Chance 2014

Medieval Mythography, Volume 3: The Emergence of Italian Humanism, 1321-1475
Jane Chance
https://doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813060125.001.0001
Published: 2014 Online ISBN: 9780813050492 Print ISBN: 9780813060125
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

CHAPTER
Five Christine de Pizan’s Illuminated Women in the Cité des

Dames (1405) 
Jane Chance
https://doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813060125.003.0006
Published: December 2014
Abstract
Christine de Pizan moves radically from allegory to a history of mythological, legendary, and historical
women and saints in the Cité des Dames (1405), in which she emphasizes the euhemeristic concept of
the gods as actual human beings who had once lived on earth. Although the reasons for Christine’s
abrupt change in her attitude toward allegorization have not previously been explored, my contention
is that it was shaped not only by her participation in the Debate but also by her reading of the earliest
manuscript of a French translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, with its highly feminized and
more positive gurations of women, and by similar illuminated royal manuscripts of Orosius and Ovid.
Christine de Pizan invests her allegorizations with personal and protofeminist concerns,
“remythicizing” her history of legendary and classical mythological women in the Cité des Dames so
that by means of their euhemerization and valorization she empowers the historical and political.
Boccaccio’s work, like many of Christine’s dealing with women, was translated into the vernaculars of
French and German and widely circulated in Europe and England during a time when queenship and
female patronage were on the rise.
Keywords: Christine, Cité, Boccaccio

Subject: Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
Christine de Pizan radically revised her approach to ancient myth in the Cité des Dames (1405) after
completing the mythographic Othea (1401). In this later work, in book 1 and at the beginning of book 2, she
only historicizes, or makes literal and humanistic, those classical myths concerning women whom previous
mythographers had made allegorical—that is, moral (or tropological), Christological, anagogical—and
allegorizations she had previously paired with chivalric exempla, the male gures of the Othea having been
completely omitted in the new work. This historicizing process—in ancient mythographic terminology,
“euhemerism”—involves interpreting the gods as virtuous, noble, or heroic mortals. Further, she omits in
her new work any illustrations of ancient mythological gures. In place of the 101 illuminations in the
Harley 4431 Othea, there are only three, which mirror what might be designated as the stages in her
persona’s own recovery in the three books of the Cité des Dames: from despair over her own loathsome
nature as a woman to an understanding of the history of the contributions of women to the material and
spiritual worlds and hence to self-acceptance, in e ect matching the three cantiche of Dante’s Commedia.
What had happened between the composition of these two similar works to so change Christine’s

educational intention from writing for young men to writing instead for women and her mode of gural
representation from allegorization to historicization?
Presumably Christine had moved on to the next stage in her evolution as a writer and an educator from that
in her Othea, when, analogously to St. Augustine in De civitate Dei, who had attempted to refute the
argument that the Roman empire had fallen because of the advent of Christianity, she had argued against
the decline of civilization from its origins having been due to women’s errors or failures and for its having
1
p. 273 been due to men’s being in charge. She did so, I will argue in this chapter, because she had become well
acquainted with a new work that boldly euhemerized the gods and focused exclusively on a history of
women, one written by a renowned male predecessor whose often niggling characterizations of those
women must have aroused her ire. Without such mythographic and allegorical trappings and without the
inclusion of male characters celebrated equally, in its style and format Cité des Dames resembles more
closely the De mulieribus claris (Famous women) (1358–74) of her countryman Boccaccio than it does the
Metamorphoses of her countryman Ovid or the medieval “Moralized Ovids” that she admired enough to
imitate (and reform) in the mythographic Othea.
In exploring the relationship between these two late medieval histories of women, by Boccaccio and
Christine, critics have focused primarily on the similarity of genre, form, and presentation in De mulieribus
2
claris and Cité des Dames. Little attention has been paid to the di erences between the two, most especially,
Boccaccio’s own misogyny in his representation of the female. Equally cursory attention has been paid, in
examining the in uence of Boccaccio on Christine, to the di erence between the De mulieribus claris and its
translation into French as Des cleres et nobles femmes (from here on, Des cleres femmes). That Christine was
familiar before 1401 with the Latin text of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris can be ascertained from the Othea,
which contains material available only from it. She was also familiar with the French translation Des cleres
femmes in some form or another because she cites lines from it during the Querelle de la Rose (Debate of the
3
Rose). Whereas Christine scholars such as Marie-Josèphe Pinet, Alfred Jeanroy, Liliane Dulac, and Jane H.
M. Taylor remain convinced that Christine mainly used the Latin original in remythifying the text of Cité des
4
Dames rather than Des cleres femmes, I will argue instead in this chapter that it was the illustrations of
classical mythological women in the manuscripts Christine likely used for Boccaccio, Ovid, Orosius, and
other sources that actually in uenced her descriptions in her text, the latter so markedly di erent from
Boccaccio’s in the Latin original or in the French translation.
5
The appearance in 1402 of the rst manuscript of the anonymous Des cleres femmes, on 21 January, which
Christine likely at least read, given its purchase by her own patron, I believe prompted her to change
mythographic modes (although other, larger reasons, detailed in the preceding chapter, provided the chief
motivation, especially relating to her abhorrence of Jean de Meun’s Rose and its misogynistic allegories).
p. 274 Arriving shortly after the rst translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium as De cas des nobles
hommes in 1401, by Laurent de Premierfait (ca. 1360–70 to 1418), this anonymous translation has been
determined to have been inscribed by someone other than Premierfait, who completed a second translation
6
of De casibus virorum in 1409 (Jean Lamelin o ered extracts in 1431). What is now the handsomely
illuminated manuscript of Des cleres femmes, or “Des femmes nobles et renommees” (Paris, B.N. fr. 12420)
was for the most part prepared in 1401 but originally intended as a New Year’s gift for 1402—as noted in the
sale by bookseller Jacques Raponde (Giacomo Rapondi), a Parisian merchant from an important Italian
family of bankers who had commissioned it for Philippe de Bourgogne le Hardi (Philip the Bold, duke of
7
Burgundy and brother of the king).
So for Cité des Dames it is Boccaccio, chie y, and the fact of the circulation of the French translation of his De
mulieribus claris that likely both inspired Christine’s own feminization of history and stirred her resistance
8
to the Certaldan’s underlying misogyny in his history even as she admired her Italian forebear. In addition

to the oldest exemplar of Des cleres femmes (B.N. fr. 12420), another (Paris, B.N. fr. 598) appears to have been
entered into the inventory for the library of Jean, duc de Berry, in 1404; two other copies, executed during
the second quarter of the fteenth century, include the same colophon with Boccaccio’s dedication to
9
“Andrée de Accioroles de Florence” (London, B.L. Royal G V and Royal 20 C V). French royals who held
copies of Des cleres femmes, in addition to Philip the Bold, included initial owner Jean d’Angoulême-Orléans
(Paris, B.N. fr. 1120), later owner Charles d’Angoulême-Orléans (Paris, B.N. fr. 599), later owner Philippe de
Bourgogne, le Bon (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 9509), and initial owner Louis de Bruges (Paris, B.N. fr.
10
133).
And it is the manuscript itself, with its 109 illuminated gures accompanying the French translation of
Boccaccio’s text, that I will argue helped catalyze this change in mode for Christine. The manuscript’s
feminized illuminations of ancient female gures, in particular, anticipate similar details in Christine’s
euhemeristic text of the Cité des Dames, while Boccaccio’s textual emphasis on the female as essentially only
physical and material must have encouraged Christine’s excision of mythological illumination—the visual
denudation of illumination in the portrayal of the female—in the manuscripts of Cité des Dames. The latter
manuscripts highlight in their sole three illuminations a personalized allegory: the gure of Christine at
work in book 1 building the foundation of the City of Ladies with the aid of Reason after the initial visionary
p. 275 appearance of the three female personi cations Reason, Rectitude, and Justice (see gure 17, Reason,
Rectitude, and Justice appear to Christine de Pizan; Reason aids her in building the foundation for the City of
Ladies; “Cité des Dames,” London, B.L. Harley 4431, fol. 290r). In the other two books, the castle of the City
of Ladies advances from foundations to walls and then towers and roofs, its building having been aided in
book 2 by Rectitude and in book 3 by Justice, with the appropriate inhabitants for each book met at the door
to the castle by the respective iconic lady (and personi cation), but in the third book, the lady also backed by
saints (see gure 18, fol. 323r, for book 2; and gure 19, fol. 361r, for book 3).
17.
Reason, Rectitude, and Justice appear to Christine de Pizan; Reason aids her in building the foundation of the City of Ladies.
Christine de Pizan, “Cité des Dames,” book 1, frontispiece. © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Harley 4431, fol. 290r
(miniatures by the Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop).

The contrast between Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and Christine’s Cité des Dames in their common subject
—signi cant women—is made clearer by their later juxtaposition in the same manuscript, an opportunity
11
that often occurred after their original and unique manuscript inception. While Christine does rely in part
on Boccaccio’s text for borrowings, for her it is the images in Boccaccio manuscripts of the original Middle
p. 276 French translation that are chie y transferred into her text via feminized

p. 277
descriptions in Cité des Dames. This phenomenon can only be explained by her close involvement in the
12
actual completion of her own frequently illustrated manuscripts, given her unique status as the “only
13
writer of her time who regularly commissioned illuminations for her works,” according to Millard Meiss.
As a result, Mary Weitzel Gibbons has observed, “the illuminations in Christine’s manuscripts, embedded in
the text, should also be considered a visual allegory, a concurrent narrative, running parallel with the
14
textual.”
18.
Lady Rectitude welcomes righteous women into the castle, its walls and towers now visible. Christine de Pizan, “Cité des
Dames,” book 2, frontispiece. © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Harley 4431, fol. 323r

19.

Lady Justice and the wise and righteous inhabitants welcome the just to the castle, its roofs now completed. Christine de Pizan,
“Cité des Dames,” book 3, frontispiece. © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Harley 4431, fol. 361r
Given Christine’s attention to manuscript production in the atelier, it is entirely possible that she either
borrowed her feminist textual interpretations in Cité des Dames from the images in others’ illuminated
manuscripts, or alternatively, perhaps as an early scribe and copyist she herself produced her own
manuscripts and/or their illuminations, at least early on. I suggest this possibility given the nature of the
images in the Boccaccio, Ovid, and Orosius manuscripts as so singularly subversive of and disjunctive to the
15
male author’s original text. Further, we do know that the ateliers that produced her illuminated
manuscripts also produced those of Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes. Of the eighty-two illustrated manuscripts
of various Boccaccio translations, the following ateliers produced manuscripts of Des cleres femmes: B.N. fr.
12420, the initial manuscript, presented to Philip the Bold, in 1402, was completed by the atelier of the
Master of the Coronation of the Virgin; B.N. fr. 598, the anonymous translation recently edited by Baroin
and Ha en, by the atelier of the Master of the Cleres femmes in February 1403 for Jean, duc de Berry; and
London, B.L. Royal 16G V, by the atelier of the Master of Sir John Fastolf (Fastolf commissioned the Middle
16
English translation of the Othea by his nephew Stephen Scrope). Further, the atelier of the Master of the
Cité des Dames also produced the illustrated Des cleres femmes held by Lisbon, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
17
L.A. 143 (beginning of the fteenth century).
Because Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes appeared “at the height of the debate” over the Rose (that is, in
January of 1402), and because Christine’s ally Jean Gerson was rst chaplain to Philip the Bold, who owned a
copy, art historian Brigitte Buettner has posed an important question for Christine scholars: “Since it is
certain that Christine worked from the French translation, perhaps even from Philip the Bold’s copy, we
might ask whether the miniatures—whose tone is on the whole more monologically positive than the text—
18
have left some traces in her writing,” speci cally, in the Cité des Dames. Although Buettner does
p. 278 speci cally answer that question, assuredly, she does point to the fact of a social categorization of
19
women represented in the miniatures of Boccaccio as being similar to that in Cité des Dames. We also know
that Christine’s part in the epistolary debate over the Rose may itself have been occasioned by her reading of
20
illustrated manuscripts of the Rose that were available in royal collections before 1400 and in which
21
violence against women is graphically depicted, the latter a point that Meradith T. McMunn has argued.
Diane Wolfthal has noted the di erence between the image of rape in the illustrations for the Othea relative
to earlier depictions and the image represented in the text of Cité des Dames, in which the rape is painted as
22
brutal and morally condemned.
What have not yet been fully recognized as having in uenced the remythi cation and feminization of the
Cité des Dames are the humanized miniatures that grace a series of early fteenth-century royal
manuscripts of its sources Orosius, Boccaccio, and Ovid. These manuscripts include, among others, French

translations of Orosius’s Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII (“Histoire universelle,” B.L. Additional
25884 and Royal 20 D I, the latter 1380, copied to B.N. fr. 301 [ca. 1400]); of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris
(“Des cleres femmes,” B.L. Royal 16 G V [1410]; and Royal 20C V [1410]); and less importantly, of Ovid’s
23
Metamorphoses (“Ovide moralisé,” B.L. Royal 1? D IV).
This chapter will argue that the feminized mythological texts of Christine’s Cité des Dames have borrowed
many of their scenes of and details for and about mythological women from the illuminations but not
necessarily from the texts of late medieval French royal manuscripts containing French translations from
Latin originals. These royal manuscripts date from between 1401 and 1410 and, in addition to the
manuscripts cited above, include Orosius, Boccaccio (namely, the two earliest manuscripts, B.N. fr. 12420
24
[ca. 1402], and B.N. fr. 598 [ca. 1403]), and a “Moralized Ovid.” Although Maureen Quilligan has remarked
on Christine’s feminized rewriting of literary tradition—as articulated by Augustine in De civitate Dei, Dante
in the Inferno, and most especially, Boccaccio in De mulieribus claris—and although she discusses and
evidences one (and only one) seemingly misogynist Boccaccian mythological illustration, of Semiramis and
Ninus in Des cleres femmes (see London, B.L. Royal 20 C V, fol. 8v), her assumption is that the misogynistic
text of Boccaccio is mirrored by this image: Quilligan says, “[T]he usual illumination of the same moment in
manuscripts of the French translation of Boccaccio’s text emphasizes the infamous side of Semiramis’s
p. 279 story. Boccaccio makes clear the terrifying sexual ambiguity her incest causes. … Boccacio’s gurative
sense of Ninus’s exchange of sex with his mother implies an emasculation that the illumination also hints at
in Ninus’s posture: the truncated hand, stu ed (protectively?) into the young boy’s placket in the general
25
area of the genitals all too clearly answers the menace of the queen’s remarkably large sword.” By analogy,
Quilligan also assumes, Christine’s more positive text must be inverting both the Boccaccian text and the
image in the manuscript of the French translation. It is true that in Christine’s portraits of classical women
she inverts the misogyny of Boccaccio (and her other classical sources, of Orosius and Ovid), but in many
cases her text describes the image used in the earlier manuscript of the French translation.
That is, the vivid empowerment of the female o ered by Christine’s own mythological texts in Cité des
Dames is curiously anticipated by the source illustrations’ iconographical detail. Most astonishing about
these speci c illustrations for the vernacular versions of male authors’ texts is their disjunction: the verbal
text accompanying the actual manuscript may or may not accord with the feminization so obviously
depicted in the manuscript illustration. Female gures who may be treated slightingly or misogynistically in
the texts by Orosius, Boccaccio, or a moralizer of Ovid because they appear marginal in the myths and
legends of these “histories” are lifted out of the margins by Christine and put in the foreground of her text,
with the accompanying male gures excised or trivialized. Most of her parallels can be found in the rst
book of Cité des Dames, the opening of the second book and its rst ve chapters, and a nal chapter on
classical mythological women who are famous not because of their virtue but by coincidence—because men
26
have put them into positions of power and importance (Cité des Dames 2.61). The proof for this parallelism
— despite the disjunction with the text—is the iconography of the illuminated depiction in the pre-1405
manuscripts of the French translations of these works, which is equivalent, literally or guratively, to the
verbal detail in the later Cité des Dames (1405).
How might Christine have come to know such manuscripts? If Christine (in the years after her husband’s
death) had worked as a scribe for, or even as an illuminator on, the earlier Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César or
Des cleres femmes (1401), or even if she had familiarized herself with one of these two works—which would
have been completed before Cité des Dames (1405)—in one of the Italian-owned bookshops of the period
where she might have supervised the illustration for one of her own manuscripts, then their remythi ed
illuminations of women would have o ered her a clear paradigm for feminizing Ovid and Boccaccio.
27
p. 280 Certainly Boccaccio was generally important in French culture. Signi cantly, the translation Des cleres
femmes (or Des femmes nobles et renommees) in B.N. fr. 12420was available from 1402, and in B.N. fr. 598
from 1403; a copy of the former was presented to Jean, duc de Berry, by Jean de la Barre and was available in
28
the duke’s library. Further, the book producers and illuminators in Paris who produced some of these royal

manuscripts of Des cleres femmes were in some cases Italian or came from Italian families. Parisian
merchant Jacques Raponde, his family originally from Italy, supervised an illuminators’ workshop for Philip
29
the Bold; perhaps Christine herself served as one of the illuminators working on Philip’s manuscript.
30 31 32
Raponde also supervised the production of manuscripts, either in a hotel or in a “manuscript factory.”
Among the book shops, Bureau de Dampmartin supported a French translation of the Decameron, according
33
to Jules Gui rey in his library inventory for Jean, duc de Berry. And Bureau de Dampmartin, according to
La Cour amoureuse—the basically all-male equivalent of the English Order of the Garter established by
Charles VI in 1401 (feminized by Christine’s Order of the Rose in the Dit de la rose written on 14 February
34
1402)—is listed as number 43, and Dine—Dino Rapondi, who was Italian—as number 446.
In the context of such manuscript comparison, it is important to note that because a work circulated during
and over a period of time and, if popular, was copied repeatedly, the work might be changed over time
because its author, if involved in subsequent copy production, had been in uenced by the reading or
copying of other works or illustrations. In the case of the Othea (1399–1401), copied in forty-eight
35
manuscripts, the period of time over which it evolved and was changed stretched even longer. Anthology
collections such as B.L. Harley 4431 were assembled from works made and illustrated for earlier patrons;
they were often made by the same workshop. We know that the workshop that completed the layout and
36
cycle for Harley 4431—which contains thirty works by Christine and 133 illustrations and was presented to
Isabeau of Bavaria, queen of France, around 1414—had also nished the 1406–8 Christine collection known
as MS D, the Duke’s Manuscript (Paris, B.N. fr. 835, 606, 836, 605, and 60?), originally begun for Louis
37
d’Orleans (d. 23 November 140?) but bought by Jean, duc de Berry. In addition, all of the works in Harley
4431 had originally been completed for other patrons before 1411. Indeed, between 1406 and 1411, Christine
had worked for the Burgundian court and not for the queen’s court. As far back as 1401, Philip the Bold had
p. 281 asked Christine to write the biography of Charles V, and in 1406 she was paid by the duke’s son, Jean sans
Peur (John the Fearless). Indeed, according to Charity Cannon Willard, “John the Fearless was Christine’s
most faithful patron; inventories of his property in 1420 show that he possessed seven volumes of her
38
works, making Christine the most represented author in his library.” Christine thereafter dedicated to the
Burgundians works such as the Advision Cristine (1405), the Sept psaulmes allegorises (1409), Lamentation sur
les maux de la France (1409), and Livre des Fais d’armes et de chevalerie (Book of feats of arms and chivalry)
(1410). Further, in 1408, MS D was nished, for Jean, duc de Berry, and in 140?–8, books were produced for
the duke of Brabant and Philippe de Nevers (Philip of Nevers). Most interesting, according to Deborah
McGrady, is the authorial personalization that occurred in Harley 4431: “In the speci c case of the Harley
opening miniatures to the Complainte amoureuse and the Livre du Duc des Vrais Amans, the artists altered the
39
MS D prototypes to explore authorial involvement in literary creation.”
Christine’s metamorphosis into “Je, Cristine,” a narrator contemporary with (or shortly following) the
translation into French of De mulieribus claris and then her personalized feminization of legendary women’s
history in Cité des Dames, appears to have been drawn not from Boccaccio’s text so remarkably as from the
portraits of women in the boldly remythicized illuminated royal manuscripts in which Des cleres femmes was
contained, as well as in other works by Orosius and Ovid that she likely read. This rst section will
demonstrate how Christine came to project herself, Petrarch-like, into her texts—by which I mean her
personalization of myth, through a number of her works in which she was in uenced by Boethius, just
before or around the time she composed the Cité des Dames. In relation to her innovative mythography, the
second and third sections will show how her strongly delineated classical mythological women in the Cité
des Dames appear to have been in uenced—not only by the text of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris or even of
Des cleres femmes, but by remarkably similar manuscript illuminations that would likely have been produced
in the best-known Italian copy centers in the city of Paris, with which she was herself familiar.
I. From Othea and Proba to “Je, Cristine,” Une Clere Femme

A concomitant self-demythologization and historical personalization, from Christine’s dei ed self-
projection in her narrator Othea in the Othea (1399–1401) to her most complex persona, the narrator
p. 282 “Christine,” in the Cité des Dames (1405), accompanied the change in mythographic mode in Cité des
Dames. She anticipates this creation in her bold allegorized autobiographies involving a narrator in the
Mutacion de Fortune (1401–3) and the Advision Cristine (1405). From a narrator who conceals herself by
means of the mask of an imaginary goddess to the narrator who, as a persona, mythographizes her own
genealogy in Mutacion de Fortune and eventually her own intellectual autobiography in the allegory of
Advision Cristine, Christine metamorphoses into her own clere femme in Cité des Dames as her narrator
“Christine,” not unlike “Dante” in the Commedia, who shifts from despairing to shriven sinner and then to
visionary, and not unlike Boccaccio. If Boccaccio uses the legitimizing power of a genealogy that would
40
demonstrate his own line of descent from divinity to structure his major mythography, the Genealogie, it
may then seem no accident that his countrywoman Christine de Pizan—a stranger in a strange land—
feminizes the same tradition.
In the Othea Christine explains Othea’s name as one that she has had to create herself for her wise narrator
because no other appropriate to her humanistic role was available. Christine uses “Othea” (which scholars
have translated from the Greek as “O goddess”) to refer collectively to the sagece de femme (wisdom of
woman), meaning that the character Othea is not only female but, in addition, signi es those qualities
considered divine, or the most noble and highly prized, in any mortal, so that Othea mythically personi es
the faculties of wisdom and the virtues. By means of her circumlocution Christine explains ancient worship
of the pagan gods before the advent of Christianity. Her rhetorical device also explains why a mythical
narrator might be writing this monitory letter to the Trojan prince Hector at the transitional age of fteen,
the beginning of his manhood, that is, to pass on to him as useful the wisdom of women that countless
generations of previous leaders have ignored.
Othea, selon grec, peut estre pris pour sagece de femme; et comme les ancians, non ayans encore
lumiere de vraye foy, adourassent plusiers dieux, soubz la quelle loy soient passees les plus haultes
seignouries qui au monde ayent esté, comme le royaume d’Assire, de Perse, les Gregois, les
Troyans, Alixandre, les Rommains et mains autres, et mesmement tous les plus grans philosophes,
comme Dieux n’eust ancore ouverte la porte de sa misericorde.
[Othea, from the Greek, can be understood as the wisdom of woman; and so also the ancient
p. 283 peoples, not yet possessing the light of true faith, worshipped many gods, under whose law
have passed the greatest dominions that have existed in the world, such as the kingdom of Assyria,
Persia, the Greeks, the Trojans, Alexander, the Romans, and many others, and especially all the
greatest philosophers, because God had not yet opened the door of his mercy.]
(Othea, fable 1, p. 199; my translation)
However, in the plain prose of the Cité des Dames, Christine, no longer projected into her text as “Othea” but
now incarnated in the persona “Christine,” explores singular contributions of famous women from these
same nations, as in the Othea but without the mythographic (scholastic and patriarchal) techniques of
moralization and allegorization. In what might be termed Othea’s sequel, or redaction, she reveals a female
history of civilization that provides a model on which to build virtues in the future—not a City of Lords, but
a City of Ladies. Most important because of their ancient mythologizing are the classical stories of
Hippolyta, Medea and Circe, Minerva, Ceres, Isis, and Arachne. Christine emphasizes the wisdom, prudence,
and creativity of the women, being interested less in the paganism of the women than in the qualities that
contributed to their moral or rational strength as leaders or inventors. She also includes non-Greek women
—Amazons, Egyptians, Babylonians, Carthaginians—from the conquered and non-European nations of
North Africa and the Middle East as well as from the Baltic.

