Illustration from The City of Ladies, 1405, parchment now held at the British Library.
Christine de Pizan urges women to take action under the guidance of Reason, who holds a mirror; Rectitude, who carries a ruler; and Justice, who holds the scales that grant each person their due.
Virtue
When Christine was writing, the Kingdom of France was nearly bankrupt. The countryside lay in ruins. The Diary of a Parisian Bourgeois even reported wolves slipping into the city at night, reaching as far as the Les Halles district. The royal armies suffered crushing defeats against England, allied with Burgundy. Real authority was unclear: Charles VI had descended into madness and had disinherited his own son in favor of the English crown. For the first time, two popes had been elected simultaneously, one in Rome and the other in Avignon. Both secular and spiritual power seemed to be unraveling.
In the midst of this turmoil, Christine de Pizan turned to what she called virtue as a guiding path forward. The Treasure of the City of the Ladies (Le Livre des Trois vertus), along with her letters from the Romance of the Rose Debate, argues for the primacy of moral character over wealth or noble birth. She did not aim to transform the structure of society but to cultivate integrity, loyalty and justice at a time when these qualities were in short supply.
This commitment also led her to devote significant energy to education. She wrote the Epistle of Othea for her son, and dedicated the Book of Peace and the Book of the Body Politic to Louis of Guyenne, the kingdom’s great hope in 1412. These works describe the virtues expected of the ideal prince, of nobles and of common people so that all might live in harmony. Christine repeatedly emphasized the importance of study in the pursuit of wisdom, praising Charles V, the king who “loved knowledge so deeply” and who “did not shy from dissimulation when it served a purpose.” Virtue was never naïveté.
Defending Women
Christine de Pizan loved reading and study above all else. Yet she recounts in The City of Ladies that her admiration for philosophers and poets eventually brought on a moral crisis. These authors, whom she trusted, often expressed a deep contempt for women. Should she despise herself as well? Encouraged by the sudden appearance of three allegorical figures (see below), Christine chose instead to trust her own judgment and challenge these prejudices. This choice is part of what makes her so distinctive. She refused to submit to the misogyny of male writers and saw clearly how damaging their ideas could be for women’s lives and self-understanding.
In an age when women were almost absent from intellectual life, Christine became their voice. In the Epistle of the God of Love, Cupid receives countless complaints from women of every background pleading for his help. Christine writes:
Thus these ladies protest the great abuses, slander, treachery, harsh insults, false accusations and many other injuries they suffer every day from the disloyal men who blame, defame and deceive them. More than any other place, they lament France, which was once their shield and defender…
Such grievances were often worsened by a misguided understanding of love. Yet fierce, possessive and jealous love was not something Christine endorsed. On the contrary, she writes that “true, perfect and complete love rests more on trust than on suspicion or jealousy.” When love is grounded in goodness and honor, the lover shines because “everything reflects their light” (The Debate of the Two Lovers). Without virtue, there can be no real love.
Venus and the Lovers
Illustration from the Epistle of Othea, manuscript 606 (National Library of France). This manuscript was produced under Christine’s supervision.
Allegories
An allegory is a literary device in which an idea is embodied in a character or image. In the Middle Ages, allegory reached a high point in the thirteenth century, especially in the portion of Le Roman de la Rose written by Jean de Meun, whom Christine frequently criticized (see the Romance of the Rose Debate).
Continuing this tradition, Christine’s works often shift strikingly between autobiographical scenes and allegorical dialogue. The City of Ladies opens with a very concrete moment: Christine is reading a book; her mother calls her to dinner; she hurries to the table and picks the book up again the next day. Her reading soon drifts into daydream, then into a painful question: why do so many authors treat women so unfairly? Christine, devastated at having been born a woman, begins to weep. At that moment, three ladies appear to her—Reason, Rectitude and Justice—and the narrative shifts into a conversation with these allegorical guides. The first offers her the key to her despair: “Turn your thoughts to Ideas, that is, to heavenly things, which are the highest.” Allegory becomes a path of elevation, a way to rise beyond psychological or historical biases.
It was often difficult in the Middle Ages to speak in the first person on sensitive political questions. In The Long Road of Study, which explores who should govern the world’s affairs, Christine avoids direct assertion. Instead, she has Nobility, Chivalry, Wealth and Wisdom debate the question, allowing her to both engage and conceal herself within their voices.
