The Book of the City of Ladies Analysis

This book starts out as a typical autobiographical story. Christine de Pizan talks as though she's going to tell us about something that happened to her just the other day. As the story begins, we...

Christine de Pizan doesn't give us just any first-person narrator. She makes herself the narrator of her own book, giving the whole story an autobiographical spin. She starts out like this, for Pet...

Yes, there's a bit of a plot to this book. But it's pretty clear from the get-go that de Pizan wrote this thing to spread her ideas about womankind and to criticize all the horrible things men had...

The (sad) fact is that there weren't any women writing philosophical books about the goodness of women during Christine de Pizan's time. So she had to make sure that her readers took her seriously....

You only need to read a few chapters of this book to realize that Christine de Pizan uses the same writing formula over and over to make her points. She'll ask one of her three magical lady charact...

The Book of the City of Ladies is just about as straightforward as titles get. On the surface, it is indeed a book about a woman who builds a city that's just for ladies. It's important to note her...

"And may I, your servant, commend myself to you, praying to God who by His grace has granted me to live in this world and to persevere in His holy service. May He in the end have mercy on my great...

The modern translation of this book is no problem in terms of accessibility. The real challenge with Pizan's writing is that she writes in a way that tends to bore modern brains kind of quickly. Fi...

Curse You, Mathéolus!In the opening lines of this book, Christine de Pizan describes how she was sitting down at her desk one day when she picked up a new book by a guy named Mathéolus. Looking f...

After reading a book about how horrible women are, Christine de Pizan sinks into despair over the fact that she was born a woman. She figures that there's no way all of the great male philosophers...

Christine de Pizan sits down one day and reads a wretched book about how horrible women are. She is so saddened by the book (huh, wonder why?) that she bemoans the fact that she was born a woman. J...

Christine de Pizan's mother didn't want Christine to have an advanced education because she considered it unladylike. It was actually her father who insisted that she get as good an education as sh...

The Book of the City of Ladies starts out pretty prim and proper, but the third book gets into more than a dozen stories about rape and sex that aren't all that appropriate for people under a certa...

This book is made entirely of references, and there are about a bajillion that we could list here. The project of The Book of the City of Ladies is, after all, to get the reader fired up to learn m...