In Our Time - Christine de Pizan

Episode Date: June 8, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Christine de Pizan, who wrote at the French Court in the late Middle Ages and was celebrated by Simone de Beauvoir as the first woman to 'take up her pen in defence of her sex.' She wrote across a broad range, and was particularly noted for challenging the depiction of women by famous writers such as Jean de Meun, author of the Romance of the Rose. She has been characterised as an early feminist who argued that women could play a much more important role in society than the one they were allotted, reflected in arguably her most important work, The Book of the City of Ladies, a response to the seemingly endless denigration of women in popular texts of the time.The image above, of Christine de Pizan lecturing, is (c)The British Library Board. Harley 4431, f.259v.With Helen Swift Associate Professor of Medieval French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Hilda's CollegeMiranda Griffin Lecturer in French and Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridgeand Marilynn Desmond Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Christine de Pisan, born in 1364, earned her living as a writer at the Court of the French Kings in Paris. It said she was the first professional woman writer in France and perhaps in Europe. Her best-known work is the Book of the City of Ladies,

which defended women against the endless attacks on them in popular histories and literature, which were written by men. She challenged prejudices against women and led debate on the role of women in society. Her themes were inspired by her own situation, a widow, who would defend for herself, and by the turmoil in France in the Hundred Years' War. Her last poem before her death in 1430 was in praise of Joan of Arc, who was stirring up the fight against the English. With me to discuss Christine de Pizan are Helen Swift, Associate Professor of

Professor of Medieval French at the University of Oxford and fellow of St. Hilders College. Miranda Griffin, lecturer in French and fellow of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. And Marilyn Desmond, distinguished professor of English in comparative literature at Binghampton University, New York. Helen Swift. Christine was born in Venice in 1364. How and when did she come to Paris? So Christine came to Paris with her father, because of her father. Her father, Tomaso de Pizano, was serving the...

Republic of Venice as a counsellor. He was a judicial astrologer. A judicial astrologer is someone who predicts the outcomes of natural disasters, diplomatic missions, warfare, is someone who's therefore very useful to a leader, or particularly a king. And he was in demand in the courts of Europe and he accepted an invitation to serve at the Court of King Charles V in Paris. When he had established himself at the Court of King Charles the fifth, he brought his family over, his wife, his two sons and his daughter, Christine. So Christine benefited from a quite... How old was she then?

She was four or five, so very early years, and she would have had her education at the Court of France. And her father had her educated, as you would have educated, a boy, in terms of her having a liberal arts education. She was educated in reading and writing French and also certainly with a reading competency of Latin. One of the great benefits of her in Paris and being at the court of Charles V was a tremendous library that was there. Charles the fifth dubbed the Wise King was the sponsor of a tremendous amount of textual production, particularly vernacular translation of Greek, Roman, early Christian texts on moral values and governance. And this created what ultimately became part of the Bibliet Nacional in

France. When King Charles VIII died, there were about 1,200 volumes in the library. So Christine learnt from this library, learnt from it in her own education, drew from it for sources in her writing, and also because of the vast manuscript production that the King was sponsoring, developed a strong sense of the value of books, both as beautiful objects, but also was forced for quite powerful objects, which was important in her career later on. You talk about the library. Do we have any information about who guides you? her through the library? Did she just wondering and pick a book here and there? I was somebody saying that's the best book today.

She'll have been guided through her education. She also had developed good contacts, if you like, at the library. Gilles Malé, the librarian and also Bureau de la Riviere, who was a figure at the court, who were also people whom she used, contacts whom she used to make use of the library. Were there any other opportunities offered to her in Paris? Was this the big one, the library?

having an intellectual father who brought her up, like, educated her like as he would, as he did, his son. So anything else? The learning and the atmosphere of learning and literature at the court was not an insular one. Literature and learning was also very much being propagated through the intellectual culture of Paris in terms of the two universities, the University of Paris, the Collège de Navarre, and Christine developed a network of correspondence. contacts, particularly one might mention the Chancellor of Paris, the theologian Jean Gersen,

who would be very important in some of Christine's correspondence in the early 1400s. So there's very much a sense of an interconnected and very rich intellectual milieu. We're talking about the interconnectedness and the contacts being made, Marilyn Desmond, but she got married when she was 15. So did she continue this study and then after the match? She had three children quite, in one after a little, not pink-pong-pong-pon. So is she still working away in the library as well? Probably not.

