Christine’s response to this homogenizing account of women is telling. Taking her lead from scripture as opposed to biology, she stresses God’s power and perfection. God would never make something evil or imperfect, and those men who suggest that God created women as flawed versions of the human species demean him and his goodness.57 Christine’s argument is more nuanced than the one the misogynists put forth. On the one hand, her emphasis on God’s power, goodness, and perfection undercuts the misogynists’ belief that biology necessarily makes women evil. God created both men and women perfectly and in accord with his wishes. On the other hand, she does not counter their stereotyped depiction of all women as essentially evil with another stereotype of her own portraying all women as essentially good. It is not our sex that makes us saints or sinners, she writes, it is what we do, what we make of ourselves. “The man or woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher,” Lady Reason tells Christine, “neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.”58
As both a writer and thinker, Christine’s inclination is to avoid generalizations and to dwell with the particular, to move away from the demands of universal law and toward the demands of the moment. At one point, for example, Lady Reason explains that “God has ordained man and woman to serve him in different offices” and that this is why it “would not be at all appropriate for [women] to go and appear so brazenly in court like men, for there are enough men who do so.” But, Lady Reason immediately adds, what is generally the case need not always be the case. “If anyone maintained that women do not possess enough understanding to learn the laws,” she continues, “the opposite is obvious from the proof afforded by experience, which is manifest and has been manifest in many women.”59 Natural and divine hierarchies matter, but they are not absolute, and in extraordinary circumstances women must act in extraordinary ways. Lady Reason assures Christine that “a woman with a mind is fit for all tasks,” and the bulk of The Book of the City of Ladies bears this claim out as the three allegorical ladies provide example after example of women who performed remarkable and virtuous actions when circumstances demanded it. Christine relates stories of empresses and queens who, suddenly finding themselves widowed, threatened on all sides, take control of their countries, rule them wisely, develop laws, defend them from attacking enemies, and conquer neighboring countries.
But if these stories are meant to demonstrate what women can do, they also, crucially, demonstrate what women are. However diverse their motives or flawed their logic, the lies men tell about women are grounded in stories that reveal famous women to be nothing but liars and temptresses. History seems to support misogyny and, as Jean de Meun wrote in defense of his accounts of deceitful woman, his stories are true so long as the “worthy men who wrote the old books did not lie.” If the misogynist argues from example to rule, Christine’s final move is to undercut their examples, to demonstrate that the very stories men tell to demonstrate that all women are liars are themselves lies, mistruths, and implausible exaggerations. History itself becomes the battleground to disprove the misogynist reification of women into deceitful woman. Until now, Christine claims, no one has contested the slanderous histories men write, so their unchallenged lies thereby become authorities, and such authority is the guarantor of truth. “Just as you yourself once said regarding this question,” Lady Rectitude says, reminding Christine of her earlier poem The Letter of the God of Love, “whoever goes to court without an opponent pleads very much at his ease.” In that earlier poem, Christine had no doubt that “[i]f women had written all those books, I know the works would read quite differently, for well do women know this blame is wrong.”60
It is, at first glance, a curious strategy. To counter traditional claims that women are liars, claims rooted in long-accepted histories, stories, and exempla, Christine will rewrite those stories, rewrite accepted history to exonerate women. On the surface, it seems she is doing little else than confirming worst suspicions, countering authority with falsification, creating fictions to counter truths, lying to prove women aren’t liars. Christine, unsurprisingly, deflects these claims, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. On a number of occasions she looks to her own experience as a woman, her knowledge of herself and of other women, to justify her alterations to commonly told stories. Lady Justice reminds her, for example, that all she needs to do is think about herself and her own body to know that Women’s Secrets is nothing but a pastiche of absurd and puerile fantasies, just as all she needs to do is reflect on the lives of friends and acquaintances to know that more often than not women, far from ruling their husbands like the serfs of imperious queens, suffer more from their husbands’ cruelties and beatings “than if they were slaves among the Saracens.”61 Often reflection on the lives of her contemporaries serves as the basis for making sense of the lives of women long since dead, a reflection rooted in the commonly held belief that human nature remains constant over time.62
