The Book of the City of Ladies

The Book of the City of Ladies or Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (finished by 1405), is perhaps Christine de Pizan's most famous literary work, and it is her second work of lengthy prose. Pizan uses the vernacular French language to compose the book, but she often uses Latin-style syntax and conventions within her French prose. The book serves as her formal response to Jean de Meun's popular Roman de la Rose. Christine combats Meun's statements about women by creating an allegorical city of ladies. She defends women by collecting a wide array of famous females throughout history. These women are "housed" in the City of Ladies, which is actually Christine's book. As Christine builds her city, she uses each famous woman as a building block for not only the walls and houses of the city, but also as building blocks for her thesis. Each woman added to the city adds to Christine's argument towards women as valued participants in society. She also advocates in favor of education for women.

Christine de Pizan also finished by 1405 The Treasure of the City of Ladies (Le tresor de la cité des dames de degré en degré, also known The Book of the Three Virtues), a manual of education, dedicated to Princess Margaret of Burgundy. This aims to educate women of all estates, the latter telling women who have husbands: "If she wants to act prudently and have the praise of both the world and her husband, she will be cheerful to him all the time". Her Book and Treasure are her two best-known works, along with the Ditie de Jehanne D'Arc.

Part I opens with Christine reading from Matheolus’s Lamentations, a work from the thirteenth century that addresses marriage wherein the author writes that women make men’s lives miserable. Upon reading these words, Christine becomes upset and feels ashamed to be a woman: “This thought inspired such a great sense of disgust and sadness in me that I began to despise myself and the whole of my sex as an aberration in nature”. The three Virtues then appear to Christine, and each lady tells Christine what her role will be in helping her build the City of Ladies. Lady Reason, a virtue developed by Christine for the purpose of her book, is the first to join Christine and helps her build the external walls of the city. She answers Christine's questions about why some men slander women, helping Christine to prepare the ground on which the city will be built. She tells Christine to “take the spade of [her] intelligence and dig deep to make a trench all around [the city] … [and Reason will] help to carry away the hods of earth on [her] shoulders.” These “hods of earth” are the past beliefs Christine has held. Christine, in the beginning of the text, believed that women must truly be bad because she “could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex. [Therefore she] had to accept [these authors] unfavourable opinion[s] of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions.” Christine is not using reason to discover the merits of women. She believes all that she reads instead of putting her mind to listing all the great deeds women have accomplished. To help Christine see reason, Lady Reason comes and teaches Christine. She helps Christine dispel her own self-consciousness and the negative thoughts of past writers. By creating Lady Reason, Christine not only teaches her own allegorical self, but also her readers. She gives not only herself reason, but also gives readers, and women, reason to believe that women are not evil or useless creatures but instead have a significant place within society.

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