Later on, when she wrote her autobiographical vignette in an allegory she wrote called A Vision, she talks about her coming to what she called the sweet taste of learning, and she describes it as something that happened only because she became a widow. She said if her husband had still been alive, she would have been so taken up with domestic duties that she couldn't have pursued the life of learning. Before we kill him off, can we talk about him being alive? She seems to have been a great love match.

Exactly. Totally faithful, totally enraptured. And last for 10 years. What did they give each other? What did he contribute to hers? Well, he was a royal secretary, and a secretary was one of the most powerful bureaucratic positions in the court. So he and his cohort were in charge of producing all the documents for what was a very

bureaucratic, very well-organized court. and he would have given her a kind of view of the importance of written documents, the importance of letters, the importance of writing as a political tool. At the same time, there's nothing to suggest that during the 10 years of her marriage, she pursued any kind of active intellectual life. She had three children, as you said. And when she looks back, she says that it's her widowhood that brought her to a life of learning. So let's get back to this widowhood.

I've got to 10 years, and she's about 25. She has three children, an aging mother and an aunt. And she has to look after them. What was her financial, as we're talking about professional woman writer, what was her financial position then? It was dire. Well, also, King Charles V died, then her father died, and then her husband very, very unexpectedly died from an epidemic

while he was outside of Paris on some kind of royal duty. And so she was suddenly without any kind of, male protector. And she talks about those years as just absolutely dire the first few years after her husband's death. She was somebody defrauded her of money that was owed to her husband. She couldn't get payment for her husband's work that was coming to her. She couldn't get property for her. She couldn't get the deeds to the property that her husband and her father left, things like that. And she found the legal system not at all prepared to help a woman without a male protector. Was she housed in the courts still?

Did you have apartments, I think, rooms there or something? That I'm not aware of any sort of habitation. Let's say she lived somewhere. Yes, exactly. She wasn't on the streets and she lived with those four, five people she had to look after. So what does she do then? Well, she spent a certain amount of time trying to get legal redress. She had a very rough time with that.

And then she started writing poetry. And she started writing lyric poetry on sort of, of basic models that were in existence. There was even a handbook about how to write poetry in circulation in Paris at the time. And she wrote very conventional poems, but she also wrote poems about the grief of being a widow. And I think that's what stands out, is that in this sort of early lyric poetry production, she writes about how sad she felt losing her husband. Was she getting money? Did she find patrons for that? I mean, I presume we're going to conclude the way she got paid.

was patrons paid her and so on. So were patrons paying her for this poetry, which you say also was popular at the time? Not initially, it would appear from her account later on in her autobiographical writings. It would appear that she just started writing poetry for her own solace. And then the poems were circulating very publicly in this wide network that she was participating in.

And then she does say, again, sort of retrospectively, looking back at this phase of her life, that the poetry attracted a lot of attention because of the novelty of a woman writer. And that that led her to into the patronage system, that got her to the attention of dukes and royal patrons, aristocratic patrons. And then from there she launches a literary career. And that's the sort of important thing, that it's this early lyric poetry that draws attention. And then she was very entrepreneurial and knew how to manipulate the patronage system. Good. Miranda, Miranda Griffin, let's do an overview of the range of her work now.

She wrote over 40 texts, the word you have. Just a quick overview so the listeners know what they're in for. Okay, so Christine's work, it's really important to say that it's very eclectic and varied and original. So starting from this use of quite conventional forms of poetry, she quite critical. moved into doing quite unusual things and using different genres and even kind of founding and forming her own genres. So she, for instance... Give us a few titles. Yeah. So for instance, she writes a couple of very long poems, quite encyclopedic, the mutation of fortune, for instance.

It tells the history of the world. The path of long study is a dream narrative. in which she talks about travelling all around the world, guided by a Sybil, and then up to heaven and having a debate about who would be the best person to rule France. She also writes a number of works in the genre of mirrors for princes. In other words, guidance and instruction for rulers about how to govern justly, wisely and piously. one of those is the biography of Charles V that she's commissioned by his brother, the Duke of Burgundy, to write after Charles's death. But she goes into what were traditionally male areas. She writes about war power, which is very popular in this country, wasn't it?