Nowhere is Christine’s dependence on her own experience to rewrite history more evident than in the story of the young and beautiful Tertia Aemilia, who learns that her aged husband, the legendary Roman general Scipio, has taken up with a mere servant girl. Giovanni Boccaccio had included this story in Famous Women, a sort of encyclopedic collection of brief stories of well-known women that he composed between 1361 and 1362. Boccaccio praises Tertia’s loyalty to her husband. She lets no one know about the affair, concealing her own emotional pain in order to protect the reputation of her much-respected husband. Having lauded her discretion, Boccaccio cannot help but move from Tertia’s story to general reflections about women. Tertia, Boccaccio suggests, like all women, was a weak and suspicious creature suffering from low self-esteem, and this makes her actions all the more marvelous precisely because they are so unexpected from a woman. Had she been like most women, she would have called in her family and friends, filling “their ears with slander and complaints” while harassing her “husband in public with tearful protests,” ruining the reputation of a person “who in all other respects was a man of spotless honor.”63 For her part, Christine, who composed The Book of the City of Ladies with a copy of Boccaccio’s work at hand, praises Tertia, who “never ceased to serve her husband loyally, to love him, and to honor him.” Unlike Boccaccio, rather than assess Tertia’s behavior in light of some abstracted conception of feminine nature, Christine simply notes that her behavior is hardly uncommon. “I have seen similar women,” she tells Lady Rectitude, including most recently a young and beautiful countess in Brittany who “thanks to great constancy and goodness did the same.”64
Christine emphasizes examples of constancy to counter claims that all women are fickle and inconstant. These claims found their biological support in a theory of complexion that held women to be moister than men and, therefore, less rational, less able to retain moral lessons, and all too easily led astray by the senses and physical pleasures. As Albert the Great, John Buridan, and a host of others had surmised, the female body itself renders women merely cunning, never prudent, naturally prone toward evil and every sort of deception. Christine attacks these ideas at the very beginning of her biographies, when she praises Eve’s body. The first woman was created in paradise itself, not from vile mud, but from “the noblest substance which had ever been created … the body of man.”65 Nor did she deceive Adam, Christine argues in The Letter to the God of Love. She believed what the serpent said, repeated it to Adam in good faith, with neither fraud nor guile, and things said with no hidden spite “must not be labeled deceptiveness.”66
Perhaps Eve was not deceitful, but this account of her actions certainly opens her to charges of dull-wittedness and inconstancy. No doubt with this concern in mind, Christine quickly turns to the story of Semiramis. Following the death of her husband, King Ninus of Nineveh, Semiramis took control of his empire, expanded and secured its borders, built fortresses, and founded cities. A notoriously infamous figure, Boccaccio h
ad already included her story in Famous Women, suggesting that Semiramis initially took control of Ninus’s army through deceit, pretending to be her young beardless son. While this example of feminine wile does not seem particularly to perturb Boccaccio, Semiramis’s private life is another matter. “Like others of her sex,” he writes, “this unhappy female constantly burned with carnal desire and it is believed she gave herself to many men,” including her own son, whom she eventually married. Appalled, Boccaccio asserts that Semiramis’s lust deranged her judgment. She became “heedless of time or circumstances” as base pleasure dragged her ever closer to the abyss. In a cunning attempt to cover her crimes, she passed laws allowing every sort of sexual impropriety, hoping her own sick pleasures might pale in comparison with those of her subjects. No good could come from any of this and, in the end, her own son slaughtered her, whether through fear others would interfere with his incestuous nights or because he had grown disgusted with himself Boccaccio refuses to say.67 Overflowing with deceit, lust, and depravity, Boccaccio’s telling of Semiramis’s life seems perfectly modeled on Scholastic accounts of woman, all women. They lack prudence and have no concern with the common good. They desire nothing but their own satisfaction, never hesitating to employ corrupt means for even worse ends.
