All right, we'll see how long I can make this last before the sounds of
construction, pile drivers, pick up back again outside. Okay! Hey everybody, it's
Anna, and welcome back to my booktube channel. It is wonderful to see you all
again. I am still really excited and riding the high of being back after a
long hiatus and feeling like March, as Hannah Witton and Leena Norms from just
kiss my frog tweeted out, March is gonna be the month where I just try really
hard to make stuff happen. February was kind of *bleh*. I wasn't feeling
motivated, wasn't feeling productive. March is gonna be the Try month! We're
gonna ride the Try Train together! Okay, so today I would also like to bring to
your attention the fact that March is Women's History Month, if you were
unaware, and the eighth of March, which is two days from when I'm filming this
video, but when *you* will be watching it, is International Women's Day.
International Women's Day actually was first known as International Working
Women's Day, and it was created by a bunch of socialist women activists in
the early 20th century to create an organization for greater enfranchisement
and rights and solidarity between working women all around the world. So
just in case anybody tries to tell you that it doesn't have working-class,
socialist roots, they would be incorrect about that. And then in the spirit of
just continuing to have greater discussions about feminism and women's
history, I wanted to bring you a review today of a book that I enjoyed, and that
is "The City of Ladies" by Christine de Pizan. this is a little pocket edition of
it. I'll show you - there, can you see it? There we are! It's a little pocket
edition from the Penguin great ideas series, which reprints philosophical
books and essays and other sort of short-ish works. It either distills them down a
little bit and abridges them, or it just reprints an essay in its
entirety. So this doesn't really come with any critical apparatus.
I kind of had to do some searching for that on my own. But I picked this up at a
secondhand bookstore here in Seattle, and I have always been meaning to read this
book because [breaks off to glare at the sound of sirens outside]
I have been meaning to read this book for a really
long time, just because I know it's an important work of feminist/
proto feminist literature. There is some debate about whether we can call books
that were written and published prior to the creation of the modern
feminist movement, whether we call those books "feminist" or not. But I'm not
going to get into that right now. I was very interested to read this because I
know it is an important part of women's history, literary history, and indeed,
world history and literature as well. So I want to give you a little bit of
background about Christine de Pizan, who is the author of this book. She was a
writer that lived in France during the Middle Ages. She was an Italian-French
writer who wrote in Middle French the entirety of her works.
I believe she published some 41 books over the period of a 30-year career,
which is just incredibly prolific, and she is most known for her
proto-feminist works "the city of ladies" and "treasure of the city of ladies," which
is kind of the sequel to this. I have not read "treasure of the city of
ladies," but I would like to, especially considering how much I enjoyed "city of
ladies." So I have some notes on my phone that I'll go ahead and share with you.
Christine, in addition to just all of her writing that she did as part of her
rhetorical training, was a court writer for several dukes, including Louis
of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and John the Fearless of Burgundy-- which
I might just say, I really appreciate the fact that someone is known in history as
John "the fearless." And she was also the court writer during the reign of
Charles VI of France. She wrote poetry and prose, biography and history,
and according to her encyclopedia entry, her successes stemmed from a wide range
of innovative writing and rhetorical techniques that critically
challenged renowned writers such as Jean de Meun,
author of "the romance of the rose," which she criticized as immoral. And oh boy,
does she ever in this book! I also have not read "the romance of the rose." I know
that's a gap in my literary history that I'm looking to fill ASAP. So
now I'll tell you a little bit about this book. So this book is kind of framed
as this defense of women as kind of this gender that has been long lambasted for
being immoral, promiscuous, seductive, tempting to men, leading men into sin,
weak, unintelligent. Pretty much any kind of insulting thing you could ascribe to
women, based off of a stereotypical assumption of that gender, Christine is
writing against in this book. So she begins by sitting down to read some of
the books in her library, and she is dismayed at the fact that she cannot
find a single book that presents what she considers a positive or
accurate portrayal of women. and so she has a dream... kind of. It's like an
allegorical dream, whereupon she is visited by these three ladies: Reason,
Rectitude, and Justice. And these are kind of the personifications of the virtues
reason, rectitude, and justice. And they tell her that they are going to be
building a city of ladies where women can live together in harmony and
happiness, cultivating their minds, cultivating their virtues away from the
dismissiveness and insults of men who want to just see women not succeed. So
Reason is the first of these three ladies that is going to help Christine
build the city, and this is the longest section of the book that was included in
this edition: Christine's dialogue with Reason. In it, she writes
back against a lot of the popular male authors of the day, most notably
Boccaccio, who was an Italian author of an epic poem-- I guess it wasn't really an
epic, but it was a courtly epic about manners and decorum
in Italy in the late medieval/early modern period. And also the author of "the
romance of the rose," who pretty much just shames women for being promiscuous, being
these vile temptresses that have caused the fall of humanity. I should say that
this is all pretty much argued and discussed within the framework of
medieval Christian morality, which if you don't know, if you're not familiar
with the Bible story is that Eve (who was the first woman) is the one that
was considered responsible for leading humanity into sin and into
falling out of favor with God and having to do things like become mortal and
suffer pain and...[breaks off] a siren
So Christine is really using this framework of Aristotelian rhetoric
applied to Christian moral philosophy, I suppose, of her time to say that women,
although they may be physically weaker than men, although they might be
considered to be the inferior sex, is what she refers to it often,
although women might be considered the inferior sex, they are every bit as
capable as men. And it is only because they don't have the opportunity to
broaden their minds and enlarge their intellects that they are seen as such.
