December 31st- Christine de Pizan

Authority, Authorship, and the Courage to Argue
​Christine de Pizan stands at a turning point in late medieval literary culture as a woman who claimed intellectual authority openly, persistently, and professionally. Writing in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century France, she supported herself through her pen and engaged directly with the political, moral, and literary debates of her time. Unlike figures whose authority was cloistered, visionary, or inherited, Christine’s was constructed through argument, learning, and sustained public presence.

A Life Shaped by Learning and Loss
Born in Venice in 1364 and raised at the French royal court, Christine was the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, a physician and astrologer to King Charles V of France. Her early education, unusual for a woman, immersed her in classical texts, history, and moral philosophy. This intellectual formation proved decisive when her circumstances changed abruptly.
Widowed in her mid-twenties and left with children and dependents to support, Christine turned to writing as a profession. What began as necessity became vocation. Over the course of her career, she produced poetry, political treatises, biographies, and allegorical works, establishing herself as one of the most prolific authors of her generation.

Writing as Intervention
Christine did not write from a position of detachment. She wrote to intervene. Her early poetic works engage themes of grief and loyalty, but she soon moved into overtly argumentative territory. Most famously, she entered the Querelle de la Rose, challenging the misogynistic representations of women in Jean de Meun’s continuation of The Romance of the Rose.
Christine’s objections were not prudish or merely personal. She critiqued the ethical and social consequences of literature that normalized contempt for women, insisting that words shape behavior and belief. In doing so, she articulated an early and rigorous defense of women’s moral and intellectual dignity.

The Book of the City of Ladies: Building with Words
Christine’s most enduring work, The Book of the City of Ladies, offers a carefully structured response to centuries of hostile tradition. Framed as an allegorical city built by women and populated with exemplary female figures from history, scripture, and legend, the text is both imaginative and methodical.
Christine does not deny women’s flaws; instead, she exposes the selective reasoning that magnified those flaws while ignoring male vice. Her argument is cumulative, grounded in precedent and logic. Authority, she insists, emerges from evidence thoughtfully assembled.

Power, Politics, and Public Voice
Christine also wrote extensively on governance, warfare, and ethical leadership, addressing princes directly and participating in contemporary political discourse. Her Book of the Body Politic reflects a vision of society grounded in mutual responsibility and moral restraint.
In her later years, Christine withdrew from public life, returning briefly to writing to celebrate Joan of Arc—recognizing in Joan another woman who unsettled expectations through action rather than compliance.

Why Christine de Pizan Still Matters
​Christine de Pizan matters because she demonstrates that female intellectual authority need not be implicit, indirect, or apologetic. She argues. She cites. She corrects. She expects to be taken seriously—and structures her work so that it must be.
For modern readers, Christine feels strikingly contemporary in her insistence that culture shapes ethics and that exclusion is neither natural nor inevitable. She did not ask permission to enter debate; she entered it prepared.
Christine de Pizan built her authority sentence by sentence, book by book. The city she imagined was allegorical, but the intellectual space she carved out was real—and it remains inhabited.

This is the limited edition shade of Superfine Merino & Silk for today. You can find it in the online shop until stocks run out, and as always it forms part of the Buy 2 Get a third half price offer available on this fibre blend. I am happy to combine orders, but will need you to add a note when you purchase each day. I usually have a lot of orders to process on the first day back and without a note it's highly likely I will miss that you have multiple orders.