Thus, from Christine’s perspective, her City of Ladies will appear well founded, unlike the City of Men as
described by St. Augustine in De civitate Dei (The City of God) or as described in universal and legendary
histories such as that of the popular Paulus Orosius, and unlike the hegemonic Greek and Roman
mythological genealogy of the gods begun by her countryman Boccaccio, the Genealogie deorum gentilium,
who fancied he had descended from these divine forebears. And whenever Christine does turn to those
traditional national genealogical cycles, she portrays only those female gures involved in signi cant
events, without mention of the more frequently celebrated heroes. Saturnus is the ancestor of Lavinia, not
just of the unmentioned Aeneas. And Aeneas’s descendant, Julius Silvius, may have fathered Romulus and
Remus, but Christine omits mention of Romulus as being important in the founding of Rome. In reference to
ancient women who have supported patriarchs of all sorts, she personalizes her text by injecting her own
self.
In the Cité des Dames, Christine, having read her countryman and poet-scholar Boccaccio (in Latin and/or in
p. 284 French), turns to the historical fabulation of the gods as earthly and mortal in the rst book and a portion
of the second book of three—and, as far as this work is concerned, solely female. Certainly Boccaccio’s Latin
Genealogie, had it been available to her—only two books of the monumental encyclopedia of myth had been
41
translated into French by the late fteenth century —might have prompted her to construct a genealogy
for herself as another wise (and famous) woman, like the Greek philosopher Leontium and the Roman
scholar Proba, among Boccaccio’s other famous classical gures, including the Cumaean Sibyl, mentioned
in his De mulieribus claris. And we know Christine was familiar with Boccaccio’s other (infamous) vernacular
work, the collection of tales gathered from sources around the world in the Decameron (1348–53) because of
42
her use of three of its nonmythological tales in the Cité des Dames.
Ever alert to female prototypes for herself as an Italian scholar like Boccaccio, Christine mentions
43
Boccaccio’s own Roman woman scholar Proba in De mulieribus claris early on in the Cité des Dames.
Christine points out that it had occurred to Proba, after she had read all of Virgil’s works, “par grant entente
de son engin et de sa pensee” [with profound insight and intelligence, and had taken pains in her mind to
understand them ], “que on pourroit, selon les dis livres, toute descripre le scripture et les histories du Viel
Testament et du Nouvel par vers plaisans et plains de substance” [that one could describe the Scriptures and
the stories found in the Old and New Testament with pleasant verses lled with substance taken from these
same works] (Cité des Dames 1.29; Cara and Richards, p. 156; Richards, p. 65). Christine then adds from
Boccaccio a particularly misogynistic gloss on Proba’s invention: “Laquelle chose, pour certain, ce dit
l’aucteur Bocace, n’est pas sanz admiracion que si haulte consideracion peust entrer en cervel de femme.
Mais moult fu chose plus merveilleuse, ce dist il, de mettre a excecucion” [“Which in itself,” Boccaccio
remarked, “is not just admirable, that such a noble idea would come into a woman’s brain, but it is even
44
more marvelous that she could actually execute it”] (Cara and Richards, p. 156; Richards, p. 66).
Christine counters that, even though Proba borrowed lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid to
combine them in orderly verses, the end result transformed Virgil into a prophet of Christianity:
Et par tel maniere dés le commencement du monde st le commencement de son livre, et

ensuivant de toutes les histories de l’Ancient Testament et du Nouvel vint jusques a l’envoyement
p. 285 du Saint Esperit aux Appostres, les livres de Virgile a tout ce concordans si ordeneement que qui
n’avoit congnoissance de ceste composicion cuideroit que Virgile eust [311 v°] esté prophete et
evvangeliste ensemble.
[In this way, starting from the creation of the world, and following all the stories of the Old and
New Testament, she came as far as the sending of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, adapting Vergil’s
works to t all this in so orderly a way that someone who only knew this work would have thought

that Vergil had been both a prophet and evangelist.]
(Cara i and Richards, p. 158; Richards, p. 66)
Christine implies that Virgil’s authority within the Christian world stems from the genius of a woman
cleverly repackaging his works as a cento, which, of course, is what she herself does, in a manner of
speaking, with ancient myth from Virgil and Ovid in the prior Othea.
In contrast to Christine’s praise of Proba, Boccaccio criticizes her. In fable 97 of De mulieribus claris, with
regret Boccaccio notes that this intellectually gifted wife (Proba) of “a certain Adelphus, and a Christian”
would have been perceived as having accomplished much more, if she had lived a longer life and if her other
works (assuming she did, indeed, write them, including an alleged Homeric cento, which would have meant
she knew Greek) had been passed down to us rather than having been lost, presumably because of
“librariorum desidia” (scribal laziness) (Brown, chap. 9?, pp. 414–15). Even with this speculation, Boccaccio
appears to attribute some laxity to Proba, at least in her oversight of scribes, while at the end of the fable he
simultaneously slams other women in a misogynistic panegyric for their devotion to the “dista , the
needle, and the loom.” In Proba’s pursuit of sacred studies and fame, she eschews the usual femineos mores
— the “feminine practice”—of the idleness associated with sewing and weaving, listening to “frivolous
stories,” gossiping, and behaving wantonly—by “scraping o completely the rust of intellectual sloth,” a
metaphor that refers back to scraping o mildew, as much as it does rust, from the scribe’s palimpsest, or
perhaps hair and roughness, if what is involved is preparing the vellum: “[S]ed quoniam sedula studiis
sacris ab ingenio segniciei rubiginem absterxit omnem, in lumen evasit eternum” [But she achieved eternal
fame by taking her sacred studies seriously and scraping o completely the rust of intellectual sloth]
(Brown, chap. 9?, pp. 414–15). Ironically, Boccaccio describes Proba’s compilation of appropriately
p. 286 matching lines from Virgil and scripture as akin to the scribe’s rote practice of merely writing down what
someone else has penned. If she had been “so intellectually gifted,” wouldn’t she have yearned to write
something more substantial?
In response to Boccaccio’s stereotyping of “femineos mores,” Christine in her own praise of Proba recalls
her former project in the Othea in which she combined myths from Ovid and the Histoire ancienne with moral
glosses and allegorizations from the Old and New Testaments (and remythographizes her sources to reveal
45
the failure of the masculine family members of the ubiquitous Virgilian male hero Aeneas). And like
Boccaccio’s Proba, who is in her opinion neither inconsequential in the history of letters—given her
contribution to Virgil’s favorable reception in the Middle Ages—nor lazy, Christine was an industrious
scholar, certainly in her plentiful production of manuscripts of the Othea, and by the time of her anthology
of works, the Queen’s Manuscript, London, B.L. Harley 4431, in 1413–14. Finally, by this means Christine
also reminds her reader of the di erence between her moral and Christian allegorical project in her previous
work and this new and wholly euhemeristic and more radically feminized Cité des Dames. In the foreground,
throughout her text, is iconoclastic Christine: unlike Proba, she debunks patriarchal idols through the
rhetorical technique of antiphrasis, or what today we term irony. Ever open to perceiving parallels between
the ancient genealogical cycles and the present ruling families, Christine frequently emphasizes the
patriarchal hegemony in ancient histories to demonstrate their moral, political, and social failure and to
o er instead a radical and innovative feminist mythography—the genealogy of the mother that would
rebuild a new society.
In these two works, the Othea and the Cité des Dames, as in her letters in the Querelle de la Rose, Christine
rewrites herself over and over again, a point that has been noticed about her voice and her opinions, which
46
change again and again throughout her works and in her persona. Christine’s modes and techniques in the
Cité des Dames—not unlike those of polysemy in medieval allegory or interlacement in medieval romance
(each of which layers meaning or brackets episodes that gloss one another and eventually converge)—along
with the irony (medieval antiphrasis) that its author shared with Chaucer, anticipate those of postmodern

ction.
In this Christine appropriates yet another late classical exemplar, Boethius, or better, his depressed
persona, “Boethius,” and his higher rational self, Lady Philosophy, from the Consolatio Philosophiae
p. 287 (Consolation of Philosophy). Translated into French by Jean de Meun as La Consolacion, it was the source
for the phrasing of various citations that appear in a number of Christine’s most autobiographical works,
including the Dantesque Chemin de Long Estude (October 1402–March 1403), the Mutacion de Fortune
( nished, according to Christine, on 18 November 1403), and the Advision (1405), contemporary with Cité des
Dames; indeed, Jean de Meun’s preface appears at the beginning of the anonymous translation of Boethius’s
47
prosimetrum that Christine likely used for the Advision. In inserting herself into her text she also surely
models herself on her French mythographic predecessor Pierre Bersuire (in his Reductorium moralium, book
48
15, and his Ovidius moralizatus, both texts that Christine borrowed from in composing the Othea), and
presumably on her Italian countryman, Boccaccio, whose clever idea it was in the rst place to write a
history of famous women. How Christine mythologizes herself by means of epic heroes appropriated from a
masculinized culture—such as the traveler who descends into the underworld (Boethius’s Ulysses and
Orpheus)—is clear especially in Mutacion de Fortune and the Advision. These two works provide an
appropriate context for the work she was thinking about, and likely working on, at about the same time, the
Cité des Dames.
In Christine’s third book of the Advision, the highly personalized complaint about the unique fortunes and
misfortunes of “Christine,” she feminizes Boethius’s intellectual autobiography, Consolatio Philosophiae,
49
with its rst two books of complaints about the goddess Fortune and the injustice of his situation. She
genders her speci cally Boethian literary situation in two ways. First and obviously, she replaces her
countryman Boethius of Padua with her persona “Christine” as su erer at the hands of Fortune, and
second, simultaneously, in addition to this learned persona, she authorizes her own self by means of the
magisterial gure of Dame Philosophy, who educates her (that is, author Christine projects herself as well
into her own rescuer).
Like Boethius, “Christine,” apparently speaking in her own voice in a long complaint to Philosophy in the
third and last book, bitterly laments the early deaths of her young husband and of her father, who was
physician to Charles V; her trials as a mother of three supporting her own mother and brothers; the lawsuits
that ensued after her father’s and husband’s deaths, through no fault of her own; her subsequent illness;
50
rumors about her alleged lovers; and so forth. Christine laments the troubles that besieged her:
p. 288 [C]omme ce soient les metz des vesves, plais et process m’avironnerent de tous lez. … Tost me fut
mis empeschement en l’eritaige que mon mary avoit acheté. Et comme il fust mis en la main du
roy, me convenoit paier la rente, et si n’en jouissoie. Et moy en la chambre des comptes demenee
par long plait contre cellui sanz pitié qui en estoit, et encore est des maistres et seigneurs, de qui
avoir droit ne pouoie, recue par lui a tort tres grief dommaige; comme le voir en soit manifeste.
[{A}s this is the fare of widows, lawsuits and legal actions surrounded me on all sides. … {S}oon an
obstacle was placed before me in the heritage purchased by my husband. And as it had reverted to
the crown, I would have to pay rent on it and so could not pro t from it. And in the Chambre des
Comptes, I, involved in a long suit against the ruthless one who was and still is one of the lords and
masters from whom I could not have justice, was most grievously and unjustly harmed by him, as
51
it is obviously to be seen.]
Christine acknowledges here that she was “conseillee par des plus saiges advocas que hardiement sur ce me
de endisse et que ne doubtasse que, comme je eusse bonne cause” [advised by the wisest lawyers that I
52
should defend myself boldly in this matter and that I should not doubt that … I had a good case], su ering

the indignity of having to appear in four of Paris’s courts; her troubles, never satisfactorily resolved,
continued for fourteen years. Her long account of her legal troubles, which ended with decisions against her
and with sergeants coming to her house to take away her possessions, is topped by an account of the shame
she felt at asking friends for help and hearing malicious gossip spread about her. After six years she nally
received the paltry amount remaining from her inheritance.
In her earlier Othea Christine had interjected a sense of the horror of this long legal battle in a very unusual,
personalized reading of the classical god of time and mutability, Saturn (fable 8), wise man and planet
under whose aegis wise men and lawyers are sheltered, whose castration by his son Jupiter she represents
more historically (and perhaps, since we know her situation from the Advision, more personally, and
53
ironically, considering her female gender), as a disinheritance: “Et fu un roy de Crete ainsi nommé, qui
moult fu sages, dont les poethes parlerent soubz couverture de fable et distrent que son lz Jupiter lui coppa
p. 289 les genitaires, qui est a entendre que il lui toil la puissance que il avoit et le desherita et chaça” [And there
was a king in Crete thus named, who was very wise, of whom the poets spoke under cover of fable; and they
said that his son Jupiter cut o his genitals, which is to understand that he took from him the power that he
had and disinherited and chased him away” [Othea, fable 8, p. 215; my translation). Feeling miserably alone,
Christine describes herself in a balade as part of a community of “povres vesves de leurs biens despouillees”
(poor widows, despoiled of their goods) by lawyers who take advantage of their ignorance, those widows
like her a “femme foible de corps et naturellement cremeteuse” (woman weak in body and naturally
54
timid).”
Christine’s more explicit identi cation with other women in similar plights in the Advision—an imaginary
community of widows to which she belongs—despite her loneliness, leads to her empowerment through
writing. In subsequent poems of lament for her lost love (her husband), to pass the sadness of this time, she
turns in solitude to scholarship: “Car, non obstant que naturellement et de nativité y fusse encline, me
tolloit y vaquier l’occupacion des a aires que ont communement les mariees et aussi la charge de souvent
porter enfans” [For although naturally and from birth I was inclined to this, my occupation with the tasks
55
common to married women and the burden of frequent child-bearing had deprived me of it].
Christine’s mixing of mythography and the personal in her prose scholarly works and allegories is unusual
in commentaries at this time—except, perhaps, in French mythographer Bersuire’s use of the political in
his Ovid commentary, visionary allegories such as this prose work, and the mystical prosimetrum of
Flemish beguine Marguerite Porete—and also projects the protofeminism that she used to arm herself as a
result of her ill fortune and protracted legal struggles. Christine regarded her new career as a kind of helpful
and even necessary mutation: as late as 1403, she imagines herself in the Mutacion de Fortune as
transformed by Fortune into a man in both intellect and will—gifts of her father—so that she might better
take up the necessary function of supporting her family, namely, by writing original works of poetry and
prose. Having been transformed from female to male by Fortune (“Qui de femelle devins masle / Par
Fortune”), body and face (“mua et corps”) changed into that of a perfect natural man (“homme naturel
parfaict”), she adds that she will reveal “par ccion” her own “istoire,” meaning her own gurative history
56
titled “La Mutacion de Fortune.” That is, having a female body, or “text” that she transcribes, she is
57
guratively transformed to male, like the classical “ ctions” (integumenta, or “cloaks”) that conceal
p. 290 autobiographical truth. Such an Ovidian “miracle” was normally reserved for the gods, as Christine’s
title for the section in Mutacion de Fortune beginning at line 1025 reveals: “Here Is Told of Several Miracles
Which Ovid Recounts about His Gods.” But a transformation into a stronger self is appropriate because, at
the beginning of her visionary allegory Le Chemin de Long Estude, nished less than a year or so earlier, in
58
1402–3, it is the Consolatio Philosophiae that Christine, much weaker, widowed and impoverished, reads
before bedtime for consolation over her misfortune: a work that also involves a persona attened by
misfortune but similarly aided by a female personi cation of wisdom, Philosophy. Signi cantly, in Mutacion
de Fortune the imagery that she uses to recount her “birth” depends upon her re guration as a scholar-poet.

In the passage under discussion in which Christine tells her life story (or establishes her genealogy, her
inheritance), she lifts Hymen, god of marriage—who guratively marries the soul to the body in the
individual and the subject to the predicate in the grammar of the sentence—from Jean de Meun’s Rose, and,
before Jean, from Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae. Hymen, in De planctu Naturae married to Venus, the
goddess of love, presides over Christine’s change into a poet who writes her self as text in Mutacion de
Fortune, more speci cally over the conception and marriage of her soul and body—the gifts of father and
59
mother, God and Nature. Christine begins with her own inheritance, one stemming from her father and his
60
patrimony—“c’est la fonteine qui sourt”—the original fountain. Later identi ed as “la fonteine de grant
pris,” the fountain is located on that same mountain of Parnassus where Pegasus was engendered and
where the nine Muses, including Calliope, live, along with the “tenth Muse,” the god of poetry and truth,
61
Apollo. Among the rich treasures here given her by her court physician–astrologer father are two crystals
of great price, presumably knowledge of the heavens (from astrology) used to heal the body. According to
Andrea Tarnowski, however, the two stones at the bottom of the fountain hint at the two stones at the Well
of Narcissus in Guillaume’s Rose that represent the lover’s eyes in re ection, which, according to Jean de
62
Meun, are able to see only half of the Garden of Deduit at one time. Tarnowksi has argued that in Christine
these two crystals are the “family jewels,” Christine’s inheritance from her father being science and
wisdom and that from her mother being Nature’s treasure, with the four stones in Nature’s garland
signifying discretion, consideration, retention, and memory. Her mother’s heritage is the healing that
comes, says Tarnowski, from virtue, as the father’s learning has been applied to healing the body.
p. 291 Despite the desire of the mother for a daughter, the inheritance from the father’s “fountain,” coupled with
Christine’s own desire to resemble her father, results in a “Christine” subsequently transformed into a
writer through her appropriation of her father’s symbolic virility, his inky wisdom spilled out so richly and
wisely on her pages. Christine’s use of the “fountain” as a Horatian image for good (male) writing whose
source is wisdom—“scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons” [of good writing the source and fount
is wisdom]—was also adopted by Jean de Montreuil in his Latin letter “Etsi facundissimus,” letter 122,
dated July– August 1401, in addressing a “vir insignis” (illustrious man) who is “copious in expression, and
63
over owing with eloquence, but also (‘and this is the source of writing’) wise.” And the female sexual
symbol of Nature’s circular “chapel” (garland or chaplet) bearing the four virtues—Consideracion, Retentive,
Memoire, Discrecion—underscores the gender of Jean de Meun’s Nature, both mater and materia and the
handmaiden of God, whose very gender will reinforce Christine’s own desire. That is, the “creation” of
Christine here comes not from Jean de Meun’s Genius and his phallic exhortation to the Barons of Love to
apply hammer to anvil, pen to parchment, but from heroic Nature herself, “Ma mere Nature la belle,” and
64
from the inclinacion (natural desire) of Christine “mon pere ressembler” (to resemble my father).
Christine’s desire for great knowledge counters her biological nature: “Car je desir ce que n’ay pas, / C’est le
tresor que grant savoir / Fait a ceulx, qui l’aiment avoir, / Et, combien que femelle fusse, / Par quoy l’avoir
dessus dit n’eüsse” [{F}or I desire what I do not have, namely the treasure which great learning gives to
those who wish to have it, and although I was born female, because of which (as I said above) I could not
65
have it].
“Christine” is here the ction, the carnal text or body, conjoined to her author’s essential self, the gurative
meaning, or “science,” that which is written with ink from her father’s fountain. Christine, given the
medieval image of fate as a book in which individual destiny is written by God’s Providence, seems to
appropriate for her own gendered use the concept of a (masculine) Providence directing a (feminine)
Fortune. In her declaration that God gives grace and a soul, as Nature provides the body, the in uence of
Providence and the heavens is expressed by the power of her father’s fountain in the construction of her
soul’s desire and then her body’s mutation through Fortune, with language taken from Jean de Meun about
66
the celestial origins of the soul and the material origins of the body.

p. 292 This important “Genealogy of Christine,” in its feminized allegorization and rationalization of the Well of
Narcissus in the Rose, may be read in the light of classical glosses on Boethius’s Consolatio, which she uses in
Mutacion de Fortune to authorize herself as poet and scholar. Christine is markedly clever here: by overlaying
her sources Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun with Boethius, Christine establishes her authority as an
Orpheus-like poet whose knowledgeable and learned father, rather than muse-mother, was responsible for
her inheritance. Too, like Orpheus, she has lost her spouse, Étienne du Castel (although from illness, not
from looking back at the underworld or being too devoted to the desires of the body, as the medieval glosses
67
on Orpheus’s loss of his wife Eurydice proclaim in that Boethian prosimetrum in book 3, poem 12).
Christine’s sexual mutation into a man in this passage, as a result of the power of Fortune, may suggest,
then, the way in which her inheritance (family jewels, or knowledge and wisdom, as poetic “virility”)
becomes the wellspring of her translatio, that is, her desire to transform the Rose into her own poetry and
writing—her words as virility, so to speak. That female desire comes from her mother and not from her
father: whereas her father wanted a son, her mother, the more powerful, wanted a daughter who would
resemble her more: “Car ma mere, qui ot pouoir / Trop plus que lui, si voult avoir / Femelle a elle
68
ressemblable.” And in relation to Ulysses, in the Consolation of Philosophy, the hero appears in book 4,
poem 3 (the mythological meter that follows that of Orpheus, book 3, poem 12), as having wisely evaded the
plight of his men—who were transformed into pigs by Circe. In William of Conches’s commentary on
Boethius, Ulysses’s wisdom protects him against the poisonous seductions of the body.
By invoking these well-known mythological types from Boethius—Orpheus, relating to her “genealogy”
and her gifts from her father and mother; Ulysses, relating to her transformation through Fortune’s
unpredictability—Christine in Mutacion de Fortune allegorizes the process by which the learned female
metamorphoses into a (male) writer, her sexual transformation additionally a re ection of her desire for a
self that is gured “male” in its wisdom and strength. Christine’s gendering of her transformation from
female suggests that the overthrowing of sex is necessary to allow her to display her own wisdom and
creativity.
Christine thus completes the subversion of the literary model provided by Jean de Meun in the Rose by
setting up her identi cation with an author from her own native country, Boethius of Padua, in his
p. 293 Consolatio Philosophiae, in her paramount work of philosophical, visionary, and allegorical
autobiography, the Advision (1405). This autobiography further elaborates on her journey toward a tower
presided over by a Boethian gure of Philosophy, this time one that describes the e orts of allegorical
personi cations to mother her advancement. In the third book, her work most clearly de ned as
autobiography, Christine genders the philosophical complaint by the in uential scholar Boethius, who,
forced to confront his dependence on the goods of the goddess Fortune—fame, wealth, position, good
health—learns in his despair from Lady Philosophy about the need to rely instead on unchanging virtue and
wisdom. In a visionary allegory in which narrator Christine is instructed by three ideals, or “mothers,” in
the three books, Christine learns instead to rely not on virtue and wisdom but on herself—to speak in her
own voice. These three stages occupy the three books of her allegory, which, in another sense, constructs in
these stages her own growing awareness of her subjectivity and her authority as “Christine.” This process
begins, rst, in book 1, with her conversation with Dame Couronnee (crowned Nature), mainly taking place
in Christine’s adopted country of France; then, in book 2, with Dame Oppinion at the schools of the city of
Athens and the University of Paris; and nally, in book 3, within the university, with Dame Philosophy,
“abeesse et superieure d’icellui couvent” [abbess and mother superior of this convent] in a special tower
69
room reachable only through a labyrinth of passageways. The Advision relays her autobiography only in
70
the third book.
Why Christine only narrates her personal story in the third book, once she has reached the University of
Paris and Dame Philosophy, has been answered in one respect by Mary L. Skemp: only through a written
rendition of her experiences can Christine understand the world and assert her “authorial voice” and speak
71

for herself. However, as I have suggested elsewhere, the movement of “Christine,” narratively and
allegorically from the outside world ever inward, rst inside a building, and then at the top of one, but
ultimately within her own body and consciousness, by means of such interiorization allows the self to be
educated according to a feminized and inverted version of the medieval concept of the ladder of education,
72
or the ascent from the trivium to the quadrivium. Further, Christine is feminizing the process of her
education within an imagined institution from which she and all women had been barred. While this
allegorical vision is a fantasy, it allows Christine access to a virtual university in which her gender position
changes. In this regard, her autobiography narrated to Philosophy in that third book duplicates the exact
p. 294 situation of despairing Boethius at the beginning of the Consolatio. Christine’s ascent in the third book,
while not a feminized mystical ascensus ad deum, does involve a climbing of the tower of Philosophy, like the
climbing of any would-be priest to reach, ultimately, theology.
Christine also tells Dame Philosophy that, forced to support herself, she turned to writing and the solitary
life, so much in contrast to her careless youth and the raising of children as a married woman. At this point
she regrets having lost opportunities of acquiring knowledge from the masters around her: “Et quel chose
est plus belle que savoir? Et quel chose est plus laide que ignorance messeant a homme? Si comme une fois
respondis a ung homme qui reprouvoit mon desir de savoir, disant qu’il n’appertenoit point a femme avoir
science, comme il en soit pou, lui dis que moins appartenoit a homme avoir ignorance, comme il en soit
beaucoup” [And what is lovelier than knowledge? And what is uglier than ignorance, so unseemly to man?
As I once replied to a man who reproved my desire for knowledge, saying that it ill suits a woman to be
learned since there are so few, I said to him that it is less seemly for a man to be ignorant as there is so much
73
of it]. Underlying her personal regret is a bitter consciousness of the di erent cultural expectations for
men and women—knowledge for men, beauty for women—and the irony that, after all, men have failed at
this attainment, whatever their greater opportunities for acquisition. Her awareness of this gender
di erence certainly propelled much of her writing: as her books circulate, by means of her presentation
copies o ered to princes and also sent by others, even to foreign princes, she describes this achievement as
deriving “plus … pour la chose non usage que femme escripse, comme pieça n’avenist, que pour la digneté
que y ssoit” [more … for the novelty of a woman who could write (since that had not occurred for quite some
74
time) than for any worth there might be therein]. She de nes that novelty as “venues de sentiment de
75
femme” [arising from the judgment of a woman].
In Cité des Dames, Christine postures as a woman reader confronting images of women as inferior,
negligent, and vicious, in a text written by a man—one Matheolus, in his Lamentations—but Christine might
as well have substituted Jean de Meun in his Rose as her example.
Mais la veue de ycellui dit livre, tout soit il de nulle auctorité, ot engendré en moy nouvelle pensee
qui st naistre en mon courage grant admiracion, pensant qu’elle peut estre la cause ne dont ce
peut venir que tant de divers hommes, clercs et autres, ont esté et sont si enclins a dire de bouche
p. 295 et en leurs traictiez et enscrips tant de deableries et de vituperes de femmes et de leurs
condicions, et non mie seulement un ou .ij., ne cestui Matheolus, qui entre les livres n’a aucune
reputacion et qui traicte en maniere de tru erie, mais generaument aucques en tous traictiez,
philosophes, poetes, tous orateurs desquieulx les noms dire seroit longue chose, semble que tous
parlent par une mesmes bouche et tous accordent une semblable conclusion, determinant les
meurs femenins enclins et plains de tous les vices.
[But just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it
happened that so many di erent men—and learned men among them—have been and are so
inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults
about women and their behavior. Not only one or two and not even just this Matheolus (for this
book had a bad name anyway and was intended as a satire) but, more generally, judging from the
treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators—it would take too long to mention

their names—it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. They all concur in one
conclusion: that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice.]
(Cité des Dames 1.1.1; Cara i and Richards, p. 42; Richards, pp. 3–4)
Here, persona “Christine” sinks into a deep depression. In her Dantesque dark wood of error, Christine
questions God’s Providence, revealing doubt of his goodness, and thus she follows in the footsteps of
previous poets and scholars who have similarly questioned God, including Boethius (early sixth century)
and Dante (early fourteenth century):
Mais non obstant que pour chose que je y peusse congnoistre tant longuement y sceusse viser et
esplucher, je ne apperceusse ne congneusse tieulx jugemens estre vraye encontre les natureulz
meurs et condicions femmenines, j’arguoye fort contre les femmes, disant que trop fort seroit que
tant de si renommez hommes, si sollempnelz clercs de tant hault et grant entendement, si
clervoyans en toutes choses comme il semble que ceulx fussent, en eussent parlé
mençongieusement et en tant de lieux que a peine trouvoye volume moral, quiqu’en soit l’aucteur,
que avant que je l’aye tout leu que je n’y voye aucuns chapitres ou certaines clauses au blasme
d’elles. Ceste seule raison, brief et court, me faisoit conclurre que, quoyque mon entendement pour
sa simplece et ingnorence ne sceust congnoistre les grans de aultes de moy mesmes et
p. 296 semblablement des autres femmes, que vrayment, toutevoye convenoit il que ainsi feust. Et
ainsi m’en rapportoye plus au jugement d’autruy que a ce que moy mesmes en sentoye et savoye.
En ceste pensee fus tant et si longuement fort chee que il sembloit que je fusse si comme
personne en letargie. Et me venoient audevant moult grant foison d’aucteurs a ce propos que je
ramentenoye en moy mesmes l’un apres l’autre comme se ce feust une fontaine ressourdant. Et en
conclusion de tout, je determinoie que ville chose st Dieux quant il forma femme, en
m’esmerveillant comment si digne ouvrier daigna oncques faire tant abominable ouvrage qui est
vaissel au dit d’iceulx si comme le retrait et herberge de tous maulx et de tous vices. Adonc moy
estant en ceste pensee, me sourdi une grant desplaisance et tristece de couraige, en desprisant moy
mesmes et tout le sexe femmenin si comme se ce fust monstre en nature.
[To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could
not see or realize how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behavior and
character of women. Yet I still argued vehemently against women, saying that it would be
impossible that so many famous men—such solemn scholars, possessed of such deep and great
understanding, so clear-sighted in all things, as it seemed—could have spoken falsely on so many
occasions that I could hardly nd a book on morals where, even before I had read it in its entirety, I
did not nd several chapters or certain sections attacking women, no matter who the author was.
This reason alone, in short, made me conclude that, although my intellect did not perceive my own
great faults and, likewise, those of other women because of its simpleness and ignorance, it was
however truly tting that such was the case. And so I relied more on the judgment of others than
on what I myself felt and knew. I was so trans xed in this line of thinking for such a long time that
it seemed as if I were in a stupor. Like a gushing fountain, a series of authorities, whom I recalled
one after another, came to mind, along with their opinions on this topic. And I nally decided that
God formed a vile creature when He made woman, and I wondered how such a worthy artisan could
have deigned to make such an abominable work which, from what they say, is the vessel as well as
p. 297 the refuge and abode of every evil and vice. As I was thinking this, a great unhappiness and sadness
welled up in my heart, for I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were
monstrosities in nature.]
(Cité des Dames 1.1.1; Cara i and Richards, pp. 42, 44; Richards, pp. 4–5)

But author Christine was certainly conscious of her injection of the personal into her mythographic text,
here especially, as the next, transformational example attests. At one point—a seminal one—shortly after
this dark scene, when the three ladies Raison, Droiture, and Justice appeared to her in a vision, narrator
Christine asks Dame Raison whether any creative women have ever invented new and important forms of
knowledge (Cité des Dames 1.33). Dame Raison replies with the respective scienti c contributions of four
signal women: Nicostrata (Carmentis), who was the daughter of Pallas; Minerva; Ceres; and Isis. Their great
knowledge contributed to the history of humanity, respectively, by means of the invention of the Latin
alphabet and grammar (1.33); armor making, the Greek alphabet, numbers, and wool and cloth making
(1.34); agriculture (1.35); and horticulture and Egyptian hieroglyphics (1.36). Only after Dame Raison’s
recitation of the last example, the myth of Isis (1.36)—who as Io initially su ered the depredations of
Jupiter’s desire and was transformed into a speechless heifer for protection from Juno, but later, as Isis,
became a wise goddess of Egypt—does persona “Christine” suddenly, fully remember by the next chapter’s
opening (1.3?) that she herself has written about Io’s transformation into Isis in the Othea, which signi es
that just as she herself may also metamorphose into something new, so also may she write something new
and better (the future Cité des Dames). In this personalized moment of understanding how greatly the
76
intelligence of women has contributed to the good of the world, she re-members (and recovers) herself.
She declares, “Dame, j’ay grant admiracion de ce que ouy dire vous ay que tant de bien soit venu au siecle
par cause d’entendement de femme” [My lady, I greatly admire what I have heard you say, that so much
good has come into the world by virtue of the understanding of women] (Cité des Dames 1.3?; Cara and
Richards, p. 178; Richards, p. 77). Dame Raison concludes with a tribute to the moral superiority of women
over men in this particular accomplishment of introducing the means to write: “Et a brief parler, tout le
bien qui vient de letres ne pourroit ester raconté, car ilz descripsent et font entendre et congnoistre Dieu, les
choses celestes, la mer, la terre, toutes personnes et toutes choses. Je te demande ou fu oncques homme qui
plus de bien feist?” [In short, all the good which comes from the alphabet and thus from books cannot be
p. 298 told; for books describe and facilitate the understanding and knowledge of God, celestial things, the sea,
the earth, all people, and all things. Where was there ever a man who did more good?] (Cité des Dames 1.3?;
Cara and Richards, p. 180; Richards, pp. ?8–?9).
An epiphanic moment for Christine’s persona, her recognition of this truth signals the equivalent Boethian
moment in the Consolatio Philosophiae (book 1, prose 2), when the depressed and defeated Boethius recalls,
in response to Lady Philosophy’s question to him of who he is, that he is a man, and rational, and has been
nurtured/instructed by Philosophy herself, which he, so silent, has forgotten: “‘Tune ille es,’ ait, ‘qui nostro
quondam lacte nutritus nostris educatus alimentis in virilis animi robur evaseras? … Agnoscisne me? Quid
taces? Pudore an stupore siluisti?’ … Cumque me non modo tacitum sed elinguem prorsus mutumque
vidisset, admovit pectori meo leniter manum et: ‘Nihil,’ inquit, ‘pericli est; lethargum patitur communem
inlusarum mentium morbum. Sui paulisper oblitus est; recordabitur facile, si quidem nos ante cognoverit’”
[“Are you the same man who was nourished with my milk, once fed on my diet, till you reached your full
manhood? … Do you recognize me? Why do you say nothing? Were you silent because you were ashamed or
stupe ed?” … Seeing that I was not merely silent, but altogether speechless and dumb, she gently laid her
hand on my breast and said: “He is in no real danger, but su ers only from lethargy, a sickness common to
deluded minds. He has for a little forgotten his real self. He will soon recover—he did, after all, know me
before”] (my emphasis). And after Philosophy removes the worldly concerns that blind him, he recognizes
her and nally is able to think and, then, speak (in book 1, prose 3). So also, the formerly de ated Christine
in Cité des Dames, through Dame Raison’s tutelage, remembers that she is a woman (and rational, after all).
It will be Dame Raison who deliberately reminds narrator Christine of what the author herself has written
about Io (and Isis) previously in the Othea: this echo of Io inscribing her name, still rational, despite her
accidental form in the shape of a cow, in Christine’s work becomes an example of the consequence of Isis’s
invention of script.