Yes. One of the early books that Caxton printed. One of the very first books that Caxon printed, therefore he was a commercial man. So he must have known it had traction here. Indeed. And that would have been brought over by some of the English people who had encountered her work when they were in Paris. And she sailed into contemporary arguments. That's one of the distinguishing facts. She certainly did. Can you give us one of two examples of that? The most famous example of that is her engagement with some writers in the Chancery of Paris and also at the University of Paris.

who were debating the merits or otherwise of an extremely influential work, the romance of the rose. I think we'll give that. It's true weight, but thank you very much when we come to it. How secure was she at court? We're talking about the first French, first writer in France, and who's professional. That was what we started with.

How she co? Secure was she? Was this, maybe there's a bit of money, but she had to write to make more money. So how much money was she making? was it keeping her on the, what are you keeping her? Okay. I think she would have been really kind of commissioned and patronised

by a number of different figures. We don't know for sure, though. Well, she is, the patrons that she mentions are, for a start, the Earl of Salisbury, who takes an early interest in her work and actually also offers her son a position in his household. So the way in which she's kind of recompensed for her work isn't necessarily just monetary. It's also kind of by placing her son and kind of accumulating status in that way.

She's also in this court which is riven by factions and infighting. and she is really having to make sure that she is pleasing both the Duke of Burgundy on one hand and also the Duke of Orleans on the other. She presents both of them with a manuscript of the mutation of fortune. I'm often sorry to be crude and blunt, but what happened? She read this book of poems, she took it to somebody and said, I present this to you, this is in your honour,

and did they say here's 50 golden Guinness or something? Is that what happened? There are records which show that she was paid. Well, that's if she's going to be professional, she's got to be paid. Absolutely, yes, yes. Good. Well, we settled out as far as we're going to settle out as in. Helen Swift, her best known work is the Book of the City of Ladies, which is remarkable.

What did she set out to do there? The Book of the City of Ladies is a book she wrote in about 1405. So this is when she's already accrued a fair amount of status and is in a position to tackle the subject of the defence of women in an authoritative way. And I think the question of her using her position to give weight to what she's wanting to say about women is important. So she presents this.

This is a revisionist history of women. It's what we believe to be the first history of women written for women by a woman. And what she's wanting to counter... And it's positive. Yes, what she's wanting to... utterly, totally, unequivocally positive about every woman, even Medea. She's not, one of the things she wants to avoid doing is generalising.

One of the things she's objecting to is how the misogynistic voices, so the voices who've been saying to offer a quote that female nature is entirely given over to vice, they are the generalising voices that have established this, and she uses the image of a torrent or gushing stream of misogyny. And it has a peculiar, given what she says, It has a very peculiar, very medieval beginning. She's sitting in a chair in the study. She's, by accident, read this book, which is entirely misogynistic.

And then she has a vision. And these persons appear to her, daughters of God, and they say, no, these three women. And she sits down and writes from the Greeks to her contemporary time about women in scholarship, women who rule, women who write, are saying these are the army of women as strong as the army of men, and this is why. But it starts with a vision. It starts with a vision.

And this is a device being used by Christine, the author, to present her projected persona as protagonist called Christine, as a figure who needs to learn, who needs to be set on the right path of study and to be corrected in her views. And reason, the first personification who appears in the dream, is really quite trenchant with her and says these things that you say you're believing

about how terrible women are these are outrageous lies. Look around you. You don't see this being borne out in your own experience. And therefore they see Christine as this protagonist character to then be sufficiently in pursuit of learning, but also being amenable to having her views corrected to be the figure to commission to produce this refutation.

What is remarkable on you read is how much she takes on. I'm coming to you now, Marion. She takes on the Old Testament. She takes on the Greeks. She goes right through figure after figure, name after name after name. It must be scores of names. Can you give us some idea how she takes them? Let's start with the Old Testament with Eve, how she takes on Eve, as it were.

Well, she basically, one of things... She takes on the idea of Eve. She takes on the idea that in the misogynist tradition, Eve was the source of all the evils that women were to present to mankind for the rest of history. And she says, no, Eve was not guilty. She was complicit but not guilty any more than Adam was. And she says Eve was made from the same body as Adam and they deserve to be treated as equally culpable.

