The Book of the City of Ladies

Rating:
Summary: Witty and revealing look at a period primary source
Review: 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".

Rating:
Summary: well....
Review: i read this book at a point when i wanted to graduate with honors at my university and had to read like 20 or so "great" books. i had never heard of this book, but it was on the list, so i picked it up and began reading it. i was honestly surprised by the beginning of the book, which started well. but then, honestly, i began to snicker a bit as i kept reading it. a valiant and honorable effort by Ms. depizan to bring women's rights to the discussion in a time when women were treated quite inhumane.

Rating:
Summary: Christine de Pizan Le tresor des dames-The treasure of women
Review: In Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies there is a very passsion in the style that she wrote in. Although for some it may not be the clearist book to read Christine shows herself and her writing to not olny to be magnificent but it shows that in an era where most women were in the shadow of men she became one of the most learned ladies of her time and even now in the year 2000 her works are sill being published. This book is for the people who enjoy midevil/rennasance writing or just want to see the views of the world from a wonderfully bright woman who in this book remarks about the other learned women of her time. Don't think this book to be out dated though, even now 600 hundred years later her work is far from being un-understandable and boaring. I also highly suggest looking into The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan or even a biography about her amazing life.

Rating:
Summary: "Une généalogie au féminin"
Review: 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).

Rating:
Summary: A Fortress from Frustration
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great book and great fun
Review: This is the third time I write a review for this book. The previous reviews never made it. Here I go again:

From an age when women were expected to play a silent and obedient supporting role, Christine de Pizan demonstrates that intelligence and grace are very useful allies. One of the first women that we know of to write professionally in order to make a living, Christine's life was a mixture of privilege and loss. Her "Book of the City of Ladies" is definitely our net gain, though, since we can appreciate the beauty of well-applied talent. The author set out to write a history of women from the female perspective, giving us a different view of many famous (plenty of them mythical) women who have served as scapegoats for damaging stereotypes that perpetuated misogyny in traditional history, literature, and philosophy. Thus, Pizan deals with Queen Dido in a manner different to that adopted by Virgil, and Lavinia --who does not say a word in "The Aeneid"-- rules as a queen according to this "Book of the City of Ladies." Medea receives some help from Pizan's editing (there is no mention of the princess of Colchis killing her children to punish Jason), Circe gets in just 14 lines far better press than with Homer, and even female characters from Boccaccio's "Decameron," like Ghismonda and Lisabetta, are described from subtly better angles, particularly Lisabetta, who proves to be an intelligent woman who uses deduction to find out what had happened to her lover, and doesn't need a ghost to tell her, as in the "Decameron."

Pizan's book is a pleasure to read. I recommend a certain background in some of the works she based her own text ("Odyssey" by Homer, "Aeneid" by Virgil, "Metamorphoses" by Ovid, some of the classical Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the "Decameron" by Boccaccio, etc.), in order to better understand the author's point in writing such a book. I was fortunate anough to have gone through a Fall 2000 quarter when I had to read these works, plus others. For the more casual, although discriminating reader, Christine de Pizan should be a new, welcome light over known subjects. It is interesting to note that her book had not been translated into English since 1521, a neglect of 461 years until this 1982 version by Earl Jeffrey Richards. This neglect speaks eloquently about the attitudes sorrounding a woman's attempt at writing her version of history. Read Christine. She will not disappoint you.