Feminism in the 15th Century

Christine de Pizan has been recorded as being perhaps the first woman to write about the position of women in society. These days she could well be known as a feminist, but as during the days in which she was writing, such a term was a long way off some have suggested that to suggest such a thing is an anachronism. Some prefer to call her a protofeminist –a term used to define women in a philosophical tradition that anticipated modern feminist concepts, yet lived in a time when the term "feminist" was unknown, that is, prior to the twentieth century.

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1364; the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano (Thomas de Pizan after the family’s origins in the town of Pizzano). Her father accepted an appointment at the court of Charles V as astrologer, alchemist and physician and Christine joined him there at the age of 4. It was at court that Christine was able to indulge her intellectual interests, where she educated herself in languages made good use of the vast amount of manuscripts in Charles V’s royal archives. When the king died in 1380 her father was out of a job, and he died soon after.

At the tender age of 15 she married Etienne du Castel, who was a royal secretary to the court. She bore him three children: a son, Jean; a daughter who went as a companion of the King’s daughter Marie, to the Dominican Abbey in Poissy in 1397, and another child who died in childhood. It was not until she was widowed at the age of 25 in 1389 and found herself without a protector, that she made her intellectual abilities and skill in writing known. This was mainly due to the fact that she had three children to look after, plus a niece and her mother to support. Upon her husband’s death she found herself facing complicated law suits with regard to claiming her husband’s salary and by 1393 she was writing love ballads that caught the attention of wealthy patrons within the court due to them being intrigued by the novelty of such prose being written by a woman. They asked her to compose poetry based on their own romantic escapades. In 1399 she began to study latin poets and between then and 1405 she composed 15 important literary works (as she herself declared) and between 1393 and 1412 she wrote over 300 ballads and many short poems.


It was in 1401-1402, however, that her literary fight for women began. She became involved in a literary quarrel known as the “Querelle du Roman de la Rose” concerning the Romance of the Rose written in the 13th Century by Jean de Meun in which he satirises the conventions of courtly love while depicting women as nothing more than seducers. Christine specifically objected to the use of vulgar terms used within the poem and argued that they denigrated the proper and natural function of sexuality and that such language was inappropriate for female characters in the poem , such Madam Raison. She saw him as slandering women deliberately through this debated text. Whilst the argument began with this poem, it finished with a general observation from Christine that women were unjustly slandered in literary texts. Hence she was seen that she could defend her claims in the male-dominated literary world in which she lived and she continued to do so.


Christine’s most notable works were finished by 1405 – The Book of a City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies (or The Book of the Three Virtues). Her final work was a poem about Joan of Arc and is a poem important to historians as it is the only record of Joan outside the documents relating to her trial.


Christine finally decided to retire from writing at the age of 65 but the exact date of her death is unknown. Simon de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 that her part in the literary quarrel regarding the Romance of the Rose was "the first time we see a woman take up her pen in defense of her sex”.