The author Christine’s triumph here is to insert herself into the text as another famous woman—une clere
femme little di erent from some of the other examples from Boccaccio and Orosius whom she will refashion
in the Cité des Dames—or as the image of herself in blue that adorns many of her presentation scenes to
77
royalty in some of her most important illuminated manuscripts. It is this sense of the personal that will
p. 299 fully dominate her own De mulieribus claris, the Cité des Dames. Framing her three-book history of women
with an allegorical vision in which she is confronted by aspects of her self and, indeed, of all women—the
qualities of reason, rectitude, and justice—she will also project herself into the individual ancient and
medieval women whose histories she recounts.
II. Reading Boccaccio: Learned Women, Sibyls, and “Women Made

Famous by Coincidence”
Christine de Pizan includes just three illustrations in her mythological Cité des Dames (1404–5?), although,
in her previous mythography, the Epistre Othea (1399–1400?), she had adorned this—her most copied text
—in the most impressive manuscripts, for example, in London, B.L. Harley 4431, with 101 illustrations of
male and female heroes and gods. In both works the nature of the text can be said to rationalize the choice of
subject in the illustration. For the Othea, an epistolary prosimetrum, Christine’s illustrations are
78
subordinated to her readings of a hundred classical fables—moral, allegorical, and anagogical —while they
79
also function as an instructional picture book for those less experienced readers. For the Cité des Dames, a
legendary history of women and allegorical vision, the frontispieces of the three books portray the female
allegorical personi cations characterized as Raison, Droiture, and Justice, who intervene personally during
Christine’s depression that ensues from her discovery of Matheolus’s scholarly misogyny in his
Lamentations. These three abstractions of faculties or virtues identi ed by Christine as “female” rationalize
the inclusion of each feminized fable or legend in the speci c book devoted to each and thereby implement
her organizational concept.
Certainly the polysemous readings of the Othea are also absent in the Cité des Dames and in its three primary
80
sources, which, along with what might be termed a yet-unedited fourteenth-century “Moralized Ovid,”
Christine revises with a rigorous hand. By “Moralized Ovid” I mean that in addition to the Ovide moralisé, a
speci c early fourteenth-century vernacular moralization of Ovid in both verse and prose edited by
Cornelius de Boer, there exists, for lack of a more precise term in this study, what I call the “Moralized
Ovid,” to distinguish it from the Latin Ovidius moralizatus of Pierre Bersuire. These manuscripts contain
some variation on what may be a French translation of the Ovidius moralizatus, perhaps like that of Chrétien
Legouais, or some variation on one of the earlier Latin moralizations of Ovid by Arnulf of Orleans or John of
p. 300 Garland. In this chapter the illuminated manuscripts containing such yet-unidenti ed “Moralized
Ovids” are Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek [Royal Library], Thottske 399.2; Lyon, Bibliothèque
Municipale de la Ville ?42; and London, B.L. Royal 1? E IV.
In addition to these “Moralized Ovids,” the three primary works that Christine reworks in the Cité des Dames
81
include, rst, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and its French translation, Des cleres femmes (1401); second,
his Italian Decameron, from which she borrows the story of Griselda, translated into Latin by Petrarch (13?3
82
and 13?4) and then retold by Philippe de Mézières in Livre de la Vertu du sacrement de mariage (1384–89);
and third, the Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII (416) of Paulus Orosius and its French translation, the
Livre d’Orose, or Orose en français, of which only the fourteenth-century version (and second redaction) was
83
known as Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The earlier French version of Livre d’Orose, or Orose en français,
was written between 1203 and 1230; to it the Faits des Romains was appended, which continues the history
from the viewpoint of Caesar. The later version, Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, includes a long summary of
84
the Trojan War and a prose Roman de Troie that ends with Caesar. Christine is believed to have read the
85
French versions and probably the Latin original; certainly copies were available in the library of Jean, duc

86
de Berry, and the royal library of the king. According to Maureen Curnow, however, Christine used the
Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César only for historical details.
It is necessary to note here that the sources for Boccaccio’s own treatment may not necessarily have been
literary, whether Latin or vernacular; those sources, or materials derived from them, may have traveled to
France from Italy and elsewhere independently of the speci c dissemination of manuscripts through the
book trade and translations. Speci cally, although Boccaccio’s catalogue of women may have been the “ rst
independent work on women of such a comprehensive scope,” there was an artistic and visual tradition in
place prior to Boccaccio’s written histories of famous men and women, De mulieribus claris and De casibus
virorum illustrium (1355–60, continued as late as 13?4), that may have come into play in the illustration of
87
the French translation of his work. Around 1330 Giotto decorated the Sala Major, or Baron’s Hall, of the
Castrum Novum in Naples for Robert of Anjou, with frescoes called Famous Men and Women of Ancient
88
Times. During the reign of Robert of Anjou the castle functioned as a center of culture for Giotto, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio. After the Angevins, the Aragons (especially Alfonso I) took up residence. Given that the
p. 301 frescoes were subsequently lost, the gures depicted on them (according to an alleged collection of
sonnets about them written anonymously around 1350) included Samson, Hercules, Solomon, Paris, Hector,
Achilles, Aeneas, Alexander, and Caesar, along with their “partners.” Although these famous couples do not
necessarily mirror any pairs found in Boccaccio’s own treatises, his original purpose in writing the history
of famous women in De mulieribus claris was to o er monitory advice indirectly to allegedly promiscuous
Queen Joanna of Naples about monogamy and virtuous love by antithesis (it was dedicated, in fact, to the
89
chaste, virtuous, and admirable Contessa Andrea degli Acciaiuoli).
Boccaccio, accordingly, begins his moralized history of famous women with the paradigmatic rst woman
and mother, Eve. In this beginning Boccaccio’s resembles Orosius’s universal history, which, while o ering
a genealogy of the world from the beginning in its three parts, on Asia, Europe, and Africa, begins with Eve.
Although Boccaccio follows Eve with Semiramis of Babylon and Saturn’s wife Ops (Opis or Rhea), he quickly
turns to deities Juno, Ceres, Minerva, Venus, Isis, and Europa and only then focuses on the Amazons and
Sibyls.
Christine’s reordering of mythological female gures in the rst book of Cité des Dames and the rst ve
chapters of the second book privileges their attributes of reason and then rectitude, in place of what
Boccaccio and Orosius o er as a literal chronology or universal “history” (see table 8). To essentialize the
positive importance of female di erence, Christine begins in her rst, large group not with Eve but with an
example of a strong rational woman, a leader of a nation, and a mother, Queen Semiramis of Assyria and
Babylon (1.15). Next, she continues with other valiant and bold queens or military leaders, among them
mythological and legendary gures such as the Amazons (1.16), beginning with Queen Thamaris (1.17),
Manalippe (Menalippe) and Ypolite (Hippolyta) (1.18), and Queen Panthassellee (Penthesilea) (1.19),
followed by Queen Cenobie (Zenobia) of the Palmyrenes 1.20) and Queen Arthemise (Artemesia) of Caria
(1.21). In this group Christine places other bold, nonclassical and nonmythological queens: Lilia, mother of
Theodoric (1.22); Fredegonde (Fredegund), queen of France (1.23); the virgin Camille (Camilla) (1.24);
Veronice (Berenice), queen of Cappadocia (1.25); and Roman virgin Cleolis (Cloelia) (1.26). She adds writers
and scholars Corni e (Corni cia) (1.28), the Roman Probe (Proba) (1.29), Sapho (Sappho) (1.30), Manthoo
(Manto) (1.31), and the queens Medee (Medea) and Circes (Circe) (1.32).
Table 8. Classical and Mythological Women in Christine de Pizan, Cité des Dames, Books 1–2
Queens, Warriors, and Amazons
1.15 Semiramis, queen of Nineveh, Babylon, and Assyria, and warrior
1.16 The Amazons

1.17 Thamiris, queen of Amazonia
1.18 Menalippe and Hippolyta
1.19 Penthesilea, queen of Amazonia
1.20 Zenobia, queen of the Palmyrenes
1.21 Artemisia, queen of Caria
1.22 Lilia, mother of Theodoric of Constantinople
1.23 Fredegund, queen of France
1.24 Camilla, daughter of the king of the Volscians
1.25 Berenice, queen of Cappadocia
1.26 Cloelia, the Brave Virgin of Rome
Wise Women, Inventors, and Artists
1.28 Cornificia, poet and scholar
1.29 Proba the Roman, poet and scholar
1.30 Sappho of Mytilene, poet and philosopher
1.31 Manto, daughter of Tiresias, expert in art of auguries and pyromancy
1.32 Medea of Colchis, expert in magical knowledge, and Circe, expert in knowledge of enchantments
1.33 Nicostrata (Carmentis), Greek scholar of literature and inventor of the Latin alphabet
1.34 Minerva Pallas of Greece, inventor of Greek script, wool gathering, cloth and armor making, making of olive oil,
wagons, and wind instruments
1.35 Ceres, queen of Sicily, inventor of cultivation
1.36 Isis, inventor of garden design and planting
1.39 Arachne, inventor of wool dyeing and tapestries, flax cultivation, and linen
1.40 Pamphile, inventor of silk
1.41 Thamaris and Irene of Greece and Marcia of Rome, painters
1.42 Sempronia the Roman
1.45 Gaia Cirilla, prudent queen of the Romans
1.46 Dido, prudent queen of Carthage
1.47 Ops/Opis, prudent queen of Crete and mother of the gods
1.48 Lavinia, prudent queen of the Laurentines

Sibyls and Prophets
2.1 The ten Sibyls
2.2S Sibyl Erythrea of Babylon
2.3 Sibyl Almathea of Cumae, Campania, Italy

2.5 Prophets Nicostrata (Carmentis), who forecast the coming of Rome, and Cassandra of Troy
Daughter Who Greatly Loved Her Father
2.9 Hypsipyle, daughter of Thoas, king of Lemnos
Wife Who Greatly Loved Her Husband
2.17 Argia, daughter of Adrastus and wife of Polynices
Overly Enamored Women
2.55 Dido, queen of Carthage, and Aeneas
2.56 Medea, daughter of the king of Colchis, and Jason the Argonaut
2.57 Thisbe and Pyramus of Babylon
2.58 Hero and Leander
Women Famous by Coincidence
2.61 Juno, Europa, Jocasta, Medusa, Helen, and Polyxena
Among the inventors who follow, she recasts female deities as mortals, such as Minerve (Minerva) (1.34),
p. 302 Ceres (1.35), and Ysys (Isis) (1.36),
p. 303
accompanied by Areine (Arachne) (1.39) and Pamphile (1.40) and the artists Thamar (Thamaris), Yrane
(Irene), and Marcia (1.41). Prudent and intellectual are Sampronye (Sempronia) the Roman (1.42), Roman or
Tuscan queen Gaye Cyrile (Gaia Cirilla) (1.45), Dido, queen of Carthage (1.46), Opis (Ops) (1.4?), and Lavinia
(1.48). At the opening of the second book, Christine continues her classical emphasis with a brief
examination of the ten wise female Sibyls, or prophets, Persia, Libica, Delphica, Cimeria, Eriphile, Samia,
Almathea, Hellespontia, Phrygica, and Tibertina, most particularly Erophile (Eriphile) and Almethea
(Almathea) (2.1–3).
Third and nally, Christine inserts a brief catalogue buried in the second book that lists well known classical
mythological women. She leaves till midway through book 2 various chapters on mythological women in
love, usually disastrously so, including Dido, Medea, Thisbe, and Hero (2.55–58), and one chapter on
mythological women famous by coincidence, usually because of their relationships with men, for which
p. 304 they are often blamed for any sexual misadventures and therefore usually prominently placed at the
forefront of legendary histories compiled by male authors—Juno, Europa, Jocasta, Meduse (Medusa),
Helaine (Helen), and Polixene (Polyxena) (2.61.1–7).
In my comparison of Christine with Orosius, Boccaccio, and the “Moralized Ovid,” in the interest of space I
will rst examine their opening gures—Christine’s Semiramis and the Amazons, Bocaccio’s Eve and
Semiramis, and Orosius’s genealogy and Semiramis. I will then move to selected examples of the classical
mythological women who appear in Christine’s rst book and the beginning of the second, as well as in
Boccaccio—Carmentis (Nicostrata) (the Cimmerian Sibyl), Minerva, and Ops—and to other examples of the
ten Sibyls, namely, Eriphile and Almathea. I will end with the rst three of the mythological women
“famous by coincidence” at the end of her second book but found also in Boccaccio and in the “Moralized
Ovid”—Juno, Europa, and Medusa.
Boccaccio’s rst four women—Eve, Semiramis, Ops, and Juno—not only appear in early fteenth-century

French manuscripts of Orosius and Boccaccio but crop up as well in the text of Cité des Dames, except for
Juno, who instead makes an appearance along the way in the text of Othea. Arachne is depicted in an
illustration from Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes and in the texts of both Othea and Cité des Dames; Europa is
found in the Ovide moralisé and Boccaccio illustrations, but in relation to Christine, only in the text of Cité
des Dames, not in Othea; and the Amazons can be found in the French illustrated Boccaccio as well as in the
texts of both Othea and Cité des Dames (as can the Sibyls and Medusa). Further, the paradigmatic female
gures in the rst book of Cité des Dames, up to book 2 and the Sibyls (2.1), follow in roughly approximate
order the gures included in De mulieribus claris, whose termination also parallels chapter 19 of the Middle
90
English translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, titled FortySix Lives. Interestingly, many of the rst
twenty- ve of those forty-six women in the Middle English translation are also represented in the text
and/or illuminations of several royal manuscripts of Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes, Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Orosius and the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, and, of course, Christine’s Othea and Cité des Dames,
suggesting that the reception of Boccaccio in the fteenth century was a ected by the circulation of the
texts and/or illuminations of Christine’s Othea and the power and in uence of manuscript copying (see
table 9). Here, of course, I am trying to show an earlier phenomenon: the impact of manuscript
p. 305 illuminations in the above-named works, most
p. 306
p. 307
especially in the earliest French translation of Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” on
Christine’s text of Cité des Dames only.
Table 9. Classical Mythological Women in Boccaccioʼs Forty-Six Lives (the Early Modern translation of De mulieribus claris), Royal
Manuscript Illuminations, and Christineʼs Othea and Cité des Dames, Books 1–2
Names in the first column refer to the women in the forty-six chapters of the early modern translation of a late
fi eenth-century print edition of Boccaccioʼs De mulieribus claris titled Forty-Six Lives (edited by Lord Morley); no. 11 is
equivalent to nos. 11–12 in Boccaccio, so from that point on the chapters in the translation are one o . Alternate
(better-known) spellings of those names are indicated by a solidus, with di erent but equivalent names in

parentheses. The italicized names signify the appearance of an illumination in one or more of the Royal MSS of various
works (see the list below). The second column refers to folio numbers, with shelf marks abbreviated (most from “Des
cleres femmes”). The third and fourth columns, if any, identify the figureʼs equivalent fable by its number in
Christineʼs Othea and/or its book and chapter in her Cité des Dames.
MSS: B.L. Royal 16 G V, Boccaccio, “Des cleres et nobles femmes” (ca. 1410)
B.L. Royal 17 D IV, Ovid, “Metamorphoses” / “Ovide moralisé”
B.L. Royal 20 C V, Boccaccio, “Des cleres et nobles femmes”
B.L. Royal 20 D I, [Orosius], “Histoire ancienne jusquʼa César”
B.L. Additional 25884, [Orosius], “Histoire universelle”
De mulieribus claris Chapter Morley; Brown MS Othea Fable Cité Bk. and
chap.
1. Eve Addl. 25884, 1r 1.9
2. Semiramis Addl. 25884, 80vr (Babel) 1.15
3. Opis/Ops (Rhea) Roy 16.g.v, 8r, 13r (Birth) 1.47
4. Juno Roy 16.g.v, 8v; Roy 20.c.v, 49

12r
5. Seres/Ceres 25 1.35
6. Minerva [and Arachne] Roy 20.c.v, 15r 1 1.34
7. Venus 6, 7, 22, 60, 65,

73
8. Isidis/Isis/ (Io) 25 1.36
9. Europa Roy 17.d.iv, 40v; Roy 20.c.v, 2.61

19r
10. Libia/Libya 15, 57
11. Marpesia and Lampedon (Amazons); Camilla Roy 16.g.v, 14r 15, 57 1.16
12. Thisbe; Erythrya/Erythraea (Eriphyle) 38 2.57
13. Ipermystra/Hypermnestra; Almathea Roy 16.g.v, 16v
14. Nyobe/Niobe; Cyrce/Circe 1.36
15. Ysiphile/Hypsipyle 54, 58 2.9
16. Medea; Mantho/Manto 1.32
17. Aragne/Arachne; Sapho/Sappho Roy 17.d.iv, 87v 64 1.39

18. Orithia/Orythia and Anthiobe/Antiope; Roy 16.g.v, 22v 15, 57 1.18
Carmenta/Carmentis
19. Erithrea Sibilla (Erythraea, Eriphyle); Roy16.g.v, 23r 100 2.1

Thamyris/Thamaris
20. Medusa; Thamyris/Thamaris 2 Roy16.g.v, 23v 5, 95 1.34, 2.61

21. Yole/Iole; Arthemisia/Artemesia Roy20.c.v, 34v
22. Dianira/Deianira
23. Yocasta/Jocasta 2.61
24. Almachea Sibilla /Almathea the Sibyl Roy16.g.v, 28r 2.3
25. Nycostrata/Nicostrata (Carmenta) Roy16.g.v, 28b 2.5
26. Procrys/Procris
27. Argia 2.17
28. Mantone/Manto 1.31
29. The Wy es of Mennon
30. Panthasilea/Penthesilea 15 1.19
31. Polixene/Polyxena 40 2.61
32. Heccuba/Hecuba 1.19
33. Cassandra 32 2.5
34. Clytemestra/Clytemnestra 34
35. Helene/Helen 43 2.41
36. Circes/Circe 98, 39 1.32
37. Camylla/Camilla 1.24
38. Penolepe/Penelope 2.41
39. Lavina/Lavinia 1.48
40. Dido 2.55, 1.16
41. Nicaula 1.13?
42. Pamphile/Pamphila 1.40
43. Rehea Ilia / Rhea Ilia
44. Gaya Cirylla / Gaia Cyrilla 1.45
45. Sapho/Sappho 1.30
46. Lucres/Lucretia 2.44, 2.64
The details of Christine’s textual descriptions of selected exemplary female gures in Cité des Dames, when
contrasted with those in Boccaccio’s original equivalent descriptions in De mulieribus claris (see table 10,
Famous Women in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris), will in many cases mirror the feminizing iconographic
details in the intermediary, or mediating, manuscript illuminations of his (and others’) translated
(vernacular) texts. Because these texts were intended for royal women (or non-Latin readers), the
importance of the visual and material context in their transmission is underscored by these details, which
alter the more conventional written Latin mythographic tradition. In these cases, Christine’s verbal
portraits of women and their equivalent manuscript images reveal a stark similarity to one another that

centers on the women’s individual superiority, whether because of their attributes of judgment,
intelligence, and creativity or because of their strength and skill, but rarely solely because of their beauty or
relationship with a powerful god or hero.
Table 10. Famous Women in Boccaccioʼs De mulieribus claris
All citations derive from Virginia Brownʼs edition and translation, Famous Women.
Chapter Figure/Reference Brief Description
1 Eve
“Our first mother”

“God brought forth a woman from Adamʼs side.”
Disobeying Godʼs law, she flattered her husband into eating the apple from the Tree of
Good and Evil
Discoverer of the art of spinning
Punished by the loss of Eden, the pain of childbirth, the death of children, and old age
2 Semiramis
Daughter of Neptune and famed queen of the Assyrians
Married her young son Ninyas a er her husband Ninusʼs death to protect the kingdom
Used feminine cunning to disguise herself as a man and lead her army to conquer
Ethiopia and India
Builder of many new cities
Suspected of incest with her own son, who had also changed gender roles
Inventor of the chastity belt
3 Opis/Ops (Rhea)
Daughter of Uranus and Vesta
Wife and sister of Saturn
“[S]aved her children Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto from a death planned by Saturn and
her brother Neptune.”
4 Juno
Famous daughter of Saturn and Opis raised in Samos
Twin and wife of Jupiter of Crete
Guardian of conjugal rights and protector of women in child birth
5 Ceres
Queen of Sicily; believed to be the daughter of Saturn and Cybele
Discoverer of agriculture and inventor of the plow and plowshare; thought to be goddess
of he harvest
Mother of Proserpina, fathered by her brother Jupiter, abducted by Orcus, king of the
Molossians
6 Minerva
Also known as Pallas; goddess of wisdom
Maker of weapons and body armor
Invented weaving and wind instruments; discovered woodworking, wool carding,
crushing olives to make olive oil, and numbers
7 Venus
Queen of Cyprus, also known as Venus Genetrix or Venus Verticordia
Daughter of Cyrus and Syria, or of Cyrus and Dione, or of Jupiter and Dione
Wife of Vulcan, king of Lemnos, and, a er Vulcan died, Adonis, king of Cyprus
Committed adultery with Mars
8 Isis, previously Io
“Goddess of Egypt” and sister of Phoroneus
Believed to be the daughter of the first king of the Argives, or of Prometheus
Married to Apis, son of Jupiter and Niobe
Thought by some to be the wife of Telegonus, father of Epaphus

9 Europa
Daughter of Phoenix; thought by others to be the daughter of Agenor
Carried o by Jupiter of Crete on a ship bearing a white bull as its standard
A er her rape, gave birth to Jupiterʼs (or Asteriusʼs) sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus,
Sarpedon
Europe named for her
10 Libya
Daughter of Epaphus and Cassiopeia and queen of Libya
Married Neptune and bore Busiris
11, 12 Marpesia/Martesia
Sisters and queens of the Amazons who became famous warriors a er the Scythians
and Lampedo
killed all their men
Amazons, while young, cut o their right breasts to better handle a bow
Boys produced during liaisons with neighboring nations were killed
Girls were raised to hunt, ride, and practice archery
13 Thisbe A Babylonian maiden whose love for Pyramus ended tragically
14 Hypermnestra
Daughter of Danaus, king of the Argives and father of 50 girls
Wife of Lynceus, son of Danausʼs brother, Aegisthus
Allows Lynceus to escape on her wedding night rather than killing him as instructed by
her father, who feared the oracle that he would die at the hands of one of his brotherʼs 50
sons
15 Niobe
Daughter of Tantalus, king of Phrygia, and sister of Pelops
Wife of Amphion, king of Thebes
Lost her sons and seven daughters when she complained to Manto, the daughter of
Tiresias, about their sacrificing to Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana, rather than to her
16 Hypsipyle
Queen of Lemnos and daughter of Thoas
Helped her father to flee when the women of the island killed all the men for their
tyranny
Loved by Jason during his voyage back to Colchis. A er bearing him two sons, they had
to be sent away
The women rising against her for this, she fled, was captured by pirates, given to
Lycurgus, king of Nemea, and made to watch his son, Opheltes
17 Medea
Daughter of Aeetes and Perse and queen of Colchis
Knowledgeable in herbs, poisons, and enchantments
In love with Jason of Thessaly, nephew of Pelias who was sent to steal the Golden
FleeceAided Jason in killing his uncle by starting a war against her own father; fled with
his wealth and Jason
When Jason fell in love with Creusa, daughter of King Creon of Corinth, Medea killed
Creusa and her own sons with Jason
18 Arachne An Asian woman of a common people, daughter of Idmon of Colophon and mother of
Closter
19–20 Orithya and Antiope

Queens of the Amazons, possibly sisters, famed aswarriors and for their virginity
Orithya was the daughter of Queen Marpesia
When Hercules took Antiopeʼs sisters, she failed to win her war against Greece

