literary campaign on behalf of women with her Letter to the God of Love, which attacked the contempt for women in fashionable poetry. This grew into the querelle du Roman de la Rose of 1401–1402, in which she criticised the enormously popular Roman de la Rose for its cynical and degrading treatment of women.
Against university men such as Jean de Montreuil and the brothers Gontier and Pierre Col, Christine argued in circulated letters that literature carried moral responsibility and that slander of women was neither witty nor true. The dossier she compiled turned a private exchange into one of the first documented debates about gender and literature in European history, the querelle des femmes that would run for centuries.