The Book of the City of Ladies

Maureen Quilligan, New York Times Book Review
Astonishing, original....an early chapter in women's revisionary history [that] offers true eloquence resurrected from the silence of the past.


Barbara Tuchman
A real book event.


Book Description
A new translation of one of medieval Europe's most remarkable feminist texts.

In The Book of the City of Ladies France's first professional woman of letters confronted head-on the misogyny of fourteenth-century Europe. Here, with the help of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan constructs an allegorical city in which to defend womankind, using examples of female virtue and achievement both from the past and her own day as the stones with which to build the city's walls and towers.

This key text in the history of feminism not only provides powerful positive images of women--ranging from warriors, inventors, and scholars to prophetesses, artists, and saints--but also offers fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture, which viewed female nature as wholly given up to vice. This Penguin Classics edition also includes a superb Introduction that sets the work within its historical and intellectual context, annotations, a Glossary, and a Bibliography.
The Book of the City of Ladies is the sequel to The Treasure of the City of Ladies: Or, The Book of Three Virtues
Translated with an Introduction by Rosalind Brown-Grant


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


About the Author
One of the most remarkable literary figures of medieval Europe, Christine de Pizan (1364-c. 1430) was born in Venice but spent most of her life in the court of Charles V of France, producing lyric poetry and a biography of Charles.

Rosalind Brown-Grant is Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds, England.


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Christine de Pizan was born in 1365 in Venice. Her family moved to Paris three years later when her father was appointed court astrologer to King Charles V. Close ties to the royal court and her father's encouragement enabled Christine to obtain a good education, unusual for women of her time. At the age of fifteen, she married a court notary, who also fostered her learning and her literary activities. She was only twenty-five when she was widowed and left without an inheritance. With three children to support, Christine turned to writing to earn her living. From 1390 to 1429, the presumed year of her death, she wrote more than twenty works, nearly all concerned with two themes: the political life of France and the defense of women. The Book of the City of Ladies is Christine de Pizan's most eloquent expression of her feminist beliefs.


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