21 Erythraea
A famous learned Sibyl born in Babylonia before the Trojan War; or who flourished during
(Herophile)
the time of Romulus, king of the Romans
Skilled in prophecy, especially of the life and work of Christ, including the Resurrection
22 Medusa
Beautiful daughter of King Phorcus
Knowledgeable about agriculture, she was famed as a Gorgon
Captured by Perseus, on a boat from Achaia bearing the image of Pegasus, along with her
gold
Said to have slept with Neptune in Minervaʼs temple and had her hair changed to snakes
by the goddess
23 Iole
Daughter of King Eurytus of Aetolia and sweetheart of Hercules, who killed her father,
took his kingdom, and abducted her when the kingʼs promise to allow a marriage was
refused
Iole e eminized Hercules out of anger, which he allowed out of adoration for her
24 Deianira
Sister of Meleager and daughter of Oeneus, king of Aetolia
Wife of Hercules
Loved by the Centaur Nessus and nearly abducted, she is rescued by Hercules, who later
dies because of a magic cloak dipped in the dying Centaurʼs blood that she gives him,
which maddens the hero to hurl himself into the fire
25 Jocasta
Sister of Creon and wife of Laius, king of Thebes
Mother (and, later, wife) of Oedipus
26 Almathea (Deiphebe)
Daughter of Glaucus, born in Cumae, in Campania, Italy
A Sibyl and virgin
27 Nicostrata
Daughter of Ionius, king of Arcadia, and mother of Evander, who took her and others to
(Carmenta)
the Palatine Hill, on which Rome was built
Seer, scholar, and inventor of the Latin alphabet
28 Pocris
Daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, and wife of Cephalus, son of King Aeolus
A greedy and jealous woman, she followed him to see if he was cheating on her and was
killed by her husband during a hunt when he thought she was an animal
29 Argia
Greek descendant of the rulers of Argus; daughter of King Adrastus
Wife of Polynices, the son of King Oedipus of Thebes
Gave Eurydice, wife of seer Amphiaraus, an unlucky Theban necklace, which led to his
discovery in hiding and catalyzed an attack against Thebes
A er Argiaʼs husband died in exile, found his body and burned it
30 Manto
Daughter of Tiresias, the most famous soothsayer in Thebes
Expert in pyromancy and magic arts
Mother of Mopsus the soothsayer
A er Creon conquered Thebes, she either fled to Asia or came to Italy and founded
Mantua

31 Wives of the Minyans
A er the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, married the Minyans who accompanied him
When the Minyans plotted to take over Lacedaemon and were captured, their wives
switched clothes with them
32 Penthesilea Amazon queen
33 Polyxena Daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy; loved by Achilles, son of Peleus
34 Hecuba
Queen of the Trojans and wife of King Priam
Daughter of Dymas, son of Aon; alternatively, daughter of Cisseus of Thrace
Mother of Hector, Cassandra, and many others
Mother-in-law to Andromache; grandmother of Astyanax, son of Andromache
35 Cassandra Daughter of King Priam; possessed the art of prophecy
36 Clytemnestra
Daughter of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and of Leda; sister of Castor, Pollux, Helen
Queen of Mycenae, married to Agamemnon
Lover of Aegisthus, son of Thyestes and Pelopia, who helped murder her husband
37 Helen
Wife of Menelaus, king of Lacedaemon, and famous for her beauty
Loved by the Trojan prince Paris, which led to the Trojan War
38 Circe
“Daughter of the Sun,” her mother was the nymph Perse, fathered by Oceanus
Married to Picus, son of Saturn, but her son Telegonus was fathered by Ulysses
39 Camilla
Daughter of Metabus and Casmilla, she was abandoned by her father a er her mother
died, became skilled with the spear and bow
Dedicated herself to the service of Diana
Queen of the Volscians
40 Penelope Daughter of King Icarus, wife of Ulysses, and mother of Telemachus, known for her
constant virtue during Ulyssesʼs long absence
41 Lavinia
Queen of Laurentum
Descendant of Saturn, child of King Latinus and Amata
Wife of Aeneas, the Trojan hero, and mother of Julius Silvus, Aeneasʼs posthumous son
42 Dido
Also known as Elissa and sister to Sychaeus
Married Acerbas, who was killed by Pygmalion
Founder and queen of Carthage
43 Nicaula
Queen of Ethiopia and Egypt; also known in the Bible as Sheba
Moral, learned, especially in natural science
Visited King Solomon of Jerusalem, renowned for his wisdom
44 Pamphile Greek woman, a daughter of Platea, who was first to pick cotton wool, comb it, and spin
it: inventor of the art of weaving

45 Rhea Ilia
A Vestal virgin descended from the Silvii, descendants of Aeneas, and daughter of King
Numitor of Alba
Gave birth to her illegitimate sons Romulus and Remus (founders of Rome); buried alive
for her concupiscence
46 Gaia Cyrilla Wife of King Tarquinius Priscus, king of Rome
47 Sappho Famed poet of Lesbos
48 Lucretia The wife of Collatinus; loved by Sextus, son of Superbus
49 Tamyris Queen of Scythia and widow who killed Cyrus of Asia when his army attacked her and the
army as well
50 Leaena A Greek prostitute who displayed “manly strength” during torture for alleged complicity
with a tyrantʼs murderers
51 Athaliah
Daughter of Ahab, king of Israel and Queen Jezabel
Queen of Jerusalem and wife to Jehoram
52 Cloelia Roman maiden “[h]anded over … as a hostage of peace to Porsenna, king of the
Etruscans”
53 Hippo A Greek woman captured by enemy sailors who drowned herself
54 Megullia Dotata Roman noblewoman called “Dowry Girl”
55 Veturia Roman matron and mother of Gnaeus Marcius (Coriolanus)
56 Tamaris Daughter of Micon and a female artist in Greece
57 Artemisia/Arthemisia Queen of Caria and wife of Mausolus, king of Caria
58 Virginia Virgin daughter of Virginius, notable for her virtue
59 Irene Daughter of the painter Cratinus Believed to be Greek and a famous painter
60 Leontium Greek woman who possessed extraordinary intellectual powers
61 Olympias
Daughter of Neoptolemus, king of the Molossians, and queen of Macedonia, wife of Philip
Her son Alexander thought to have been the product of adultery, Philip repudiated her
and married Cleopatra, daughter of Alexander of Epirus
Believed to have killed her husband, in company with her son, through Pausanius
So slandered Cleopatra that the new wife hung herself
62 Claudia A Vestal virgin known for her love of her father
63 Virginia
Wife of Lucius Volumnius and daughter of Aulus
A famous Roman matron known for her purity
64 Flora
Nymph and prostitute who married Zephyrus, the wind
Goddess of flowers
Protective legend invented for her as “Clora”
66 Marcia
Daughter of Varro, remained a virgin all her life

Famous for intellect and artistic ability
67 Sulpicia
Daughter of Servius Paterculus and wife of Fulvius Flaccus
Known for her preservation of her chastity
68 Harmonia Daughter of Gelon of Sicily, famous for her sense of duty
69 Busa of Canosa di
Also known as Paulina
Puglia
Famous for her generosity
70 Sophonisba
Queen of Numidia; married to Syphax but loved by Masinissa
Known for her harsh death
71 Theoxena Daughter of Herodicus, prince of Thessaly, and sister of Archo; wife of Poris
72 Bernice Also known as Laodice, married to Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia; famous for avenging
her sonʼs death
73 The Wife of Orgiago Married the Chie ain of the Galacians
74 Tertia Aemilia Married to Scipio Africanus the Elder
75 Dripetrua Daughter of Mithridates the Great, born with a double row of teeth; queen of Laodicea
76 Sempronia Daughter of Gracchus and sister of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus; wife of Scipio Aemilianus
77 Claudia Quinta A Roman woman, known for extraordinary boldness
78 Hypsicratea Queen of Pontus and wife of Mithridates the Great Known for devotion to her husband
79 Sempronia A Roman woman, “[v]ersatile and quick-witted”
81 Julia
Daughter of Julius Caesar
“Inviolable love and sudden death added much luster to her reputation.”
82 Portia
Daughter of Cato Uticensis
“[S]he fully inherited her fatherʼs bravery and perseverance.”
83 Curia Wife of Quintus Lucretius: “A splendid example in the ancient world of extraordinary
constancy and absolute fidelity”
84 Hortensia Daughter of Quintus Hortensius, known for her eloquence
85 Sulpicia Wife of Truscellio, famous for her love
86 Cornificia A poet during Octavianʼs reign

87 Mariamme
Daughter of Aristobulus, king of the Jews, and Queen Alexandra; queen of Judaea
Famous for her beauty and thought to be of divine likeness
Sister of Aristobulus
88 Cleopatra
Queen of Egypt and daughter of Ptolemy Dionysius, with a “[u]niversal reputation for

greed, cruelty, and lust”
Also known for her lineage and beauty
89 Antonia Daughter of Mark Antony the triumvir
90 Agrippina Wife of Germanicus and mother of Caligula
91 Paulina A Roman woman known for her beauty and for being a model of virtue
92 Agrippina Also known as Julia Agrippina; mother of the emperor Nero
93 Epicharis A freedwoman manifesting “[m]anly fortitude and a noble spirit”
94 Pompeia Paulina Senecaʼs wife
95 Sabina Poppaea Neroʼs wife, wooed by Orthro, a companion of her husband
96 Triaria Wife of Vitellius and possessed great “ferocity”
97 Proba Wife of Adelphus and possessed great knowledge of literature
98 Faustina Augusta Daughter of Emperor Antonius Pius and wife of Marcus Antoninus; was deified a er death
99 Symiamira A Greek woman from Emesa famous for her role in the Senate and the fame of her son,
Varius Elagabalus
100 Zenobia
Queen of Palmyra and descended from the Ptolemies
Known for her virtue and scornful of womanly pursuits; lived in the forests and hunted
from her youth
Married Odaenathus and joined him in his desire to conquer the Eastern Empire by
donning armor
Ruled her extensive empire in her sonsʼ name while they were young
Learned Latin, Egyptian, and Greek
Only had sex with her husband to procreate
Eve, Semiramis, Queen of Assyria and Babylon, and the Amazons in Orosius
and Boccaccio
Although the gure of Eve is missing in the Latin text of Orosius’s Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII—
p. 308 despite the appearance of an Adam

p. 309
p. 310
p. 311
p. 312
p. 313
p. 314
p. 315
p. 316
p. 317
as “ rst man” in book 1, chapter 1—she is rst in Boccaccio’s history of women, De mulieribus claris, as if to
set the negative tone for what follows.
Boccaccio portrays Eve as a woman “maturam viro” (ripe for marriage) for Adam, and “immortalem et
rerum dominam atque vigiliantis iam viri sociam, et ab eodem Evam etiam nominatam” [the immortal
mistress of nature and the companion of the man who, now awake, named her Eve] (De mulieribus claris,
chap. 1; Brown, pp. 14–15). Further, by privileging her physical beauty and suggesting that women
themselves perpetuate such privileging by men, Boccaccio sets the tone for his entire history of women:
Preterea hanc arbitrari possumus corporea formositate mirabilem. Quid enim dei digito factum est,
quod cetera non excedat pulchritudine? Et quamvis formositas hec annositate peritura sit aut,
medio in etatis ore, parvo egritudinis inpulsu, lapsura, tamen, quia inter precipuas dotes suas
mulieres numerant, et plurimum ex ea glorie, mortalium indiscreto iudicio, iam consecute sunt,
non super ue inter claritates earum, tanquam fulgor precipuus et apposita est et in sequentibus
apponenda veniet.
[We can imagine, besides, how marvelously beautiful her body was, for whatever God creates with
p. 318 his own hand will certainly surpass everything else in beauty. Beauty, to be sure, perishes with
old age, and even in the ower of youth it may vanish from a slight attack of illness. Yet, since
women count beauty among their foremost endowments and have achieved, owing to the
super cial judgment of mortals, much glory on that account, it will not seem excessive to place
beauty here and in the following pages as the most dazzling aspect of their fame.]
(Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, chap. 1; Brown, pp. 14–15)
In other words, the mater omnium (mother of us all), the “vetustissima parens” (most ancient of mothers),
is for Boccaccio less the agent of human redemption—of the felix culpa, the “happy fall”—than the cause of
our obsession with female physical beauty. The rest of Boccaccio’s rst chapter is concerned with the story
of Eve’s ckleness, folly, and desire for glory that led to the mutual fall and subsequent su ering of Adam
and Eve, unrelieved by hope of any later redemption and thereby implying her natural inferiority.
In contrast, Christine in the Cité des Dames argues explicitly for Eve’s equality with Adam as signi ed by her
birth from Adam’s rib, as in the Epistre au Dieu d’Amours, where she establishes Eve’s creation as rst,
before that of Adam, the origin of feminine authority and its moral superiority made canonical by priority of
91
creation. Christine imagines her creation in the Terrestrial Paradise as the image of God: in the words of
Dame Raison,

La endormi Adam et de l’une de ses costes, en signi ance que elle devoit estre coste lui comme
compaigne, et non mie a ses piez comme serve, et aussi que il l’amast comme sa propre char,
forma le corps de la femme. … Je ne scay se tu le nottes—elle fu formee a l’image de Dieu. O!
comment ose bouche mesdire de vaissel qui porte si noble emprainte? … [L]aquelle ame Dieu crea
et mist aussi bonne, aussi noble en toute pareille en corps femenin comme ou masculin.
[There Adam slept, and God formed the body of woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she
should stand at his side as a companion and never lie at his feet like a slave, and also that he should
love her as his own esh. … I don’t know if you have already noted this: she was created in the
image of God. How can any mouth dare to slander the vessel which bears such a noble imprint? …
p. 319 God created the soul and placed wholly similar souls, equally good and noble[,] in the feminine
and in the masculine bodies.]
(Cité des Dames 1.9.2; Cara i and Richards, p. 78; Richards, pp. 23–24)
Christine acknowledges the superiority of Eve’s creation from Adam’s body in two senses: the rst,
chronologically, in that she was created as crown of creation, after Adam as the rst man, superior to all
beasts; and the second, ontologically, in that she was created not from mud—even if gathered from the eld
of Damascus—but rather from informed matter, that is, Adam’s body. Dame Raison declares: “Et en quel
place fu elle faicte? En paradis terrestre. De quelle chose fut ce? De vil matiere? Non, mais de la tres plus
noble creature qui oncques eust esté cree: c’estoit le corps de l’omme de quoy Dieu la st” [In what place
was she created? In the terrestrial Paradise. From what substance? Was it vile matter? No, it was the noblest
substance which has ever been created: it was from the body of man from which god made woman.] (Cité des
Dames 1.9.2; Cara and Richards, p. 78; Richards, p. 24). Christine also notes that, contrary to “Du secret
des femmes,” on gynecology and translated in the mid-fourteenth to the fteenth centuries from the
92
Secreta mulierum (The secrets of women) (inaccurately attributed to Albertus Magnus, 1193?–1280), there
is no shame, impotence, or weakness (meaning, no original sin) in Nature’s creation of the female body
(Cité des Dames 1.9.2; Cara and Richards, p. 76; Richards, p. 22).
Curiously, an illustration of exemplary mother Eve does appear, along with Adam, in a manuscript of the
French translation of Orosius, one that more closely resembles her treatment at the hands of Christine. This
“Histoire universelle” suggests that while Adam slept, Eve awakened— literally emerging from Adam’s side
at the invocation of God (see gure 20, creation of Eve, London, B.L. Additional 25884, fol. 2r). The
illustrator has made the two gures, Eve and Adam, appear hermaphroditic—two in one, joined together.
What is singularly feminized in the illumination is the empowerment conveyed by the superior position of
Eve—direct, upright—which mirrors the direct and upright vertical posture of God as he creates her at the
end of Creation, after having made the stars, sun, moon, sh, birds, animals—and man. A very di erent but
equally feminized illustration, unlike the text of Boccaccio’s “Des femmes renommees,” in Paris, B.N. fr.
12420, fol. 6v, shows Eve as a lady in a garden being tempted by the serpent—she lifts the apple to her lips—
while an angel stands poised behind her with a sword (see gure 21).
20.

Creation of Eve. French trans. of Orosius, “Histoire universelle.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Additional 25884, fol.
2r.
21.
Temptation of Eve by the serpent. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr. 12420,
fol. 6v (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
p. 320
p. 321 The Orosius (“Histoire universelle”) manuscript illustration of Eve serves as a key to what follows in
Christine’s text, the feminized treatment of Semiramis and the Amazons: the strength and enterprising
nature of Semiramis as a queen and military leader allow her to place her duty to her nation above her desire
as a woman and her maternal obligations in order to o set the absence of the missing king, husband, and
father. But Orosius’s text barely mentions Semiramis, whereas Boccaccio’s stresses her deceit and
lustfulness. Irene Samuel, who has traced the di erence between medieval and antique portraits of
Semiramis, notes that she is identi ed as lussuria only in the Middle Ages, as in Dante and Boccaccio,
whereas in antiquity she was known for her city building and martial strategy. Apparently the Church
93
Fathers altered her legend by adding a Christian polemic, which the Middle Ages inherited. In Orosius’s
discussion of Babylon, Samiramis of Assyria (as he calls her) provides a lead-in to an extended comparison
of the beginnings of Babylonia and Rome and a contrast between the decline of the one empire and the rise
94
of the other, along with the preservation of the Christian religion. Samiramis appears in Orosius’s history
after the death of her husband, Ninus, who has conquered Babylon, primarily because it is she who
establishes Babylon as the capital of the kingdom. For this reason, Orosius notes, all ancient histories begin
with Ninus, just as all histories of Rome begin with Procas the Mede, great-grandfather of Romulus, who
95
came to rule when Ninus’s kingdom was passed to the Medes. And Boccaccio’s Latin account focuses his
96
moralistic criticism on Semiramis, although he initially praises her spirit, skill, and intelligence.
Semiramis sleeps with her son Ninyas, who has nearly the same name as his father, and takes up armor to
battle for the autonomy of the kingdom; she acts with “astu … muliebri” (feminine cunning) to trick her

husband’s army by pretending to be her son and cross-dressing as a man, thereafter decreeing that every
woman should do the same (De mulieribus claris, chap. 2; Brown, pp. 18–19). Then Boccaccio marks her as
libidinous: “Nam cum, inter cetereas, quasi assidua libidinis prurigine, ureretur infelix” [Like others of her
sex, this unhappy female was constantly burning with carnal desire], so much so that she gave herself to
men, including her own handsome son, as if their sexes had been exchanged (“qui, uti mutasset cum matre
sexum, in thalamis marcebat ocio, ubi hec adversus hostes sudabat in armis” [{who,} though he had
changed sex with his mother, … languished idly in bed while she exerted herself in battle against her
97
enemies]) (De mulieribus claris, chap. 2; Brown, pp. 22–23). Finally, Semiramis invents chastity belts for
p. 322 her women because she fears they will seduce her son, who (according to some reports) eventually kills
her out of shame or fear for the children who might be born from their union (De mulieribus claris, chap. 2;
Brown, pp. 24–25).
Compare the two pejorative versions of Semiramis in the texts of Orosius and Boccaccio with that of
Christine in Cité des Dames and the illumination by the Orosius illustrator, who concur on her bravery and
strength, although only Christine, of the three writers, omits any mention of subterfuge in her actions. For
Christine, Semiramis is a “femme de moult grant vertu en fait de fort et vertueux courage es entreprises et
excercice du fais des armes” [a woman of very great strength—in fact, of strong and powerful courage in
enterprises and undertakings in deeds of arms], a sister of Jupiter, and daughter of Saturn (Cité des Dames
1.15.1; Cara and Richards, p. 106; Richards, p. 38). Christine’s Semiramis only takes up arms to govern her
kingdom; she rebuilds Babylon, “qui avoit esté fondee par Nambroth et les giayans” [which had been
founded by Nimrod and the giants] (Cité des Dames 1.15.1; Cara and Richards, p. 108; Richards, p. 39). While
Christine agrees with Boccaccio when he says that Semiramis takes up arms “virili animo” (with manly
spirit), “quasi vellet ostendere, non sexum, sed animum imperio oportunum” [almost as if she wanted to
show that spirit, not sex, was needed to govern] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 2; Brown, pp. 18–19), Christine
leaves out Boccaccio’s description of her cross-dressing and subterfuge.
The positive image of Semiramis in the Orosius manuscript of “Histoire universelle”—an illustration that
Christine may have known—reveals a gure identi ed clearly as female, neither male nor cross-dressed,
seated in a chair on the left watching her young son Ninyas play (in Boccaccio, she stands) (see gure 22,
Semiramis, “Histoire universelle,” London, B.L. Additional 25884, fol. 80r). The scene is duplicated in an
illustration from a French translation of Boccaccio except that a standing Semiramus looks back at the son
she protects while soldiers crowd around her and a heap of armor lies at her feet (see gure 23, Semiramis,
Boccaccio’s “Des femmes renommees,” Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 8r).
22.

Semiramis, queen of Assyria and Babylonia, holding a sword, with son Ninus. French trans. of Orosius, “Histoire universelle.” ©
The British Library Board. London, B.L. Additional 25884, fol. 80r.
23.
Semiramis with Ninyas. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans.
Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 8r (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
In the rst (Orosius) illustration, Semiramis holds a sword in her lap, but instead of appearing in the armor
she must have worn to battle the rebels, she is depicted in a long dress, inside a room, with soldiers behind
her—that is, inscribed in the margins—as if she is protecting her son from them or turning her back on
them. Like the Orosius illuminator, Christine levels no criticism against Semiramis: “[Semiramis] avoit bien
si grant et si hault courage et tant amoit honneur” [{Semiramis} had such a great and noble heart and so
p. 323 deeply loved honor] (Cité des Dames 1.15.2; Cara
p. 324
and Richards, p. 110; Richards, p. 40). Christine also justi es what had appeared to other chroniclers as
incest (or unnatural desire) as a practical strategy to protect her kingdom: “[E]lle prist a mari un lz que
elle avoit eu de Ninus son seigneur” [she took as husband her son she had had with Ninus her lord] (Cité des
Dames 1.15.2; Cara and Richards, p. 108; Richards, p. 40). In Christine’s textual portrait, Semiramis is
alone, without other women; Christine justi es her actions rationally: “[E]lle ne vouloit mie que en son
empire eust autre dame couronnee que elle, laquelle chose eust esté se son lz eust espousee autre dame;
l’autre estoit qu’il lui sembloit que nul autre homme n’estoit digne de l’avoir a femme fors son propre lz”
[{S}he wanted no other crowned lady in her empire besides herself, which would have happened if her son
had married another lady; and second, it seemed to her that no other man was worthy to have her except her

own son] (Cité des Dames 1.15.2; Cara and Richards, p. 108; Richards, p. 40).
Immediately following this positive chapter on Semiramis in Christine’s Cité des Dames is one glorifying the
martial Amazons (Cité des Dames 1.16.1), which grows out of the previous discussion naturally, given
Semiramis’s taking up of arms to aid her nation. In the cases of both Semiramis and the Amazons the
98
women turn to war by necessity—because they have been left to rule their nations without men. In their
written responses, rst Orosius and then Boccaccio hint that the Amazons are an imbalanced nation because
they lack male leadership. However, the illustrations of the Amazons in both the Orosius and the earliest
Boccaccio translation manuscripts (especially B.N. fr. 12420), by means of the corrective notion of gender
balance in their postures and costumes and, in relation to the queens, by means of their interest in
negotiation and matters of state, bear out Christine’s more sympathetic treatment in her text of women left
to shoulder the responsibility of self-government.
For Orosius, the Amazons (who occupy a region near the Caspian Mountains, according to Historiarum
adversum paganos libri VII 1.2.50) not only take up arms for self-protection and for vengeance against the
Egyptians for the death of their husbands but also because these wives are “exilio ac viduitate permotae”
(aroused by their exile and widowhood); they kill all the surviving husbands “ut omnibus par ex simili
condicione animus eret” [that there might be a common incentive for all from a like condition]
(Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII 1.15; Zangemeister, p. 65; Deferrari, p. 35). Eventually, Alexander the
Great subjugates an army of three hundred Amazons led by Thalestris, or Minothea (who desires to conceive
a child by him) (Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII 3.18.5).
p. 325 In De mulieribus claris, Boccaccio, who notes that the rst Amazons, Martesia and Lampedo, identify
themselves as daughters of Mars, harshly views their warlike activity as motivated by vengeance for the loss
of their husbands (De mulieribus claris, chaps. 11–12). And he adds that it is also for their military prowess
that famed Queen Orithya, daughter of Martesia, and Orithya’s sister (and virgin co-queen) Antiope were
especially known, for which reason Hercules was assigned by King Eurystheus the obtaining of Orithya’s
girdle as his most di cult Labor. In the process, Hercules also seizes Hippolyta, Orithya’s sister, for
Theseus, for which act Orithya vows revenge on the Athenians, but she loses in battle and returns home (De
mulieribus claris, chaps. 19–20).
In contrast, Christine’s treatment in Cité des Dames sympathetically describes the plight of the Scythian
women after the loss of their husbands and their consequent self-mutilation in order to defend their nation
and themselves under the blazon of “the Amazons,” an activity they learn to do well. After war has taken all
their men, Lampheto and Marpasia in Scythia create the Amazons (the Breastless Ones) by cutting o the
left breasts of the noble women so that they might better carry a shield and, as well, the right breasts of the
commoners so they might shoot a bow more e ectively: “[E]lles maintendroient leurs seignouries sans
subjeccion d’ommes” [{T}hey would maintain their dominion by themselves without being subject to men]
(Cité des Dames 1.16.1; Cara and Richards, p. 110; Richards, p. 41). Once Lampheto and Marpasia (the rst
queens of Scythia) have conquered much of Europe and Asia and have passed away, Thamaris eventually
comes to rule, and she and her Amazons defend themselves against and conquer Cyrus, king of Persia, “par
lequel sens, cautelle et force” [{t}hanks to her sense, prudence, and strength] (Cité des Dames 1.17.2; Cara
and Richards, p. 121; Richards, p. 42).
The story of how Thamaris ambushes Cyrus and his men is lovingly retold in Cité des Dames 1.18.3, along
with the story of how Orithyia, mother of Penthesilea (who mourns the loss of Hector in Othea), acts
aggressively only in defense of her country. After Orithyia learns that the Greeks, “sans de er” (without
provocation), had come at night to kill unexpectedly everyone they met, “bien leur cuide chier vendre son
maltalent” [{s}he resolved that they would pay dearly for her displeasure] and summons her women to
arms (Cara and Richards, p. 118; Richards, p. 45). Amazons Menalippe and Hippolyta arm themselves with

lances, elephant-hide shields (around their necks), and “courans destriers” (swift chargers) so that they
p. 326 can charge the Greeks—in particular, Hercules and Theseus—and shame them by unhorsing them (Cité
des Dames 1.18.4; Cara and Richards, p. 118; Richards, p. 46).
What do the illustrations reveal? The image of the Amazons jousting in Orosius’s “Histoire universelle”
di erentiates them from the male knights by their long dresses as they ride astride (see gure 24, London,
B.L. Additional 25884, fol. 104r). In the illumination of early Amazons Marpasia and Lampeto in one royal
Boccaccio manuscript of Des cleres femmes, the warriors appear not just as equals but as superiors: on the
right side of the illumination, they wear feminized armor (still with long skirts) and are taller and more
imposing than the male gures opposite (see gure 25, London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 14r). However, in the
earliest manuscript of the Boccaccio translation, immediately following this image, the queens depicted in
the upper-right column image are more regally attired and seated and appear to be discussing matters of
state (or negotiating) rather than ghting battles (see gure 26, Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 18vb).
24.
Amazons jousting. French trans. of Orosius, “Histoire universelle.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Additional 25884, fol.
104r.
25.

