Happy Saturday. One of our previous episodes that got a very quick name drop in our most recent installment of Unearthed was Christine de pisign so I thought we would bring out our episode on her as Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out September fifth, twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Christine de Pisan pretty much frequently summed up as a late medieval writer, but the word writer just does not encompass everything that she did at all. She wrote all kinds of verse. She wrote military manuals and treatises on war and peace and the just governance of a nation. She wrote an autobiogra in the form of an allegory. She was the official biographer of King Charles the Fifth of France, and she wrote the only popular piece of writing that praised Joan of Arc while Joan of Arc was still living. She also wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, which is a compilation of notable women from history, literature, and mythology. That was one part of her very active participation in an ongoing debate in medieval France about the nature of women and their representation in history and literature, something we still discussed today, and until Christine got involved, this argument had mostly been more exclusively really been going on among men. So she was pretty great, we're gonna talk about it today. Christine de Paizsan was born in Venice, Italy, in thirteen sixty four. Her father was Tamaso di Benvenuto di Pazzano, or Thomas of Pissan, who was a government advisor and a professor there and not long after Christine was born, though, he was a pointed to the court of Charles the fifth of France to serve as the king's medical adviser and astrologer, or his medical astrologer. These two things were pretty tightly connected at that point. When Christine was three or four, she and the rest of the family joined her father in France. Her father was a humanist and a highly educated man, and he made sure all of his children were educated. He gave Christine the same education that he gave to his sons. Growing up in the court of Charles the fifth also gave Christine and her siblings access to extensive libraries and numerous prominent scholars. Charles the Fifth was nicknamed Charles the Wise, and he surrounded himself with cultured, educated people, and he assembled an incredible library at the Louver. So by her early teens, Christine was well read and well educated, and the breadth of her reading was just incredible. It set her up to write about everything from love to military strategy later in her life. When she was about fifteen, a marriage was arranged for Christine. It was to court notary Etienne Duquestell, who was about twenty five. The same year that they got married, Etienne was appointed court secretary in spite of her youth when they got married and the difference in their ages, Christine described this marriage as a very happy one. They had three children together, two sons and a daughter, and Etienne encouraged Christine to continue her studies after she got married and became a mother. But things started going downhill for Christine and her previously happy family. In thirteen eighty, Charles the Fifth died of an abscess at the age of forty two, and he was succeeded by his son, Charles the sixth. We actually did a podcast on Charles the sixth in August of twenty seventeen. He was the one who initially showed a lot of promise as a leader, but then developed cycles of terrifying and violent psychosis when he reached his early twenties. When Charles the fifth died, though Charles the sixth was only a lie, so his uncles were doing most of the actual ruling and all the political back and forth in court, Christine's father lost his position at Tienne still had his post as secretary, but he was being paid a lot less, so the family fell into financial difficulty, and that was compounded when Christine's father died sometime in the late thirteen eighties. Then Christine's husband died suddenly in thirteen ninety, possibly due to plague while he was away from home on a mission for the crown. So at the age of twenty five or twenty six, after ten years of marriage, Christine was a widow with children to support because of her father's death. She also needed to support her elderly mother, and the family had taken in a niece as well. It does appear that in all of this Christine had inherited some property. She was entitled some of her late husband's salary as well, but actually getting any of this became this really complicated legal tangle that was exacerbated by the fact that she was a woman, which made it a lot harder for her to advocate for herself in all of these matters. Was eventually resolved after about fifteen years, but that did not help her at all in the meantime. Yeah, fifteen years is a long time to have financial struggles while you try to get what is due to you, right, That's a long time to have to deal with them. Christine did have other family that she could have gone to live with, or she could have remarried. Either of those would have been the typical course of action for a woman in her situation, but she didn't want to do that, in part because she was so heartbroken following the death of her husband, so she decided to try to earn a living as a writer. This is kind of a theme on the show. We've done a number of previous episodes about women who decided to earn a living by writing. This is because for big chunks of history, writing has been one of a very few available options for women from the more affluent social classes to try to earn their own money. At the same time, writing wasn't necessarily totally acceptable, and sometimes it was only possible while writing under the name of a man. But for a particular social class it was one of a very, very few options. But there is a really big difference between Christine de Paizan and other women that we've talked about on the podcast who decided to earn their own money as writers. She lived before the invention of the printing press. There were multiple printing methods in use in Asia long before this, but in the West, Johann Gutenberg is credited with developing a press that used movable type sometime in the early to mid fourteen hundreds. Christine died long before Gutenberg printed his Bible and long before the printing press revolutionized the way publishing worked in the West. So unlike the other women that we've talked