So she starts by revising. Adam was made of mere earth. Right, right. Made of a body of a human. Made of the body of a human. So she takes Genesis apart right from the start, which had always in this sort of anti-feminist, misogynist tradition, been the starting point for tirade.

against women and how evil women are. But one of the things that's really important about the list of these biographies, this long list of biographies of women, is that it shows her incredibly intense reading in the Royal Library and the Dukal Libraries as well. She must have read, I mean, she couldn't have read every volume, but she must have read almost everything

in those libraries to have the knowledge, to draw on in order to also have the authority to write this kind of revisionist history. Yeah, absolutely. It is very impressive. But she lines up her heroines, doesn't she? Right. She rhymes up in the old head, Judith and Esther and Susanna and said, look at these women. What are you talking about? These are powerful women who change kingdoms, change history.

Right. And she keeps doing that. She keeps doing that. She also talks about the early queens of France. And then she moves through classical antiquity and moves through all of the sort of known mythological women that she can identify. You mentioned Medea, who she credits Medea only with being a wise woman who helps Jason win the golden fleece. She doesn't mention the fact that Medea has another story to her that's very lamentable. You mean like killing her son that one?

Yeah, killing her children to get back at Jason when he leaves her. That is left out of her history. Only Medea's wisdom and agency are emphasized. But she goes through and treats a lot of women who come up in the mythological tradition, drawing from Ovid's metamorphoses, for instance, which would have been available to her in a French translation with allegories attached. And so she treats all of these mythological women

only emphasizing their agency and their importance in the first two books. And then the third book is the female saints of the Christian era. There's a lot of highography there. But we're more used to that than what she did. Miranda, I know you want to get in. Could you address that?

She took on the Greeks. that was really stunning, I think, at the time. She takes on the Greek, Aristotle's view of women. Now, what does she do there that's new insignificant? Who knows? Well, I've just read, you've written. No, I've read something else as well, never mind. It's that they said that women were inadequate men.

Right, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Now, let's go from that. And what she's saying is that women should be understood as humans. She's really talking about the way in which that men and women are equal. They both have equal status as humans. And that the way in which they're presented is very often as being kind of women first

and all lumped together categorized as all being inherently lustful and inadequate and weak. And what she's trying to do in the city of ladies is, draw out individual stories in order to make the case that there is this kind of whole list of women who have acted in ways which are strong, taking over from husbands who have died, taking over from rulers who are inadequate, and showing themselves to be strong leaders. She also does more than that, doesn't she? And she says that the idea of strength is to be contested, that what we call weakness, says this.

I'm paraphrasing, what we call weakness can be strength if it's properly deployed and it often is especially by women. Is there something in that? Christine's wanting to both ensure that what she perceives as being feminine qualities are seen as positive qualities. And there are two aspects to this, one of which is she wants to make the most out of moral strength, moral courage, and the idea of spiritual, moral and civic virtue that she sees women to have in abundance. and that this has been remarkably undervalued. But she also does want to suggest that women are not excluded from physical strength. So she's not making it just that...

Well, she's writing about the Amazons and the Samoam, the Amazons particularly. She's very keen on the Amazons. She's wanting to create the sense of the possibility of the varied ways in which women's virtue can manifest itself. And one of the really key things here is that she's wanting to promote women's virtue and women's status in its own right, but she also very strongly believes. that what is good for women is also good for men

and is good for society. So her interest in promoting women's virtue is also an interest in promoting the virtue and moral values of society. Marilyn, how radical, how novel was this? It was absolutely novel. There's nothing like it before this text. There are lots of existing texts

which treat women, and there was a book by Bocacho called A Famous Women in the English title, which has a list of 100 women, but it's not pro-woman. A lot of the women come in for incredible critiques under Bocacho's sort of handling of them. So she's very much rewriting Bocacho's version of this. She's very much rewriting the historical traditions. She'd been reading in the library.

She's very much rewriting every kind of book that she could consume gets repackaged in order to put women back into history. And I think that is absolutely radical in the early 15th century. It was still radical in the 1960s when women's history emerged as a discipline to think that women were in history was something that was pretty edgy. So for her to do this in the early 15th century is without model and without precedent. The model she's using, she's totally revising. What do you think did it have at the time?

It was a work which was received with... with great interest and as a novelty, I think. It gets translated into English later in the 15th century. And it gets copied into a wealth of manuscripts. So it's a work which has quite a fundamental effect, I would say. Although, of course, always framed as being by a woman and possibly for women as well. Is there anything more important we have to say about what I think,

what you all think was the most important book? Or do we move on? I wanted to say something about it being a city. Yeah. So the way in which Christine presents this in her vision is that the three personifications who visit her. Reason and rectitude and justice, yeah. Absolutely.

