Heroines: Remarkable and Inspiring Women. An Illustrated Anthology of Essays by Women Writers

1995

Robertson 305.40922 HER

[Scotland]: Saraband

Italian-born, Christine de Pisan (1364-c.1430) grew up in Charles’s V’s court in Paris, where her father was a physician and astrologer. Unusually, for the time, she received an education, and began to write. Most scholars and authors were unmarried men, but the widow de Pisan managed to make a living from her writing; the first woman to do so in Europe. In her lifetime, de Pisan produced at least 30 books of essays and poetry, her most well-known is The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). In her works, she promoted equality of education for the sexes, objected to the ‘trivialisation of women’s domestic work’, and celebrated female virtues. Despite promulgating these proto-feminist ideas, she never demanded that society change or reform. De Pisan knew her limits.