about on the show who made their living by writing, she was not writing books to sell to the masses or through subscriptions. There wasn't a mass distribution method that was efficient at all. To sum it up, Christine de Pizon was going to try to make a living as a writer of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The very few people who earned a living writing at this point were doing so by writing commissioned works for wealthy patrons. It was virtually unheard of for a woman to go out seeking patrons, but Christine did. It definitely helped that she had so many connections from having grown up connected to the royal court and from being the widow of a court secretary. It also helped that she started out writing the kinds of pieces that were really popular at the time, including lyric poems and allegories. Love poems were especially popular, and Christine had a lot to draw from. She really channeled her grief over her husband's death into a lot of her early work, and she called her happier love poems written during this time, singing joyously with a sad heart. Her first commissions were short pieces for members of the French nobility, or she would dedicate a poem to someone who would then give her a gift as a gesture of thanks. In less than a year, her work was being passed around and read outside of France. By fourteen oh three, she had written enough poems to turn them into a collection that was one hundred ballad verlais erndou and those are three different poetic forms. She also made ends meet by doing transcriptions and illustrations of other people's work. In May of thirteen ninety nine, while she was still writing the poems that would later become that first collection, she also wrote an eight hundred and sixty verse poem called The Letters of the God of Love or the Letters of Cupid, written in the form of a letter to Cupid during a spring festival. Although sometimes it's translated as a letter from Cupid. There's a lot of variety in how people approach her work and translating it. In this work, women from a range of social classes, married and unmarried, describe a number of insults and degradations that they have experienced in their lives. And these insults and degradations are not just from knights and nobles and other real life men, or from the general expectations of society. They're from works of literature, including Roman de la Rose or The Romance of the Rose. Roman de la Rose was a very long, incredibly popular, and widely read poem about love. According to the Letters of Cupid, it was one of the things that was causing offense to women. The conclusion of this poem wasn't about love at all. It was about deception and unscrupulous men taking advantage of women's trust. Letters of Cupid seems to have spawned a literary quarrel, Or if it didn't start that quarrel, it was at least written two years before the quaral started in fourteen oh one. And we're going to get to that after we first pause for a little break from one of the sponsors that keeps us going. When GUILLLM. De Laurie started writing Romando la Rose in the late twelve thirties, it was supposed to explore the whole art of love, so poem that was deeply connected to the traditional poetic forms and the themes of courtly love that were a huge part of medieval European literature. If you have read medieval European literature, you will recognize these things. This poem is a dream allegory that tells the story of a man in a walled garden who's trying to get to a rose, and that rose symbolizes love. Along the way, he meets characters like beauty and generosity, and honesty and chastity. He's also shot by Cupid's arrows and the rose is given more and more protection, and those allegorical characters like beauty and generosity coach him in a very courtly way in the Pursuit of Love. Guillum died around twelve seventy eight, and about forty years later Jean de Muenz decided to add to the poem, and it's this additional material that was at the heart of the quarrel of the Rose. Written in a very body suggestive style in Jean de Mouen's edition, the narrator goes on a lengthy battle before calling on Venus, who represents carnal love, to set fire to the castle where the rose is being sheltered and then pluck it. There is a lot of violence and deception involved, and it is basically the opposite of the tone in the first part of the poem. Jean de Muen's ending to the Roman de la Rose was at the heart of a multi year literary quarrel among the French court. Two years after Christine de Pisan criticized it and her Letters of Cupid, another Jeanne Jean de Montroyx, wrote an essay praising the body violent ending. So it's not one hundred percent clear whether he had read the Letters of Cupid, but she definitely made this point before he wrote his defense of this poem. The text of the essay has not survived until today, but concurring with his opinions were Gontier Cole and his brother Pierre. Jean de Montroux and Gontier Cole were both secretaries to Charles the sixth and Pierre was the canon of Notre Dame. After reading this essay in fourteen oh one, Christine wrote Jean a lengthy letter taking apart all of his points. She pointed out not only the poem's graphic, suggestive language and its violence and deception, but also the fact that a lot of the most negative allegorical characters were depicted as women. She made it very clear that she did not think that the second part of Roman de la Rose was worth the giant heaps of praise that he had given it in this essay. Really, she did not pull any punches with this. Here is something she wrote in this letter quote, It truly seems to me that, in view of the aforementioned arguments and many others, this work should more fittingly be engulfed in a shroud of flame than crowned with laurel. Even though you call it quote a mirror of the good life, an example to all classes for political self conduct and for living religiously and wisely. On the contrary, begging your pardon, I say that it is an exhortation to vice that encourages a dissolute life, a doctrine of deceit, a path to damnation, a purveyor of public defamation, a cause of suspicion and distrust, a source of shame to many people, and perhaps a seed of heresy. This led to a whole series of exchanged essays and letters, with Jean y'osson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, taking Christine's side in the debate. Although a lot of the