164. Christine de Pizan — The Book of the City of Ladies with Kathleen B. Jones

AMY HELMES: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to unearthing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my co host Kim Askew. 

KIM ASKEW: Today, we're going to be discussing a single mom who was also Europe's first professional woman writer of the late middle ages.

AMY: A widow who turned to her pen to support herself, her mother, and her three children. Christine de Pizan was described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex as the first woman to take up her pen in defense of her sex. 

KIM: The book we're going to be discussing today, The Book of The City of Ladies, is Christine's history of Western civilization from the point of view and in praise of women, showcasing them as the intellectual and moral equals of men.

AMY: And that's really something, considering that this book was first published in 1405. That's almost four centuries before Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which we covered on this show a few weeks ago. 

KIM: Right, and we have an expert on Christine with us today to give us more insight into the writer and her remarkable book.

AMY: Let's raid the medieval manuscripts and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Joining us today is Kathleen B. Jones. During her over two decades as an academic teaching women's studies at San Diego State University, Kathleen authored six books, including three monographs and three edited anthologies of critical essays.Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, received the prestigious 2015 Barbara “Penny” Kanner Book Award from the Western Association of Women Historians. 

KIM: After resigning from her teaching post to focus on her writing career, Kathleen earned an MFA in Fiction from Fairfield University. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Fiction International, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, the Briarcliff Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. And her debut novel, Cities of Women, was published by Keylight Books in September. Her inspiration for this novel came from The Book of the City of Ladies, a work she'd previously taught in her Women's Studies courses. Congratulations on your new book, Kathy, and welcome to the show.

KATHLEEN: Thank you. And thanks for inviting me. 

AMY: Okay, so you in your book have created a fictional portrayal of Christine based on extensive research you've done. And considering the vast time gap, she was born in 1364, as well as the limited historical records that are available, what is known about her life and what captivated you to base your novel on her life and her work?

KATHLEEN: Well, as you said, she was born in 65. We don't have accurate dates. And she was born in Venice, where her father was then working as an advisor to the city leadership. But the following year, he returned with his family to Bologna in Italy, for reasons that we don't quite know and In that year, 1365, he received several offers of a new job, and he accepted the one from Charles V in Paris, and he moved to Paris. Three years later, he moved his family to Paris, and that's when Christine first became acquainted with the city. She was four years old at the time, and, probably at that very young age, introduced to the court of Charles V. We don't know a lot. about her youth. And so I was able to invent things, which is great for a novelist. In fact, when you don't have a lot of information, it's the time when you can be the most creative. We do know, however, that her father encouraged her education and that he was well positioned with his place in the court, and especially because of the library of Charles V (he was a renowned collector of manuscripts) to enable his daughter to become educated at a fairly young age. Her mother really wanted her to pursue a much more traditional life and, you know, be married, have children, focus on domestic duties. The father was very much an advocate of her education and she recounts this in several places in the various books that she wrote. She was kind of a protégé at a very early age of the politics and humanistic climate inParis.

KIM: Um, I'm curious, based on what you said, and how you portrayed her father's role as an advisor, um, how much do we actually know about his work? 

KATHLEEN: We know he was an astrologer. And astrologers were very much advisors to kings at the time, among a bunch of other counselors that they would have. We don't know much about the actual activities that he undertook, but he served in a variety of diplomatic roles, consulting the stars for propitious times when, you know, the king could pursue the

various of his adventures, also in relation to the ongoing war with England and so forth. He was very, very proximate to the royal family,and lived very near them. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: You and your novel, I think, did a great job at showing what a precarious role that is as astrologer to the king. You have a lot of power in the answers you're giving, and also... 

KIM: A lot can go wrong.

AMY: A lot can go wrong. You better make sure you're seeing the right things in those stars, yeah? 

KIM: Yeah, that's a lot of pressure. 

