by Christine de Pizan
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Product Description
A new translation of one of medieval Europe's most remarkable feminist texts.
In The Book of the City of Ladies France's first professional woman of letters confronted head-on the misogyny of fourteenth-century Europe. Here, with the help of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan constructs an allegorical city in which to defend womankind, using examples of female virtue and achievement both from the past and her own day as the stones with which to build the city's walls and towers.
This key text in the history of feminism not only provides powerful positive images of women--ranging from warriors, inventors, and scholars to prophetesses, artists, and saints--but also offers fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture, which viewed female nature as wholly given up to vice. This Penguin Classics edition also includes a superb Introduction that sets the work within its historical and intellectual context, annotations, a Glossary, and a Bibliography.
The Book of the City of Ladies is the sequel to The Treasure of the City of Ladies: Or, The Book of Three Virtues
Translated with an Introduction by Rosalind Brown-Grant
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 A different point of view, 2006-04-14
This book is, in many ways, very close to other written in the Middle Ages: a list of good or bad women or men from the past, joined together around an idea: loyal wifes, or martyrs, or good rulers,... this is something very common that can be read, for instance, in Triomphi by Francesco Petrarca. But the original thing is that it was written by a woman and from a feminine point of view, trying to show that women are not those monsters some male writters showed -not all of them-. Some things she says are so actual and refreshing!! For instance, she rejects that stupid idea some men had that women like being raped and when they say no, they don't mean it,... isn't it something that still can be heard today?
The stories are not original, some of them can be read in Petrarca, or Chaucer or Boccaccio, with no great differences. For instance the story of Griselda can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Petrarca translated into Latin, and appears as one of the Canterbury Tales and in Christine's City of Dames.
The bottom line in this book is, for me, that if men were perfect, women would be perfect as well, but meanwhile, we are just human beings with our defects and virtues, and we should try to behave correctly.
Apart from that, I appreciate a book that shows what the Middle Ages were, now that everybody has got a very Romantic idea of it, full of mysteries and terrible secrets kept by the templarians or the cathars, about graals and esoteric forces,... Christine, as Boccaccio and Chaucer, or the poet Villon show the real Middle Ages: Christine is studying and suddenly, her mother calls her to supper, people goes on pilgrimages but they drink a lot of ale on their way and get drunken so they fight among them, and they do think, not about secret esoteric mysteries but about real things: should or should not women receive an education, how can we live a good life, how women and husbands must talk and treat to each other, ...
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Pizan (a woman ahead of her time), 2005-10-30
In this book, Pizan is acting as a voice for women. She was a widow with several kids who made a living by writing-an uncommon occurance for women in Medieval Europe. One could consider her a feminist of her day. However, unlike contemporary feminism, she never stated that the woman was equal to the man. She was only trying to say that women are not as bad as the man says they are. Still, this ideology was a kind of vignette into more Rennaisance ways of thinking.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A Fortress from Frustration, 2004-07-02
THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES by Christine de Pizan is an allegory written in the early 1400s as an effort to defend womankind from spurious attacks by the male gender. The BOOK itself serves as the city, the protection and community of good women who show that the defamatory collective statements about women (they are greedy, they are inconstant, they are not chaste, etc.) are not true.
De Pizan was born in 1365 in Venice. When she was a small child, the French King Charles V gave her father a position at his court (he served as astrologer). The family's close ties to the court afforded Christine a good education, which was unusual at the time (and opposed by her mother). Though the family's fortunes faded, Christine made a happy marriage and had three children. When her husband died in 1389, de Pizan turned to writing to make her living. She became a highly respected voice on the status of women.
The book is structured around three ladies of heaven coming to visit Christine and charging her with building the City of Ladies. Christine has just been reading a book by Mathéolus, who is deeply critical of womankind, and Christine is upset and discouraged. The women are Reason, Rectitude and Justice. While they help her build and populate the city, Christine asks them to defend womenkind against various charges she hears brought against women, and they do so, each getting her own book of the work. The responses are examples of women in history, some biblical, some historical, some mythological (but these are explained by the Christian Christine as being real women whose fame was so renowned that their societies thought they were goddesses and began to worship them). Interestingly, she retells some women's histories differently: Medea is a woman who deeply loved her husband, the same with Socrates' wife.
The book has an extensive index, which is helpful, because one learns so much about so many different women. Nearly ever vignette could be turned into a novel, a la THE RED TENT. The section by Justice at the end is the most monotonous, as it is basically a Lives of the Saints about the virgin martyrs, and their stories are nearly all the same: Some man wants Virgin Martyr X. She doens't want him. He tricks and entreats her. She says no. He has her tortured (usually her breasts are pulled off). She withstands torture due to God's help (she sings out of a pot of boiling water into which she is placed head first; 12 men tire of beating her, but still she is unhurt). God calls her home and she dies happily.
I think the first two sections (which are longer than the last) are very interesting historically and I was happy to read particularly of Lavinia and Margaret (my mother's names) and Anastasia (like my name). The Women of Heaven make the point often that men's behavior in the world puts them in no position to criticize women. The book would make a nice kind of "devotional" or meditative reading source, a woman for each day, or something like that, if you didn't want to read it all at once.
The sad thing is that women, as a whole, still endure these ridiculous criticisms. If you tire, like Christine, of hearing these baseless charges, you may want to retire to the BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 "Une généalogie au féminin", 2002-05-20
LA CITE DES DAMES was one of the first medieval books I have read (but I am by no means an expert in the area... yet!), and I recommend it to not only those interested in this period, but also for those interested in what we would call "women's studies," historiography, or similar endeavors. It is filled with many interesting stories from ancient times to Christine's own time, which also makes the book a pretty entertaining (and sometimes even humorous) account of the historic figures it discusses. Christine herself was an amazing person, so if you buy it, be sure not to skip the introduction - especially if you are unfamiliar with medieval writings: Some of the ideas presented (and how they are presented) are much different than how we would think in modern times, so it is important to familiarize yourself with things like massive over-proving (which may end up being tedious to the unsuspecting reader), Christine's view on marriage, and literary conventions that would perhaps seem very silly to us now, but worked well 600 years ago. Basically, when reading this book, if you keep in mind the context in which it was written, you should be able to appreciate it and like it just as I have. (by the way -- the book I read was not the Penguin edition, but rather the 1998 English translation by Earl Richards, ISBN 0892552301, so unless you're planning on extensive criticism, you should be okay with this version).
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Witty and revealing look at a period primary source, 2001-07-15
Christine falls asleep while contemplating why women in her society get such a bad rap, and has a long dream about exemplary women and their characteristics. Did you ever wonder why we just accept that women in the Middle Ages were considered demons in disguise? Christine tells us all about what she thinks of that concept and of those who insist on spreading such maliciousness, all in an engaging story full of examples of brave, courageous, intelligent, pious, beautiful, generous women. The book was written to dispel some of the nastier slanders then current about women, but it's still good reading today. I confess that during the part about martyrs I wandered off a bit (it is some gruesome stuff in places), but as a period source, it's definitely one every history maven ought to have. Christine is intelligent, observant, and witty; her writing fairly sparkles with indignation over the treatment of women and her sardonic amusement at those men spreading those lies. While hyper-Catholic and in places highly allegorical (and in many places its version of "history" is highly questionable, of course), it is an essential look at a time period where women didn't often make their views known in written form. This book is distinct from "The Book of the Treasure of the City of Ladies".
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