debate was about the poem's more graphic content and its treatment and depiction of women, it was also connected to overall concerns of poetic style and language and whether it was appropriate for a formal work of verse to include that kind of subject matter. Christine's argument also connected to the idea that Jean de Muen had a responsibility as a writer with an audience, and that was a responsibility not to go sneaking a bunch of misogyny into a work under the trappings of formal poetry and courtly love. Christine also thought that writers should be creating work that would improve society, not make it worse, and they especially shouldn't be making society worse by using respectable poetic forms to degrade women. I feel like I have lived through this exact same argument on the internet over and over for the last entire history of the Internet. Yeah, that seems accurate to me. By the time this was all said and done, Christine had written almost as much on the subject as all of the other people involved combined. She wrote in a very self deprecating, self effacing way, and as with her other works, she wrote in Middle French while the men were writing in formal Latin. Her tone was often like, I know, I'm only a woman, and I'm not nearly so learned as you, sir, but I think I have some experience with this, and here is why the end of Romando la Rose is sexist garbage, deserving no praise at all. She also collated all the exchanged letters in fourteen oh two, and she delivered them to the Provost of Paris and Charles the sixth wife Isabeau of Bavaria. Asking for their support. She brought the receipts directly there she did. The Quarrel of the Rose also led to Christine writing her most famous work, The Book of the City of Ladies. Like Romandela Rose, this is a dream allegory. It's one with Christine as a character. It begins with the character Christine studying and she finds book after book, all of them written by men, describing women as wicked and full of vice. The character Christine finally becomes convinced if so many great and educated men have written so many negative things about women, then surely those things must be true. She goes so far as to ask God God, how he could have made something as terrible as women, and to wish that she had instead been a man, since, according to all this literary evidence in front of her, women were worthless and men were great. The character Christine is then visited by three ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who offer her comfort and reassurance that all these things she has been reading against women are indeed false. They say that they have been charged with traveling the earth to help people get back on the right path. They charge Christine with building a city quote, so that from now on, ladies and all valiant women may have a refuge and defense. Christine and the Three Ladies go on to build a city together, along the way, picking apart various attacks on women and pointing out hypocrisies, like, for example, how Avid's portrayal of women was degrading, but the man himself was a vain philanderer. And while building this city, Christine and the Three Ladies talk about a long list of mythical and historical women, including the Amazons, Zenobia, Sappho, and the biblical figures of Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth. The Three Ladies go on to tell Christine about queens and princesses, and women's scholars and poets. The book's third section is all about saints and other holy women, and they also talk over a lot of more general questions, like why there aren't women arguing in the courts of law and whether a woman has ever invented anything new. The Book of the City of Ladies was a work of literature created intentionally to offer a positive portrayal of women and to offset widespread depictions of women as weak, deceptive, and moral. To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and unfaithful. It offers examples of chastity, constancy, and faithfulness in love. To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and dishonest, it offers examples of integrity, honesty, and good It also points out in numerous places is how there are fewer examples of women as scholars and leaders because women had fewer opportunities to get the education that they needed to become scholars or the experience they needed to become leaders, and among other things, the book explicitly advocates for girls to get the same education as their brothers. The Book of the City of Ladies wasn't the first book to compile the biographies of real and mythical women into one volume. Giovanni Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women was written about thirty years before that and was the only major work at the time to do so. Concerning Famous Women was one of Christine de Paisan's inspirations, but The Book of the City of Ladies was Europe's first book of this type to be written by a woman from a woman's perspective. Christine de Paisan took a copy of this book to Isabe of Bavaria, just like she had all of those letters. There's an illustration of that encounter of Christine delivering her book to Isabee. In fourteen oh five, Christine wrote a follow up to the Book of the City of Ladies that was called The Treasure of the City of Ladies, also sometimes known as the Book of the Three Virtues. It's a conduct manual for women, which in some ways is really conventional as the Book of the City of Lady was when it comes to things like the treatment of marriage and gender roles. It assumes that marriage and motherhood are how the world works for women, and it advises women on how to get the best and most satisfying lives for themselves within that world. There is a lot about duty and virtue, but at the same time, the Book of the Three Virtues also points out that expectations placed on women were impossible to live up to, and rather than being framed as this is how you should conduct yourself because it's what God wants and what your husband expects, it's more like, this is how you should conduct yourself to get the best possible place for yourself in the situation that you're in. It's more about women improving their quality of life than about women living up to social expectations. And there's also a lot of encouragement for women to be self sufficient, whether they are a widow pondering remarriage or a married woman considering how much of a role to play