KATHLEEN: Exactly. That's actually relevant to Christine's own experience, I think. The fact that she has to figure out which side to stand for in the ongoing feuds that existed after the death of Charles V in 1380, when she saw her father's fortunes decline, partly because of the shifts in, you know, favor at the court and the conflicts over which of the king's brothers were actually going to be the most influential over the Dauphin, you know, the son of the king who was set to be heir and ultimately became Charles VI. He was very young, he was 11 when his father died, and so there's these, you know, feuds between the uncles over who should have the most influence at court.

And she had to figure out which side. to take, and that's been an area of a lot of controversy in the Christine scholarship, whether she favored Philip of Burgundy or Louis of the Orleanist family. So there's a lot about that in the scholarship about her.

AMY: And listeners, this time period is during the Hundred Years War. Kathy, it's really interesting because I also listen to The Rest is History podcast, and I just happened to choose... they had a four-episode series on the Hundred Years War, but once I was listening to it, I realized what a great connection it is to our topic today, because this is the time period she's in. 

KATHLEEN: Right, exactly, from the latter part of the 14th century all the way up to the influence of Joan of Arc over what was happening in France. So she lived in an amazing period of European history. 

KIM: So back to Amy's question about, what made you decide this is the story you want to tell? 

KATHLEEN: Well, I had actually taught excerpts from The Book of the City of Ladies when I was at San Diego State University in introductory Women's Studies courses. And I found that the students were fascinated that she wrote the kinds of things she did in, you know, the late 14th, early 15th centuries. A lot of the students at the time imagined feminism began in 1970. And so when they, when they hear that many, many centuries earlier, here was a woman who supported herself with her writings and took the side of women revising history to showcase their accomplishments, you know, they got really excited about that. I'm not saying she's a feminist in the modern sense of the term, but she certainly is unique in, uh, advocating for women at a time when many, many negative things were said and women had very little real authority. She insinuates herself into these literary and political circles and becomes, you know, quite influential. 

KIM: Yeah. It's pretty amazing for her time. All right, so she had this precocious upbringing. She's exposed to all the political things going  on. She's exposed to the royal library, which is pretty amazing. Um, and then in 1379, she actually gets married. She marries a notary and secretary at the royal court, Etienne de Castel. And it seems like it was a very happy marriage, what you'd call a love match, which as we know from this podcast was pretty unusual for that time period. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Kathy?

KATHLEEN: Her father, of course, is the one who selected the person she was to marry, and yet he did so, I think, with his daughter's interests at heart. He did not choose somebody who wouldn't respect her intelligence. So she's married at 15 and her husband is about 10 years older than she, uh, but respectful. And one of the things that differentiates Christine from, say, contemporary feminists, is that she underscores the idea that it's okay for a woman to be subordinate to her husband. Not in the sense that she has no life of her own, but she's very traditional in that sense. But it was a happy marriage, and when he dies about 10 years later, she's completely bereft. She's so mournful. She goes into a period of what I would say, uh, depression, and actually magnified by the debt that she was left with, because she couldn't inherit her father's estate. That estate that he had in Italy went to her two brothers. So she's left with the support of three children, a mother and a niece, and how is she going to do that? Well, luckily, I mean, she was privileged. She had access to influential people, but she spends almost 14 years in court trying to get herself out of debt. She was actually forced to pay rent on a property that her husband owned, which was taken back by the French court. And so she's like, in a really distraught place and begins to turn to writing, initially poetry, to sort of write herself out of her despair, except for the fact that the poetry she writes is never only what it appears on the surface. It's also got a lot of political messages embedded in it.

AMY: All right, so yeah, she was only 25 when her husband died, so fairly young. She has three kids, this mother that she needs to support, a niece, and that's very sad, but also this is when things get so interesting and she writes in her journal, actually, "I had to become a man" which is fascinating. And, and she does. She takes care of business. So talk about some of her works and what she was writing. 

