Christine de Pisan: The Treasure of the City of Ladies

The Late Middle Ages (1300–1500) was a time of great change in the cultural and political life of Western Europe. The importance of this era is often overshadowed by the more dramatic transitions that took place during the subsequent early modern period (1500–1750), but what historians often refer to as the “transformation” or “reinvention” of Europe around 1500 was only possible because of events that were already underway in the centuries preceding the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation.

Among these events were the Black Death of 1348, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337–1453), the crisis of papal authority which resulted from ecclesial schisms, the rising power of national monarchs, and priest-led liturgical reform movements stretching from England to Bohemia. These changes took place, again, mostly in the realms of politics and culture, and it would take several more centuries for the social concerns of class or gender awareness to approach anything resembling a modern level of consciousness. Neither the embryonic bourgeoisie nor the feudal peasantry had enough power or self-awareness to challenge the prevailing social structures. Aside from a few remarkable women of the Church such as Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) or Catherine of Sienna (1347–80), there was little in the way of literary production by women of any class.

The present document, a selection from The Treasure of the City of Ladies, is an extraordinary exception to this general rule. It was not only written by a woman, but a secular woman at that. The author, Christine de Pisan (1364–1430), is generally hailed by feminist historians as a brilliant pioneer in female literature and by all historians as an insightful, pragmatic, and shrewd commentator on the conditions of late Medieval society.

Christine de Pisan was a French-Italian lady of noble birth who turned to writing as a way to make an income when her husband died of the Plague. In addition to ballads, biographies, and treatises on war and governance, she also wrote moral commentaries, and took up a critique of the famous Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun (1240–1305), whose passages often railed against the fickleness and “falsity” of women. In two books defending and celebrating women of history, The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, she brought the first proto-feminist studies in history into vernacular French. The latter work, from which this document is taken, is a manual for the practical education of women of various classes. This selection treats the practical matters of organizing the work of a feudal manor. De Pisan’s status as a widow gave her first-hand experience with the problems of trying to run an agricultural estate in the absence of the legal lord, and her desire to reach out to women who shared her predicament demonstrates an awareness of social responsibility that belies conventional conceptions of sheltered aristocratic women whose concerns were limited to their domestic environment.

Her lucid and no-nonsense instructions regarding the management of an estate and the coordination of its seasonal operations is not merely proto-feminist; it is proto-managerial. Readers of Christine de Pisan today can gain as much from her common-sense and practical knowledge as did the feudal householders of her day.