in the management of her household. I read one description of this book as I was researching this that called it Machiavelli for medieval French women. Like Christine's other writing, the Book of Virtues is steeped in a sense of Christian virtue and piety. This probably offered her some protection as an incredibly outspoken woman who was pointing out and contradicting sexism and misogyny over and over and over again. That made it kind of hard to criticize what she was doing without also looking like you were criticizing Christian values. I mean, she did get criticism, but this buffered it a little. Christine de Paisan didn't only address women in her writing about conduct. Her Moral Teachings was a collection of advice written in verse for her son Jean Duquastell as he was leaving to go to England to be fostered, and she also wrote a lot of advicement for kings and nobility, and we're going to talk more about that after a quick sponsor break. By the time Christine de pisign wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, she had become well known enough that she was getting commissions for work that were well outside of those popular poetic forms that we talked about earlier. Philip, Duke of Burgundy, commissioned her to write a biography of his brother Charles the Fifth, in whose court she had grown up. He made that commission in fourteen oh four. The One Hundred Years War was going on during the entirety of Christine's life, and much of her work turned toward issues of war and peace. After the death of Philip the Bold in fourteen oh four, his son John, also known as John the Fearless, became the Duke of Burgundy, and his ongoing dispute with Louis, Duke of Orleans prompted Christine to write to both of them to advocate for peace and to remind them to their duty to their people not to go to war at their expense. This, unfortunately did not work. The Armagnac Burgundian Civil War started in fourteen oh seven, and that lasted for almost thirty years. In fourteen ten, she published a book on military leadership and tactics called The Book of Deeds and Arms of Chivalry. This was yet another totally unexpected thing for a woman to be doing, so much so that people thought she might have just copied an earlier military manual and other books of strategy to do it. A later editor even edited her name out of it and made it look like it was written by a man. But this was Christine's own original work. It was a product of her extensive study of history and strategy and tactics, and all of that extensive reading she had done in the Court of Charles the Fifth. It covers all the military technology of the time as well as tactics and strategy, and it makes a case that peace is preferable to war, but sometimes as own only attainable through war. She fills out her discussion of all of this with examples from military history. She also walks through the idea of just war, a war fought to keep law and justice, to defend the people from injury or oppression, or to reclaim stolen land. The book discusses how the people fighting in the war should conduct themselves justly, and then once the war was over, it was incumbent on the ruling class to rule the people in a just way. In spite of the questions about whether Christine, who after all was a mere woman, had just copied this book from someone else, this book was translated into English and it became one of the first books printed in England after William Caxton established a printing press in Westminster. He printed it as The Fate of Arms and Chivalry in fourteen eighty nine. We haven't really touched on all of Christine's work because she was prolific. Between thirteen ninety nine and about fourteen fifteen, she wrote twelve major works totally more than a thousand pages. She also worked directly with the scribes and illuminators who created the finished manuscripts of her work. Throughout she was an advocate for women as well as for justice and for peace. She also paid careful attention to the need to improve the lives of the poor, while also trying to encourage a sense of charity among her readers who were likely to be wealthy, since people in the lower class typically were not literate. Outside of the world of her writing, she was also very savvy. She was invited to several royal courts outside of France, but she preferred to stay in her adopted homeland. And she also had to be very strategic to provide for her children in a world where money and family and political connections were extremely important. I mean, she was making the ends meet through all of her writing, but that's not the same thing as providing for the future of your children in this world. She had no dowry for her daughter, but was able to negotiate a place for her at the Royal Dominican at Poissi and as a companion to Charles the sixth daughter Marie. She also negotiated for her son to be fostered with John Montague, the third Earl of Salisbury, with the hope of ensuring him a political future. This second part led to a whole complicated negotiation with King Henry the Fourth to get her son back after John Montague was a co conspirator and an uprising against him. Though that's a whole huge drama of international intrigue in which she had this ongoing, careful negotiation with a king to get her son to return to France. As we noted earlier, England and France were at war throughout Christine's entire life. The Battle of Agincourps in fourteen to fifteen was a massive defeat for France, and not long afterward Christine joined her daughter at the convent in Poisi. She mostly stopped writing, at least for public view. Around that same time, she did come out of retirement for one last work, though. Christine's last known piece of writing was about Joan of Arc, and it was written to honor her after the French victory at Orleons in fourteen twenty nine. Like we said at the top of the show, this is the only major work written to celebrate Joan of Arc during her lifetime. And we don't know exactly when Christine died, but it was sometime around fourteen thirty one in Poisi, France. I find the whole idea of building a whole city where the ladies can find comfort and refuge to be very comforting, and I am glad that Christine did it. I want to make a joke, but I think it belittles thinks, so I'm gonna refrain. Okay, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note our email addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. One