Christine de Pizan: the first feminist?
The Renaissance poet wrote a quietly devastating critique of violent and oppressive men, conjuring a brilliant riposte to Eve's 'first disobedience'
[This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Next week: Thomas Hobbes. And then: Akhenaten, Buddha and Cicero.]
IN 1404 AN ITALIAN-BORN French poet and court writer took up her quill to write a book in defence of women and wives. Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–1430) turned her brilliant mind to a subject that scarcely impinged on the men who ruled her society.
De Pizan was writing at the height of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) and in the shadow of the Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed as many as 200 million people and sowed deep distrust in the church and in governments, who had proved helpless before the ravages of history’s worst pandemic. People’s prayers went unanswered; the services of doctors and priests were redundant. The…