A Narration of Female Experience: Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies

Abstract

Christine de Pizan (1363/1364?-1430) is recognised as the first professional female writer who left a significant mark not only on medieval literature but also women’s writing tradition. Depending on personal and collective female experience, she becomes the writer of over a hundred literary pieces in which she deals with different aspects of women’s lives in the patriarchal society of the medieval period. Her oeuvre displays a struggle against the misogynistic confines that limit and imprison women into degraded positions. This study aims to explore one of her significant works, The Book of the City of Ladies (1404-1405), in which de Pizan gives an account of various women’s stories and their achievements from pagan times to Christian history. In this narration of the medieval dream vision genre, de Pizan strategically uses allegorical characters to initiate a discussion on misogynistic discourse and practices. While the work unveils a panorama of the female experience, it offers a narrative that challenges patriarchal power and dominance. This paper illustrates how de Pizan empowers women’s existence in her narration based on female experience and predates feminist writing before later generations of women writers.