They tell her that what they're going to do is enable her to build this city. So these stories are kind of very physical as well. They're being understood as very kind of concrete things. They start by clearing the ground of any misogynist work by throwing away stones in the field of letters. And then these stories kind of form the foundation and the walls and then eventually the population of the city.

And this is why the title of the work is the city of ladies. Helen, Helen Swift, then she writes a mutation of fortune, and which you want to talk about the mutation of fortune. Which of you? Miranda, okay, you talk the mutation of fortune on how it... Okay, so the mutation of fortune that she writes is this long history of the world, taken from her reading that she would have been doing

in Charles Ville's library in the Louvre. But before she gets to the history of the world, She has this kind of short autobiographical insert, which is an autobiography told, as so much of her work is, in the form of an allegory. So she talks about how she starts off life, and her mother here is Dame Nature. She doesn't talk about her historical mother.

She talks about her historical father, but not her actual mother. Then she says her mother, Dame Nature, sends her to the court of Lady Fortune, which is kind of a metaphor for embarking on adult life going off into the world. And then Fortune sends her to get married. And what's the point that you're trying to make about? Sorry, she then sends, she goes off into the world with her husband. There's a shipwreck.

Now obviously, as we know, Etienne did not die in a shipwreck. He died of fever. And then she says, Lady Fortune came to me and she held my limbs and she touched my body. and I turned into a man. That's the punchline now we're looking for. Now what does that signify for you with regard to the previous book? So this is actually earlier

than the city of ladies. Oh, this is earlier. This is earlier than the city of ladies. Right, so this is 14.0.40. What does that mean? Can we move for a second and move elsewhere? Helen. What does it mean to you that she turned into a man?

Is that just a good story or is she making a statement about something or other? This is, as Miranda was saying, this is important in how she is finding a mode of expression, particularly for Christine through allegory, to define what's happened to her in her life and the position that she's been left in

as a result of, as Marilyn was saying before, what happens to her after the death of her husband. And so her becoming a man is a way of representing the role and responsibility that she has to take on at that point. But this isn't to say that Christine is therefore saying that a woman should become a man or that a woman can properly be valued in relation to her having masculine qualities. And I think that's an important difference between the mutation of 14 in 1403 as an allegory

and then what she's doing in 1405 in the City of Ladies when she's promoting these examples of women as women. Back to you then, Rhonda, what effect did this iron become a man have? Did that have a big effect at the time? It's actually just one moment in her poetry, and I think what she's doing there is kind of trying out a particular reaction to this devastating widowhood, which obviously left her in this very kind of powerless position. And also we haven't emphasised enough, and you did at the beginning, but that's re-emphasised.

That marriage seems to have been wonderful. Absolutely. She agreed for the rest of her life, but she never married again, and she wrote about it. So that was, she was talking about something powerful, probably the most powerful thing in her life ever. Indeed. It's a real shadow that hangs over the rest of her writing, I think. and we see through her writing various reactions to it and I think this really extraordinary gender transition that she writes about in the mutation

is one way of thinking about the way in which she managed to become head of her household and her own living be responsible for the rest of her family via working via her pen. Marilynne Desmond, we've got 100 years of war battling on in France, We've got civil wars, we've got civil wars, we've got disruptions, we've got King coming on. After Charles of 5th, his son was very mentally distressed and then was classified in those days as being mad,

and so people were taking its place. There's quite a turmoil going on. She seems to have been in a sort of nice capsule somehow. Well, she wasn't, she wasn't. The war forms, the various. wars and conflicts. First of all, the 100 years war was, went on during her entire lifetime and shaped a tremendous amount of

the experiences of her day. I mean, there would be truces and then the war would start up again, but it was always part of the backdrop, the conflict with the English. But then because Charles the 6th, Charles V's son, was, had, as you referred to it, he had tremendous problems with bouts of insanity that became more and more frequent. And as he sort of became less and less capable as a leader, there was an enormous amount of tension in the extended royal family as various people moved in to take power. And that resulted

in an ongoing civil war at the same time that then the British, the English, undertook to exploit for their own ends as well. So by the middle of the first decade of the 15th century, things were getting very dire in Paris. And in 1407, the second son of Charles V was murdered, Louis of Orleans, who had been one of her potential patrons. He was murdered by John the Fearless, who was a Burgundian, who was starting to sort of move in. So this brought things to a head in 1407. And from 1407 on Paris itself is a very chaotic place. It's not safe for anyone. And what she was she in the middle of all that? Well, she took on more and more of a political voice. She turned to the library. She started trying to write in prose political tracks, which would help intervene in this crisis.