KATHLEEN: Okay, she starts with writing what would be called lyric poetry, initially, when her husband dies in 1390. As I said, a lot of her time is taken up in these court battles. But the poetry that she starts writing has a lot to do with the mourning of a widow. But it has to be read in the context of the politics of the time. In other words, the widow isn't just the actual widow of Christine de Pizan or any other widowed woman. It's also, in a sense, the widowed France, because by now, Charles VI has become king, and he is often subject to bouts of insanity. And there's this feud between, as I mentioned, the dukes over who's going to control things. So her poetry is also about the sorrow of the political times. And soon she turns to writing essays, much more explicitly, you know, about politics. The book that you're referring to before, The Mutation of Fortune, is about her transformation into a man and as a way of saying, " If the men aren't going to come to the rescue of a beleaguered France, then I will, as a woman, and I will give advice about how to ease these tensions and solve these problems." And it's also an allusion to the fact that the Queen, Queen Isabeau, who was married to Charles VI, doesn't have the right to rule in her own name because women couldn't rule. But she appeals to the queen as somebody who might be able to, you know, solve some of these political problems. Uh, as times go on, uh, she soon enough she becomes involved in a literary debate about the subject of women. That is what sort of catapults her to public recognition, when she takes on this debate, and does it in a very overt way.

AMY: I believe you are talking about her sort of clap back, we could call it, to the popular courtly love poem, The Romance of the Rose. A lot of our listeners may be familiar or at least have heard of that. So what did she get mixed up in here? What did she do?

KATHLEEN: Well, she is involved in this debate about the added lines to this poem that had actually been written almost a century earlier. There were lines added to the poem, The Romance of the Rose, by a man named Jean de Meunes in the later part of the 13th hundreds. and these lines are what she specifically responds to because it was in way erotic poetry, and some people say, "Oh, she was a prude. She was objecting to this." No, what she was actually talking about was the way in which women were being criticized and misrepresented in these lines of poetry. And it's part of what becomes a major theme of her writing, which is the defense of women. She acknowledges that some of the poetry is fine. But she says, basically, people can hide really mean messages behind flowery words. And I want to set the record straight. But more than that, it's a way of positioning herself as a writer, as someone with authority who can engage in this debate, which had up until this time just been a debate between educated men. And equally important is the fact that she does it by a series of letters that she writes to major people attached to the court and to what's called the Chancery. The, the secretarial wing of the court. And by doing that, by taking this debate, which would have been in kind of private circles among, you know, literary men, and making it public through these letters, she really ratchets up the argument, and specifically, it becomes a turning point in her career around the year 1402, because now she's really a public intellectual you could say in modern terms. And the central thing for her is the defense of women. Don't say these awful things. Don't try to turn women away from virtue, which of course is what, you know, becomes the major enterprise of her later writing, how to ensure that virtuous women are recognized and are secured from the attacks that many are writing against them. Many men are writing against them.

AMY: I can just imagine how this would have been received, like how all eyes would have suddenly been upon her. Like, “Hey, I have something to say about this. Why don't you listen to me for a second?" I mean, that's really amazing. 

KIM: To take on this popular poem that everyone loves. Be like, "Hey, wait a second." 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, this is really pretty ballsy stuff. 

KIM: So let's go ahead and dive right into The Book of the City of Ladies. Kathy, can you give our listeners who might not have read it maybe an overview of what it is and what she's trying to accomplish with it? She pretty much lays it all out at the opening of the book, right?

KATHLEEN: Well, it's important to note that the book is an allegory. And by now, she's begun to write allegories. The Mutation of Fortune is a kind of allegory she's written about dreams or visions that she has. And so, as with The Mutation of Fortune, The Book of the City of Ladies starts out with a very kind of domestic scene. She's in her study, uh, she's reading. She puts one book aside and all of a sudden she sees another book on the shelf and she pulls it off and it's this, you know, really scurrilous attack on women and she starts reading it and then she says, "I got to put it away. This is just too much. "She puts it away, but she's so haunted by it. She takes it out again, and then she starts to say to herself, "Why is it that men have written these horrible things about women? How can they, even learned men, get away with this? How can that be?" And she becomes despondent and says at one point, " I fell into such a state of despair. I began to regret the fact that I was born a woman, and I began to hate the entire female sex." And in the deepest point of despair, she has another vision. 

