The Book of the City of Ladies

by Christine Pizan

  Solente, Suzanne, ed., Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, 4 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1959–66). Translated extracts in Charity Cannon Willard, ed., The Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: Persea Books, 1994).

  ——Le Livre des Fais et des Bonnes Meurs du Sage Roy Charles V, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1936–40). Translated extracts in Willard, The Writings of Christine de Pizan.

  Willard, Charity Cannon, and Hicks, Eric, eds., Le Livre des Trois Vertus, Bibliothèque du XVe siècle, 50 (Paris: Champion, 1989). Sarah Lawson, trans., The Treasure of the City of Ladies, or, The Book of the Three Virtues (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); and Charity Cannon Willard, trans., A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies (New York: Persea Books, 1989).

  2. PRIMARY TEXTS BY OTHER MEDIEVAL AUTHORS CITED IN THE INTRODUCTION

  Augustine, Saint, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, Charles G. Osgood, ed. and trans. (Indianapolis and New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1956).

  Blamires, Alcuin, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

  Boccaccio, Giovanni, De Claris Mulieribus, Vittorio Zaccaria, ed., in Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Vittore Branca, ed., vol. 10, I Classici Mondadori (Verona: Mondadori, 1970). Concerning Famous Women, Guido A. Guarino, trans. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964).

  de Boer, C., ed., ‘Ovide Moralisé;’: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, publié d’après tous les manuscrits connus, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1915–38).

  Cazelles, Brigitte, trans., The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

  Fiero, Gloria K., Pfeffer, Wendy, and Allain, Mathé, eds. and trans., Three Medieval Views of Women: ‘La Contenance des Fames’, ‘Le Bien des Fames’, ‘Le Blasme des Fames’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

  Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, Félix Lecoy, ed., 3 vols., Classiques Français du Moyen Age (Paris: Champion, 1965–70). The Romance of the Rose, Frances Horgan, trans. and ed., World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  Larrington, Carolyne, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

  Roche-Mahdi, Sarah, ed. and trans., Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992).

  Van Hamel, A.-G., ed., Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce de Jehan le Fèvre, de Ressons, 2 vols. (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1892–1905). Translated extracts in Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, 177–97.

  Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Quadruplex, sive Speculum Maius: Naturale – Doctrinale – Morale – Historiale, 4 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck, 1964–5, reprint of edition of 1624).

  3. SECONDARY WORKS ON CHRISTINE DE PIZAN

  Blanchard, Joël, ‘Compilation and legitimation in the fifteenth century: Le Livre de la Cité des Dames’ in Earl Jeffrey Richards et al., eds., Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 228–49.

  Brown-Grant, Rosalind, Reading Beyond Gender: Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  Brownlee, Kevin, ‘Martyrdom and the female voice: Saint Christine in the Cité des Dames’ in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 115–35.

  Curnow, Maureen Cheney, ‘“La pioche d’inquisicion”: legal-judicial content and style in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames’ in Richards, Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, 157–72.

  Delany, Sheila, ‘Rewriting woman good: gender and the anxiety of influence in two late-medieval texts’ and ‘“Mothers to think back through”: Who are they? The ambiguous case of Christine de Pizan’ in her Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 74–87 and 88–103 respectively.

  Dulac, Liliane, ‘Un mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan: Sémiramis ou la veuve héroïque (du De Claris Mulieribus à la Cité des Dames)’, Mélanges de philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux (Montpellier: Centre d’Etudes Occitanes, 1978), 315–43.

  Gottlieb, Beatrice, ‘The problem of feminism in the fifteenth century’ in Julius Kirschner and Suzanne F. Wemple, eds., Women of the Medieval World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 337–64.

  Hindman, Sandra L., ‘With ink and mortar: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames: an art essay’, Feminist Studies 10 (1984), 457–84.

  Kolve, V. A., ‘The Annunciation to Christine: authorial empowerment in the Book of the City of Ladies’ in Brendan Cassidy, ed., Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 171–96.

  McLeod, Enid, The Order of the Rose: The Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976).

  Mc Leod, Glenda K., Virtue and Venom: Catalogues of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

  Phillippy, Patricia A., ‘Establishing authority: Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames’, Romanic Review 77 (1986), 167–93.

  Quilligan, Maureen, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).

  Schibanoff, Susan, ‘Taking the gold out of Egypt: the art of reading as a woman’, in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 83–106.

  Willard, Charity Cannon, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984).

  4. BACKGROUND WORKS

  Blamires, Alcuin, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

  Bloch, R. Howard, ‘Medieval misogyny’, Representations 20 (1987), 1–24.

  Bullough, Vern L., ‘Medieval medical and scientific views of women’, Viator 4 (1973), 485–501.

  Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  Ferrante, Joan M., Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).

  Gaunt, Simon, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  Gold, Penny Schine, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

  Krueger, Roberta L., Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  Lacy, Norris J., ‘Fabliau women’ Romance Notes 25 (1985), 318–27.

  Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  Marks, Elaine, and de Courtivron, Isabelle, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981).

  Moi, Toril, Sexual/Texual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985).

  Rigby, S.H., English Socity in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (London: Macmillan, 1995).

  Robertson, Elizabeth, ‘The corporeality of female sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret’ in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, 268–87.

  Thomasset, Claude, ‘The Nature of Woman’ in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed., A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1992), 43–69.

  Wilson, Katharina M., Medieval Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

  Wilson, Katharina M., and Makowski, Elizabeth M., Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Mi
sogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 190).

  Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1928).

  Christine de Pizan’s name can also be spelled ‘Pisan’, and readers should look under both spellings in reference sources, including the www.