And war becomes a very overt theme in all her writing, but it also becomes very, very much a political act. She becomes what nowadays we call a public intellectual. Absolutely. Helen, Ellen Swift, the romance of the rose. the most, well, the most famous text, a meant, book, poem, whatever you want, at that time. She took it on very strongly and admirably, I thought. Would you go into that? Yes, so the Romance of the Rose is a much celebrated work

in the 13th, 14th century, and one of the things that it can be seen to be is the authority on vernacular misogyny, and that's certainly one of the ways in which Christine framed it. She first took it on at any length in 139, in a fictional letter. Can you just say just briefly what it was? The Romance of the Rose.

Yeah, just very, very briefly. The Manse of the Rose, very briefly for the 21,000 lines that make up the Romance of the Rose. You can do. It is a seduction narrative in which on one level someone picks a flower, in which on another level it is a deflowering of a sexual kind. And that forms the narrative framework of the work.

However, it also encompasses in what's seen as its second part, as it was by two authors. The second author, Jean-Domain, expanded the scope of it into all kinds of areas of intellectual inquiry, natural sciences, philosophy, and really expanded the whole scope of what poetry was to be intellectual poetry.

But the drive of it was seduction, and that's what she attacked. Christine felt that this was turning the representation of love into deceit, the degradation of women and very much a vilification of marriage. And she objected strongly to all of those things. She represented Jean-Domain, the continuator of the Rose,

in the Letter of the God of Love, as a scandalmongerer. Does anybody want to come in on the point that one of the critics you, one of the criticisms you made, which was very telling, is that women are accused of being deceitful, lustful, go on and on.

that has been for centuries. But the man is taught to be deceitful and encouraged in his lust and taught to be immoral. He's supposed to be the hero and she won't have it. And it's an extraordinary simple. It seems now. But was rather, was it a shocking point to make at the time? Yes.

Judging from the letters that circulate in the Rose debate, she had her defenders, Jean-Gersen-Saint was one of them, the Chancellor. and she also had her detractors. And there was a series of letters that she later put together in a dossier and dedicated them to the queen, where her male interlocutors really take her on and sort of do a lot of mansplaining, telling her she's got it wrong, she doesn't know how to read allegory, she doesn't know personifications. And she just keeps coming back.

And it's really clear that it's not the rose itself. It's the kind of reading of the rose that she sees as dangerous. Because she says, a jealous husband might go home and beat his wife. wife after reading the rose because there's a kind of theme about domestic violence in the rose. And she herself used the rose a lot. She relies on the rose tremendously for an enormous amount of mythological information, of theological, intellectual stuff that she takes from it. So it's not that it's it's not that she objects totally to the entire text, but how it might be read by certain kinds of uneducated readers.

And she also sees that the courtly tales are mainly to do with infidelities, and she deplores that completely. Indeed. She's responding to what is already a very entrenched tradition of courtly love narrative, which tends to be told from the point of view of a male narrator who is trying to persuade, by fair means and foul, a woman to accede to his desires. It's a really interesting text that she writes in response to this, which is called the Duke of True Lovers, which is a courtly love narrative, which is kind of transposed into a much more real world situation,

in which a young woman who is married is being wooed and courted by this gentleman, and is very tempted to give in. And at one point in her in the narrative, she receives a letter from a very wise, older woman, this is obviously Christine's voice coming in here, who warns her of all the dangers that she might be incurring if she were to say yes to this man. Dangers that you never hear of in any other courtly narrative, the way in which she might

ruin her reputation, her family might be dragged into scandal, and she will live out the rest of her days in misery. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you feel about this text, at the end of the Duke of True Lovers, indeed. the lady does give in to this suitor and what the wise older lady has predicted does indeed come to pass. Have we any idea just to do a check before we move on to Marilyn any idea of the audience she was reaching at this time

any idea of how well she was being received by her patrons were patrons falling away or falling over themselves what was going on? No, she seems to have a very wide audience in terms of what the intellectual culture of Paris would support. I mean any reading audience is an elite audience in this period. But her books, her manuscripts are increasingly being produced in luxury editions, which suggests she had enormous resources, and her patronage was very lucrative for her.