AMY: I'm giving sound effects because that's what I'm picturing, 

KATHLEEN: Exactly. These three ladies appear to her. Uh, Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice. And essentially they say, Look, why aren't you trusting your own judgment? You've talked to a lot of other women. They don't think this way about themselves. You are a learned person. Why do you accept these awful things that have been said? Let us help you set the record straight. And in fact, we want you to build a City of Ladies, a place where virtuous women will be protected from these attacks, and, invite virtuous women of all classes, it's not just for noble people, and you will build this city with the trowel of your pen, and we're going to give you guidance about how to do it. And so she sets off for the next bunch of pages writing what we would now call revisionist history, saying, Here are the things that women have done. Here are the accomplishments that they've had in politics, in the arts, in science, in religious enterprises, as mystics, as visionaries. This is what it's really about and not the stuff that's been written about women. So in a nutshell, that's, that's what it's about. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, and just hearing that, it just fires me up again. I love what she did. Um, so, um, like her contemporaries of the time, her work very much alluded to and responded to the work of her predecessors. Can you share some of the work she references in Book of the City of Ladies?

KATHLEEN: Well, the title itself is a kind of allusion to Augustine's City of God, you know. So she's clearly influenced by classics, the humanists. Boccaccio's About Famous Women, even Dante is an influence here. And this demonstrates the fact that she was erudite and learned in not only the vernacular French, but Latin. So she uses these things, but she doesn't just... I mean, some people would say, "Oh, it was just a compendium of things that other people had already written." No, it's very different, because she doesn't just repeat the stories that have been told by these other sources like Boccaccio. She rearranges them and sets it up as a kind of dialogue. Okay, are there really famous women rulers? Well, Lady Reason says, let me tell you about a whole host of them. Were there women who were educated in the arts? Of course. And then down the road they go. So she divides them up by, I guess, subject as opposed to chronologically, you know. It's not just a march through history, it's really innovative in the sense in which it's showing the accomplishments that women have made in this whole array of areas of interest from politics to religion.

AMY: Right, because she'll be like, Okay, let's talk about women who used their medical know-how, or let's talk about women who had super strength. 

KATHLEEN: Exactly. 

AMY: If she were around today, she would be our third co host on Lost Ladies of Lit. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. 

AMY: She's pulling all these women out of the hat that you're like, Who's that? Who? Who? I've never heard of this woman. I've never heard of this Amazonian warrior queen that she's referencing. But then she starts going into, like, Let's talk about Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. And then I'm like, Well that's not real. What's going on here? She's using both real women in history and fictional women in history? 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, exactly. In fact, she goes all the way up to her contemporary time to talk about the Queens of France and some of the wives of the dukes that she knew. She's weaving together, because after all, the mythologies would have been based in some way on conflict, right? And so they would have invented characters to represent the conflict. So she's taking those characters back and saying, this is part of our legacy too. Even Medea gets a makeover. She's inspiring people. I mean, because after all, they're stories.It's an allegory, so that even the real characters come to stand for something other than just themselves. Like I was saying before about her poetry, where she's talking about a widow mourning also stands for, you know, the mourning of the loss of the king. So also here, you know, these characters are meant to be inspirational, and they're more than real, just as the mythical are, you know, sort of more than mythical. 

AMY: Okay. Got it. 

KIM: Right, and a lot of those myths were used and are used to portray something about women, whether they're real or not. They're used by writers and thinkers to sort of say something about what a woman is. So I think it was free for her to take them, you know. 

KATHLEEN: And, and you think about what's been going on in contemporary literature just within the last, say, 10 years in historical fiction, for example. There've been so many rewriting of characters from Greek mythology, whether it's, uh, you know, it's Phaedra. A friend of mine wrote novel about Phaedra, or you read a rewriting of Lilith, 

KIM: Mm 

AMY: Circe, Yeah, 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, Circe. The purpose of it is, like with fiction, I guess, in general, it's to say, Hey, there's another way of looking at the story, and we can perhaps talk about it differently than the traditional one. So I think she's doing that. She's a kind of, you know, latter day precursor for all of these feminist retellings, like the ones you read, uh, the ones you mentioned, you know, Circe or Matrix by Lauren Groff or, you know, some of these other books. 

