Christine de Pizan 1364 – 1430

Christine de Pizan was a 14th and 15th-century Italian-French author and one of the earliest professional women writers in European history. Widowed in her mid-twenties, she supported herself, her three children, and her mother by writing prolifically across genres, producing over forty works in poetry, history, biography, and political philosophy. Her 1405 work The Book of the City of Ladies is regarded as one of the foundational texts of European feminist political thought, defending women against the misogynistic attacks of a long male literary tradition through an extended catalogue of historical and mythological female figures of virtue and learning. Her later work The Book of the Three Virtues developed practical advice for women across social classes. Her contemporary Treasure of the City of Ladies remains an important source on late medieval social life.

Christine de Pizan was born in 1364 in Venice. Her father Tommaso da Pizzano, a physician and astrologer, accepted an invitation to the court of Charles V of France, and the family moved to Paris in 1368, where Christine received the unusual education that would later sustain her independence. Married at fifteen to the royal notary Etienne du Castel, she was widowed at twenty-five with three children, her mother, and a niece to support.

She turned to writing for a living and is generally regarded as the first professional woman of letters in European history. Her works include the lyric collections of the 1390s, the Letter to the God of Love (1399), the polemical exchanges of the Querelle de la Rose, the moral and political treatises Book of the Body Politic and Book of Peace, the Book of the City of Ladies and the Treasure of the City of Ladies (both 1405), and her last work, the Ditie de Jehanne d'Arc (1429).

In the City of Ladies and its companion she defended women's intellectual and moral capacity against centuries of misogynist commonplaces, building an allegorical city populated by historical and biblical women of achievement. She withdrew to the Dominican convent at Poissy in 1418 during the English occupation of Paris and is thought to have died there around 1430.