When you say luxury editions, they are extraordinary. She took, she was very interested in the illustrations and got her own illustrator. Was it Anastasio? Well, she does talk about Anastasio in the book of the city of ladies as a very gifted woman illustrator who does decoration, I think, in manuscripts, and that she had worked with her. I mean, one of the things that her manipulation of patronage also involved was her negotiation of the book world of Paris. She seemed to be very conversant and working very closely with all of the artisans that make up bookmaking in this period, the makers of parchment,

the artists, the scribes, the binders. And she seems to have been able to work with that world. that sort of business in order to produce these absolutely luminous, beautiful editions. So just to get it clear, this is, we're not talking about a lady of advantage sitting high in a town with a quill pen sending it. She's rolling up her sleeves, isn't she? She's with these people, she's in the writing, she's with the manuscript. She portrays herself presenting book to the queen just to make sure that they know who she is and what value this book has. and she also I would add to that there are surviving

manuscripts in her hand that she wrote herself so that she was very active in the production of her books towards the end of her life she went to quite a man retired rather went into a nunner which her daughter was already there but she didn't become a nun she did like a lot of

wealthy old people did then women and men in the monasteries went there to spend a retirement in as a Christian person but not as a then she woke up to Jonah Bark and her last big work is about Jonah Bark Helen what was the attraction there So Christine as you say had been in a sort of retirement

in a convent in a Poise and in the 1420 setting the scene for this this is a particularly grim moment in terms of all the conflicts both international and domestic that we were speaking about before and there is an absence of hope, I think, and Christine's turned to writing only devotional works

as far as we know during this period. And Joan of Arc arrives on the scene, and Christine writes in this poem in honour of Joan of Arc, the sun began to shine again in 1429. You're at the first line? It's near the beginning of it, and it's a wonderful opening. It's a very moving opening.

This shows that for Christine, why Joan of Arc represents hope is because this Joan is involved in the lifting of the siege of Orleon in leading to the coronation of the Dauphir Charles the 7th and for Christine this is the fulfilment of prophecy is how she presents it that Joan is the virgin saviour who's been predicted by prophets of old and Joan has enabled a reforming of the body politic

a sense that things the members of the body, the political body, now in place that France is the divinely appointed kingdom, that Charles the 7th is the proper monarch, and that things having been so dismembered might now be falling into place. And for Christine, this is joyous. This is a visionary exclamation of joy. Miranda, it's fair to say that her reputation faded for several centuries, but as in this last century was taken up, you mentioned the 1960s. Where is it meant? now and Timunda Bourgeois was very keen on

so that's mid-last century and so on. Where is it now? So Beauvoir mentions her as being somebody who took up her pen in defence of her sex and also somebody who advocated education for women. This is a very kind of central

idea for Beauvoir in the second sex. Christine now is taking her place at the table and I kind of choose those words advisedly because Judy Chicago's piece, which has a kind of table setting for important women in history, has a place for Christine de Pizant. She is now really ensconced, I think, in the canon of work, both for people

who are interested in women's writing, but also for people who are interested in the politics of the Hundred Years' War. She's so involved in it, and she has so many interesting things to say about Well, so of you three. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Helen Swift, Marilyn Desmond and Miranda Griffin. Next week we'll be discussing the American Popinists, the farmers' protest movement in America's Gilded Age. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So here we are, what do we miss out? In 1410, as things got very, very serious in Paris, the text that Christine wrote on the deeds and conduct of warfare is very important in this respect. It's very important to consider in this respect because in it she distills received knowledge, going back to Roman text on warfare, for the conduct of war. And she does it in simple language designed to be read to or read by military figures. And it's a very virtuoso study of the strategies of warfare, but also the sort of theology and theory behind warfare, the notion of a just war, which was a very major issue for when Christians were fighting with Christians, this sort of rules of warfare for how to treat non-combatants and prisoners.

And this was a very influential text. it was translated, it was printed, and it seems to have been used, the last battle of the 100 years war in 1453 seems to have been conducted along various, where the French finally throw the English out, where it was conducted along lines that you can sort of trace to this text. It in many ways is marked as the beginning, the resumption of theoretical studies of warfare since the Roman error. So it's a very, very important moment when she writes that book. But she also then, a few years later, goes on to write a book about diplomacy and peace. So she doesn't see war as the only way to address the situation that the French were in in the early 15th century.