KIM: Right. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah. 

AMY: Um, alright, so she's writing The Book of the City of Ladies. Can we circle back a little bit more to her life at this time? What's going on? 

KATHLEEN: The period between 1390 and 1405 when she completes The Book of the City of Ladies is probably among her most productive, in terms of her writing career. And it's partly, like we were saying before, a response to the feuds over royal succession. The king's brothers fighting with one another over who was going to really control the court. And because Charles VI was subject to, uh, bouts of insanity from about 1392 on, this was a real, you know, hot potato. And she's watching all of these conflicts and is most concerned with seeing peace in France. And so, in a way, what culminates in The Book of The City of Ladies is an effort to say, perhaps Isabeau can intervene here and bring peace back to France because the guys are just going to tear us apart. And when the book, what's now known as The Queen's Book, a manuscript that's in the British Library, is ultimately presented to Queen Isabeau it's years after she writes the first version of The Book of the City of Ladies. But Christine presents, herself, this massive collection of her writings to the Queen in 1414, and at the very center of it is The Book of the City of Ladies. And it's there for a reason. It's an appeal to the Queen to, you know, deal with intervening in these battles and trying to introduce some kind of peace to the realm. So besides advocating for women per se, it's again situated in the context of the political strife of France and the ongoing, you know, war with England. 

KIM: Yeah, it's so interesting that, you know, you think about a lot of writers today as sort of being passive activists in a way, and she doesn't sound very passive at all, which is really interesting. Um, yeah. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, yeah. 

KIM: I fell in love with this book when I read it as an undergrad. Shout out to Dr. Laurel Hendrix, who introduced it to me. I still have, um, the 1982 edition. Uh, That's the book that I used in this class. And Marina Warner in the foreword writes that Christine uses a benevolent tone rather than quote a shrill one. And she also talks about the courtly way she's very familiar with. But also, she says that it concealed an underlying rage. Because she was a mom, it made me think of that, um, phrase we hear now a lot, mom rage. So, um, Kathy, it seems like her rage is more, uh, politically motivated, but would you like to read maybe a favorite passage from The Book of The City of Ladies so listeners can get a feel for the tone and the style of this book ?

KATHLEEN: Okay, um, sort of going back to what I was paraphrasing before, but let me read the actual words. I talked about how she picked up this book by Matheolus:

 I put it down in order to turn my attention to more elevated and useful study, but just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different 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 devilish and wicked thoughts about women and their behavior. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and my conduct as a natural woman. And similarly, I discussed that with other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who graciously told me of their own experiences and intimate thoughts in order to know, in fact, whether the testimony of so many famous men could be true. And so I relied more on the judgment of others than on what I myself felt and knew. I was so transfixed in this line of thinking for such a long time, it seemed as if I were in a stupor. 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. I mean, and then she goes on, a little bit longer, and the three ladies appear to... Pull her out of her despair. We use the term gaslighting, how women are gaslighted. That's what it is! And like, this is 1405. 

KIM: I know, it's, so, in some ways, it's so contemporary to how we're talking about what it is to be a woman today. 

KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm. 

KIM: You're supposed to be confident, but everything's telling you not to be. You're supposed to be body positive, but everything you see is telling you not to be. 

AMY: I have a favorite moment from sort of around the beginning where the three, um, you know, Reason, Justice, I forget what their, what their names were, the, the visions. 

KATHLEEN: Reason, Rectitude and Justice.

AMY: Yeah, okay. So they appear to her and they're trying to like, talk her, you know, down from all these feelings. She's like, you know, Why are the men saying all these things that were like, I forget what she was upset about, but it's something relating to sex. And, one of the visions was basically like, "Girl, these are written by old men whose male parts no longer work and they're just bitter." I mean, she basically says that! I laughed out loud. 

KIM: Yeah, Yeah, can you imagine them reading it at court and just being like, " She said that. She actually said that." 