To Christine, this entire reading of Semiramis’s life is flawed. Christine simply ignores Semiramis’s cross-dressing, even as she admits that the widow did marry her son. Questionable though this behavior might seem to us, Christine adds that the widowed queen had good reasons for acting as she did. Had her son married another woman, Semiramis may well have lost some of her power and, the implication goes, the state some of its security. More important, Christine notes, in those early days “people lived according to the law of nature, where all people were allowed to do whatever came into their hearts without sinning.”68 The appeal to ancient custom, to the differences between life before and after the introduction of law, is hardly original with Christine. In the late thirteenth century, Vincent of Beauvais had employed it in his Speculum Doctrinale to explain away both Abraham’s adultery (“In Paradise God praised marriage, he did not condemn adultery”) and Lot’s incestuous relations with his two daughters (“Lot and his holy daughters acted for the sake of posterity, otherwise the human race would have died out, thus their public service excuses their private guilt”).69 While Vincent is mostly interested in clearing the names of the long and revered dead, Christine is doing something much more interesting. Christine argues that not only were Semiramis’s actions moral given their time and place, she acted with foresight and a concern about the common good, about what she could and must do to maintain the security of her empire. Far from being “heedless of circumstance,” as Boccaccio claimed, she knew exactly what was allowed and what was needed. She acted with reason and prudence, not with lust and cunning, properly weighing means and ends for the good of her state.
Christine takes up the topic of prudence again a bit later in the text. After listening to Lady Justice recount the lives of several women of great learning who could “conceive, know and retain all perceptible things,” Christine asks “whether women can reflect on what is best to do and what is better to be avoided, and whether they remember past events and become learned from the example they have seen, and, as a result, are wise in managing current affairs, and whether they have foresight into the future.”70 Lady Justice responds that Nature bestows prudence on both men and women, some receiving more, some less, and then supports her contention with accounts of the lives of particularly prudent women such as Gaia Cirilla (the wife Tarquin, king of Rome), Dido of Carthage, and Ops, the queen of Crete. She concludes with the life of Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia. Suddenly widowed and pregnant with Aeneas’s son, Lavinia fled to the woods fearful that “Aeneas’ son by another woman would have the child put to death in his desire to rule.” Despite these hardships and her long widowhood, Lavinia never remarried, treasured the memory of her dead husband, and treated her stepson so well he eventually “harbored no evil against her or his half brother.” She founded cities and governed wisely until her son was of age and assumed power.71 Perhaps not all women can be this prudent, this virtuous, but neither can all men. One should not expect anything more, nor anything less.
The recovery of prudence as both a male and female virtue is at the absolute center of Christine’s ideological critique of the misogynist tradition and her rediscovery of who she is and what she can do. It is also at the absolute center of her contention that women are not natural liars. Christine offers no shortage of examples to disprove misogynist claims that all women are seductive and deceitful temptresses, and such stories go a long way to demonstrate that women are perfectly capable of considering context and circumstance, of matching means to end, to achieve the good. Prudence frees women, just as it frees men, from slavishly following after the senses and the sordid satisfaction of every base desire. It allows the virtuous woman to reflect on and respond to whatever situation confronts her. Unfortunately and all too often, she will confront a world filled with lies and deception, with treachery and violence. In such circumstances, the noblewoman is no different from John of Salisbury’s man of eminence, no different from the heroes and heroines of vernacular romance. Lady Rectitude includes any number of stories of women who lie virtuously and out of necessity. Hypsipyle places herself in grave danger when she lies to protect the life of her father, as does Lady Curia to save her husband, and Tertia Aemilia, embodying the very wisdom Christine recommends in The Treasure of the City of Ladies, lies to conceal her husband’s extramarital affair.72 If possession of the faculty of prudence frees women from the charge of being natural liars, it also sets them free to lie when circumstance requires and virtue demands it.
