Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women
Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women

Author: Rosalind Brown-Grant

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-09-18

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780521537742

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Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) is justly renowned for its full-scale assault on the misogynist stereotypes which dominated the culture of the Middle Ages. Rosalind Brown-Grant locates the Cité in the context of Christine's defence of women as it developed over a number of years and through a range of different texts. Arguing that Christine tailored her critique of misogyny according to the genre in which she was writing and the audience she was addressing, this study shows that Christine's case for women nonetheless had an underlying unity in its insistence on the moral, if not the social, equality of the sexes. Whilst Christine may not have been a radical in modern feminist terms, she was able to draw upon the cultural resources of her day in order to construct an intellectual authority for herself that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the day.

The Book of the City of Ladies
The Book of the City of Ladies

Author: Christine De Pizan

Publisher: Persea Books

Published: 1998-06-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780892553730

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In dialogues with three celestial ladies, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan (1365-ca. 1429) builds an allegorical fortified city for women using examples of the important contributions women have made to Western Civilization and arguments that prove their intellectual and moral equality to men. Earl Jeffrey Richards' acclaimed translation is used nationwide in the most eminent colleges and universities in America, from Columbia to Stanford.

Debate of the Romance of the Rose
Debate of the Romance of the Rose

Author: Christine de Pizan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0226670147

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In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan’s criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces. In Debate of the “Romance of the Rose,” David Hult collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan’s supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice. The resulting volume affords a rare look at the way people read and thought about literature in the period immediately preceding the era of print.

Christine de Pizan
Christine de Pizan

Author: Barbara K. Altmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 100014352X

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Christine de Pizan wrote voluminously, commenting on various aspects of the late-medieval society in which she lived. Considered by many to be the first French woman of letters, Christine and her writing have been difficult to place ever since she began putting her thoughts on the page. Although her work was neglected in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, there has been a eruption of Christine studies in recent decades, making her the perfect subject for a casebook. This volume serves as a useful guide to contemporary research exploring Christine's life and work as they reflected and influenced her socio-political milieu.

The Political Theory of Christine De Pizan
The Political Theory of Christine De Pizan

Author: Kate Langdon Forhan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1351746383

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This title was first published in 2002: Christine de Pizan held no political office and her work was not influencial on any political theorist living today. However, in the disciplines of women's studies and French literature she has inspired intellectual debate, so much that the two sides of the debate are referred to as Christinophiles and Christinoclasts. This book persents the political paradoxes of Christine de Pizan. She was a woman in a man's world, an Italian at a French court, and the daughter of a civil servant in a world structured by social class. Her corpus of political works include five works designed to educate the male ruling class, two works expressly princesses and a treatise on warfare. The goal of this book is to outline the political theory of Christine de Pizan and situate her ideas within the history of political ideas in general.

Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book
Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book

Author: Rosalind Brown-Grant

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-01-20

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 150151332X

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This collection of essays examines how the paratextual apparatus of medieval manuscripts both inscribes and expresses power relations between the producers and consumers of knowledge in this important period of intellectual history. It seeks to define which paratextual features – annotations, commentaries, corrections, glosses, images, prologues, rubrics, and titles – are common to manuscripts from different branches of medieval knowledge and how they function in any particular discipline. It reveals how these visual expressions of power that organize and compile thought on the written page are consciously applied, negotiated or resisted by authors, scribes, artists, patrons and readers. This collection, which brings together scholars from the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, philosophy and music, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishing authority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shaping reader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscript culture.

Chaucer in Context
Chaucer in Context

Author: S. H. Rigby

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780719042362

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Everyone knows of the Canterbury Tales, acknowledged as one of the leading texts of the English Canon. Consensus about them ends there. Amongst the most written about works of English literature, they still defy categorisation. Was Chaucer a poet of profound religious piety or a sceptic who questioned all religious and moral certainties? Do his pilgrims reflect the actual society of his day, or were they a product of an already well-established literary tradition and convention? Was he a defender of women or a misogynist, who reproduced the antifeminism characteristic of his time? Did his writings present a challenge to the dominant social outlook of late Medieval England or reinforce the status quo? This stimulating new book surveys and assesses these competing critical approaches to Chaucer's work, emphasising the need to see Chaucer in historical context; the context of the social and political concerns of his own day. Writing as a historian, Rigby brings refreshing new insights to this contested old chestnut and Chaucer, and his Tales, are revealed to us as Chaucer's contemporaries would have seen them.

Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan's Ditié
Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan's Ditié

Author: Karen Green

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1793613176

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Grounded in a close reading of the records of Joan's trial and rehabilitation, on the early letters announcing her arrival at Chinon, and on three literary works; Christine de Pizan's Ditié, Martin le Franc's Le Champion des dames, and Alain Chartier's, Traité de l’Esperance, this controversial work argues that serious historians should accept that Joan was trained. It proposes that she was identified and taught how to behave in the expectation of the fulfillment of the Charlemagne Prophecy and other prophecies from the Joachite tradition. It explores the possibility that Christine de Pizan, who had been promoting these prophecies from the beginning of the century, had some hand in the process that resulted in Joan's appearance and demonstrates, at the very least, that there are many links connecting Christine de Pizan to the knights who fought with Joan.

Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain
Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-09-07

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9004438440

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Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.