Early Amazons Marpasia and Lampeto. Boccaccio, “Des cleres femmes.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Royal 16G V,
fol. 14r.
26.
Amazons Marpasia and Lampeto. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr. 12420,
fol. 18vb (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
p. 327
p. 328 The later Amazonian queens famed for their prowess—Ortygia and Antiope (Antiope served with, or was
succeeded by, Ortygia as queen) occupy the central position in the illumination, are crowned and appear
with shield, horse, armor, and long dresses but, as ladies, ride sidesaddle; in the margins of the picture can
be seen what appears to be their army (see gure 27, Ortygia and Antiope, Boccaccio, “Des cleres femmes,”
London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 22v). But the image in the earliest, anonymous translation of Des cleres
femmes, in which Ortygia, daughter of Marpesia, in a long dress and astride and accompanied by other
Amazons jousts with a knight in armor, resembles much more the previous Orosian illumination of gure
24, Amazons jousting with male knights (see gure 28, Boccaccio, “Des femmes renommees,” Paris, B.N. fr.
12420, fol. 29r).
27.

Ortygia and Antiope, the first Amazon queens. Boccaccio, “Des cleres femmes.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Royal
16 G V, fol. 22v.
28.
Ortygia, daughter of Marpesia, jousts astride and in a dress. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French
trans. Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 29r (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
Finally, the Amazon Thamaris, later shown killing Persian king Cyrus (who had tried to ambush the
Amazons) in Boccaccio’s “Des cleres femmes” (London, B.L. Royal 16G V, fol. 59r), dominates the
illumination (not shown): in her long skirts and crown she holds her sword high; the men she has
conquered appear as small, crouching, humbled, while Cyrus kneels atop his slain men.
Learned Women and Sibyls
If Boccaccio in De mulieribus claris displaces contributions to civilization by learned women by means of an
emphasis similar to that in his treatment of Semiramis, that is, in relation to their gender roles, either as the
lovers or wives of men, Christine, in contrast, demonstrates the skills, knowledge, and wisdom of women
who have founded civilizations in Cité des Dames 1.30.1–1.47.1. How Christine reinterprets these women as

founding gures is bolstered by detail in the illuminations for the 1402 translation of Boccaccio, “Des
99
femmes renommees.” Among those portrayed are the Greek poet Sappho, who contributes through great
learning (Cité des Dames 1.30.1–2); the Greek philosopher Leontium, through understanding of philosophy
(Cité des Dames 1.30.3); the prophet and Cimmerian Sibyl, Carmentis (in Boccaccio, Carmenta), or
Nicostrata, through the invention of alphabets (Cité des Dames 1.33.2, 1.37.1, 1.38.4, 2.5.1); the goddess
Minerva, through the invention of armor and the skill to make it (Cité des Dames 1.34.1, 1.38.3, 1.38.5); and
the goddess Ops, wife of Saturn, also identi ed with Othea, who o ers prudence, or wisdom incarnate (Cité
des Dames 1.47.1, 2.61.2).
Christine in the Cité des Dames promotes wise Sappho, with her “hault entendement” (profound
p. 329 understanding) and knowledge of the liberal arts
p. 330
and sciences, as a scholar and writer (Cité des Dames 1.30.1; Cara and Richards, p. 158; Richards, p. 6?),
whereas, in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, Sappho, girl of Lesbos, is primarily a poet, not a scholar. There
is nothing mentioned whatsoever about her great philosophy or learning, and Boccaccio ends by telling the
story of her unhappy love for a young man who spurned her (chap. 47). Boccaccio merely features her
climbing Parnassus and joining the Muses, until, “laureo pervagato nemore in antrum usque, Apollinis
evasit et, Castalio proluta latice, Phebi sumpto plectro” [wandering through the laurel grove, she arrived at
the cave of Apollo, bathed in the Castalian spring, and took up Phoebus’ plectrum] (De mulieribus claris,
chap. 47; Brown, pp. 192–93)—that is, she apparently composes and plays music. Christine, however, as an
ironic means of understanding Sappho’s contribution, purports to cite as her authority Boccaccio himself,
in the allegory of the seven liberal arts in which Sappho appears as a hero:
Sapho, admonnestee de vif engin et d’ardent desir par continuel estude entre les hommes bestiaulx
et sans sciences, hanta la haultece de Pernasus la montaigne, c’est assavoir d’estude parfaite. Par
hardement et osement beneuré s’acompaigna entre les Muses non ref-fusee, c’est assavoir entre
les ars et les sciences, et s’en entra en la forest de lauriers, plaine de may, de verdure, de eurs de
diverses couleurs, odeurs de grant souefveté, et de plusieurs herbes ou reposent et abitent
Grammaire, Logique et la noble Rethorique, Geometrie, Arismetique. Et tant chemin a qu’elle vint
et arriva en la caverne et parfondeur de Appolin, dieu de science.
[Sappho, possessed of sharp wit and burning desire for constant study in the midst of bestial and
ignorant men, frequented the heights of Mount Parnassus, that is, of perfect study. Thanks to her
fortunate boldness and daring, she kept company with the Muses, that is, the arts and sciences,
without being turned away. She entered the forest of laurel trees lled with May boughs, greenery,
and di erent colored owers, soft fragrances and various aromatic spices, where Grammar, Logic,
noble Rhetoric, Geometry, and Arithmetic live and take their leisure. She went on her way until she
came to the deep grotto of Apollo, god of learning.]
(Cité des Dames 1.30.1; Cara i and Richards, p. 160; Richards, p. 67)
p. 331 Christine’s depiction of Sappho is similar to that in the illustration in Des cleres femmes, in which Sappho is
depicted as a magister of men (London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 29r). But both Christine’s text and the
illustration in Des cleres femmes go beyond Boccaccio’s text, in which Sappho’s learning is never mentioned;
he mentions only her artistry as a poet, for which she was famous in her own day. Christine, in fact, speaks
tongue in cheek to emphasize Boccaccio’s lack of perception and learning: “Par ces choses que Bocace dist
d’elle doit estre entendu la parfondeur de son entendement et les livres qu’elle st de si parfondes sciences
que les sentences en sont fortes a savoir et entendre meismes aux hommes de grant engin et estude, selon le
tesmoing des ancians” [From what Boccaccio says about her, it should be inferred that the profundity of
both her understanding and of her learned books can only be known and understood by men of great

perception and learning, according to the testimony of the ancients] (Cité des Dames 1.30.1; Cara and
Richards, p. 160; Richards, p. 67). Christine adds even more to the Boccaccian text: after Plato died,
Sappho’s poems were found under his pillow (Cité des Dames 1.30.1; Cara and Richards, p. 160; Richards, p.
68).
For Greek philosopher Leontium, Boccaccio’s Latin text in chapter 60portrays her as a courtesan
antagonistic to Theophrastus, whereas Christine praises her great learning and suggests she had a reason
for her resistance to the philosopher, which is revealed only in the illustration in Des cleres femmes—his
attempted rape. In Boccaccio, Leontium is said to have attacked in print the “famous philosopher,”
Theophrastus, “ut aut invidia percita, aut muliebri temeritate inpulsa” [moved either by envy or womanly
temerity] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 60; Brown, pp. 250, 251). Her failure to preserve her “matronalem
pudicitiam” (matronly honor) results not only from this “invidi animi … certissimum argumentum” (clear
sign of an envious disposition) but from his belief that she “seposito pudore femineo meretrix, imo
meretricula, fuit” [disregarded feminine decency and was a courtesan, or rather, a little trollop] (De
mulieribus claris, chap. 60; Brown, pp. 252–53). Boccaccio waxes eloquent in his condemnation of her
lustfulness:
Heu facinus indignum! Inter lenones impurosque mechos et scorta atque fornices versata, potuit
magistram rerum phylosophiam inhonestis in cellulis et ignominiosis deturpare notis atque
impudicis calcare vestigiis et cloacis immergere fetidis, si phylosophie splendor obfuscari potest
impudici pectoris labe.
p. 332 [What disgraceful behavior! Living in the brothels among pimps, vile adulterers, and whores,
she was able to stain Philosophy, the teacher of truth, with ignominy in those disgraceful
chambers, trample it with wanton feet, and plunge it into lthy sewers—if indeed the splendor of
Philosophy can be dimmed by the infamous action of an unchaste heat.]
(De mulieribus claris, chap. 60; Brown, pp. 252–53)
In contrast, note Christine’s brave Leontium, the Greek woman philosopher who “osa, par pures et vrayes
raisons, reprendre et redarguer le philosophe Teophraste” [dared, for impartial and serious reasons, to
correct and attack the philosopher Theophrastus]; Leontium appears at the end of Christine’s chapter on
Sappho, apparently because of her “grant science” (great learning) (Cité des Dames 1.30.3; Cara and
Richards, p. 160; Richards, p. 68). The illumination of Leontium in Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes (London,
B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. ?4r) supports Christine’s version of her “impartial reason” for physical resistance: a
beautiful woman reading at her table is embraced from behind by a man, whose assault she counters by
throwing up her hands. Possibly Christine harbored a special sympathy for Leontium because of her
100
mention in the Debate of the Rose.
In Boccaccio, Nicostrata (later called Carmenta by the Latins because she prognosticated in verse, carmen)
(De mulieribus claris, chap. 27) is similar to Christine’s own gure in her knowledge of Greek, her
scholarship, and her gift for prophecy; yet for Boccaccio, it is the eloquence of her son Evander and not her
own that leads to the suspicion that he was fathered by Mercury. For this reason they leave for Italy—either
because of the suspicion that Evander has killed his real father or because he has been sent into exile for that
same crime. Further, Boccaccio attributes to him the founding of the city of Rome and the naming of a hill,
and not to his mother, who guided him there. Although Boccaccio recognizes Nicostrata as the inventor of
the rst sixteen letters of the Latin alphabet, he denigrates the foolish men who thought this discovery was
so amazing that they transformed her into a goddess. From her alphabet (to which other “wise men” added
other letters) came an “in nite number of books” and the greatness of Roman civilization; Boccaccio ends
with a panegyric on the renown of Italy, returning brie y and almost grudgingly to Carmenta as deserving
of praise as the creator of the alphabet and planter of the rst seeds of grammar (De mulieribus claris, chap.

2?; Brown, pp. 105–13; here, pp. 112–13).
p. 333 Boccaccio’s paean to Carmenta will be picked up by Christine and attributed to him as an authority in Cité
des Dames 1.3?.1 (“ce sont les propres paroles de Bocace” [they are Boccaccio’s own words]) so that she can
conclude, “[O]u fu oncques homme qui plus de bien feist?” [Where was there ever a man who did more
good?] (Cité des Dames 1.3?.1; Cara and Richards, p. 180; Richards, pp. 78–79). Christine’s discussion has
been motivated, apparently, by Boccaccio’s comment that “foolish men” worshipped Carmenta as a
goddess, for the narrator Christine exclaims to Dame Raison that “ces hommes communement dient que
leur savoir est comme chose de nul pris et est un reproche que on dit communement quant on raconte de
quelque folie de dire, c’est savoir de femme” [{t} hese men usually say that women’s knowledge is
worthless. In fact when someone says something foolish, the widely voiced insult is that this is women’s
knowledge] (Cité des Dames 1.37.1; Cara and Richards, p. 178; Richards, p. 77).
Indeed, Christine presents her countrywoman Italian Carmentis (originally named Nicostrata)—with whom
she identi es as an inventor, as she does many of these wise women—during her discussion of inventors
and original thinkers in Cité des Dames, a subject raised when the narrator asks Dame Raison whether any
women have ever discovered new arts and sciences. For Christine, Carmentis/Nicostrata was a scholar of
Greek who invented the Latin alphabet and laws “par ordre de droit et de raison” (in accord with right and
reason) as supported for centuries thereafter, even in Christine’s day (Cité des Dames 1.33.3; Cara and
Richards, p. 166; Richards, p. ?1). Nicostrata’s eloquence was so great that people imagined her to be loved
by Mercury, god of eloquence, and imagined her son by her husband to be Mercury’s son (Cité des Dames
1.33.2; Cara and Richards, p. 166; Richards, p. 71). Also a prophet, Nicostrata leaves Arcadia, where she was
born, for Italy; accompanying her are her son and many of her people. When she arrives at what is now
101
Rome, she names the high hill on which it is situated after her father— the Palatine. It was for this new
country, with its savage men, that she invented the Latin alphabet and the laws necessary to civilize it. After
her death a temple is raised in her honor, and her name is changed to “Carmentis” in honor of her poetry
(carmen) (or her prophecy, according to Boccaccio). For which reason, scholar Cerquiglini-Toulet notes that
Carmentis embodies a late medieval view of the poet as inventor: “The model of Carmentis relied on the
p. 334 voice, which called things into being: it evoked construction, architecture, and art. Was inventing—
102
writing—sowing seeds? Was it construction?”
What is excised from Boccaccio’s description of Carmentis is exactly what Christine singles out in her text as
most important, her learning and her invention; like Christine, the illustrator of Des cleres femmes gives
agency to Carmentis and not to her son. The illustration for Nicostrata in Boccaccio’s text (London, B.L.
Royal 16 G V, fol. 28v) shows a woman on the left, seated, reading from a scroll (apparently of the laws) to a
tiny male gure on her right, who can only be her son Evander. To the right are the men of the new country
and before her knees and feet the Palatine hill, with a lacy texture like a river. Indeed, Christine considers
Carmentis so important that she brings her up again in Cité des Dames 1.38.4, when she proclaims to Dame
Raison the ignorance and malice of men who dismiss women: “[C]este noble dame Carmentis, laquelle par
la haultesce de son entendement les a appris comme leur maistresse a l’escole (ce ne pevent ilz nier) la leçon
de laquelle savoir se tiennent tant haultains et honorez, c’est assavoir, les nobles letres du latin” [{T}his
noble lady, Carmentis, through the profundity of her understanding taught them like a school-mistress—
nor can they deny it—the lesson thanks to which they consider themselves so lofty and honored, that is, she
taught them the Latin alphabet!] (Cité des Dames 1.38.4; Cara and Richards, pp. 182, 184; Richards, p. 80).
The remaining two learned women, Minerva and Ops, both of whom appear in Boccaccio’s text, the Des
cleres femmes illustrations, and the text of Christine’s Cité des Dames, are normally considered deities.
Boccaccio minimizes the accomplishments of Minerva, or Pallas (De mulieribus claris, chap. 6), although,
like Christine, he presents the iconography of her statue in her temple as re ective of her role as goddess of
wisdom. He begins with Minerva’s virginity and her battle with Vulcan and then, even though he quickly
moves to a display—very similar to that of Christine— of her many inventions that bene t civilization (De

mulieribus claris, chap. 6; Brown, pp. 34–37), he concludes with the quali er that “nonnulli gravissimi viri
asserentes non unius Minerve, sed plurium” [Some authoritative sources, however, assert that the
inventions mentioned above do not belong to a single Minerva but to many]. Boccaccio adds, and ends with,
only that “ego libenter assentiam, ut clare mulieres ampliores sint numero” [I shall gladly agree with them
in order to increase the number of famous women] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 6; Brown, pp. 38–39).
p. 335 Christine’s text, with its extravagant list of Minerva’s inventions in Cité des Dames—she occupies a signal
103
role as a Calabrian countrywoman of Christine in many of her works —is matched more closely by the
illustration of Minerva in Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes (London, B.L. Royal 20 C V, fol. 15r) than by
Boccaccio’s text. Christine, careful to note that these women have been called goddesses because of their
excellence and knowledge, describes Minerva as the inventor of “aucunes letres grecques que on appelle
caracteres” (a shorthand Greek script; that is, the Greek alphabet), and numbers; addition and subtraction;
methods of wool gathering and cloth making, sheep shearing and carding, wool spinning and weaving; olive
oil and fruit juice; wagons and carts; armor and harnesses and early military strategy; and musical
instruments such as utes, fes, trumpets, and wind instruments (Cité des Dames 1.34.1–5; Cara and
104
Richards, pp. 170, 172, 174; Richards, pp. 74–75). In the illustration in Boccaccio, the dominant standing
gure of Minerva on the left points an insistent nger at a seated gure who weaves wool or cloth, behind
whom is a man making armor, above whom is a man playing the ute, and at the very top right is a man
(behind whom are olive trees) who is gathering either fruit or olives. The illuminator, if not Christine, must
have enjoyed putting this important gure center front in the illumination, while marginalizing the
subsequent generations of men who were indebted to her for so many of the inventions that bene ted them
and their civilizations.
I have left until last in this section Ops or Opis, queen of Crete and alleged mother of the gods, who is
denigrated in Boccaccio’s text but celebrated in Christine’s as well as in the illustrations for Des cleres
femmes, in both of which she is called “Thea” in echo of Christine’s signal labeling in the Othea (see gure
29, Ops, Opis, or the goddess Othea, queen of Crete, Boccaccio, “Des femmes renommees,” Paris, B.N. fr.
105
12420, fol. 10v). What is most telling about this illustration as a borrowing from another manuscript is the
complete disjunction between it and Boccaccio’s text, which dismisses Ops’s importance either
domestically, historically, or theologically, and consequently its complete congruence with Christine’s
identi cation of her as prudent in the Cité des Dames. Boccaccio denigrates Ops (also Rhea)—daughter,
sister, and wife—because “Que … nullo, quod ad nos venerit, facinore, se egregiam fecerat, ni muliebri
astutia Iovem Neptunum atque Plutonem lios” [{Ops} did not distinguish herself for any deed which has
come down to us, except for the fact that through feminine cleverness she saved her children Jupiter,
p. 336 Neptune, and Pluto] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 3; Brown, pp. 24–25). For Boccaccio, Ops, erroneously
reputed to be mother of the gods and a goddess herself, was worshipped, apparently, as the Magna Mater
(Christine’s Othea, in a di erent guise), because Boccaccio describes her priests and sacri ces—essentially,
the apparatus of her rituals—as an “enorme malum” (shameful situation) (De mulieribus claris, chap. 3;
Brown, pp. 24–25). Ops’s ignominious end in fatigue and old age, death, transformation to dust, and then
damnation in hell seems un tting for a goddess, an attribution explained by Boccaccio as a “[m]irabile
profecto fortune ludibrium seu potius cecitas hominum, an, velimus dicere, fraus et decipula demonum”
p. 337 [marvelous jest on the part of Fortune, or rather men’s blindness, or better yet a deceitful snare of devils]
(De mulieribus claris, chap. 3; Brown, 26–27).
29.

Ops, Opis (Othea), queen of Crete. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr.
12420, fol. 10v (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
But Christine invests the gender roles of Ops with a myth of survival redemption that emerges from her
prudence, a quality characteristic of the mythical goddess Othea in Othea. For Christine in Cité des Dames,
Ops “fu es tres ancians aages repputee prudente pour ce que, selon ce que dient les anciannes histoires,
moult prudentmment et constamment se sceut contenir entre les prosperitez et adversitez qui lui
advindrent en son temps” [was considered in the most ancient times to be prudent because, according to
what the ancient historians relate, she knew how to conduct herself most prudently and steadfastly among
the prosperities {and adversities} which befell her during her lifetime] (Cité des Dames 1.47.1; Cara and
Richards, pp. 210, 212; Richards, p. 95). Christine also o ers the usual myth about Ops’s role as daughter of
Caelus (Christine actually cites “Uranus,” his name in Greek) and Vesta (instead of the more usual “Terra”
or “Gaea”) and as wife of Saturn, who dreamed his son would kill him. Because Ops rescued her sons Jupiter,
106
Neptune, and Pluto from death, she was subsequently honored for her prudence (Cité des Dames 1.47.1;
Cara and Richards, p. 212; Richards, p. 96).
In accord with Christine’s text in Cité des Dames, the illustration for Ops in the royal manuscript of
Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes, fol. 8r (also in Paris, B.N. fr. 598, fol. 11v), is rubricated by her identi cation as
“Opis or Othea.” The image visualizes her as an enthroned queen between two men on either side, slightly
in back of her (presumably Saturn and Uranus, or perhaps Saturn and Jupiter). And the chapter heading can
be read two ways: she is “Ops ou Opis ou thea la deesse” or, given the rubricated capital O, “Ops ou Opis ou
[O]thea la deesse.” Othea, of course, is the mythical “goddess of prudence” Christine imagines as writing to
Priam’s son Hector before the fall of Troy in Othea (fable 1); the translator has either borrowed the name
“Othea” from Christine’s own Othea or else Christine is (or aided) the translator, scribe, or illuminator.
In relation to the Sibyls, who are connected to the learned women in Christine’s Cité des Dames, Boccaccio
misogynistically understands the etiology of their prophetic ability and prophecies from God in their
virginity, not because of their wisdom or skill. Erythraea (or Eriphile; Herophile in English), for Boccaccio
(De mulieribus claris, chap. 21), is the most renowned, not the wisest, of the Sibyls and (in a Dantesque touch)
the one whose prophecies included a history of his life. He dismisses the reputation of Almathea (or
p. 338 Deyphebe), Sibyl of Cumae, for guiding Aeneas through the underworld. Boccaccio writes, “Sunt preterea
qui dicant hanc Enee profugo ducatum ad inferos prestitisse, quod ego non credo” [There are some who
claim that, when Aeneas was a fugitive, Almathea was his guide in the underworld, but I do not believe this]
(De mulieribus claris, chap. 26; Brown, 102–3). Most awkwardly of all, Boccaccio insists on reminding his
reader of the poets’ treatment of Almathea’s gift as resulting from the love of Phoebus Apollo instead of
from her virginity, although he suggests his preference for a more natural (and simultaneously, allegorical)
reading of the source for her talent—the sun, or, implicitly, Christ as the true light: “Et quanquam

poetarum litere testentur hanc a Phebo deliectam et eius munere et longevos annos et divinitatem
obtinuisse, ego quidem reor virginitatis merito illam ab illo vero Sole, qui illuminat omnem hominem
venientem in hunc mundum” [Poets say that she received from Phoebus, who loved her, the gifts of
longevity and prophecy. I believe, however, that it was Almathea’s virginity that earned her the light of
prophecy from that true Sun which enlightens every man who comes into this world” (De mulieribus claris,
chap. 26; Brown, pp. 102–3). And at the end of the chapter on Almathea, Boccaccio undermines not only her
importance but that of all women in his paean to male excellence: “Demum si ingenio et divinitate
pervigiles valent femine, quid hominibus miseris arbitrandum est, quibus ad omnia aptitudo promptior?”
[Finally, if women are able to achieve so much through their keenness of intellect and the gift of prophecy,
what ought wretched men to think who have greater aptitude for everything?] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 26;
Brown, pp. 104–5).
In Christine, however, the ten pagan and prophetic Sibyls represent the equivalent of biblical prophets
because they speak for their respective nations. Appearing in Christine’s second book, of Droiture, the Sibyls
open her discussion because of their wisdom in prophesying the coming of Christ and in attacking paganism
(Cité des Dames 2.1.4). The title of their o ce is “Sebile” (Sibyl) or “savant la pensee de Dieu” (knowing the
thinking of God) (Cité des Dames 2.1.3; Cara and Richards, p. 220; Richards, p. 100). They are named for the
country where they originated: Persia; Libya (Libica); Delphi (Delphica); from Italy (called Cimeria);
Babylon (Eriphile, or Herophile, or Herophyle; also called Erythrea, from the island); Samos (Samia);
Cumae, in Campania, Italy (Cumana; also Almathea, or Deiphebe); Troy, on the Hellespont (Hellespontina);
Phrygia (Phyrica); and Tiburtine (Tiburtina, or Albunia).
After this introduction, Christine, like Boccaccio, chooses to focus, out of all the Sibyls, only on Erythee
p. 339 (Erythraea) (Cité des Dames 2.2.1–3) and Almethea (Almathea) (Cité des Dames 2.3.1–3). The virgin
Erythee is the wisest of the Sibyls (Cité des Dames 2.2.1), while the virgin Almethea, or Deiphile (Deiphebe),
had “tres especiale grace d’esperit de prophecie” (the most special grace of the spirit of prophecy [lit., spirit
and prophecy]) (Cité des Dames 2.3.1; Cara and Richards, p. 224; Richards, p. 103). It was Almathea who led
Aeneas into the underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid and who is lauded by Rectitude because she
counseled emperors (2.3.2).
The illustrations of the Sibyls in Boccaccio that correspond to a Christinian text are three in number: one, of
Almathea, the Sibyl of Cumae, corresponds to the Othea text and its illustration and is nearly identical to an
illustration in a fourteenth-century French prose manuscript of a “Moralized Ovid.” The other two, of this
same Sibyl and of Erythrea, are intended to illustrate Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes, but in fact are closer to
Christine’s text in the Cité des Dames than to Boccaccio’s. As with the other illuminations, the Boccaccio
illuminator’s interpretation of both Sibyls accords with Christine’s feminized approach, not with
Boccaccio’s resistance to female autonomy, wisdom, and achievement and his gender bias in regarding
women, even Sibyls, in terms of masculine relationships. The illumination of Eriphile (Herophile), or
Erythrea, in Boccaccio’s “Des cleres femmes” (London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 23r) portrays her as solitary,
engaged in writing; the depiction of Almathea, Sibyl of Cumae, identi es her as equally solitary but reading
rather than writing (see gure 30, Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 36r; like that of London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol.
28r).
30.

Almathea, Sibyl of Cumae. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 36r
(1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
Further, note that in the Othea the Sibyl of Cumae appears in fable 100 converting Caesar Augustus to
Christianity; she is depicted as standing above a kneeling and presumably humble emperor while pointing
above to the sun, which emblazons forth the Virgin holding the infant Jesus (see gure 31, the Sibyl of
Cumae converting Caesar Augustus to Christianity, in Christine de Pizan, “L’Epistre Othea,” London, B.L.
Harley 4431, fol. 141r). The identical image also appears in the same fourteenth-century Copenhagen
manuscript of the “Moralized Ovid” mentioned above, with the di erence that there are nine stars to which
the Sibyl points, only one of which is marked with a cross (see gure 32, the Sibyl of Cumae converting
Caesar Augustus to Christianity, “Moralized Ovid,” Copenhagen, Royal Library Thottske 399.2, fol. 390ra).
31.
Sibyl of Cumae converting Caesar Augustus to Christianity. Christine de Pizan, “Lʼepistre dʼOthea la deese.” © The British Library
Board. London, B.L. Harley 4431, fol. 141r.
32.