of our previous episodes that got a very quick name drop in our most recent installment of Unearthed was Christine de pisign so I thought we would bring out our episode on her as Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out September fifth, twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Christine de Pisan pretty much frequently summed up as a late medieval writer, but the word writer just does not encompass everything that she did at all. She wrote all kinds of verse. She wrote military manuals and treatises on war and peace and the just governance of a nation. She wrote an autobiogra in the form of an allegory. She was the official biographer of King Charles the Fifth of France, and she wrote the only popular piece of writing that praised Joan of Arc while Joan of Arc was still living. She also wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, which is a compilation of notable women from history, literature, and mythology. That was one part of her very active participation in an ongoing debate in medieval France about the nature of women and their representation in history and literature, something we still discussed today, and until Christine got involved, this argument had mostly been more exclusively really been going on among men. So she was pretty great, we're gonna talk about it today. Christine de Paizsan was born in Venice, Italy, in thirteen sixty four. Her father was Tamaso di Benvenuto di Pazzano, or Thomas of Pissan, who was a government advisor and a professor there and not long after Christine was born, though, he was a pointed to the court of Charles the fifth of France to serve as the king's medical adviser and astrologer, or his medical astrologer. These two things were pretty tightly connected at that point. When Christine was three or four, she and the rest of the family joined her father in France. Her father was a humanist and a highly educated man, and he made sure all of his children were educated. He gave Christine the same education that he gave to his sons. Growing up in the court of Charles the fifth also gave Christine and her siblings access to extensive libraries and numerous prominent scholars. Charles the Fifth was nicknamed Charles the Wise, and he surrounded himself with cultured, educated people, and he assembled an incredible library at the Louver. So by her early teens, Christine was well read and well educated, and the breadth of her reading was just incredible. It set her up to write about everything from love to military strategy later in her life. When she was about fifteen, a marriage was arranged for Christine. It was to court notary Etienne Duquestell, who was about twenty five. The same year that they got married, Etienne was appointed court secretary in spite of her youth when they got married and the difference in their ages, Christine described this marriage as a very happy one. They had three children together, two sons and a daughter, and Etienne encouraged Christine to continue her studies after she got married and became a mother. But things started going downhill for Christine and her previously happy family. In thirteen eighty, Charles the Fifth died of an abscess at the age of forty two, and he was succeeded by his son, Charles the sixth. We actually did a podcast on Charles the sixth in August of twenty seventeen. He was the one who initially showed a lot of promise as a leader, but then developed cycles of terrifying and violent psychosis when he reached his early twenties. When Charles the fifth died, though Charles the sixth was only a lie, so his uncles were doing most of the actual ruling and all the political back and forth in court, Christine's father lost his position at Tienne still had his post as secretary, but he was being paid a lot less, so the family fell into financial difficulty, and that was compounded when Christine's father died sometime in the late thirteen eighties. Then Christine's husband died suddenly in thirteen ninety, possibly due to plague while he was away from home on a mission for the crown. So at the age of twenty five or twenty six, after ten years of marriage, Christine was a widow with children to support because of her father's death. She also needed to support her elderly mother, and the family had taken in a niece as well. It does appear that in all of this Christine had inherited some property. She was entitled some of her late husband's salary as well, but actually getting any of this became this really complicated legal tangle that was exacerbated by the fact that she was a woman, which made it a lot harder for her to advocate for herself in all of these matters. Was eventually resolved after about fifteen years, but that did not help her at all in the meantime. Yeah, fifteen years is a long time to have financial struggles while you try to get what is due to you, right, That's a long time to have to deal with them. Christine did have other family that she could have gone to live with, or she could have remarried. Either of those would have been the typical course of action for a woman in her situation, but she didn't want to do that, in part because she was so heartbroken following the death of her husband, so she decided to try to earn a living as a writer. This is kind of a theme on the show. We've done a number of previous episodes about women who decided to earn a living by writing. This is because for big chunks of history, writing has been one of a very few available options for women from the more affluent social classes to try to earn their own money. At the same time, writing wasn't necessarily totally acceptable, and sometimes it was only possible while writing under the name of a man. But for a particular social class it was one of a very, very few options. But there is a really big difference between Christine de Paizan and other women that we've talked about on the podcast who decided to earn their own money as writers. She lived before the invention of the printing press. There were multiple printing methods in use in Asia long before this, but in the West, Johann Gutenberg is credited with developing a press that used movable type sometime in the early to mid fourteen hundreds. Christine died long before Gutenberg printed his Bible and long before the printing press revolutionized the way publishing worked in the West. So unlike the other women that we've talked about