Middle-Aged Women:

The Story of Christine de Pisan

Meg Reeder
Western Civilizations B
Rebecca Koerselman
December 2
nd
2013
Throughout the Roman rule women became more autonomous than in previous
governments and were at times allowed to own personal property. However, through the
misinterpretations of Jesus Barjosephs teachings and the rise of the Early Church, womens
roles suffered significantly and gender inequality increased greatly. Because the Early Church
fathers were the sole interpreters of scripture, their understanding of the Bible greatly shaped the
medieval Christian worldview, including the Christendom view of women. During the 14
th

century, titled by historians as the Medieval Ages, the Early Church defined the virtues of the
society. In this culture arose one of the worlds first feminists, Christine de Pisan, in France. As a
poet she urged the people of the time, including the king, to allow the education of women in
order to promote peace. Due to her upbringing and the political turmoil of her time, de Pisan
calls upon women to be leaders of peace. Through her writings and historical examples, de Pisan
both explicitly and implicitly critiques her leaders, attempting to change the seemingly concrete
medieval worldview.
During the time of Early Christianity, Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, became a
theological voice for the Church. In his work City of God, Augustine argues that society
flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise God, whereas the communion of saints is
rooted in a love of God that is ready to trample on self, (Perry 198). The saint believes that in
the City of God, humans love God over self and are willing to throw out everything else. Further,
the Saint believed lust to be one of the greatest sins, reasoning that lust separated him from God.
Over time, Christian society began to see sexual sin as a weakness and a way to limit the ideal
virtues of women. Men became to believe that lust and sexual sin were the womens fault and
that roles of women in the church must be limited because of this. In a late medieval painting by
Michelangelo portrays the medieval view of women as the root of sin. (see figure 1.)
Figure 1