KATHLEEN: Absolutely. There's so many of those outrageous things that if you put it into a kind of contemporaneous language, it would be like, That's because, you know, they just can't do it anymore. Or that's because they're really jealous of, you know, what you have. I used to have a pin I wore, or I still have it somewhere: War is menstruation envy. 

KIM: Oh, Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So in her writing on The Romance of the Rose, she makes the argument that if women had written these classics, they wouldn't have been falsely accused of all these things. but then she takes this argument to the next level in The Book of the City of Ladies. All of this that we're talking about makes me think of the episode we just recently did on Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Like Wollstonecraft, Christine was pre feminist, so there wasn't really the term feminism that we know now. But in Christine's case, she wasn't asking for equal rights or power, because that really wasn't a concept, right, in the 15th century. She was arguing that women's lives could be made better. And just like Wollstonecraft, Christine advocated for the education of women.

AMY: Yeah, and she also wanted men to sort of align with their own principles. In other words, you talk this talk, why aren't you walking the walk, sort of thing. Like Wollstonecraft, she's very skillful at dismantling all these flawed arguments regarding women. Kathy, is there any other examples from her writings that you find really powerful or thought provoking in this regard?

KATHLEEN: Yeah. Let me read you something from a little bit later on, where she's still wondering here about the arguments that men are making about why women are inferior. And Christine asks Lady Reason, My lady, according to what I understand from you, woman is a most noble creature. But even so, Cicero says that a man should never serve any woman, and that he who does so debases himself, for no man should ever serve anyone lower than him. Lady Reason replies, The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher. Neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body, according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues. You know, that's a pretty modern concept to, you know, that virtue, knowledge, even strength, doesn't reside in sex, but in what the person does. Um, there's been many, many glosses on that paragraph that have brought that idea into, you know, the 21st century. That's what she was saying. You're assuming that women are inferior, but they've been denied education, many of them. That's what makes them less aware of certain things. Educate them, like Wollstonecraft said, and you'll see that those differences disappear. 

KIM: Yeah, what a modern thing to write. 

AMY: I know, this is pre Enlightenment Era, you know? There are parts of The Book of the City of Ladies where she brings in the church and kind of ties it into religion. But she was really ahead of her game in terms of using reason.

KATHLEEN: Well, the humanist tradition from Italy is already making its way in France. And actually, that was part of what the debate about The Romance of the Rose was about, not just what she turns attention to, but it was about who was going to demonstrate in Latin and in French that they were sophisticated, like the Italian humanists. And so, you know, this humanistic thinking is making the rounds long before the idea of the Enlightenment. Like the Renaissance painter, Artemisia Gentileschi is another person, a painter, not a writer, who also tries to rewrite the way that women have been, uh, she doesn't rewrite, she repaints some of the stories. So, you know, this is a tradition that is sort of touching on the idea of equal dignity of all people. The dignity of the soul, et cetera, et cetera, you know.

AMY: I found it interesting that she did have a lot of patrons who were men, right? Mm

KATHLEEN: Mm hmm, Yeah. 

AMY: So yeah, how were people responding to her work?

KATHLEEN: Well, um, definitely, I mean, the invitation by Phillip of Burgundy to write the biography of Charles V is an indication that her writing was seen of a high stature and that she had that kind of influence. Many years after her death, a person wrote a book about the lost tapestries of Christine de Pizan. Now they're not her tapestries, but the writing that she did was sort of transformed into tapestries, and they became really important artifacts that nobles across Europe were interested in owning. So we know that her work had resonance outside of France. 

AMY: That's like the medieval, 'got adapted to film." 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. 

AMY: if you got a tapestry… 

KIM: I love it. Yeah, you got a tapestry. Yeah, yeah. Was she paid more for the tapestries? No, just kidding. 

KATHLEEN: I don't think she got any of those royalties, nor did her heirs. But one of the earliest translations into English was in fact, the first translation into English of was, I believe, around 1521. And then It wasn't translated again until sections of it appeared in the 1970s. And the edition that you read, Kim, was the most recent, until recently, updating of that translation into English. 

