Berean Fruit · City of Ladies Series

Who Was Christine de Pizan?

Christine de Pizan was an Italian-born French poet, author, and court writer who became the first known professional woman writer in European history. Born in Venice around 1364 and raised at the court of Charles V of France, she was educated well beyond the norm for women of her era — a circumstance she would later argue was precisely what the literary tradition had systematically denied women.

When her husband Étienne du Castel died in 1390, Christine was left at twenty-five to support three children, her mother, and a niece. Rather than remarry, she turned to writing, and over the following decades produced a body of work encompassing poetry, biography, political philosophy, moral instruction, and literary criticism.

Christine is historically significant for being one of the earliest writers, male or female, to make a sustained public argument against misogyny in the literary tradition. She engaged directly and by name with the most celebrated texts of her day, arguing that their portrayals of women were false, harmful, and morally indefensible — establishing a form of feminist literary criticism six centuries before the term existed.

Her two most enduring works, The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, remain standard texts in medieval studies, the history of feminism, and the philosophy of gender. She retired to a convent around 1418 following the chaos of the Hundred Years' War and wrote her final known work, a poem celebrating Joan of Arc, in 1429.

She established a form of feminist literary criticism six centuries before the term existed.

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Why This Collection?

This collection presents Christine de Pizan's major works alongside the primary texts she responded to — Ovid and the Romance of the Rose — so readers can encounter her arguments in their original polemical context. Pizan was not writing in a vacuum. She was writing against specific books, specific claims, and a specific literary culture that treated misogyny as aesthetic refinement.

Reading these texts together restores the argumentative force of her work. The City of Ladies is not merely a celebration of women's virtue; it is a structured refutation of identifiable claims. The Epistles are not abstract reflections on gender; they are point-by-point responses to named opponents.

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Read These Together

The sources Pizan was reading — and fighting

Ars Amatoria — Ovid, c. 1 BC — The Art of Love, In Plain English

The book that taught men how to manipulate women, and one of the primary texts Christine de Pizan set out to challenge. Its explicit objectification of women made it a central target of her critique of misogyny in the literary tradition.

Le Roman de la Rose — Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meung, 13th Century — The Romance of the Rose, In Plain English, As a Novel

A widely celebrated medieval French allegorical poem whose later sections contain extended misogynistic passages that Pizan publicly and persistently challenged. Her written debate over this text, the Querelle de la Rose, was among the first sustained feminist literary arguments in the Western tradition.

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The Works of Christine de Pizan

Her voice, her argument, her legacy

Poetic Works of Christine de Pizan — In Plain English, As a Novel

Pizan's collected poems reveal her earliest literary work and her development as a professional writer, written largely after her husband's death left her solely responsible for her children and mother. They demonstrate her formal mastery of courtly genres while she began redirecting those forms toward the defense of women.

The Book of the City of Ladies — Foundational Work, 1405 — Le Livre de la Cité des Dames

Christine's most celebrated work. Modeled structurally on Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris but written in deliberate opposition to its ambivalences, the City of Ladies constructs an allegorical city built from the lives of virtuous and accomplished women drawn from history, scripture, and mythology. It is widely regarded as a foundational text of proto-feminist thought.

The Epistles on the Romance of the Rose — A Public Feminist Debate, 1401–1402

This collection gathers the letters and treatises constituting the Querelle de la Rose, in which Pizan, alongside Jean Gerson, challenged the moral propriety and misogynistic content of the Romance of the Rose. It represents some of the earliest documented instances of a woman publicly and systematically arguing against misogynistic literature.

The Treasure of the City of Ladies — Practical Companion, c. 1405 — Step by Step, For People of All Ranks

Written as a practical companion to the City of Ladies, this work addresses women of every social station, offering concrete guidance on the exercise of virtue, household management, political life, and the cultivation of dignity. Where the City of Ladies argues for women's worth philosophically, the Treasure operationalizes those convictions as lived ethics.

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The Full Argument at a Glance

Christine de Pizan was not writing in isolation, and neither are these books. She was responding to specific texts, specific arguments, and a specific literary culture that treated the degradation of women as a mark of sophistication. To read her work without reading what she was fighting is to catch only half the argument.

• Classical Source — Ovid's Ars Amatoria: the classical source she traced misogyny back to
• Medieval Target — The Romance of the Rose: the celebrated medieval poem she publicly opposed
• The Controversy — The Epistles: the controversy itself, in the participants' own words
• Early Voice — Poetic Works: her voice before the argument sharpened into a cause
• The Answer — The Book of the City of Ladies: her fullest, most sustained response
• Practical Ethics — The Treasure of the City of Ladies: her most practical one