ALL MEN ARE LIARS
Revealing long-revered authority to be false, purposefully distorted to demean and slander women, reveals that authority to be nothing but base deception. Whether or not women are natural liars, men also lie and, all too often, those lies are anything but virtuous.
Pietro de’Zorzi, the eldest son of Moderata Fonte, who died giving birth to her fourth child in Venice in 1592, certainly understood this. Pietro appended two sonnets to the front of his mother’s posthumously published treatise, The Worth of Women, praising her efforts to call out the deceivers for what they really were. “Up to now,” he writes, “men could conceal all their misdeeds, but now their flaws, as well as women’s true qualities, will be known from one end of the world to the other.”73 Fonte’s book appeared in 1600, eight years after her death—all things considered, a relatively bad year for the reputation of men, at least in Venice. That same year another Venetian woman, Lucrezia Marinella, published her own table-turning work, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Vices and Defects of Men, a spirited response to Giuseppe Passi’s 1599 diatribe On the Defects of Women, an all too typical, if particularly rabid, attack on the female sex. Marinella makes her intentions abundantly clear from the very outset: “My desire is to make this truth shine forth to everybody, that the female sex is nobler and more excellent than the male.”74 Nobler, according to Marinella, not simply because women possess all the virtues—prudence, intelligence, kindness, courage, and constancy—that men so often claim they lack, but nobler too because it is men themselves who lack those very virtues. Fonte would not have disagreed, and despite the stylistic differences between their two works, both Marinella and Fonte share an unshakable belief in the almost innate dishonesty of all men, a belief that every man is liar and that this belief must guide a woman’s every word and every deed.
Marinella and Fonte stand at something of a crossroads in the literary history of the defense of women. Among the most famous Venetian women writers of the late sixteenth century, they would build on the arguments of Christine de Pizan and more immediate predecessors, while resituating and reframing them. The social and cultural world of turn-of-the-century Venice may well have encouraged women to deeper reflection and reassessment of th
eir place in the world. The forced enclosure of so many Venetian noblewomen, both before and after marriage, contrasted not only with the freedom that foreign female visitors experienced but also with Venice’s famous and quite visible courtesans, not to mention actresses, who had only recently begun to appear onstage. The variety of roles women played in Venetian society almost begged for analysis.75 Not content, as Christine had been, to unmask the lies men pass off as truths about women, Marinella and Fonte return slander for slander, or better, argue that when men lie about women, they reveal the truth about themselves and in so doing reveal a truth about all men and all women. Their critique is subtle. If a tradition dating back as least as far as Tertullian had argued that women are natural liars because they are essentially artificial, covered, and adorned, Fonte and Marinella argue that to be human, male or female, is to be adorned. The difference between men and women does not rest in adornment but in the vile adornments men adopt to suppress and oppress women.76
Whereas Christine de Pizan worked her way through the slanders of the misogynists behind closed doors in dialogue with three allegorical figures, Fonte stages her attack as a conversation among seven women who, “despite their great differences in age and marital status,” are good friends. They often set aside time to gather together for “quiet conversation; and on these occasions, safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence,” they can speak freely on any topic they desire. On this day, Fonte tells us, the women have convened for the afternoon at Lenora’s house, a beautiful residence along one of the Venetian canals with a lovely and secluded courtyard garden filled with flowers and fruiting trees. The oldest member of the group, Adriana, a widow “of great discernment,” describes the garden as a paradise. Corinna, a young single woman, quickly adds that among the garden’s most charming aspect is “that there are no men here.”77 Men might be physically absent, but from the beginning they are the topic of conversation, spurred on, no doubt in part, by the arrival of Helena, just returned from her honeymoon and still in the first thralls of love with her new husband.
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