on the show who made their living by writing, she was not writing books to sell to the masses or through subscriptions. There wasn't a mass distribution method that was efficient at all. To sum it up, Christine de Pizon was going to try to make a living as a writer of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The very few people who earned a living writing at this point were doing so by writing commissioned works for wealthy patrons. It was virtually unheard of for a woman to go out seeking patrons, but Christine did. It definitely helped that she had so many connections from having grown up connected to the royal court and from being the widow of a court secretary. It also helped that she started out writing the kinds of pieces that were really popular at the time, including lyric poems and allegories. Love poems were especially popular, and Christine had a lot to draw from. She really channeled her grief over her husband's death into a lot of her early work, and she called her happier love poems written during this time, singing joyously with a sad heart. Her first commissions were short pieces for members of the French nobility, or she would dedicate a poem to someone who would then give her a gift as a gesture of thanks. In less than a year, her work was being passed around and read outside of France. By fourteen oh three, she had written enough poems to turn them into a collection that was one hundred ballad verlais erndou and those are three different poetic forms. She also made ends meet by doing transcriptions and illustrations of other people's work. In May of thirteen ninety nine, while she was still writing the poems that would later become that first collection, she also wrote an eight hundred and sixty verse poem called The Letters of the God of Love or the Letters of Cupid, written in the form of a letter to Cupid during a spring festival. Although sometimes it's translated as a letter from Cupid. There's a lot of variety in how people approach her work and translating it. In this work, women from a range of social classes, married and unmarried, describe a number of insults and degradations that they have experienced in their lives. And these insults and degradations are not just from knights and nobles and other real life men, or from the general expectations of society. They're from works of literature, including Roman de la Rose or The Romance of the Rose. Roman de la Rose was a very long, incredibly popular, and widely read poem about love. According to the Letters of Cupid, it was one of the things that was causing offense to women. The conclusion of this poem wasn't about love at all. It was about deception and unscrupulous men taking advantage of women's trust. Letters of Cupid seems to have spawned a literary quarrel, Or if it didn't start that quarrel, it was at least written two years before the quaral started in fourteen oh one. And we're going to get to that after we first pause for a little break from one of the sponsors that keeps us going. When GUILLLM. De Laurie started writing Romando la Rose in the late twelve thirties, it was supposed to explore the whole art of love, so poem that was deeply connected to the traditional poetic forms and the themes of courtly love that were a huge part of medieval European literature. If you have read medieval European literature, you will recognize these things. This poem is a dream allegory that tells the story of a man in a walled garden who's trying to get to a rose, and that rose symbolizes love. Along the way, he meets characters like beauty and generosity, and honesty and chastity. He's also shot by Cupid's arrows and the rose is given more and more protection, and those allegorical characters like beauty and generosity coach him in a very courtly way in the Pursuit of Love. Guillum died around twelve seventy eight, and about forty years later Jean de Muenz decided to add to the poem, and it's this additional material that was at the heart of the quarrel of the Rose. Written in a very body suggestive style in Jean de Mouen's edition, the narrator goes on a lengthy battle before calling on Venus, who represents carnal love, to set fire to the castle where the rose is being sheltered and then pluck it. There is a lot of violence and deception involved, and it is basically the opposite of the tone in the first part of the poem. Jean de Muen's ending to the Roman de la Rose was at the heart of a multi year literary quarrel among the French court. Two years after Christine de Pisan criticized it and her Letters of Cupid, another Jeanne Jean de Montroyx, wrote an essay praising the body violent ending. So it's not one hundred percent clear whether he had read the Letters of Cupid, but she definitely made this point before he wrote his defense of this poem. The text of the essay has not survived until today, but concurring with his opinions were Gontier Cole and his brother Pierre. Jean de Montroux and Gontier Cole were both secretaries to Charles the sixth and Pierre was the canon of Notre Dame. After reading this essay in fourteen oh one, Christine wrote Jean a lengthy letter taking apart all of his points. She pointed out not only the poem's graphic, suggestive language and its violence and deception, but also the fact that a lot of the most negative allegorical characters were depicted as women. She made it very clear that she did not think that the second part of Roman de la Rose was worth the giant heaps of praise that he had given it in this essay. Really, she did not pull any punches with this. Here is something she wrote in this letter quote, It truly seems to me that, in view of the aforementioned arguments and many others, this work should more fittingly be engulfed in a shroud of flame than crowned with laurel. Even though you call it quote a mirror of the good life, an example to all classes for political self conduct and for living religiously and wisely. On the contrary, begging your pardon, I say that it is an exhortation to vice that encourages a dissolute life, a doctrine of deceit, a path to damnation, a purveyor of public defamation, a cause of suspicion and distrust, a source of shame to many people, and perhaps a seed of heresy. This led to a whole series of exchanged essays and letters, with Jean y'osson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, taking Christine's side in the debate. Although a lot of the debate