We mentioned at the start that Christine was born in Italy, but we have not mentioned how that fits into any of her literary career. Because if Jean-Domain representing the Romance of the Rose and the body of misogyny and for Christine, a mishandling of poetry, is in one corner, so to speak, and is very much blacklisted by Christine. The figure whom she wishes to promote against that, in the other corner is Dante.

And for Christine, Dante is the figure of someone who is doing poetry properly and someone who is doing so in a way that represents women positively, that has a collaborative relationship between men and women, between Dante the Pilgrim and Beatrice, that this is the sort of modern,

that Christine wants to promote in place of Jean-Dermain. And part of that is to do with how she is positioning herself between literary traditions, a nexus of traditions, that she as someone who has become a trans-alpine figure moving from Italy to France is particularly well positioned to do. I wanted to mention that one of the people who translates Christine's work into English has a kind of interesting connection to English history. So it's Stephen Descrope, and he translates the letter from Othea,

which we haven't spoken about very much. It's a really interesting text. One of her very early ones, she's writing it to the mythological figure, Hector, but also for the Dauphin at the time, Louis de Guienne. And it also happens that her son is around that age as well. So it's a book of advice about how to be a fair and just ruler. and this work gets translated by Stephen Descrope into English and Stephen Descrope is the ward and stepson of Sir John Fastolf

who is better known to us as full staff from Shakespeare's plays. Well, that's a neat one, isn't it? But is there any sense in which there was a body, not a body, but there were voices saying, what's a woman doing in this area? What's the woman doing talking to us about war? What's, have you any evidence for that sort of thing coming up? I don't think we have any evidence specifically about war.

I mean, certainly Christine gets an awful lot of attacks leveled at her for being a woman daring to intervene in a debate in the context of the quarrel about the romance of the rose. And it's interesting how later writers write mentioning Christine or indeed publishers producing her work, whether her name sticks or not, so whether her name is still attached to her works and in what way it's attached.

I don't quite get that, can you just... When Christine is being translated, published, commented on by later writers and publishers, whether her name as author of those works stays with those works. And sometimes it disappears, which one could see is this a strategic decision because they don't want to publish it as being by a woman

because that wouldn't sell as well. Or sometimes her name stays with her texts and is seen to be as part of the marketing for it, that this is literature that's good for women, which women will like because it was written by a woman. We didn't bring up the contested position she has among feminists. I think one of the things that has been a little bit disappointing about her reception in the academy among feminist.

scholars and feminist readers has been a kind of quick move to judgment that she wasn't our kind of feminist. She didn't criticize enough the structures of the world that created these limitations for women. She didn't have, she was too close to power. She was too close. She was playing up to all these powerful dukes and kings who were themselves not necessarily ideal. So I think it's been very lamentable. I don't think that judging her whether or not she is a feminist has been productive. I think that she uses feminist strategies at times, rhetorical strategies that are clearly feminist, and that she is working in a context where there isn't a lot of room for her to do anything more than what she did. And instead, I think we need to judge her enormous accomplishments as such.

Absolutely. So I think it's really important to say that when she's, she's talking in the city of ladies about the stereotypical presentation of women. And she cites a proverb that says all women are good for is talking, weeping and spinning. And she doesn't refute that, really. She says, but those are all great things to do. So in a sense, she is really focusing on a fairly kind of cliched idea about womanhood. Because not turning everything upside down, which is very clever, I think. The thing is what she's doing is kind of talking.

She's kind of talking about women having a particular sort of nature. I think they agree with. Yeah, that she agrees with. But then she says, but these things are positive things. And then she goes on to kind of talk about how kind of weeping shows compassion, talking is important, and creativity is also important. But she's also able to show that individual women's stories are important. and actually not all women are lumped together and the same.

Maybe one can say that the historical leap back four or five hundred, six hundred years taking into account that things are so radically different that a single leap to feminism wasn't perhaps possible. But she went a long way to addressing more male positively, as you've all said. And she is the first person to do all of these things, so she doesn't have models. And I think a good example of that is when she writes about domestic violence, which comes up actually very frequently in her works. And she sees it as very, very lamentable. She says there are cruel bad husbands of all ranks, and women who have a bad husband just have to be patient and suffer.

She doesn't seem to have any way of criticizing domestic violence as a problem in itself. She can't see any way out of the structure of marriage that, authorises violence against women in this period. So I think that's a perfect example. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC, follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Program.