Order and Morality
Despite her independence and her exceptional life as a woman writer, Christine de Pizan did not challenge the social hierarchy of her time. She regarded the order of society as sacred because it reflected God’s will. Under such conditions, each person must live in the station assigned to them:
“nobles as nobles, commoners as commoners, all forming a single body under one Policie, living together in peace and justice as they should.” (The Book of the Body Politic)
When writing a kind of handbook for exemplary women (The Treasure of the City of the Ladies (Le Livre des Trois vertus)), Christine considers every social condition: widows, princesses, the wives of craftsmen, the wives of laborers and even “women of dissolute life” (prostitutes). She offers practical, situation-specific advice. Wives of craftsmen, for example, should learn the trade so they can take over if needed and prevent their husbands from entering risky business ventures. As for the poor, they must bear their hardships with patience. At the time, justice had nothing to do with equal rights; it meant giving each person what was suitable to their place in society. One conviction, however, never wavered for Christine: women were as intelligent, capable and strong as men. Nothing should prevent them from being educated—indeed, much depended on it.
The Romance of the Rose Debate
Timeline and key figures
The facts
In 1401, Jean de Montreuil, a university-trained Latin scholar, wrote a glowing defense of The Romance of the Rose. This prompted Christine de Pizan to read the poem herself. Although already well known in literary circles, she had written only poetry up to that point. Outraged by what she discovered, she sent Montreuil a letter that summer expressing her disapproval of a work she saw as misogynistic, immoral and dangerous. Two camps soon emerged: the rhodophiles (supporters of The Romance of the Rose) and the rhodophobes (its detractors).
Jean de Montreuil asked his allies, the brothers Pierre and Gontier Col, to respond to Christine. In February 1402, she gathered the entire correspondence and sent it to the Queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria, asking for her support.
In May 1402, Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, joined the rhodophobes. He wrote a Latin treatise condemning The Romance of the Rose. The exchange of letters continued through the year before gradually coming to an end.
“I repeat, again and again, as many times as you like: The Romance of the Rose, despite its merits (and the greater the danger, the more genuine the merit, as I have said), can easily lead to wrongdoing because human nature inclines toward evil. It offers perverse encouragement to immoral behavior, comforts dissolute living, spreads deceit, fosters slander, suspicion and shame, and is in many places dishonorable reading.”
Christine de Pizan, responding to Gontier Col
People involved:
Christine de Pizan: Writer.
Jean de Montreuil: Royal secretary, cleric, admirer of Latin literature. Killed by the Burgundians in 1418.
Pierre and Gontier Col: Pierre was a canon at Notre-Dame; Gontier, a royal secretary, diplomat and member of Montreuil’s humanist circle. He too was assassinated by the Burgundians in 1418.
Jean Gerson: Chancellor of the University of Paris; rhodophobe and ally of Christine.
Jean Chopinel (Jean de Meung): Co-author of The Romance of the Rose, finished around 1270.
Isabeau of Bavaria: Queen of France, wife of Charles VI, known as “the Mad King” after his psychotic episodes beginning in 1392.
Rhodon: Greek for “rose.”
The Romance of the Rose
What is it about?
The Romance of the Rose was one of the greatest literary successes of the medieval West. Written by two authors in different eras, it offers a long exploration of love.
The first part, by Guillaume de Lorris (of whom nothing is known), presents a dreamlike, poetic vision of courtly love. The second part, completed forty years later around 1270, was written by Jean de Meung, a scholar trained at the University of Bologna, the most renowned university in Europe at the time.
The poem begins with a dream vision: a young man of twenty enters a marvelous garden. He becomes enchanted by a rosebud, but a series of obstacles prevent him from plucking it, delaying love’s fulfillment and heightening his desire. This is courtly love in its purest form.
“Nature always comes galloping back; clothing cannot stop it. Every creature longs to return to its own nature; nothing can truly prevent it, not even propriety. This must excuse Venus and all the ladies who stray, even though marriage binds them. Nature is stronger than training. […] Men and women alike feel the pull of natural appetite, which the law tries to curb. It demands that once united, a husband take only a virgin and a wife only one husband for life. Yet they are tempted to follow their own free inclinations; if they resist, it is out of shame or fear of punishment. Nature hunts them, like the beasts we have already mentioned.”
The Romance of the Rose
A Contradictory and Rebellious Book
In the second part, the lover continues his pursuit, aided by figures such as the Old Woman and Fair Welcome, and opposed by Slander and Jealousy. In the end, he succeeds in picking the rose.
Jean de Meung’s continuation has a more abrasive and argumentative tone. He stresses the violence of social constraints, questions the legitimacy of the nobility and attacks clerical hypocrisy. He also scrutinizes love as a social construct: is desire simply a natural instinct tied to death and reproduction? Human conventions distort love. Men and women, caught in these constraints, resort to cunning to achieve their ends. Wouldn’t everyone be happier in a kind of universal orgy? This is the gist of the Old Woman’s startling speech, which gives female desire a more active and concrete role than in traditional courtly love.
The Debate: Christine Walks Into the Locker Room
Christine’s Audacity
In the Middle Ages, intellectual disputes did occur, but they stayed within an academic world that was entirely male. These debates often resembled the atmosphere of a men’s locker room, where mocking women was commonplace and unchallenged.