was about the poem's more graphic content and its treatment and depiction of women, it was also connected to overall concerns of poetic style and language and whether it was appropriate for a formal work of verse to include that kind of subject matter. Christine's argument also connected to the idea that Jean de Muen had a responsibility as a writer with an audience, and that was a responsibility not to go sneaking a bunch of misogyny into a work under the trappings of formal poetry and courtly love. Christine also thought that writers should be creating work that would improve society, not make it worse, and they especially shouldn't be making society worse by using respectable poetic forms to degrade women. I feel like I have lived through this exact same argument on the internet over and over for the last entire history of the Internet. Yeah, that seems accurate to me. By the time this was all said and done, Christine had written almost as much on the subject as all of the other people involved combined. She wrote in a very self deprecating, self effacing way, and as with her other works, she wrote in Middle French while the men were writing in formal Latin. Her tone was often like, I know, I'm only a woman, and I'm not nearly so learned as you, sir, but I think I have some experience with this, and here is why the end of Romando la Rose is sexist garbage, deserving no praise at all. She also collated all the exchanged letters in fourteen oh two, and she delivered them to the Provost of Paris and Charles the sixth wife Isabeau of Bavaria. Asking for their support. She brought the receipts directly there she did. The Quarrel of the Rose also led to Christine writing her most famous work, The Book of the City of Ladies. Like Romandela Rose, this is a dream allegory. It's one with Christine as a character. It begins with the character Christine studying and she finds book after book, all of them written by men, describing women as wicked and full of vice. The character Christine finally becomes convinced if so many great and educated men have written so many negative things about women, then surely those things must be true. She goes so far as to ask God God, how he could have made something as terrible as women, and to wish that she had instead been a man, since, according to all this literary evidence in front of her, women were worthless and men were great. The character Christine is then visited by three ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who offer her comfort and reassurance that all these things she has been reading against women are indeed false. They say that they have been charged with traveling the earth to help people get back on the right path. They charge Christine with building a city quote, so that from now on, ladies and all valiant women may have a refuge and defense. Christine and the Three Ladies go on to build a city together, along the way, picking apart various attacks on women and pointing out hypocrisies, like, for example, how Avid's portrayal of women was degrading, but the man himself was a vain philanderer. And while building this city, Christine and the Three Ladies talk about a long list of mythical and historical women, including the Amazons, Zenobia, Sappho, and the biblical figures of Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth. The Three Ladies go on to tell Christine about queens and princesses, and women's scholars and poets. The book's third section is all about saints and other holy women, and they also talk over a lot of more general questions, like why there aren't women arguing in the courts of law and whether a woman has ever invented anything new. The Book of the City of Ladies was a work of literature created intentionally to offer a positive portrayal of women and to offset widespread depictions of women as weak, deceptive, and moral. To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and unfaithful. It offers examples of chastity, constancy, and faithfulness in love. To counteract depictions of women as deceptive and dishonest, it offers examples of integrity, honesty, and good It also points out in numerous places is how there are fewer examples of women as scholars and leaders because women had fewer opportunities to get the education that they needed to become scholars or the experience they needed to become leaders, and among other things, the book explicitly advocates for girls to get the same education as their brothers. The Book of the City of Ladies wasn't the first book to compile the biographies of real and mythical women into one volume. Giovanni Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women was written about thirty years before that and was the only major work at the time to do so. Concerning Famous Women was one of Christine de Paisan's inspirations, but The Book of the City of Ladies was Europe's first book of this type to be written by a woman from a woman's perspective. Christine de Paisan took a copy of this book to Isabe of Bavaria, just like she had all of those letters. There's an illustration of that encounter of Christine delivering her book to Isabee. In fourteen oh five, Christine wrote a follow up to the Book of the City of Ladies that was called The Treasure of the City of Ladies, also sometimes known as the Book of the Three Virtues. It's a conduct manual for women, which in some ways is really conventional as the Book of the City of Lady was when it comes to things like the treatment of marriage and gender roles. It assumes that marriage and motherhood are how the world works for women, and it advises women on how to get the best and most satisfying lives for themselves within that world. There is a lot about duty and virtue, but at the same time, the Book of the Three Virtues also points out that expectations placed on women were impossible to live up to, and rather than being framed as this is how you should conduct yourself because it's what God wants and what your husband expects, it's more like, this is how you should conduct yourself to get the best possible place for yourself in the situation that you're in. It's more about women improving their quality of life than about women living up to social expectations. And there's also a lot of encouragement for women to be self sufficient, whether they are a widow pondering remarriage or a married woman considering how much of a role to play in the management