KIM: That amazes me. 

KATHLEEN: So, yeah, so she... Yeah, it's really, I mean, it was translated into other languages, but in English between 1521 and uh, to, I think, no extant English copies, you know, when you could find them if you knew what to look for. But that's why there was this sort of resurgence of interest in her in the 1970s was the, you know, availability of a new translation of The Book of the City of Ladies. But the resurgence of interest in her really coincided with the development of the modern women's movement, I would say, the 1970s. And it's just mushroomed since then. More and more and more and more is added to the literature. And there's in fact a Christine de Pizan Society; a North American branch and a European branch. So, you know, that's all developed within the last four decades or so.

KIM: All right, so let's circle back to Christine's life. In 1413, she crafted one of her final major works. It's called The Book of Peace. And in it, she offers guidance on governance for the future heir to King Charles VI. However, in 1415, as England's invasions cast this shadow over France, Christine sought sanctuary in a convent, possibly the same convent where her daughter had embraced the life of a nun years earlier. And during this turbulent period, her writing career seemed to be on a hiatus. 

AMY: Yeah, but not so fast. Because she had one last work up her sleeve. So after the triumphant siege of Orleans in 1429, that was a victory masterminded by none other than Joan of Arc, Christine was so inspired by that, that she took up her pen once more to write the Tale of Joan of Arc. In it, she hailed Joan as a beacon of hope for the French people. 

KIM: So then, Christine died at around the age of 65. That was about 1430. And it's worth noting that her poem actually remains the sole literary tribute to Joan of Arc written during Joan of Arc's actual lifetime. And how perfect is that? Because Joan, you know, purported to see visions. And we have The Book of the City of Ladies, which is about these visions that Christine is having that are, you know, the women who are telling her to write this incredible book and build this city. 

AMY: It's almost you know, an addendum, yeah, that would have fit into The Book of the City of Ladies had she known about her, you know? 

KIM: That's so perfect. 

AMY: Let me add her. 

KIM: Yeah, one last lady. 

AMY: So, Kathy, as we said in the beginning, you transitioned from academics to writing fiction. It's your first novel. What was that experience like for you?

KATHLEEN: Well, you know, telling stories is often the way you get people most interested in some point that you're trying to make. And I discovered that as a teacher for years, that, you know, I could assign what I thought were exciting articles for students to read, but if I could engage them with a story, that was something that would be more of a hook. So that's always been in the background of my thinking. And as I progressed as an academic, I began to really write more and more differently, let's put it that way. I didn't want to just write abstract theory or dry accounts of things. But at the same time, my training as a researcher clearly influenced my ability to write this particular story because I knew how to do that kind of research. And I had access. As a former professor, I'd have access to libraries. The fact that I was an academic, you know, enabled me to figure out how to use the materials to the greatest advantage of the story. But, um, it's almost as if, you know, I needed to set aside all of the footnotes that I'd been trained to rely upon to tell a story. Put that away and just let your imagination go visiting. I found that when I did that, the research was both a boon and a barrier because I could get caught up in doing all that research if I wanted to, and then I'd never write the story, you know, so you had to sort of let the research get out of the way of your imagination. 

KIM: Right, it's like you had all the tools, but, yeah, you had to step away from it. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, you have to step away from it, too, because you could, like, you could research till the cows come home, and you never write the novel. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. Well, I loved all the research that you put into your novel. I think it just makes it that much more fascinating. And this has been such a fun discussion. It was so lovely to have you on the show to talk about Christine and The Book of the City of Ladies, and congratulations on your debut novel. 

KATHLEEN: Thank you very much for inviting me. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to tune in next week when we'll be talking more about the women who illuminated medieval manuscripts like Christine's City of Ladies. We wrongly believed it was only monks doing this work, but there's a lot more to the story, and Kathleen is going to be back for that discussion. It's a really fascinating subject. Until then, be sure to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review if you enjoyed the show, and visit our Facebook forum to chat with us and other listeners. Keep exploring the lost gems of women's literature. 

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.