Saint Christina of Bolsera (ca. 1650–1655)| Carlo Dolci / National Trust Images via Art UK
I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s writing by her high school teacher—a woman, the student explained, who liked to do things outside of the box.
I still cannot understand why Christine de Pizan, who thought of herself as a philosopher and was very famous during her own time, is so largely neglected in my discipline. Dionysos Mattison, a former philosophy Phd student of mine, once remarked that philosophy is the “men’s studies department.” I wonder whether that is the reason why de Pizan does not yet have an honorable place within it.
Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–1430) earned her living by her pen. She wrote 10 volumes of courtly poetry, a biography of Charles V commissioned by the French regent, and a number of philosophical books on the place of women in medieval European society—one of which is The Book of the City of Ladies. As we learn in the first paragraph of the book, she faced an openly misogynist world. She describes her sense of hopelessness: If all these very erudite men think so badly of women, maybe they are right?
But she knew they weren’t. She imagined three ladies (Reason, Rectitude and Justice) who appear to her, in a sort of inversion of the holy Annunciation scene, to proclaim that she was the chosen one to build a new city, a city inhabited by all those virtuous women that the men of her time vilified. Reason will provide the foundations and the solid walls, Rectitude will guide the construction of its buildings, and Justice, with her “golden measuring cup,” will instruct on how to build very high towers. De Pizan does not just tell stories; she proceeds argument by argument, which is what I take to be a distinctive trait of philosophy. She engages the issues of her time through a systematic use of reason, which is what I currently teach my students that philosophy is about.
De Pizan built an imaginary city to make the lives and virtues of these women visible. In the case of the women who were saints, the expression of their Christian piety involved great suffering. Was de Pizan’s insistence on the big walls surrounding the city also a symbol of the protection women needed? De Pizan leaves that unsaid, and I think the confusion is intentional. What is important about her account of the saints is not only that they suffered, but that they did so piously. The point is that they were women.
De Pizan lived in a society that identified women with Eve, responsible for original sin, and conceived of their bodies according to the medical apparatus of the time. Males were characterized by hot/dry elements, whereas females were marked by their cold/wet humors. Menopausal women were subjected to practices such as leeches to take that excess of dark, cold and wet humors out of their bodies. That must have been painful.
And yet, I kind of envy de Pizan: she could name openly misogynist texts like Le Roman de la Rose and write rebuttals to them, as she did with The Book of the City of Ladies, but I have never met anybody who would openly declare that women are inferior. No philosophy professor I know says, “We should not teach Christine de Pizan.” I have never met anybody who openly says, “We should not teach Tullia D’Aragona, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Ann Conway.” The list of women philosophers is endless. And yet, very few philosophy professors teach them.
I wonder if it is not necessary, as one of my students said today in class, to build cities of women just to make them visible, in the way Christine de Pizan did. And even more so, I wonder whether we could not use her writings, which faced the open misogyny of her time, as a magnifying glass to detect hidden misogyny of our own time. For instance, the most painful part of the text to read is certainly Part III: all stories of female saints—virgins who refused to submit to a destiny of wife, by claiming they were married to Jesus—and who paid for their choice by being tortured and then killed, often by their own fathers, emperors, or judges (as a reminder that the family or the state may not always be an ally to the second sex). The third part is pages and pages of stories about women saints whose bodies were torn into pieces and put back together by an angel or a miracle, only to be thrown into the sea with a heavy rock. Miraculously, they would re-emerge from its depths carrying the rock under their arm, to then be cast in dark dungeons, starved to death until God brought them food and comfort. All of this often occurred over and over again, until death came as a liberation—in Saint Catherine’s case, as in others, through decapitation. Interestingly, it was milk, instead of blood, that is said to have come out of their bodies.
Particularly illuminating seems to me the life of Saint Christine, a martyr de Pizan surely felt an affinity for, given her name—which also carries within itself the very word “Christ.” Tormented by her father for refusing to worship his idols, she endured a savage beating, was put in chains, stripped and spreadeagled, put on a wheel with fire underneath, was scalded with boiling oil, imprisoned, tied to a great stone and cast into the sea, covered with poisonous serpents, and had her breast cut off. Yet she emerged unscathed and kept singing the praise of the Lord. Finally, for relentlessly singing the name of Jesus, her tongue was cut out. But she continued to praise the Lord: “When the evil Julian heard her voice, he reproached the torturers for not having removed enough of Christine’s tongue, telling them to cut it so close that she would not be able to converse with her Lord Jesus.” And yet, after this happened, “she spat out the remains into the tyrant’s face and blinded him in one eye.”
As I read those painful pages, I kept thinking of Christine de Pizan’s herself, and how her own voice has been silenced—despite her popularity in her own time. I kept thinking of all the women philosophers whose voices have been silenced. And why this association between the feminine and suffering? Why are most of the representations of the Madonna so sad? Why is it that the typical miracle of the Madonna has to be statues crying blood and milk? Even Hollywood stars—today’s idols of feminine virtue—starve themselves to please the lord(s) who control cinema’s heaven and hell. Seeing these tropes as part of the legacy of fetishized female suffering described by de Pizan helps us recognize the misogyny of our own times for what it is.
How much do we believe ourselves to be beyond misogyny just because it is less evident? For instance, have women stopped perceiving maternity in sacrificial terms? As I read those painful pages, I kept thinking about the association between femininity, Madonnas who cry, milk and blood.
In 2023, my colleague Vanessa Place and I co-wrote a “Menstrual Rosary” to mark the inauguration of The New School’s Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute. It was put into music by Stefania De Kenesseay and later adapted into a short film. To our surprise, the film won recognition at 33 festivals and competitions. Perhaps it spoke to some people? Now, as I hear New School students sing, “Bleeding the miracle, always the same, rust of the vein, tears the immaculate face,” I cannot help but repeat to myself: “They have cut our tongues, torn our bodies into pieces, tossed boiling oil over our bodies, thrown us into the silence of history. And yet we are still singing.”