of her household. I read one description of this book as I was researching this that called it Machiavelli for medieval French women. Like Christine's other writing, the Book of Virtues is steeped in a sense of Christian virtue and piety. This probably offered her some protection as an incredibly outspoken woman who was pointing out and contradicting sexism and misogyny over and over and over again. That made it kind of hard to criticize what she was doing without also looking like you were criticizing Christian values. I mean, she did get criticism, but this buffered it a little. Christine de Paisan didn't only address women in her writing about conduct. Her Moral Teachings was a collection of advice written in verse for her son Jean Duquastell as he was leaving to go to England to be fostered, and she also wrote a lot of advicement for kings and nobility, and we're going to talk more about that after a quick sponsor break. By the time Christine de pisign wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, she had become well known enough that she was getting commissions for work that were well outside of those popular poetic forms that we talked about earlier. Philip, Duke of Burgundy, commissioned her to write a biography of his brother Charles the Fifth, in whose court she had grown up. He made that commission in fourteen oh four. The One Hundred Years War was going on during the entirety of Christine's life, and much of her work turned toward issues of war and peace. After the death of Philip the Bold in fourteen oh four, his son John, also known as John the Fearless, became the Duke of Burgundy, and his ongoing dispute with Louis, Duke of Orleans prompted Christine to write to both of them to advocate for peace and to remind them to their duty to their people not to go to war at their expense. This, unfortunately did not work. The Armagnac Burgundian Civil War started in fourteen oh seven, and that lasted for almost thirty years. In fourteen ten, she published a book on military leadership and tactics called The Book of Deeds and Arms of Chivalry. This was yet another totally unexpected thing for a woman to be doing, so much so that people thought she might have just copied an earlier military manual and other books of strategy to do it. A later editor even edited her name out of it and made it look like it was written by a man. But this was Christine's own original work. It was a product of her extensive study of history and strategy and tactics, and all of that extensive reading she had done in the Court of Charles the Fifth. It covers all the military technology of the time as well as tactics and strategy, and it makes a case that peace is preferable to war, but sometimes as own only attainable through war. She fills out her discussion of all of this with examples from military history. She also walks through the idea of just war, a war fought to keep law and justice, to defend the people from injury or oppression, or to reclaim stolen land. The book discusses how the people fighting in the war should conduct themselves justly, and then once the war was over, it was incumbent on the ruling class to rule the people in a just way. In spite of the questions about whether Christine, who after all was a mere woman, had just copied this book from someone else, this book was translated into English and it became one of the first books printed in England after William Caxton established a printing press in Westminster. He printed it as The Fate of Arms and Chivalry in fourteen eighty nine. We haven't really touched on all of Christine's work because she was prolific. Between thirteen ninety nine and about fourteen fifteen, she wrote twelve major works totally more than a thousand pages. She also worked directly with the scribes and illuminators who created the finished manuscripts of her work. Throughout she was an advocate for women as well as for justice and for peace. She also paid careful attention to the need to improve the lives of the poor, while also trying to encourage a sense of charity among her readers who were likely to be wealthy, since people in the lower class typically were not literate. Outside of the world of her writing, she was also very savvy. She was invited to several royal courts outside of France, but she preferred to stay in her adopted homeland. And she also had to be very strategic to provide for her children in a world where money and family and political connections were extremely important. I mean, she was making the ends meet through all of her writing, but that's not the same thing as providing for the future of your children in this world. She had no dowry for her daughter, but was able to negotiate a place for her at the Royal Dominican at Poissi and as a companion to Charles the sixth daughter Marie. She also negotiated for her son to be fostered with John Montague, the third Earl of Salisbury, with the hope of ensuring him a political future. This second part led to a whole complicated negotiation with King Henry the Fourth to get her son back after John Montague was a co conspirator and an uprising against him. Though that's a whole huge drama of international intrigue in which she had this ongoing, careful negotiation with a king to get her son to return to France. As we noted earlier, England and France were at war throughout Christine's entire life. The Battle of Agincourps in fourteen to fifteen was a massive defeat for France, and not long afterward Christine joined her daughter at the convent in Poisi. She mostly stopped writing, at least for public view. Around that same time, she did come out of retirement for one last work, though. Christine's last known piece of writing was about Joan of Arc, and it was written to honor her after the French victory at Orleons in fourteen twenty nine. Like we said at the top of the show, this is the only major work written to celebrate Joan of Arc during her lifetime. And we don't know exactly when Christine died, but it was sometime around fourteen thirty one in Poisi, France. I find the whole idea of building a whole city where the ladies can find comfort and refuge to be very comforting, and I am glad that Christine did it. I want to make a joke, but I think it belittles thinks, so I'm gonna refrain. Okay, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note our email addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.