Sibyl of Cumae converting Caesar Augustus to Christianity. “Ovide intitule Metamorphose contenant xv livres.” Copenhagen,
Royal Library Thottske 399.2, fol. 390ra (ca. 1480). By permission of the Royal Library (Det Kongelike Bibliothek), Copenhagen.
Once again, a royal manuscript contains an illustration perhaps copied from one of Christine’s heavily
illuminated manuscripts because of the remarkable interpretation contained in its details, but an
p. 340 illustration of a work written by a male author, one whose image matches—in this case— both an image
in a manuscript of the earlier mythological work and the description in its text.
“Women Famous by Coincidence” in Boccaccio and in a “Moralized Ovid”

Juno, Europa, and Medusa are all brie y mentioned in a catalogue in Cité des Dames 2.61 as famous (or
infamous) women who merit their fame by coincidence, not because of any particular independent
accomplishment. This chapter, appearing as it does in the second book after a discussion of foolish love,
extends the explanation for why women su er because of their love attachments to men. In each of these
p. 341 three cases in Boccaccio,
p. 342
the woman earns notice and is favored initially because of her beauty but thereafter blamed for whatever
consequences ensue. Christine appears to give each short shrift precisely because the classical woman’s
involvement remains a passive one, her fame gained primarily by her propinquity to a male leader. But
Christine also revises Boccaccio by means of her stress on women’s literal or gurative maternity in relation
to the founding and rule of nations, an emphasis also portrayed in the illuminations found in Des cleres
femmes and in various late medieval manuscripts of the “Moralized Ovid.”
Angry Juno, sister and consort of Jupiter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, pursues Jupiter’s mortal lovers with a
vengeance; in Boccaccio, however, “poeticis ctionibus et insane antiquorum liberalitate celi regina facta
est, que mortalis regina fuerat” [the ctions of the poets and the extravagant folly of the ancients made this
woman, who had been a mortal queen, into the queen of heaven] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 4; Brown, pp.
26–27). For him she is guardian of marriage and childbirth and “alia longa plura, ridenda potius quam
credenda” [many other things that arouse our amusement rather than our belief], temples to her having
been raised “sic humanti generis hoste suadente” [through the Enemy of humankind] (De mulieribus claris,
chap. 4; Brown, pp. 28–29).
But Christine sco s that Juno is renowned “plus pour sa bonne fortune que pour autre excellence” [more
because of her good looks {lit., good fortune} than for some other outstanding quality] and that, as sister
and spouse of Jupiter, she is reputed to be “deesse d’avoir” (goddess of riches) simply because Jupiter was
understood as “souverain dieu” (supreme god) (Cité des Dames 2.61.2; Cara and Richards, p. 404;
Richards, p. 203). Then Christine adds to the discussion of her fame Juno’s role as goddess of marriage and
childbirth: to her also the Samites “attribuerent aussi les confors des drois de mariage, et a son ayde

recouroient les femmes en oroisons. Et de toutes pars rent temples d’elle, autieulx, prestres, gieux, et
sacre ces” [attributed … the privileges and prerogatives of marriage. In prayer, women had recourse to her
help, and they established temples to her everywhere, as well as altars, priests, games, and sacri ces] (Cité
des Dames 2.61.2; Cara and Richards, 404; Richards, 203).
The unusual illustration for Juno as goddess of childbirth in Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes imagines her as
hovering above on a owery cloud like those found in the illustrations of B.L. Harley 4431 to indicate divinity
in the Othea, but the main action below her more closely re ects a situation that Christine—so interested in
p. 343 maternity and the relationship between mother and child—likely preferred. This illustration in the
earliest manuscript focuses on the rather unfamiliar (and unconventional) birthing scene of the laboring
woman, who appeals for help to the goddess Juno above her while the midwife supports the kneeling
mother-to-be—unlike the more graphic illustration in the later Premierfait translation, in which the
laboring woman pulls on a twisted skein, the midwife seems poised to catch the baby as it emerges under
the woman’s dress, a di erent woman holds the baby after it has emerged, and Juno is carefully segregated
from the action by a frame of clouds. To the left in the latter (and to the right in the earliest manuscript)
appear a priest and others, ready to baptize the child should it be in danger of dying and so to prevent it
from su ering an eternity in limbo (see gure 33, Juno, goddess of childbirth, Boccaccio, “Des femmes
renommees,” Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 11r; followed by gure 34, trans. Laurent de Premierfait, London, B.L.
Royal 20 C V, fol. 12r).
33.
Juno, goddess of child-birth. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol.
11r (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
34.

Juno, goddess of child-birth. Boccaccio, “Des cleres femmes,” trans. Laurent de Premierfait. © The British Library Board. London,
B.L. Royal 20 C V, fol. 12r.
In contrast to this depiction of Juno, note the more conventional portrait of her as Saturn’s daughter, the
ruler of the air, and as consort and sister to Jupiter, the ruler of the ether, both of whom appear at the scene
of their father Saturn’s castration with brothers Pluto and Neptune, as governors of earth and water, in the
frontispiece for the French prose “Moralized Ovid” (Copenhagen, Royal Library Thottske 399.2, fol. 1r; see
Chance, MM, 2:121). In the four “poles” of the manuscript—which conceal the four rulers of the cosmic
regions, namely, Juno (air) and her brothers Jupiter (ether or re), Neptune (water), and Pluto (earth)—the
tableau tells the circular story of Saturn’s eating his children and the subsequent castration of Saturn by
Jupiter, which leads to the birth of Saturn’s daughter Venus (love) from his severed testicles that have been
hurled into the foamy brine. The point in Ovid may be that the Stoic cosmic harmony achieved by the fair
chain of love knits together re and air in the seed- re that rejuvenates and powers the cosmos, that is, the
union of Jupiter and Juno, with the illumination illustrating a balance among equal parties, including Juno.
Christine almost never grants the goddesses Venus or Juno any real importance, whether in Othea or Cité des
Dames; however, in Cité des Dames 2.61.2, the gure of Juno is important at precisely (and solely) that point
where she functions as a goddess to whom ancient women turned for help.
Europa, who follows quickly upon the fable of Juno in Christine, in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris as queen
of Crete (and daughter of Agenor, king of Phoenicia) is deemed important primarily for her physical
p. 344 attributes: “[T]am mirabili formositate valuisse, ut amore invise cretensis caperetur
p. 345
Iuppiter” [It is said that the power of her marvelous beauty was such that Jupiter of Crete fell in love with
her sight unseen] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 9; Brown, pp. 46–47). After Jupiter tricked her into following
her father’s ocks, he seized her and she was “navi, cuius albus taurus erat insigne, imposita” [put on a
ship with a white bull as its standard] and brought to Crete. (See gure 35, Europa with the bull on the ship’s
ag, Boccaccio, “Des femmes renommees,” anonymous, 1402, Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 17v.) The
translation by Laurent de Premierfait includes an illustration without the bull on the ship’s ag but with
Europa clearly being groped by bull-like men. (See gure 36, London, B.L. Royal 20 C V, fol. 19r.)
35.

Europa, with a bull on the shipʼs flag. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr.
12420, fol. 17v (1402). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
36.
Europa, with bull-like men from the ship. Boccaccio, “Des cleres femmes,” trans. Laurent de Premierfait. © The British Library
Board. London, B.L. Royal 20 C V, fol. 19r.
That Europa is crowned in this later illumination (that is, the one above, from the Premierfait translation)
heralds her special royal status. The bull may be missing because Boccaccio and the illuminator are aware of
the euhemerized tradition of Europa that identi ed the “bull” as the icon on the boat that took her away;
what remain are the human gures and the boat. However, the moral that Boccaccio provides in his text is
one that blames the rape victim in the most typical misogynistic fashion: “Vagari licentia nimia virginibus
et aures faciles cuiuscunque verbis prebere, minime laudandum reor, cum contingisse sepe legerim his
agentibus honestati nonnunquam notas turpes imprimi, quas etiam perpetue demum castitatis decus
abstersisse non potuit” [I consider it highly inadvisable to give maidens too much freedom to stroll about
and listen too readily to the words of just anyone. I have often read that girls who do this have seen their
reputations so stained that afterwards they could not be washed clean, even by the glory of perpetual
chastity] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 9; Brown, pp. 48–49). Much of his chapter is devoted to retracing the
arguments about what actually happened: Did Mercury lure the Phoenician ocks to the sea? Did Jupiter
take Europa to Crete on his back as a bull? When did it happen? Boccaccio concludes that she became famous
because of Jupiter’s “marriage” to her or because of the contributions made by her people. Concerning the
various sources that he has consulted:
[C]laram tanti dei connubio plures Europam volunt, a rmantes insuper aliqui seu quia nobilitatis
fuerit egregie—nam Phenices, multes agentibus meritis, suo evo pre ceteris stematibus claruere
maiorum—, seu divini coniugis veneration, seu liorum regum gratia, vel ipsius met Europe virtute

precipua, ab eius nomine Europam partem orbis tertiam in perpetuum nuncupatam.
p. 346
p. 347 [{M}ost of them agree that Europa became famous through her marriage to a great divinity. In
addition, some claim that the third part of the world has always been called “Europe” after her,
either because she was of exceptional nobility (for numerous achievements made the Phoenicians
more famous in their own time than other peoples of ancient lineage) through reverence for her
divine husband, or through respect for her kingly sons, or because of the extraordinary virtue of
Europa herself.]
(De mulieribus claris, chap. 9; Brown, pp. 48–49; my emphasis)
Boccaccio ends by praising her as an “insignem virtutibus mulierem” (woman distinguished for her
virtues), one whose name was assigned to the world (here he means “Europe”), in part because the
philosopher Pythagoras had dedicated a statue to her.
In Christine’s much shorter fable devoted to her, Europa is celebrated similarly as famous, in that Jupiter,
out of love for her, “nomma la tierce partie du monde de son nom” [named a third of the world after her]
(Cité des Dames 2.61.5; Cara and Richards, p. 406; Richards, p. 203). This gesture is part of her
acknowledgment that many geographical sites are named after women, including England (which is named
after “Angela”). Christine, however, to grant the Phoenician political and social power in place of her
passive importance as a beauty promotes the abducted Europa to being equal to Jupiter—enthroned consort
and queen—unlike the passive Ovidian gure hauled away on Jupiter in the form of a bull in one manuscript
107
of a “Moralized Ovid.”
Note that Europa is, in fact, enthroned with Jupiter in an unusual illumination in a French prose paraphrase
“Moralized Ovid,” in which she appears to have a swollen abdomen and both her hand and Jupiter’s rest
upon her belly, as if to celebrate the birth of an imminent child. Such importance for her fecundity helps
gloss her role as the eponymic founder of the continent of Europe, the pregnancy proclaiming her future
power as mother of nations. (See gure 37, “Moralized Ovid,” London, B.L. Royal 17 E IV, fol. 40v; the image
very much resembles that in B.L. Additional 102324.)
37.

Pregnant Europa enthroned with Jupiter. “Moralized Ovid.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Royal 17 E IV, fol. 40v.
Another woman appearing in this section of Christine in Cité des Dames on women famous by coincidence,
108
namely, Medusa, or Gorgon, is “renommee pour sa tres grant beauté” (celebrated for her outstanding
beauty) (Cité des Dames 2.61.5; Cara and Richards, p. 406; Richards, p. 203). So also in Boccaccio, Medea is
p. 348 similarly described as attractive to men for
p. 349
her beauty, “admirande … pulchritudinis” (so astonishingly beautiful), in part because of her golden hair,
beautiful face, and tall body; these, once being seen, “quasi quoddam preter naturam mirabile,
quamplurimos ad se videndam excitaret homines” [like something wondrous and supernatural,
commanded the gaze of many men]. Boccaccio, drawing on the euhemerist tradition once again, identi es
Medusa’s gaze as so alluring that it might trans x a viewer: “[G]randis ac placidus oculorum illi fuit vigor
ut, quos benigne respiceret, fere immobiles et sui ne scios redderet” [{H}er eyes in particular had a power in
them so lofty and tranquil that people she gazed upon favorably were rendered almost immobile and
forgetful of themselves] (De mulieribus claris, chap. 22; Brown, pp. 88–89). Boccaccio also acknowledges her
shrewdness and her agricultural skill (apparently a misunderstanding of the name “Gorgon”), which brings
her wealth and the unfortunate attention of Perseus as an avaricious suitor who abducts her and her
treasure. Because Perseus wants her and her treasure, he travels in a ship that bears the image of Pegasus,
her o spring. While Boccaccio is keen on moralizing the dangers of avarice at the end of Medusa’s fable, in
the process he debunks the more well-known myths about her. The truth, says Boccaccio, is what has
engendered those Ovidian stories of her rape by Neptune, which angered Minerva (not Diana); her
paralyzing gaze and snaky hair; and her having given birth to Pegasus, the winged horse Perseus rides to
seize her kingdom (De mulieribus claris, chap. 22; Brown, pp. 88, 89–90, 91).
According to Christine’s equally euhemerizing text, Medusa, daughter of the rich king Phorcys, similarly
boasts such supernatural beauty that “elle avoit le regart tant plaisant avec l’autre beauté du corps et du
viayre et des blons cheveulx comme l d’or loncs et crespés que elle attrayoit toute mortelle creature que
elle regardoit si a soy que elle rendoit les gens comme inmouvables” [she also attracted to herself, because
of her pleasing appearance—her long and curly blond hair spun like gold, along with her beautiful face and
body—every mortal creature upon whom she looked, so that she seemed to make people immovable] (Cité

des Dames 2.61.5; Cara and Richards, p. 406; Richards, pp. 203–4). Missing in Christine’s account,
however, are Ovid’s version of the rape of Medusa by Neptune in Minerva’s temple, Minerva’s revenge by
turning Medusa’s hair into snakes, and the transformation into stone of everyone who gazes upon Medusa’s
severed head (borne by Perseus in Metamorphoses 4.794–803). Also missing is the portion of the
p. 350 Metamorphoses myth that involves the interjection of the hero Perseus and his mirroring bronze shield,
supplied by Minerva (Metamorphoses 4.770–86).
The illumination of Medusa in the earliest (anonymous) manuscript of Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes shows
her to be a striking beauty, as Ovid describes Medusa (Metamorphoses 4.794–97) and also as Christine
describes her, unlike the ugly (later) monstrous Gorgon. The illustrator places Medusa, crowned, seated on a
cushion near a ship, alone and beautiful, taking up the whole of the illumination; to her right a tiny Perseus
rides the winged steed Pegasus inside the vessel. (See gure 38: Medusa, Boccaccio, Des cleres femmes,
anonymous trans., Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 31r; very similar are images Paris, B.N. fr. 598, fol. 32r, and
London, B.L. Royal 16 GV, fol. 23v.) The illuminator has con ated two myths from Ovid here, of the gures
Pegasus and Perseus, in that Pegasus is born from Perseus’s beheading of Medusa (Metamorphoses 4.785–
86), although Pegasus is also said to be the son of Neptune (who raped her, according to the Medusa myth).
Perseus wore winged sandals and bore a sword given him by Mercury, which aided him in killing the
monster attacking Andromeda (Metamorphoses 4.665–67, 733–34), but Bellerophon, who killed the
Chimera, actually rode Pegasus.
38.
Medusa. Boccaccio, “Des femmes nobles et renommees,” anonymous French trans. Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 31r (1402). Courtesy
of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
Convincing, powerful, and disjunct, the images in the early fteenth-century royal manuscripts must be
read against the grain of the texts that they purport to illustrate; generally they anticipate the text of
Christine’s Cité des Dames more closely than they follow that of either De mulieribus claris or Des cleres
femmes. Whether she saw the images in the manuscripts in which they are contained (particularly in B.N. fr.
12420 and 598) or in earlier sketches, or whether she herself painted them or supervised their painting—
about which we have no evidence, except for her clear familiarity with the best manuscript illuminators in
Paris (an issue with which this chapter has not been concerned)—there is no exact textual source for them
except Christine’s Cité des Dames.

The inference to be drawn from these parallels is that one should exercise care in assuming literary
in uence—text to text—and should study the entire manuscript, rather than separate the manuscript
illumination from its accompanying text (which, after all, was completed by a di erent authority
altogether). The situation is complicated by the matter of translation, which is not completely clear:
Christine presumably read French translations of Orosius, Boccaccio, and Ovid—but perhaps also the Latin,
because we know she was familiar with the Latin versions. And Christine’s own ideas evolved in the course
p. 351 of her career—the text of Othea, as radically protofeminist as it appears when read against earlier Ovidian
mythographies, is less feminist and radical when read against Cité des Dames, in which, after all, Christine
inserts even herself as a character, a persona, and une clere femme.
Did Christine omit illustrations of the women in Cité des Dames to reduce the viewer’s voyeuristic
fascination with the female face and body, with the female “text”? Or had she “ nished” with the
illustration of the female gure because she had spent time herself illuminating (or directing the
illumination of) Othea and other texts? Or because she had, in fact, translated some of these texts herself
p. 352 and worked with the illuminators? While the answers to these questions are not clear, what is clear remains
109
her insistence on privileging herself as a voice within the text, as various scholars have agreed, and in
so doing creating both a double who functions as a ctional character and a fully complex narrative whose
sources are interwoven and/or changed and deleted as Christine sees t.
Christine’s writing shifted markedly after the protofeminist mythographic works discussed in these two
110
chapters. As Christine became more con dent in her success with her royal audience, her writing
addressed more explicitly her political and social concerns. Some were catalyzed by her desire to emulate
her countryman Dante in De monarchia (and perhaps other Italian humanists) by actually expressing her
views on good government—beginning, for example, with a letter to Eustace Deschamps on France’s
corrupt government, Une Epistre a Eustache Morel (Letter to Eustache Morel) (1404) and her biography of her
patron Charles V, the Livre des Fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (Book of the deeds and good
practices of the wise king Charles V) (1404). Other works expressed even larger ethical, social, and political
ideals, such as the Livre de la Prod’hommie de l’homme (Book of man’s integrity) (1405–6), on prudence and
the cardinal virtues; the Livre du Corps de policie (Book of the body politic) (1407), a “Mirror of Princes”
handbook; and especially, the Fais d’armes et de chevalerie (1410). This treatise on medieval warfare allowed
Christine to rewrite Jean de Meun and the misogyny of the Rose in one nal way through the aid of yet
another contemporary mentor, Honorat Bovet, and a mythological countrywoman, Minerva.
III. Arms and the Woman: Honorat Bovet, Jean de Meun, and Minerva
in Le Livre des Fais dʼArmes et de Chevalerie (1410)
Despite the obvious correspondence to the Rose in her early poems, the two works that most e ectively
respond to the misogyny of Jean de Meun’s Rose are her Cité des Dames and the Livre des Fais d’armes et de

chevalerie. In the Cité des Dames Christine substitutes a feminized Raison to correct Jean’s masculinized and
scholastic Rayson (however gendered “female,” grammatically, as an abstraction), which Christine had
111
similarly corrected in the Othea; so also in Cité des Dames Christine removes feminine subjectivity
altogether from “the garden” for separate consideration as a category. Indeed, the female Rayson from
Jean’s Rose, as a projection of the cleric himself who might lecture that there is nothing wrong with the
word coilles (testicles) because it names a thing created by God, reappears in Christine’s Cité des Dames as a
female advocate and mentor for the author herself. Just as the social rationalization of euphemism in Cité
p. 353
des Dames includes disguising the ugly and inappropriate, so also Christine’s Raison deconstructs La
Vieille’s misogynistic amatory instructions to women (and her mimed readings of Ovid’s Heroides women as
victims of men) by means of her emphasis on female intelligence and leadership in her own portraits of
classical women. Accordingly, as in her autobiographical works (and some sections of works not generally
considered autobiographical), Christine proclaims herself to be what some misogynists of the day would
consider an oxymoron, that is, a rational woman, often in scholastic metaphors that depict her as a very
beacon of wisdom: Christine is not just a cleric or pseudoclericus but a magister in a university-like
institution. In every case, to make her point she genders female the source she is appropriating—whether
epistle, debate or dialogue, or chivalric treatise—in order to subvert the problematic metaphors and
allegories of Jean de Meun’s Rose.
The Fais d’armes, Christine’s treatise on the art of warfare, with its categorization of martial strategies (a
synthesis of ancient and medieval sources), again subverts the author of the Rose. In addition to rewriting
the last two books of the chivalric treatise Arbre des batailles (Tree of Battles) (1387) penned by her near
contemporary Honorat Bovet (previously understood by scholars to be “Honoré Bonet,” the prior of
112
Selonnet) (ca. 1345–ca. 1410), in her third and fourth books she also revises one of Bovet’s sources for the
rst book, Jean de Meun’s French translation of the fourth-century Roman Vegetius’s De re militari
113
(“Concerning military matters”) (1284). Composed after Cité des Dames and the Trois vertus, Fais d’armes
exists only in two manuscripts from her lifetime, the earliest owned by the duke of Burgundy, and it has
114
never been critically edited. It was regarded at the time as so important a text on chivalry and warfare that
William Caxton translated it into Middle English in 1490 at the command of Henry VII. In it Christine
condemns lawless wars and declares that God opposes wars of vengeance and encourages the prince to aid
115
those less fortunate, including women, widows, and orphans. Christine also revises the three
conventional estates into four so that they include nobles, lawyers, the commons, and craftsmen, with
116
clergy noticeably absent.
At the opening of the third book of her Fais d’armes, Christine deliberately invokes Jean de Meun’s
continuation of the Rose and his authority in a parodic dream-vision debate that may have been in uenced
p. 354 by Honorat Bovet’s own dream-vision debate with Jean de Meun, the recently edited and translated
117
Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun (1398). She achieves this by imitating the Rose’s ower and garden
imagery in a dream-vision setting in which her source Bovet, whose own book utilizes arborial imagery,
appears, unnamed, in front of her bed, just as Jean de Meun appeared before the dreaming Bovet in the
118
corner of the garden of La Tournelle, where Jean had lived outside Paris. And, in the middle of her book on
warfare and after using her source (Vegetius’s De rei militari) so assiduously, Christine stops—just as the
Rose stops and then is continued—immorally, in Christine’s eyes—by Jean de Meun. By adopting the
persona of Bovet as monkish authority, Christine seizes the opportunity to validate her own work as that of
as a good woman and to berate Jean de Meun for his as a bad clerk.
In both these senses—the criticism of Jean de Meun and the disgendering of chivalry—Christine’s purpose
in writing her own work echoes Bovet’s, although she only uses the fourth part of his four-part book in her
work. It should come as no surprise to learn that Bovet (born in Provence), driven from his Benedictine
abbey, wrote a satirical work entitled Apparition de Jehan de Meun, which, like much of Christine’s early
work, criticized Jean de Meun. Further, Bovet’s Arbre des batailles can be said to be paci st in intent, given
his depiction of the emperor, pope, kings, knights, and serfs as covered with blood. So also Christine

moralizes chivalry by promulgating a broad-minded and charitable set of guidelines in regard to warfare
(for example, she is especially sensitive to Jews and Saracens).
In the dream vision of Fais d’armes, Christine encounters what might be termed the masculine (or clerical)
projection of herself in Bovet, whose authority and mastery she appropriates for herself in her own writing.
Bovet will act as magister and she as student—in a commentary school setting that resembles the
convention found also in sixth-century Fulgentius’s in uential Expositio Virgilianae continentiae (Exposition
of the content of Virgil), in which magister Virgil is questioned by the homunculus (little man) Fulgentius,
his disciple (and yet also a magister). During the dream (caused by Christine’s intellectual fatigue from
writing the rst two parts), Bovet appears before her bed and “labels” her (that is, validates her authority)
as “dear friend Christine.” By identifying Christine in terms of “dear friend,” Bovet di erentiates love from
the masculinist sexual desire of Guillaume de Lorris and de nes as appropriate to the female the sexual
energy of Genius in Jean de Meun, but he does so in terms uniquely suited to Christine’s own project: he
p. 355 acknowledges her labor and her ceaseless study for the purpose of increasing wisdom and virtue: “Dear
friend Christine, whose love of deed and thought result in the labor of studying, which is ceaseless, in
consideration of the great love you have for things represented by letters, especially in exhortation of all
119
noble works and virtuous conditions as well.” Bovet has appeared to her almost as an act of grace, a
Macrobian dream messenger like Philosophy appearing to Boethius or Virgil to Dante or even Reason to
Christine, in Cité des Dames, who will help her nish her book. Christine is, however, not in despair, like
Boethius, Dante, or herself earlier in Cité des Dames, but tired out from a learned and speci c labor. And her
dream visitor provides the exact authority necessary for her to nish her task, one of learnedness, like
Reason or Philosophy, but here masculine, instead of the eternal feminine as in most dream-vision
personi cations of abstractions. Finally, when Christine mentions Jean de Meun as having taken the fruit in
his work from others, she establishes the ironic and parodic nature of the visitation frame.
Christine’s work introduces this question of unethical mimesis speci cally in a context damning to Jean de
Meun. For centuries male scholars appropriated from their predecessors the materials necessary to create
poems and treatises, of course, but if to do so replicates some immorality, or is itself unethical because it is
borrowed, does that make mimesis an endorsement of immorality? So, as in her dream vision in book 3.1, in
which Bovet appears before her while she lies in bed before returning to her writing, in the third book Bovet
authorizes her to use the fruits of his tree (the Tree of Battles) in completing her work, although she is
hesitant to do so: “[I]t is good for you to gather from the Tree of Battles in my garden fruit that will be of use
to you, so that vigor and strength may grow within you to continue work on the weighty book. In order to
build an edi ce that re ects the writings of Vegetius and of other authors who have been helpful to you, you
must cut some branches of the tree, taking only the best, and with the timber you shall set the foundation of
120
this edi ce.” In this same passage, Bovet urges her to take the branches of the tree to set a foundation for
her “edi ce,” yet Christine questions, “I pray you to tell me if my work can be reproached for your
counseling me to make use of the aforesaid fruit.” Bovet’s answer suggests (in a very modern sense) that
the more a work is cited and used—“seen and approved by people”—the more “authentic it becomes.” How
this works is that rst his disciples normally “exchange and share the owers they take from my garden
p. 356 individually,” suddenly reminding us of Christine’s early metaphor of the garden as learning and the
ower as a sign of speci c knowledge in both the Debate letters and the Dit de la rose.
By invoking Jean de Meun, Christine places before the reader his authority as a plagiarist and his role as her
bête noire, but also, since this frame sequence is about authorization and authority, it o ers her an
opportunity to present the “ ower” of her reading of Bovet, and a moral reading at that, as analogous to
Jean de Meun’s reading of Guillaume. That Bovet deliberately invokes Jean’s garden image is clear from his
second argument in this same passage in their dialogue—which Jean de Meun took from the garden of
Guillaume de Lorris: “Did not Master Jean de Meun make use of the works of Lorris, and likewise of other

writings in his Romance of the Rose?” Most important, using the authority of Bovet allows Christine to
justify her own morality of writing and to imply Jean de Meun’s immorality in witnessing Guillaume’s
vicious vision: “But it is wrong to take material without acknowledgment; therein is the fault. So do boldly
what you have to do and do not doubt that your work is good. I assure you that it shall be commended and
praised by many a wise man.”
By con ating all of these paradigms—the dream vision of interiorization, the master-student relationship,
the biblical garden, and the edi ce—Christine also disgenders the poetic authority of her predecessors. The
metaphor here begins with the tree (of knowledge of battles), as it does in her reply to Pierre Col, inviting
comparison with the biblical tree in the Garden of Eden, and the building on a foundation also alerts us to
what will become the City of Ladies constructed in Cité des Dames. The di erence is that this is, ostensibly, a
secular work and one normally associated with the masculinist preoccupations of chivalry and warfare. As a
woman, Christine places herself in that tradition of passing on authority from a master to a student. And as
a woman, Christine dreams not of abstraction (Boethius’s Philosophy) or of desire (Guillaume’s Garden of
Deduit), but of the practical consequences of the Path of Long Study.
In this chivalric treatise as well as in her other Rose poems, Christine intends to disgender Jean de Meun’s
masculinist constructions of chivalry and warfare and authority by replacing him with herself as authority.
Like the Advision, which has been interpreted as a “Mirror for Princes,” the Fais d’armes can be read on two
levels, as simultaneously political and international in its understanding of the need for just laws in making
121
and managing warfare and autobiographical and personal in its allegorical frame. Christine recognizes
chivalry as open to female as well as male participation because of her vision of society as interlocking chain
122
p. 357 mail, in which the individual becomes part of a larger moral and social community. Through chivalry,
knights might establish their own idealized community, or city of gentlemen—as delineated in Christine’s
biography of Charles V—by means of their relationship with and obligation to women and the poor.
Convinced that men had made a mess of civilization through wars like the Trojan War, the Hundred Years
War between France and England, and the civil wars dividing France, in both Othea and Cité des Dames
Christine also promulgates the idea of the Amazons as female warriors and military leaders.
But, in addition, in this work Christine also rewrites gender roles in Jean de Meun’s Rose, in which the
beloved herself is silent and (for all practical purposes) nameless. At the beginning of Fais d’armes, as a
woman who admits that she does not know the art of language, Christine authorizes her treatment of the
masculine subject of chivalry by justifying her own plain and unadorned (truthful) words as more useful to
123
prospective knights than those of the learned clerks who normally write on such subjects. Acknowledging
that women normally attend to household duties and spinning on the dista , she reveals that she has been
compelled to write this work, despite her unworthiness, by her true a ection for noble men in the
124
“profession of arms” and not by any desire to dictate. Finally, in her prologue Christine ends her
apostrophe to Minerva with the acknowledgment that “like you I am an Italian woman.” Christine comes to
understand the high o ce of chivalry by means of the contemplation through her window of her compatriot
Minerva of Magna Graecia (Apulia and Calabria, in Italy), both a goddess and, according to Boccaccio in De
125
mulieribus claris, the inventor of armor. In this respect one illustration for Fais d’armes is pertinent to
Christine’s assertion of her authority: she is portrayed in the illustration at part 1, chapter 1, the prologue, in
B.L. Harley 4605, fol. 3, in the panel on the left, writing with pen in hand in her room while she gazes
outward; in the right panel, outside her window, appears Minerva with armor, an upraised sword, and a
large shield (see gure 39, Christine de Pizan, “Fais d’armes,” London, B.L. Harley 4605, fol. 3r). Having
feminized her discussion, Christine goes on to say, in agreement with Cato, that what one does with one’s
126
body lasts only one age but that what one composes and writes in a book lasts forever.
39.