In the Bible, Adam and Eve are living in the Garden of Eden, when Eve is tempted by a serpent
to eat from the tree of good and evil. After eating the fruit from the tree, she convinces Adam to
do the same. This event has become known as the fall of man (New Revised Standard Version,
Genesis 3). Tertullian, one of the first Christian authors, in On the Apparel of Women, said to
women,
do you not know that you are (each) Eve? You are the devils gateway. You
are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine
law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to
attack. You destroyed so easily Gods image, man. On account of your desert-
that is death- even the Son of God had to die, (1).
Tertullian directly captures and expresses the view adopted by the medieval ages, explicitly
blaming women for sin. Therefore, the paintings representation, depicting the serpent as a
female, exemplifies the prevalent idea of the time that women were the cause of sin. Because
Eve was understood as the first human to sin and was female, she not only represented the
mother of womankind, but also the root of sin. Thus, women as descendants of Eve were readily
viewed as the weaker sex and the cause of evil in the world. Further, specific passages in the
New Testament of the Bible, once interpreted by the leaders of the medieval church, helped
continue the discrimination of women. Ephesians six instructs on morals in the home stating that
[w]ives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, and that man is head of the family
(New Revised Standard Version). Further, in 1 Corinthians chapter eleven, Early Church father
Paul, commands the congregation regarding appropriate behavior saying women should be
silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate as the law
also says.It is shameful for a woman to speak in church, (New Revised Standard Version).
Not only these verses but others in 1 Corinthians chapter eleven and Timothy chapter 1
instructed the church in regards to women and were interpreted by the medieval church fathers
in such a way as to support their view of women as the weaker sex as well as the origin of evil.
It is under the influence of these ideals that Christine de Pisan is raised. Living during the
medieval ages, the worlds first feminist, she wrote with boldness and confidence, establishing
herself as a gifted writer. Her father, a salaried counselor who served as an astrologer and doctor
in the court of Charles V, shared with his daughter, his interests in education, despite the
contemporary belief that learning was dangerous for women, (Bomarito and Hunter 282).
Truncating her education, de Pisan married Etienne Castel, a secretary to Charles V. However, in
1390, ten years into the marriage, her husband died, leaving her widowed and alone to care for
her children. Forced to care for her children on her own, she attempted to support her family
through writing. Two years after her marriage ended, Charles VI, son of Charles V, went insane,
leaving the nation to fend for itself (Stearns 277). The patriarchal system, set up by Abrahamic
narratives in the Bible, followed through in the medieval ages and failed de Pisan widowhood.
Steeped in a life surrounded and impacted by weak men, de Pisan begins writing in favor of
womens education, calling women to be leaders of peace within the failed patriarchal system in
which they are forced to live in.
In her most famous work The Book of the City of Ladies de Pisan argues in favor of
female education. Through her writing, she argues that women should be educated in order to be
peacemakers in the place of their husbands. The work shows unmistakably her idea of women
as an able substitute for men when they are absent. Indeed, Christine describes herself as a
substitute for her husband, (Adams 19). In this work she argues in favor of co-regency,
attempting to open the eyes of her audience to possibly perceive Charles VI wife, Isabeau, as a
valid substitute during his periods of insanity. Instructing her audience on the female leader she
asserts [s]he must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the
scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient
subjects, (de Pisan.) In this plight she reasons that women must be educated as men, even
though [n]ot all men (and especially the wisest0 share the opinion that it is bad for women to be
educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them
that women knew more than they did, (de Pisan). During the Medieval Ages, men wished that
women not be educated, de Pisan argues, because they desired women to remain the weaker sex.
She continues by asserting that ones sex does not determine virtue, that virtue is divine, coming
only from God. Even though she believed God created man and women for different
responsibilities, she asserts that virtue comes from the creator and does not reside in a persons
sex, but in what God has bestowed upon them. Through her argument she implicitly explains that
[u]nless one accepts that virtue and honour are intrinsic goods, morality and rational self-
interest cannot be guaranteed, (de Pisan). Further, in a somewhat vailed to the ideas represented
in Michelangelos painting, she writes, [a]s to those who state that it is thanks to a women, the
lady Eve, that man was expelled from paradise, my answer to them, would be that man has
gained far more through Mary than he ever lost through Eve, ( de Pisan). She argues that Virgin
Marys birth of Jesus, the man who saved the world from its sins, more than made up for
anything lost in the garden. Using an example from the Bible, she asserts that Tertullian was
wrong in his blame of women. De Pisan maintains the fact that the first female was instrumental
in the fall of man but argues that because the Virgin Mary birthed the worlds savior, a female
was also influential in the saving of the world. Through both the direct and secondary arguments
she makes in The Book of the City of Ladies she attempts to show her audience that women can
rule, and should rule as in the case of Charles VI.
In her other works, de Pisan continues to argue in favor of female leadership, calling
women to be leaders of peace. In her manual of advice to women, The Treasure of the City of
Ladies, or The Book of the Three Virtues, she further illustrates her vision for Charles VI wife as
a peace maker in her mentally insane husbands place. She explains the difficulties the Queen
faced and purported that the [t]he womens place in the world is to intercedeas a force for
peace, she tempers impulsive male reactions, (Adams 27). The author believed men to be
extremely irrational beings, imprudent and driven by their passions and desire for revenge.
Therefore, she asserted that women must take the mans place in a quasi-counselors role, to
keep senseless wars from their fruition. She argues that when war arises the princesss task is to
be the means of peace and harmony and to work to avoid war because of the trouble that can
arise from it, (de Pisan 35). In a complete departure from Machiavelli who argues that it is
better to be feared than loved, de Pisan directs the princess to seek the love of her subjects and
work hard to deserve it (Green 468). The author asserts that her protection rests in their love and
should be the princess main concern as the peace maker. In the manual she requests that the
princess to be rational, above her male counterparts emotional ruling, emphasizing that this is
the way women must behave in order to be leaders. Further, in The Treasure of the City of
Ladies, de Pisan discusses the education of children and the best way to instil virtue, (Green
468). Continuing to assert that virtue comes not from ones sex but from God, she insists that
children learn virtue from their parents. She believes that it is also better for children to love their
parents in the place of fear, asserting that children will more easily learn from someone that
they love and respect, (Green 468). This argument further demonstrates her ideas regarding
individual virtue, sex, and leadership. Because, in her opinion, the men of her time, the leaders,
lacked virtue, she used her second work to focus on instructing women to use their intrinsic gifts.
Through this instruction, she implicitly indicts the noblemen of her nation.
After being widowed ten years into her marriage, de Pisan was forced to find a way to
support her family. Serving as a court writer for Charles VI, Christine de Pisan had a firsthand
perspective of the Kings court. Because her father equipped her with an appreciation for
education, she learned to look at her surroundings critically. As she grew up within the Medieval
Ages she was subject to a society that limited the roles of women. With her love of education
she understood the limits of her society and began to write, to not only make money, but to
attempt to challenge her audience to gain a new perspective. In her most famous work The Book
of the City of Ladies, she invites women to seek an education so they might take the place of
their husbands as leaders of peace. Further, asserting that ones sex does not determine virtue,
she instructs women to use their God given gifts of virtue. Through this assertion she implies the
lack of virtue possessed by men, the leaders of her country at that time. Reasonably, she indicts
the men because the patriarchal society, adopted from the Abrahamic narratives, failed her nation
and failed her personally in her widowhood.
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Augustine. City of God. Sources of Western Tradition. Marvin Perry, George W. Bock.
Boston: Wadsworth, 2012. 199. Print.
De Pisan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. Earl Richards. New York: Persea,
1998. Print.
Tertullian. On the Apparel of Women. Whitefish, MO: Kessinger, LLC, 2010. Print.
Secondary Sources:
Adams, T. Christine De Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, and Female Regency. French Historical
Studies 32.1 (2009): 1-32. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2013.
Bomarito, Jessica, and Jeffrey W. Hunter. Feminism in Literature. Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2005.
Print.
Green, Karen. Christine De Pisan and Thomas Hobbes. Philosophical Quarterly 84.177
(1994): 456-76. Academic Search Complete. Web. Nov. 2013.
Stearns, Peter N. Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000. New York [etc.:
Charles Scribners Sons, 2001. Print.
Artifact:
Michelangelo. Adam and Eve:The Fall of Man. 1508. Chapel Ceiling. Sistine Chapel, Vatican
City.