Christine de Pizan Builds a City of Ladies

Around 1405, the professional French author Christine de Pizan completed Le Livre de la Cite des Dames, known in English as The Book of the City of Ladies. Written in vernacular French with prose structured around Latinate syntax and conventions, the work was her second extensive prose text. Pizan composed the book as a direct rejoinder to popular misogynistic texts of her era, most notably the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun and the thirteenth-century Lamentations of Matheolus, both of which presented women as disruptive, untrustworthy, and inferior.

The narrative opens with an autobiographical persona confronting Matheolus's treatise on marriage, an encounter that plunges her into severe despair and self-loathing over being born female. In her distress, she assumes that because so many learned male writers had condemned female nature across generations, their unfavorable judgments had to be accurate. This despondency is interrupted by an allegorical visitation from three celestial Virtues: Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice. Each figure arrives to guide Christine through the conceptual and physical erection of an allegorical sanctuary designed to protect and vindicate women.