Inside her house, Christine de Pizan writes about chivalry while gazing outside at Minerva, maker of armor from Magna Graecia
in Calabria. Christine de Pizan, “Fais dʼarmes.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Harley 4605, fol. 3r.
That the one gure on the right in the frontispiece to Christine’s work is the authority, or alter ego, for the
other is made apparent through the equivalence of the pen to the sword. For Christine de Pizan—
p. 358 contemplating through her window the model of Minerva, the Greek and Italian (Calabrian) goddess of
armor making and wisdom—chivalry was a matter of universal moral and social concern because it involved
law and order, the basis for both civil (internal) and international law. Modeling herself on her Italian
countryman Dante, Christine envisioned the poet’s role as both moral and social: to educate the monarch
ruling the kingdom about the aws in society and about the ways to mend them. Chivalry proclaims that
that model, that moral code that knits together men like chain mail and, accordingly (as she implies in her
use of the metaphor in her biography of Charles V), provides a bulwark against the assaults of sin—original
sin—enabling our inner selves to create a social order. The illustrator (perhaps even Christine herself) by
p. 359 means of her selection of the subject here acknowledges the novelty of a woman author codifying the
rules of warfare by portraying Christine gazing on a woman deity linked to her by means of nationality—
127
Italian—and genealogy, a deity whose function embraces wisdom as well as warfare. In addition, for
Christine, women, in following Minerva, creator of armor making, also “make the armor” through their
weaving and cloth-making skills, necessitated by their gendered role within their culture. Di erent from
men, as she asserts in some of her early courtly poems, women are guratively more capable of knitting
together a harmonious social order because they are more moral, wiser, and peace loving.
At the opening of book 3, chapter 1, when Bovet rst appears at her bed, as in Bibliothèque royale
manuscript Brussels 9009–11 the Harley illumination places Christine in bed, prone, and the prior at the
right with arm upraised (see gure 40, Christine de Pizan, “Fais d’armes,” London, B.L. Harley 4605, fol.
191v). For a monk to appear in a woman’s bedroom may seem incongruous, but this may be the point: it is a
dream, Christine is sleeping, and dreams are not always constructed out of masculine desire as in the
Garden of Deduit. The monk has now taken the place of Christian’s Italian Minerva (appropriate signi er for
the Romans Vegetius and Frontinus) as authorizer, or author. Lending weight to the authority behind his
vision, Bovet dedicated his book to France’s Charles VI and is depicted in the frontispiece to Brussels,
Bibliothèque royale, 9001–11 (fol. 1), presenting a copy to him.
40.

In bed, Christine de Pizan envisions Bovet. Christine de Pizan, “Fais dʼarmes.” © The British Library Board. London, B.L. Harley
4605, fol. 191v.
For Christine in her Fais d’armes, Minerva and Bovet together supplant the roles of Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun in the Rose, with its articulation of male desire projected onto the Rose. Christine, we can see,
by attempting to codify and regularize the rules of battle and martial conduct also attempts to moralize and
feminize both—or to civilize both. But also, in acknowledging rhetorically her own foolish presumption in
this enterprise, as a woman like others who “generally are occupied in weaving, spinning, and household
duties,” Christine justi es herself, rst, because of her literary contemplation of her compatriot Minerva,
goddess of armor making, and second, because of her “plainest possible language” more readily accessible
to those who have been “military and lay experts in the aforesaid art of chivalry” instead of the subtlety and
128
polished words of the clerks. Education, after all, must be accessible if it is to be useful.
Viewing the monk Bovet as her master in her Fais d’armes, Christine, who spent much of her life as a writer
decrying the courtly-love excesses of the chevalier, in this book codi es appropriate rules of warfare,
p. 360 weaponry, military strategy, and laws of con ict. Indeed, her ideas have subsequently in uenced
international law, in that she argues war is lawful for a just cause, whether in self-defense, defense against
tyranny, or in preservation of the freedom of a country. That chivalry and the promulgation of a code of
speci cally masculine behavior also interested women other than Christine is also attested by its readers, or
at least its patrons. A manuscript of Fais d’armes was presented to another woman, Margaret of Anjou, as a
wedding gift in 1445, by John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury; Talbot had been designated as constable of France
for accompanying Margaret to England to marry Henry VI. Yet another manuscript of this popular work
reveals the coat of arms of Marie of Hungary. It was translated into English and printed by William Caxton in
the year 1490 at the request of Henry VII.
After this work, Christine returned to even larger issues: national peace, morality, death and resurrection.
Her desire for peace, re ected early on in her appeal to the French to strive for peace when the French were
p. 361 about to begin civil war after the Peace of Chartres ended (1409), surfaces in a work contemporary with
Fais d’armes, the Lamentation sur les maux de la France (or, Lamentation sur les maux de la guerre civile du 23
aout 1410) (Lamentation on France’s ills in the civil war of 23 August 1410). The three-part Livre de Paix
(Book of peace) (1412–14), a treatise on good rule through the classical virtues of prudence, justice,
magnanimity, the moral use of force, clemency, liberality, and truth, is imbued with her own experiences
during a time of chaos and war. And “L’Epistre de la prison de vie humaine et d’avoir reconfort de mort
d’amis et pacience en adversite” (Letter on the prison of human life and on having comfort from the death
of friends and patience in adversity) (1416–18), as a letter of consolation, was inspired by those men who
died at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) and is dedicated to Christine’s friend Marie de Berry, countess of

Auverne and duchess of Bourbon, who also su ered personally as a result of this battle. In this philosophical
work Christine mourns France’s heroes and takes as her title that of the text of St. Bernard of Chartres
comparing human life to a prison from which we escape at death. This work and the Heures de contemplacion
sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur (Hours of contemplation on the Passion of Our Savior) (ca. 1420–29) both
address times of bereavement: in the latter work, times when various women, including the Virgin Mary,
might serve as models for those a ected. For all practical purposes her writing career ended when she
retreated to a convent in 1418, most probably Poissy, where her daughter was serving as a nun. Christine’s
impassioned and nal poem, the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (Song of Joan of Arc) (23–31 July 1429), centers on
the victory of Joan of Arc.
What in part explains the international and timeless appeal of Christine’s corpus of writings, given their
relatively early date, is her singular interest in women. Her friendships with powerful aristocratic women
like Marie de Berry and Isabeau de Bavière remind us of her modernism. She consistently promotes the
education of women and defends their virtue and wisdom, just as, late in her life, she champions Joan of Arc
in one of her last works. Christine’s educational philosophy for women is expressed in the didactic works
Cité des Dames and what might be termed its sequel, the Livre des Trois vertus (Book of three virtues; 1405), a
social classi cation of women as the fourth estate; it concerns the education of women of all classes, ages,
129
and situations. Here Reason, Rectitude, and Justice are joined by Prudence to instruct women of three
classes (queens and ladies, noblewomen, and commoners) in its three parts, in moral and practical lessons
that range from how to handle servants when their husbands are absent to learning how to love spouses.
p. 362 Even in her own day, as a near contemporary of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geo rey Chaucer, Christine
eventually became so in uential in France, England, and elsewhere in western Europe that copies were
made of her manuscripts. In England, her poem the Epistre au Dieu d’Amours in uenced Hoccleve’s Letter of
Cupid, and William Worchester paraphrased Fais d’armes in his Boke of Noblesse. Various nobles, among them
Henry IV, Henry VII, Edward IV, Lord Salisbury, and Earl Rivers, had her works copied; they were translated
not only into English but even into Portuguese, namely, Trois vertus, by request of Queen Isabel of
130
Portugal. And when printing began in France and England in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
addition to the publication of French versions of the Fais d’armes, the Tresor de la Cité des Dames, the Othea,
and the Chemin de Long Estude, several translations appeared in English: the Morale Proverbes, the Fayttes of
131
Armes and Chyvalrye, the Body of Polyce, the Cyte of Ladyes, and the C[ent] Hystoryes of Troy (the Othea). Her
132
Cité des Dames continued to be read, translated, and adapted well into the nineteenth century.
From Christine de Pizan we turn next, in chapter 6, to her Italian contemporary Coluccio Salutati, a
mythographer worlds apart from her and her adoptive nation, yet like her similarly focused on the necessity
for wise rule and studia humanistica. The Florentine also shares with her a desire to valorize the hero
Hercules (as he appears in the Othea as an exemplar of wisdom and fortitude). Although Salutati cannot by
any means be identi ed as a protofeminist, like her he found violence against women objectionable, at least
as expressed in the murderous behavior of Hercules toward his wife Megaera in Seneca’s tragedies, and he
sought to justify the hero (and the writing of poetry) through an elaborate work of mythography that was
not nished in his lifetime.
Notes
1. Allen Frantzen points out, in Beyond the Closet: Same-Sex Love from “Beowulf” to “Angels in America” (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 89, that “Augustine wished to augment his ambition, in the third book of the City of God, that
the fall of Rome was not caused by the cityʼs conversion to Christianity. He enlisted Orosius to demonstrate that the city
had su ered disasters before the conversion, as well as a er.”
2. For modern treatments of Boccaccioʼs De mulieribus claris as a source for Cité des Dames, see Maureen Quilligan, The
Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizanʼs Cité des Dames (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Liliane Dulac,
“Un Mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan: Sémiramis ou la veuve héroïque (du De mulieribus claris de Boccaccio à la

Cité des Dames),” in Mélanges de philologie romane o erts à Charles Camproux (Montpellier: C.E.O., 1978), 1:315–43; and
the helpful Patricia A. Phillippy, “Establishing Authority: Boccaccioʼs De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pizanʼs Le Livre
de la Cité des Dames,” Romanic Review 77 (1986): 167–94. For Christineʼs use of the allegorical frame found in Cas des
nobles hommes et femmes, see Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 116–17. See also Kevin Brownlee, “Christine de Pizanʼs Canonical
Authors: The Special Case of Boccaccio,” Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995): 135–52; Judith Kellogg, “Christine de
Pizan and Boccaccio: Rewriting the Classical Mythic Tradition,” in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and
Trends, ed. Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody (Manoa: University of Hawaii, 1989), pp. 124–31; Dennis J. OʼBrien,
“Warrior Queen: The Character of Zenobia According to Giovanni Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, and Sir Thomas Elyot,”
Medieval Perspectives 8 (1993): 53–68; and Kazimierz Kupicz, “ʻPars souci de brièvetéʼ: Résonances du Décaméron dans la
Cité des Dames de Christine de Pizan,” in La Forme brève: Actes du colloque franco-polonais Lyon, 19, 20, 21 septembre 1994,
ed. Simone Messina (Paris: Honoré Champion; Florence: Cadmo, 1996), pp. 23–27.
3. According to Brigitte Buettner, Christine echoes terms in the prologue of Des cleres femmes in a letter to Gontier Col (in late
September of 1401). See Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes: Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript
(Seattle: College Art Association / University of Washington Press, 1996), p. 110n154; Eric Hicks, ed., Le Débat sur le Roman
de la Rose, Bibliothèque du XVe siècle 43 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1977), p. 25; Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, La
Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 199 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 63; and David F. Hult, ed. and trans., Debate of the Romance of the Rose,
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 97.
4. Christine generally prefers the original Latin to the anonymous French translation of 1402, Des cleres et nobles femmes,
although she may borrow phrasings from the French: see Alfred Jeanroy, “Boccace et Christine de Pisan: Le De claris
mulieribus, principale source du Livre de la Cité des Dames,” Romania 48 (1922): 93–94; and Marie-Josèphe Pinet, Christine
de Pisan (1364–1430): Étude biographique et littéraire, diss., Lyon, Bibliothèque du XVe siècle 35 (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1927), p. 400. See also Dulac, “Un Mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan,” pp. 315–43, who compares the myth of
Semiramis in Boccaccioʼs Latin version with Christineʼs. More recently, Jane H. M. Taylor, in her comparison of several
myths (Semiramis, Medea, and Clytemnestra) in both the original Latin and the French translation, finds that Christine
prefers the less misogynistic original Latin, in “Translation as Reception: Boccaccioʼs de Mulieribus claris [sic] and Des
cleres et nobles femmes,” in “Por le soie amiste”: Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones,
Faux titre 183 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 506. For the Latin original, see Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, ed. and trans.
Brown; for the anonymous 1402 French translation, see Boccace: “Des cleres et nobles femmes”: MS. Bibl. Nat. 12420 (chap.
I–LII in vol. 1; LII–end in vol. 2), ed. Jeanne Baroin and Josiane Ha en, 2 vols. in 1, Annales littéraires de lʼUniversité de
Besançon 498 (Paris: Di usion des Belles Lettres, 1993–95). For the relationship between Des cleres femmes and Cité des
Dames, see Maureen Curnowʼs excellent discussion in “The Livre de la Cité des Dames of Christine de Pisan: A Critical
Edition” (diss., Vanderbilt University, 1975), 1:139–54. Unfortunately, Curnow uses Musée Condé 856 (formerly 662) as her
text for the translation, which she believes is a copy of B.N. fr. 12420, without having closely compared the two
manuscripts. Thus Curnowʼs statement implying authorship by Premierfait, or at least the influence of Premierfait on this
early translation, which preceded his, may be mistaken: “The French translation [B.N. fr. 12420] does not strictly follow
Boccaccioʼs Latin. The author condenses and expands at will; he also adds some moralizing comments and explanations.
This is similar to the expansions and explanations found in the two translations of Boccaccioʼs works which are definitely
done by Laurent de Premierfait: the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (1400 and 1409) and the Decamerone (1411–14)”
(Curnow, 1:139). Premierfaitʼs translation of the former, De cas des nobles hommes et femmes, is two to three times as long
as Boccaccioʼs original: see Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, bk. 1, trans. Laurent de Premierfait, ed. Patricia May
Gathercole, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 74 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 7. For Curnowʼs discussion of the alleged influence of Premierfaitʼs De cas des nobles
hommes et femmes on Cité des Dames, see Curnow, 1:165–67.
5. See the description of the Philip of Burgundy manuscript (Paris, B.N. fr. 12420, fols. 1r–167r–v) in Carla Bozzolo, Manuscrits
des traductions françaises dʼoeuvres de Boccace dans les bibliothèques de France: XVe siècle (Padua: Antenore, 1973), pp.
96–98; and of Paris, B.N. 598 (Baroinʼs recently edited manuscript) on pp. 92–93.
6. See Bozzolo, Manuscrits, pp. 3–23, for Premierfaitʼs dates and manuscripts. For the discussion of attribution of authorship
for the anonymous translation of 1402, see Baroin and Ha en, Boccace, p. 9: they note that Laurent de Premierfaitʼs
translation of De casibus illustrium virorum is far superior to that of Des cleres femmes. Gontier Col, so influential an
antagonist of Christine in the Querelle de la Rose, originally owned a copy of De cas des nobles hommes et femmes with
Premier-faitʼs presentation scene to Jean, duc de Berry (Paris, B.N. fr. 131, beginning of the fi eenth century, with a
portrait of the Master of the Cité des Dames) (Bozzolo, Manuscrits, pp. 43, 59).
7. The first French translation of Boccaccio, in B.N. fr. 12420, was illustrated by the Coronation of the Virgin Master and his
associates with 109 miniatures that form a cycle similar to those of the literary genre of estates literature, many with

women as subjects. For information about the Italian Raponde family and its members Dine (Dino) and Jacques, see
Buettner, Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes, p. 23. See also Patrick M. de Winter, La Bibliothèque de Philippe le
Hardi, duc de Bourgogne (1364–1404) (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1985), for detailed
inventories of the library of Christineʼs patron Philip the Bold and Marguerite of Flanders, which contained her Othea (inv.
no. 62, belonging to Philip the Bold, ca. 1402–4; Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 4373–76, from Flanders, which contains her
presentation illumination, fol. 55), as well as other manuscripts that she may have borrowed from them, including
Boccaccioʼs “Des femmes nobles et renommees” (inv. no. 48, noted as belonging to Philip, ca. 1401–2).
8. For French translations of Boccaccio in the fi eenth century, see Bozzolo, Manuscrits. Sixteen manuscripts of the
anonymous translation of De mulieribus claris exist; eight are held in French libraries (p. 1). See also L. Sozzi, “Boccaccio in
Francia nel Cinquecento,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese: Atti del Convegno di studi “Lʼopera del Boccaccio nella
cultura francese”—Certaldo 2–6 settembre 1968, ed. Carlo Pellegrini, Ente Nazionale “Giovanni Boccaccio” 1 (Florence: Leo
S. Olschki, 1971), pp. 211–357.
9. Bozzolo, Manuscrits, pp. 24–25. The dedicatee was, in fact, Andrea Acciaiuoli, countess of Altavilla and sister of Niccola
Acciaiuoli, Boccaccioʼs friend from youth whom he later felt betrayed him.
10. Bozzolo, Manuscrits, pp. 40–41.
11. These two works by Christine and Boccaccio were sometimes combined in one manuscript: Chantilly, Musée Condé 856,
contains both Cité des Dames, fols. 4v–30r (incomplete, only bk. 3, chaps. 6, 8, 11–12), and Des cleres femmes, fols. 31r–
130v (with a date of 12 September 1401, during the reign of King Charles VI, fol. 130r–v) (pp. 99–100); so also Paris,
Collection Particulière, Ex Phillipps 3648 (third quarter of the fi eenth century), with Des cleres femmes, fols. 1r–82r, and
Cité des Dames, fols. 83r–150r (see Bozzolo, Manuscrits, pp. 98–99).
12. That Christine not only personally directed copying and ornamentation of her works but also participated in the work is
suggested in the recent publication of what will likely become the definitive bible of Christine manuscript cataloging and
production, which also contains a description of her own calligraphic cursive modeled on chancery cursive: see Gilbert
Ouy, Christine Reno, and Inès Villela-Petit, Album Christine de Pizan, ed. Olivier Delsaux and Tania Van Hemelryck, Texte,
Codex & Contexte 14 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2012), pp. 17–38. Early studies of Christineʼs oversight of manuscript
production and the inscription of her own manuscripts, particularly what is known now as the “Queenʼs Manuscript,” her
anthology in London, B.L. Harley 4431, were published by Charity Cannon Willard, “An Autograph Manuscript of Christine
de Pizan?” Studi francesi 27 (1965): 452–57; Gilbert Ouy and Christine Reno, “Identification des autographes de Christine
de Pizan,” Scriptorium 34 (1980): 221–38; Sandra L. Hindman, Christine de Pizanʼs “Epistre Othéa”: Painting and Politics at
the Court of Charles VI, Toronto Texts and Studies 77 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), pp. 61–63;
and James C. Laidlaw, “Christine de Pizan: Publisherʼs Progress,” MLR 82 (1987): 35–67.
13. Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (The Franklin Jasper
Lectures) (New York: George Braziller / Pierpont Morgan Library, 1974), 1:8.
14. See Mary Weitzel Gibbons, “Visual Allegory in the Chemin de Long Estude,” in Christine de Pizan and the Categories of
Di erence, ed. Marilynn Desmond, Medieval Cultures 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 128–45.
15. For the various techniques of literary subversion practiced in their own works by medieval women, see chap. 1,
“Introduction: The Discursive Strategies of the Marginalized,” in Jane Chance, The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women,
New Middle Ages Series (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), esp. pp. 12–15, on the narrator Christine falling into despair
a er reading a misogynistic text and author Christine constructing the setting and context as if the voice speaking is male,
until the identity of the narrator is revealed as a “femme naturelle.”
18. Brigitte Buettner notes: “The mere fact that the Cleres femmes was issued in a lavishly illuminated manuscript attests to its
favorable reception. Morever, a year a er Cité des Dames Philip the Bold received his copy, Jean, duc de Berry, was
presented with a new, almost identical version by his treasurer, Jean de la Barre, also an étrennes gi . What Jonathan
Alexander recently termed the phenomenon of ʻtwin or multipleʼ copies is thus at once an index of the competitive
behavior that characterized aristocratic collecting and of the appeal of a particular work” (Buettner, Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres
et Nobles Femmes, p. 23; see also Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work [New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992], p. 139). Buettner acknowledges that Chaucerʼs Legend of Good Women reflects the impact of
the Latin original of De mulieribus claris, just as Christineʼs “rewriting” of the Des cleres femmes “is a sign of its immediate
impact” (pp. 21–22). She concludes, however, that the “immediate success” of Boccaccioʼs Des cleres femmes can best be
explained di erently: “The social and gender composition of the Cour amoureuse [of Charles VI in 1401] does closely
parallel the textual community of the Cleres femmes. This, more than Christine de Pizanʼs instant reaction, helps to explain
the workʼs immediate success” (p. 23).
19. Buettner, Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes, pp. 96, 99.
20. The six manuscripts of the Rose that may have been available were Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier 4782 and 9576

(both owned by the duke of Bourgogne, Jean sans Peur, or his father, Philippe le Hardi, that is, Philip the Bold); Città del
Vaticano, Vat. Reg. lat. 1522 (also owned by Jean sans Peur, or his father, Philip the Bold); Paris, B.N. fr. 12595 (owned by
the son of Jean sans Peur, Philippe le Bon, that is, Philip the Good, or his father or grandfather); and New York, Pierpont
Morgan Library M.48 and M.245 (most likely belonging to a member of the French royal court, possibly from the collections
of Charles V and Charles VI, with notes and inscriptions, possibly spurious, indicating they were made for Jean, duc de
Berry): see the Pierpont Morgan Library typescript catalogue, M.48; Meradith T. McMunn, “Was Christine Poisoned by an
Illustrated Rose?” The Profane Arts Les Arts Profanes 7 (1998): 146–48; and M. Paul Meyer, “Chronique,” Bibliothèque de
lʼÉcole des Chartes 26 (1865): 597–98.
21. See McMunn, pp. 136–51.
22. See Diane Wol hal, “ʻDouleur sur Toutes Autresʼ: Revisualizing the Rape Script in the Epistre Othea and the Cité des
Dames,” in Desmond, Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Di erence, pp. 41–70.
23. For a detailed description of B.L. Royal 16 G V, “De mulieribus claris,” translated anonymously into French, see George F.
Warner and Julius P. Gilson, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and Kingʼs Collections in the British Museum
(London: Longmanʼs, Green; Bernard Quaritch; Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1921), 2:375b–377b; for Royal
20 DI, a history beginning with the story of Thebes, titled “Les Livres des estoires dou conmencement dou monde” (a work
also found in Stowe MS. 4), see Warner and Gilson, 208a–209b. In her edition of the Othea, Parussa notes that Royal 20 DI
was listed in the catalogue of the Louvre in 1380 and originated in Naples. It was copied around 1400 at a Paris atelier in a
manuscript known today as BN fr. 301. Note that the Histoire ancienne jusquʼà César also appears in B.L. Royal 16 G VII.
24. Other fi eenth-century manuscripts of Des cleres femmes are listed in an appendix of Buettner, Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres et
Nobles Femmes, pp.100–101. Only two would have been able to influence Christineʼs depiction of women in Cité des
Dames (1405): B.N. fr. 12420, ca. 1402, and B.N. fr. 598, ca. 1403, given to Jean, duc de Berry, by Jean de la Barre, with 107
miniatures by the atelier of the Master of Berryʼs Des cleres femmes. There followed four others, between 1410 and 1415:
London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, ca. 1410 (103 miniatures by an associate of the Master of Sir John Fastolf—who brought back to
England the Middle French Othea for copying and translating); London, B.L. Royal 20 C V, ca. 1410, with 105 miniatures;
Brussels, Bibl. Royale Albert Ier 9509, ca. 1410–15, 33 miniatures, from the library of the dukes of Burgundy; and Lisbon, C.
Gulbenkian Foundation L.A. 143, 1410–15, with 48 “surviving miniatures” by the Boucicaut Master workshop.
25. See Quilligan, Allegory of Female Authority, p. 76; see also pp. 69–103, on the first book of Cité and its empowering of
various women (presumably by inversion of Boccaccioʼs text, but Quilligan by this point ceases to continue the monitoring
of Boccaccio in her fine analysis of Christineʼs women).
26. There are brief portraits in book 2 of a few classical mythological women whom I do not discuss here: Hypsipyle, cited as
an example of a daughter known for her love of her father (2.9); Argia, a wife known for her love of her husband (2.17); and
four consecutive portraits of women excessive in their love for a man, to their own detriment (Dido, 2.55, Medea, 2.56,
Thisbe, 2.57, and Hero, 2.58).
27. For Boccaccioʼs general importance in French culture of the fi eenth century, see Franco Simone, “La Présence de Boccace
dans la culture française du XVème siècle,” JMRS 1 (1971): 17–31.
28. See P[ercy] G[erald] C. Campbell, LʼÉpître dʼOthéa: Étude sur les sources de Christine de Pisan (Paris: E. Champion, 1924), p.
106n1. For editions of the French translations of Boccaccio and for facsimiles of the manuscripts in which such
translations appeared, see “De Casibus Illustrium Virorum”: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Paris Edition of 1520, ed. Louis
Brewer Hall (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholarsʼ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962); Henry Martin, ed., Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur:
Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes. Reproduction des cent cinquante miniatures du manuscrit 5193 de la Bibliothèque
de lʼArsenal (Brussels: Librairie Nationale dʼArt et dʼHistoire / G. Van Oest, 1911); Baroin and Ha en, Boccace; and Laurent
de Premierfait, trans. Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, bk. 1, ed. Gathercole.
29. See Alfred de Champeaux and Paul Gauchery, Les Travaux dʼart exécutés pour Jean de France, duc de Berry, avec une étude
biographique sur les artistes employés par ce prince (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1894), p. 121.
30. See Paul Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe exécutés pour des princes et des grands seigneurs français: Notes et monographies,”
Le Manuscrit 2 (1895): 163.
31. De Champeaux and Gauchery, p. 151.
32. Albrecht Kirchho , Die Handschri enhändler des Mittelalters (Leipzig: Published by the author, 1853; rpt. Osnabrück,
1966), p. 99.
33. See Jules Gui rey, Inventaires de Jean, duc de Berry (1401–1416) (Paris: E. Leroux, 1894–96), 1:912, 953.
34. See Carla Bozzolo and Hélène Loyau, eds., La Cour amoureuse dite de Charles VI, 3 vols. (Paris: Léopard dʼOr, 1892–1992),
cited in Buettner, Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes, p. 110n157.
35. On the relationship between text and image in Christineʼs works, especially in the Othea, see Hindman, Christine de Pizanʼs
“Epistre Othéa.” On Cité des Dames, see Hindman, “With Ink and Mortar: Christine de Pizanʼs Cité des Dames (An Art
Essay),” Feminist Studies 10 (1984): 457–77; and Margarete Kottenho , “Die Miniaturen des ʻLivre de la Cité des Damesʼ als
historische Quellen,” Historisches Jahrbuch 115 (1995): 335–61.