Christine changed that. She burst into the men’s inner circle. Outraged by the tone of a novel she judged to be misogynistic, she grabbed one of its admirers by the collar, dragged him out, and demanded that he justify himself publicly, calling on the queen as a witness. At first, the humanists were stunned. They looked down on her. Gontier Col urged her to “correct herself and make amends for the obvious error and foolishness” into which she had fallen.
Christine refused to be intimidated. She went further, compiling the entire correspondence into a book that she presented to Isabeau of Bavaria. She stood firm in her reasoning. The Romance of the Rose speaks about women, analyzes them and denigrates them. Christine argued that:
Because I am a woman, I can speak to this matter better than someone who has no experience of it and talks at random.
Her gesture left a mark. No one tried to silence her or exclude her from the debate. Yet it took considerable confidence to challenge so directly a circle that had never been contradicted. She even taunted Gontier Col:
Do you not know that a small weasel can attack a great lion and defeat it?
“What a fine doctrine! Is it such an accomplishment to deceive women? Who are these women? Are they snakes, wolves, lions, dragons, wyverns or ravenous beasts, enemies of mankind, that we must trick and capture them? Read your manuals. Learn to be cunning, to entrap them, to insult them, to storm their fortress and drag them all to shame!”
Christine de Pizan, to Pierre Col.
All women are whores
“All of you are, will be or have been, whether by choice or circumstance, whores.” How can anyone speak of women in such defamatory, unfair terms? Christine refuses to allow readers to imagine women as inherently corrupt beings who must be tricked into submission. The dispute may sound simple: rhodophobes defend women’s dignity; rhodophiles behave like boors in the lineage of a modern Donald Trump. In reality, the debate soon becomes far more complex.
The debate: nature, ethics and freedom
Freedom of Expression
Christine criticizes the poem’s treatment of women as part of a broader concern for virtue and authorial responsibility. She is outraged that The Romance of the Rose uses explicit language.
Pierre Col, the rhodophile, replies that God created testicles and genitals, and that for this reason “the secret parts are necessary, useful, profitable, beautiful and good.” Should a writer then use words like “ass,” “dick,” and “balls”? According to Col, the author of The Romance of the Rose “does not say that one must speak of them. He says that one may speak of them. Obligation and permission are not the same thing.”
Christine disagrees entirely. She is progressive on women’s rights, but her opponents are more progressive when it comes to artistic freedom.
Levels of Discourse: Who Speaks?
Rhodophiles emphasize the distinction between author and character. When Jean de Meung writes that all women are “whores,” it is the Jealous Husband who speaks—the man who imprisons his wife. This distinction is essential to literature.
“In his book, Jean de Meung introduces characters who speak according to their own nature: the Jealous Man as the Jealous Man, the Old Woman as the Old Woman, and so on. It is unfair to claim that the author himself blames women for evil when it is the Jealous Man who voices such things. The author reveals and corrects the disorderly passion of jealousy.”
Pierre Col, replying to Christine de Pizan
Perverse Humanity
Moreover, while women are mocked in the poem, men fare no better. The Old Woman says men “cheat and betray us; they are all lechers and womanizers. So we must deceive them without remorse.”
Both sexes are caught between a desire for freedom and the laws restricting them. The result is universal distortion and cunning. Women live in cages and must outwit their constraints. Men must deceive to bypass social prohibitions and slander.
“Women are born free, yet the law subjects them to conditions that strip away their natural liberty. Nature is not so foolish as to create Marotte solely for Robichon, nor Robichon for Mariette, Agnès or Perette. Nature made us—have no doubt about it, my dear son—all meant for one another. So even though marriage was established to curb debauchery, quarrels and crimes of passion and to ensure the proper raising of children, ladies and young women, whether beautiful or plain, will still strive in every possible way to return to that original freedom.”
The Roman of the Rose
Polyamory and Original Sin
Christine’s opponents hold an uncomfortable position. She criticizes them for ignoring original sin and defending a poem that seems to celebrate natural, innocent polyamory in defiance of marriage. These were bold positions in 1401. Pierre Col, fond of women, defends himself:
It is true that human nature does not incline a man to abstain from meat forever, or to remain chaste, or to stay faithful to one woman for life, nor a woman to one man. Our frailty leans toward vice. Do I therefore praise vice? No.
At this point, the debate resembles the trial of Flaubert after Madame Bovary, with Christine in the role of prosecutor Pinard.
The positions are far less clear-cut than they appear. Today, we tend to forget the rebellious power of The Romance of the Rose. While bravely launching the first public debate on the cultural representation of women, Christine may have missed the depth of a contradictory, unsettling work that in many ways foreshadows the Renaissance soon to come.