Friends of PUL Small Talk Renate Kosinski: “Christine de Pizan from Venice to Paris to Princeton: The Trajectory of a Medieval Writer and Entrepreneur”

The Friends of PUL’s own Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski reveals the story of Venice-born French writer Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1430). Raised in an intellectual milieu – her father was the court physician of the French King Charles V – she became a scholar interested in ancient and contemporary history and politics, the role of women in society, as well as in some religious topics. De Pizan was one of the most productive and versatile writers of the late Middle Ages. She wrote her own manuscripts and also directed a busy manuscript workshop in Paris. She was the first (and for a long time the only) woman writer to live from her writing by seeking commissions and cultivating wealthy patrons. 

De Pizan’s corpus of around 40 works comprises poems about love and widowhood, political allegories, a royal biography, polemics in defense of women's intellectual and moral worth, didactic and devotional works, and – as her last achievement – a famous poem about Joan of Arc, her contemporary. The rediscovery of de Pizan through the 1982 English translation of “The Book of the City of Ladies” (1405) by Earl Jeffrey Richards, during his time as a Princeton Ph.D. student, changed the field of medieval and feminist studies in the United States.