36. On this manuscript, B.L. Harley 4431, see Sandra L. Hindman, “The Composition of the Manuscript of Christine de Pizanʼs
Collected Works of the British Library: A Reassessment,” British Library Journal 9 (1983): 93–123. See also Gilbert Ouy and
Christine Reno, “Le Catalogue des manuscrits autographes et originaux de Christine de Pizan,” in Sur le chemin de longue
étude … : Actes du colloque dʼOrléans, juillet 1995, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), pp. 127–33. The
definitive description appears in Ouy, Reno, and Villela-Petit, Album Christine de Pizan, pp. 316–43.
37. Deborah McGrady, “What Is a Patron? Benefactors and Authorship in Harley 4431, Christine de Pizanʼs Collected Works,” in
Desmond, Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Di erence, p. 195. See also Ouy, Reno, and Villela-Petit, Album Christine
de Pizan, pp. 228–93, for precise information about the dukeʼs manuscript collection.
38. See Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea, 1984), p. 170. See also Georges
Doutrepont, Inventaire de la “librairie” de Philippe le Bon (1420) (Brussels: Kiessling, 1906), p. 478.
39. McGrady, p. 196 (my emphasis).
40. Thomas Hyde, “Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth,” PMLA 100 (1985): 744n3.
41. There is only one partial French translation of the Genealogie deorum gentilium and then only of the last chapters, on
poetry (bk. 14, chaps. 2–3), by Jean Miélot, canon of Lille, around 1471, it is held in Paris, B.N. fr. 17001, fols. 29r–31r
(Bozzolo, Manuscrits, pp. 2, 36, 120–21). Interestingly, Gontier Col also owned the exemplar of the Latin Genealogie
deorum gentilium used by Laurent de Premierfait for his second translation of Des cleres femmes (p. 37).
42. See Carla Bozzolo, “Il Decameron come fonte del Livre de la cite des dames de Christine de Pizan,” Miscellanea di studi e
ricerche sul Quattrocento francese (1967): 3–24, who shows that she borrowed from it for the wife of Bernabo de Genevois,
Scismonde, daughter of the prince of Salerno, and for Lisabeth.
43. See also the discussion of Proba as a figure for the author Christine (writing against Boccaccio) in Didier Lechat, “Dire par
fiction”: Métamorphoses du “je” chez Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, et Christine de Pizan, Études christiennes 7
(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), p. 395.
44. When De mulieribus claris fully illustrates the meaning in Christine, Virginia Brownʼs facing-page edition and translation
will be cited in conjunction; where Des cleres femmes alters the text, I will either include the original from both editions or
only from Baroinʼs. What Boccaccio actually says is: “Non equidem admiration caret tam sublime considerationem
muliebre subintrasse cerebrum, sed longe mirabile fuit executioni mandasse” [Certainly it is no small wonder that such a
lo y design made its way into a womanʼs mind, but more wondrous still is the fact of its fulfillment] (De mulieribus claris,
chap. 97; Brown, pp. 412–13).
45. Consider the context of the equally negative transformation of the Roman hero Aeneas in the French vernacular between
the twel h and fi eenth centuries, according to Daniel Poirion (via H. R. Jaussʼs concept of “remythisation” in relation to
the allegorical tradition) in “De lʼEneide a lʼEneas: Mythologie et moralization,” Cahiers de civilisation médiéval 19 (1976):
229. Poirion suggests that the French Eneas (Aeneas) of the twel h and thirteenth centuries may have had homosexual
inclinations, mainly reflecting a change of Venus (representing voluptuousness) into Eros-Cupid in the Judgment of Paris.
He remarks that “[l]e retour dʼErôs dans lʼEneas prépare ainsi le mythe du Roman de la Rose,” by which he reminds us that
Venus appears therein but is construed as the kind of masculine eroticism, finʼamor, usually associated with her son,
Cupid. He notes that Eros proper does not really return until the century a er Jean de Meun, a er which the sexuality with
which the concept is associated is feminized and transformed by means of allegory in the fourteenth and fi eenth
centuries (p. 229). For Poirionʼs reliance on Jauss, see Hans Robert Jauss, “Allégorie, ʻremythisation,ʼ et nouveau mythe:
Réflexions sur la capitivité chrétienne de la mythologie au Moyen Âge,” in Mélanges dʼhistoire littéraire, de linguistique et
de philologie romane o erts à Charles Rostaing, comp. by his colleagues, students, and friends (Liège: Association des
Romanistes de lʼUniversité de Liège, 1974), pp. 469–99.
46. For Christineʼs changing voice in her epistles, see Nadia Margolis, “ʻThe Cry of the Chameleonʼ: Evolving Voices in the
Epistles of Christine de Pizan,” in The Late Medieval Epistle, ed. C. Poster and Richard Utz, vol. 1 of Disputatio: An
International Transdisciplinary Journal of the Late Middle Ages (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 37–
70; for the allegorical character Oppinion in the Advision primarily, but with reference to the idea of change of opinion in
her other works, see Douglas Kelly, Christine de Pizanʼs Changing Opinion: A Quest for Certainty in the Midst of Chaos
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007).
47. See Glynnis M. Cropp, “Boèce et Christine de Pizan,” Le Moyen Âge 87 (1981): 387–417. The manuscripts from which
Christine likely borrowed include especially Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale 525, fols. 201–21, dated 1362, but also
Auckland, Public Library GMSS 119, and Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 3861, both of which date from around 1400. Glynnis
Cropp has recently edited this anonymous Boethius, in Le Livre de Boèce de Consolacion, Textes Littéraires Français 580
(Geneva: Droz, 2006).
48. See Chance, MM, 2:320–76, chap. 7: “The Mythography of the Personal: Pierre Bersuireʼs Ovidius Moralizatus and the
Castration of Saturn (ca. 1342–1350s).”
49. For Christineʼs approach to Boethius in the Vision, see Benjamin Semple, “The Consolation of a Woman Writer: Christine
de Pizanʼs Use of Boethius in Lavision-Christine,” in Women, the Book, and the Worldly (Selected Proceedings of the St.

Hildaʼs Conference), ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 39–48.
50. See Christineʼs complaint to Philosophy about Fortune in the edition of the Advision based on all three extant
manuscripts, Le Livre de lʼAdvision Cristine, ed. Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), pp. 95–
117 (3.3–14); and its translation, Vision of Christine, trans. Glenda McLeod and Charity Cannon Willard, Library of Medieval
Women (Woodbridge, Su olk, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 91–110. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in
the text and/or notes with the name(s) of the editor or translator, title, page(s), and book, chapter, and/or line number(s).
51. Christine, Advision 3.6 (Reno and Dulac, pp. 100–101; McLeod and Willard, pp. 96–97).
52. Christine, Advision 3.6 (Reno and Dulac, p. 101; McLeod and Willard, p. 97).
53. For an interesting interpretation of how Salic Law was used to exclude women from inheritance of landed property during
the time of the Debate of the Rose and how it a ected Christineʼs economic situation and her participation in the Debate,
see Craig Taylor, “The Salic Law, French Queenship, and the Defense of Women in the Late Middle Ages,” French Historical
Studies 29 (2006): 543–64. Apparently Jean de Montreuil was responsible for altering a phrase in the Salic Law in support
of the Valois monarchy against the English, which was embraced by the French as a means of national security.
54. Christine, Advision 3.6 (Reno and Dulac, pp. 105, 104; McLeod and Willard, p. 100).
55. Christine, Advision 3.8.9–12 (Reno and Dulac, p. 108; McLeod and Willard, p. 102).
56. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, ed. Suzanne Solente, Société des anciens textes français (Paris: A. et
J. Picard, 1959), vol. 1, lines 142–43, 141–56, respectively. Portions of the Mutacion have been translated by Kevin
Brownlee, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, eds., The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 88–109.
57. See the discussion of Christineʼs understanding of the poetic/prose text of Mutacion de Fortune and its use of integumenta
in relation to truth compared with composition as abbreviatio by Jeannette M. A. Beer, “Stylistic Conventions in Le Livre de
la Mutacion de Fortune,” in Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, ed. Earl Je rey Richards, Joan Williamson, Nadia Margolis,
and Christine Reno (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 124–36.
58. Charity Cannon Willard believes the Chemin de Long Estude was finished right a er the Debate of the Rose, which would
strengthen Christineʼs resolution to (as it were) use Boethius to repudiate Jean. See Willard, Christine de Pizan, pp. 105–6.
For the Chemin, see Christine de Pizan, Le Chemin de Longue Étude, ed. and trans. Andrea Tarnowski, Lettres gothiques
(Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000).
59. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 820 .
60. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 157, 201.
61. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 418, 217.
62. See Andrea Tarnowski, “Maternity and Paternity in La Mutacion de Fortune,” in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to
Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmermann and Dina De Rentiis, European Cultures: Studies in Literature and the Arts
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), pp. 116–26.
63. David Hult believes that Jean de Montreuil addresses a lawyer in this letter; see Christine de Pizan, in Hult, Debate of the
Romance of the Rose, p. 69. The reference derives from Horace, The Art of Poetry, 1.309: “Scribendi recte sapere est et
principium et fons” [Of good writing the source and fount is wisdom], in Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. H.
Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 476.
64. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 469; 449–51 (my emphasis).
65. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 444–48 (my emphasis); see also Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Brownlee, p. 95.
66. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 667 .
67. See the discussion of medieval Boethian mythographic glosses in Chance, MM, 1:205–41.
68. Christine de Pizan, Mutacion, vol. 1, lines 389–91.
69. Christine, Advision 3.1.19–20 (Reno and Dulac, p. 92; McLeod and Willard, p. 88).
70. See the early study by Maureen Slattery Durley, “The Crowned Dame, Dame Oppinion, and Dame Philosophy: The Female
Characteristics of Three Ideals in Christine de Pizanʼs Lavision-Christine,” in Ideals for Women in the Works of Christine de
Pizan, ed. Diane Bornstein, Medieval and Renaissance Monograph Series 1 (Detroit: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and
Early Modern Studies, 1981), pp. 29–50. Durley views these guides as Christineʼs “mothers.”
71. See Mary L. Skemp, “Autobiography as Authority in Lavision-Christine,” Moyen français 33–36 (1994–95): 17.
72. Jane Chance, “Speaking in propria persona: Authorizing the Subject as a Political Act in Late Medieval Feminine
Spirituality,” in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley
Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, pp. 266–90 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1999); on Christine in the Advision Christine,
pp. 277–83.
76. See Jane Chance, “Re-Membering Herself: Christine de Pizanʼs Refiguration of Isis as Io,” MP 111 (2013): 133–57.

77. See the discussion in the introduction to this volume of Christineʼs use of the illumination frontispiece to a manuscript and
how she positions herself or her alter ego within it, pp. 8–11.
78. Parussaʼs critical edition of the Othea is based on B.L. Harley 4431 and three other manuscripts (of the forty-three extant
manuscripts).
79. Christineʼs miniatures also serve uniquely as a didactic device to aid in “illuminating” her fables: see the early pioneering
work on Christineʼs illuminations by Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 34–38, out of a longer section on Christineʼs allegory, pp. 33–47; and by
Mary Ann Ignatius, “Christine de Pizanʼs Epistre Othea: An Experiment in Literary Form,” M&H 9 (1979): 127–42.
80. On the complexity of the “Moralized Ovid,” see also Chance, MM, 2:320–76.
81. For Boccaccio as the chief source of the Cité des Dames, see, in particular, Jeanroy, pp. 93–154, esp. pp. 92–105; for the
dating of De mulieribus claris, see Henri Hauvette, Boccace: Étude biographique et littéraire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1914), pp.
394–410. The earliest (anonymous) version of Des cleres femmes, recently edited, exists in Baroin and Ha en, Boccace. A
much longer unedited translation has been attributed to Laurent de Premierfait; it appears in Musée Condé 856 (formerly
662), along with an incomplete copy of Cité des Dames, and was first printed by Antoine Vérard (Paris, 1493) and reprinted
in Paris in 1538: see Henri Hauvette, Les Plus Anciennes Traductions françaises de Boccace (XIVe–XVIIe siècles), Bulletin
italien des annales de la Fac. Bordeaux, 1907–9 (Bordeaux: Feret, [1909?]), p. 193. For the attribution to Premierfait, see
Henri Hauvette, De Laurentio de Primofato qui primus Joannis Boccaccii opera quaedam Gallice transtulit ineunte seculo XV,
diss., University of Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1903), p. 6.
82. The Decameron was a source for the stories of the wife of Guillaume of Roussillon, the wife of Bernabo of Genoa,
Ghismonda, Lisabetta of Messina, and Griselda, according to Curnow, 1:155. Curnow also discusses the influence on Cité
des Dames of the Italian Decameron (Premierfait did not translate it into French until 1414) and of the Histoire ancienne
jusquʼà César (Curnow, 1:155–72, 172–75), the latter of which was used primarily for historical details (Curnow, 1:148).
83. Orosiusʼs account was translated into West Saxon by King Alfred in the tenth century and into French by others beginning
in the twel h century in various versions. The Old English translation of Orosius has been edited by Janet Bately, The Old
English Orosius, EETS, s.s., 6 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980). For the title of Histoire jusquʼà César, which rightly
refers to the second redaction only, see M. Paul Meyer, “Les Premières Compilations français dʼhistoire ancienne,”
Romania 14 (1885): 63.
84. See the partial critical edition of Histoire ancienne jusquʼà César (Estoires Rogier) by Marijke de Visser-van Terwisga, 2 vols.,
Medievalia 30 (Orleans: Paradigme, 1999), on the Assyrians, Thebes, the Minotaur, the Amazons, and Hercules. In chapters
3–4, on the author, date, and so forth, the translation is attributed to Wauchier de Denain; it was completed in the early
thirteenth century (between 1208 and 1230) for Roger, the castellan of Lille (2:217–24).
85. Willard, Christine de Pizan, pp. 92, 112–13.
86. See Solente, introduction to Christine de Pizanʼs Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, 1:lxiii–lxviii.
87. See Buettner, Boccaccioʼs Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes, p. 109n124; on womenʼs catalogues in the Middle Ages, see
McLeod, Virtue and Venom, p. 68.
88. This information is taken from “New Castle Museum,” a brochure published for and about the city of Naples (Naples: Joint
to the Major for Culture, D.E.C., n.d.).
89. In his Epistola ad Andream de Acciarolis, Boccaccio notes at the beginning that he did not dedicate De mulieribus claris to
Queen Joanna, as was his original intention, but to Countess Andrea degli Acciaiuoli. See the passage cited in the
appendix to the Middle English version of Boccaccioʼs Famous Women, titled Forty-Six Lives, trans. Henry Parker, Lord
Morley, ed. Herbert G. Wright, EETS, o.s., 214 (London: Oxford University Press, 1943 [for 1940]; rpt. 1970), p. 181.
90. In addition to the Middle English translation of Boccaccioʼs Famous Women by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, see also Die
mittelenglische Umdichtung von Boccaccios “De claris mulieribus” [a Middle English translation based on B.L. Additional
10304, fols. 2–46], ed. Gustav Schleich (Leipzig: Mayer and Müller, 1924).
91. See Christineʼs Epistre au Dieu dʼAmours, lines 591–604. See also the discussion of the creation of two human races,
particularly as expounded by Philo Judaeus, in R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1989): 9–15.
92. Cf. Cara i, p. 507n; Richards, p. 261n. Although Richards notes that, according to editor Curnow, Christine cites from
memory of the Latin, in fact there existed various fi eenth-century manuscripts of a French translation of this gynecology:
see Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Ce Sont les secres des dames, de endus à reveler. Publiés pir la première fois dʼaprès des
manuscrits du XVe siècle, avec des facsimile, une introduction, des notes et un appendice, ed. Alexandre Colson (Paris:
Édouard Rouveyre, 1880). The fi eenth-century manuscripts, among others, include B.N. fr. 631 and B.N. fr. 2027. See also
the translation by Helen Rodnite Lemay, Womenʼs Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnusʼ De Secretis Mulierum
with Commentaries, SUNY Series in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of New York, 1992).
93. See Irene Samuel, “Semiramis in the Middle Ages: The History of a Legend,” M&H, o.s., 3 (1944): 32–44.
94. See Paulus Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, ed. Carolus Zangemeister, CSEL 5 (Vienna: C. Geroldi Filium
Bibliopolam Academiae, 1882; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966), p. 86 (2.3); The Seven Books of History against the

Pagans, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), p. 47.
95. Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, 2.2–3; Zangemeister, pp. 83–86; Deferrari, pp. 45–46.
96. Dulac has provided an appendix allowing for direct comparison of Boccaccioʼs Latin fable of Semiramis with the longer
French version in “Des femmes nobles et renommees” (the 1402 manuscript, B.N. fr. 12420) and Raisonʼs fable in Cité des
Dames, with both the Latin and French condemning her incest with her son and Christine attempting to justify it, in “Un
Mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan,” pp. 332–43.
97. Cf. the nearly identical French of the published edition of the anonymous 1402 translation, Des cleres femmes: “Car
comme, entre les autres femmes, elle ainsi que continuelment ardy du feu de charnalité, pour laquelle chose on dit elle
avoir eu compaignie charnelle avec plusiers; … lequel Nynie, voulsist Dieu quʼil et sa mere eussent ensemble changié de
sexe, demouroit oiseux es chambers des dames, ou ceste royne, sa mere, labouroit en armes contre les ennemys” (Baroin
and Ha en, Boccace, p. 22). However, the Old French translation of Orosius known as “Histoire ancienne” does insert a
note about her lechery: “ele estoit ardans en luxure et desirans de sanc humain espandre et de terres ardoir et
confundere”; chap. 4 (de Visser-van Terwisga, 1:3).
98. Dulac points out that husbandless Semiramis also appears as a victim of Fortune (like Christine, I might add) in the
Mutacion de Fortune and as an “image de parfait ʻchevalerieʼ” in the Chemin de Long Estude, in “Un Mythe didactique chez
Christine de Pizan,” p. 320.
99. The manuscripts include London, B.L. Royal 16 G V and 20 C V: Sappho (London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 8r); Leontium
(London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 74r); Nicostrata/Carmentis/Carmenta (London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 28v); and Minerva
(London, B.L. Royal 20 C V, fol. 15r).
100. On “Leuntion contre Théophraste,” see Hicksʼs introduction to his edition, Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, pp. xl–l.
101. This story of the naming of the Palatine (in anticipation of the founding of Rome) is repeated in Cité des Dames 2.5.1
because Nicostrata is also a prophet, like Cassandra and Queen Basine, in 2.5.2–3.
102. See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy: The Uses of Books in the Fourteenth Century, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 121–22.
103. See Jane Chance, “Christineʼs Minerva, the Mother Valorized,” in Christine de Pizanʼs Letter of Othea to Hector, Translated
with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretative Essay, Library of Medieval Women (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Information
Group, 1990), pp. 121–33.
104. Minervaʼs armor making and military strategy are also discussed in Cité des Dames 1.38.3 and 1.38.5.
105. Cf. Opis or Ops in B.N. fr. 598, fol. 11v; also London, B.L. Royal 16 G V, fol. 8r. Opis in fr. 598 is alone with statues of small
figures (perhaps images of the children her husband Saturn has devoured).
106. Opsʼs daughter Juno appears in Cité des Dames 2.61.2.
107. See Europa riding a bull (Jove), Lyon, Bibliothèque Municipale 742, fol. 10v.
108. A Gorgon also appears separately in Cité des Dames 1.34.4, but is identified only as the image of a snake on the shield of
the statue of Minerva.
109. See Kevin Brownlee, “Ovide et le Moi poétique ʻmoderneʼ à la fin du Moyen Âge: Jean Froissart et Christine de Pizan,”
Recherches et Rencontres 1 (1990): 153–73; Cerquiglini-Toulet; Chance, “Re-Membering Herself”; and Lechat; among
others.
110. For a chronology and dating of works, see Nadia Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan, New Perspectives on
Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), pp. xix–xxiii; wherever
discrepancies exist between Margolis and the definitive first-manuscript dates provided by Ouy, Reno, and Villela-Petit,
Album Christine de Pizan, the latter prevails in this volume.
111. Lori Walters demonstrates how Christine corrects Jean de Meunʼs version of Reason in her Epistre au Dieu dʼAmours, in
“The Woman Writer and Literary History: Christine de Pizanʼs Redefinition of the Poetic Translatio in the Epistre au Dieu
dʼAmours,” French Literature Studies 16 (1989): 1–16.
112. For the correct spelling of Honorat Bovetʼs name (previously, Honoré Bonet), see Michael Hanlyʼs edition and translation
of the Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun, in Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue: The Apparicion Maistre
Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 283 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
113. Jean de Meunʼs Vegetius was therea er put into rhyme by Jean, Prior at Besançon, and then two additional translations
followed: one by Jean de Vignay (early fourteenth century) and the other anonymous (1380). Other primary sources for
the first books of Fais dʼarmes include the less important Frontinus (ca. 84–96 A.D .), a Roman consul and governor of
Britain, in his Strategemata; and Valerius Maximus, in De dictis et factis memorabilibus. See the introduction to the Middle
English translation, The Book of Fayttes of Armes and Chyualrye, translated and printed by William Caxton from the French
original of Christine de Pizan and edited by A. T. P. Byles, EETS, o.s., 189 (1932; with corrections, rpt. London: Oxford
University Press, 1937; rpt. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1985), pp. xxxvi–li. See also the recent translation by Sumner Willard and
the edition by Charity Cannon Willard, The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry (University Park: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1999), from which all citations have been taken for Fais dʼarmes, with book(s), chapter(s), and page
number(s) as indicated.
114. See Charity Cannon Willard, “Christine de Pizanʼs Treatise on the Art of Medieval Warfare,” in Essays in Honor of Loris
Francis Solano, ed. R. Cormier and U. T. Holmes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), p. 189.
115. Christine de Pizan, Fais dʼarmes, 1.7, p. 26.
117. See Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun.
118. Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun, p. 63.
119. Christine de Pizan, Fais dʼarmes, 3.1, p. 143 (my emphasis).
120. Christine de Pizan, Fais dʼarmes, 3.1, p. 144 (my emphasis).
121. The multivocal nature of Christineʼs allegory—on one level autobiographical, on the other political, or simultaneously
both—has been examined by Rosalind Brown-Grant, “Lavision-Christine: Autobiographical Narrative or Mirror for the
Prince?” in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview, 1992), pp. 95–111; Catherine Jones West, “Re-Envisioning Womanʼs Place: The Body Politic and Spiritual in
Lavision-Christine,” in New Readings of Spiritual Narrative from the Fi eenth to the Twentieth Century: Secular Force and
Disclosure, ed. Phebe Davidson, Studies in Religion and Society 31 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1995), pp. 1–11; Andrea
W. Tarnowski, “Perspectives on the Advision,” in Christine de Pizan 2000: Studies in Honour of Angus J. Kennedy, ed. John
Campbell and Nadia Margolis, Faux titre 196 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 105–14, 317–18; and Liliane Dulac and
Christine Reno, “The Livre de lʼAdvision Cristine,” in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L.
McGrady (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 199–214.
122. See the translated excerpt of the biography of Charles V in Charity Cannon Willard, “Christine de Pizan on Chivalry,” in The
Study of Chivalry, ed. Howell Chickering and Tom Seiler (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988), p. 520.
123. Christineʼs sex and name are omitted in publisher Antoine Verardʼs 1488 printed edition, LʼArt de chevalerie selon Végèce
suivi du Livre des faits dʼarmes et de chevalerie, reprinted by Philippe le Noir in 1527 with a changed title. See Willard,
“Christine de Pizanʼs Treatise,” p. 189; see also Fais dʼarmes, pp. 12–13n1, which includes Verardʼs changes.
125. Christine de Pizan, Fais dʼarmes, 1.2, p. 13. For Boccaccioʼs De mulieribus claris, see Virginia Brown, ed. and trans., Giovanni
Boccaccio: Famous Women (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 37, 38 (chap. 6).
127. See Paris, B.N., fr. 603 (formerly 7087), fol. 2.
129. See Astrik L. Gabriel, “The Educational Ideas of Christine de Pisan,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 3–21.
130. See Percy Gerald Cadogan Campbell, “Christine de Pisan en Angleterre,” Revue de littérature comparée 5 (1925): 659–70;
see also Jane Chance, “Gender Subversion and Linguistic Castration in Fi eenth-Century English Translations of Christine
de Pizan,” in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998),
pp. 161–94.
131. See Cynthia J. Brown, “The Reconstruction of an Author in Print: Christine de Pizan in the Fi eenth and Sixteenth
Centuries,” in Desmond, Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Di erence, pp. 215–35.
132. See Glenda K. McLeod, ed., The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fi eenth through the Nineteenth Centuries: Visitors
to the City (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1991).

Chance 2014

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Chance 2014

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Medieval Mythography, Volume 3: The Emergence of Italian Humanism, 1321-1475

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Five Christine de Pizan’s Illuminated Women in the Cité des

Keywords: Christine, Cité, Boccaccio

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

(miniatures by the Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop).

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

(miniatures by the Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop).

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

(miniatures by the Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop).

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

I. From Othea and Proba to “Je, Cristine,” Une Clere Femme

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

(Othea, fable 1, p. 199; my translation)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Et par tel maniere dés le commencement du monde st le commencement de son livre, et

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

(Cara i and Richards, p. 158; Richards, p. 66)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

II. Reading Boccaccio: Learned Women, Sibyls, and “Women Made

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Queens, Warriors, and Amazons

1.15 Semiramis, queen of Nineveh, Babylon, and Assyria, and warrior

1.16 The Amazons

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

1.18 Menalippe and Hippolyta

1.19 Penthesilea, queen of Amazonia

1.20 Zenobia, queen of the Palmyrenes

1.21 Artemisia, queen of Caria

1.22 Lilia, mother of Theodoric of Constantinople

1.23 Fredegund, queen of France

1.24 Camilla, daughter of the king of the Volscians

1.25 Berenice, queen of Cappadocia

1.26 Cloelia, the Brave Virgin of Rome

Wise Women, Inventors, and Artists

1.28 Cornificia, poet and scholar

1.29 Proba the Roman, poet and scholar

1.30 Sappho of Mytilene, poet and philosopher

1.31 Manto, daughter of Tiresias, expert in art of auguries and pyromancy

1.35 Ceres, queen of Sicily, inventor of cultivation

1.36 Isis, inventor of garden design and planting

1.40 Pamphile, inventor of silk

1.41 Thamaris and Irene of Greece and Marcia of Rome, painters

1.42 Sempronia the Roman

1.45 Gaia Cirilla, prudent queen of the Romans

1.46 Dido, prudent queen of Carthage

1.47 Ops/Opis, prudent queen of Crete and mother of the gods

1.48 Lavinia, prudent queen of the Laurentines

2.1 The ten Sibyls

2.2S Sibyl Erythrea of Babylon

2.3 Sibyl Almathea of Cumae, Campania, Italy

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19579/chapter/178309653 by University of Edinburgh user on 19 September 2023

Daughter Who Greatly Loved Her Father

2.9 Hypsipyle, daughter of Thoas, king of Lemnos

Wife Who Greatly Loved Her Husband