And also, Reason does bring up the very good point that in general, many of the
men and the male authors that are slandering women are only doing so
because they've been burned by women and they're jealous of their capabilities.
That's actually the line that's listed on the front of this book, is: "men who
have slandered the opposite sex out of envy have usually known women who are
cleverer and more virtuous than they are." And that's pretty much the main thrust
of Reason's conversation with Christine about
justifying the role of women in the world.
All right, and this excerpt-- hi Lily! [to my dog walking by] This excerpt that I'm about to read to
you was very reminiscent to me of later writings like Mary Wollstonecraft's "vindication of the rights of women"
and writings by Virginia Woolf about women's equality and desire for greater justice.
So this is where Christine has been asking Lady Rectitude to refute those
who claim that it isn't good for women to be educated. So here's the quote:
"Rectitude replied, 'This should prove to you that not all men's arguments are
based on reason, and that these men in particular are wrong. There are
absolutely no grounds for assuming that knowledge of moral disciplines which
actually inculcate virtue would have a morally corrupting effect. Indeed, there's
no doubt whatsoever that such forms of knowledge correct one's vices and improve
one's morals. How could anyone possibly think that by
studying good lessons and advice one will be any the worse for it?
This view is completely unthinkable and untenable. I'm not saying that it's a
good idea for men or women to study sorcery or any other type of forbidden
science, since the Holy Church did not ban people from practicing them for
nothing. However, it's just that it's not true to say that women will be corrupted
by knowing what's right and proper.'" I was not expecting to have such a well-
reasoned defense of women's education this early in literature. And maybe
that's just because I haven't read very many female medieval writers, but now I'm
thinking I might have to start because I'm really intrigued at how they formed
their arguments. And where you can see that especially Christine in this book
is grasping at ideas that will be later fully fleshed out and teased out into
greater pleas for equality and justice between genders and sort of give way to
the modern feminist movement. Towards the end when Christine is talking to Justice,
I think, is when this sort of nascent feminist ideology kind of bumps up
against some of the strictures of Christine's time, where she's trying to
also list off a series of good female role model models, whether
Christian saints or historical figures or figures from mythology that
are going to populate this city of ladies, where the Virgin Mary, who is
the Blessed Mother of Jesus, is going to rule as the Queen over all of the
good women that live in the city. I think towards the end when she attempts to
negotiate a woman's place in marriage and why women are not allowed to testify
in court at this period in time, and what about the tensions between women who are
loved for their virtue versus women who are loved for their physical
attractiveness? Does that mean that those women that are taking pains to make
themselves physically attractive and care for their appearance are any less
deserving of the appellations of virtue? That was really interesting to me
because I think we still have those same conversations now. I mean I am constantly
talking to people, they they see, you know, that I wear makeup and I'm a pretty
outspoken feminist person. They ask me all the time, "well, how can you do
both of those things at the same time?" I feel like we're still having many of the
same debates that have been constructed but also rehashed throughout time about
gender and gender presentation, especially as it pertains to women,
because there's kind of this impossible standard set up, right? And Christine does
talk a lot about the double standards that are facing men and women, especially
when it comes to sexual conduct, where women are completely expected to be
these chaste virgins that don't know anything about sex and sexuality, but
they're also expected to put up with their husbands abusing them, and men are
allowed to be unfaithful and abuse their wives and abuse women and disrespect
them without any consequence. And she definitely does bring up the unfairness
and injustice of it and suggest that if women were able to become more educated,
they would be able to gain greater rights, and they wouldn't only have to
rely on both the solidarity and support of other women.
The security of the knowledge that they themselves know that they
haven't done anything wrong, that they might actually have a chance for justice
in this life. And I don't know, it's it's hard to articulate my thoughts on this
book in a succinct manner, because it's deceptively short, but it covers a
whole lot of ground! It covers things that I did not expect an early modern/
medieval writer to to engage with in a way that is still extremely
readable and relatable today. I am somewhat used to reading older texts,
although about as old as I ever got when I was in graduate school was maybe like
the late 17th century, and some of those can be really difficult to read without,
you know, being too presentist and, projecting a modern sensibility onto it
or tying it in too easily to 18th and 19th century models of gender and womanhood
and femininity, which is what I studied.
But this text was really thought-provoking. I'm fascinated to learn more about Christine de Pizan's life,
to read her other works, and to go ahead and read the books that she was writing
against. I know I have a copy of the Decameron on hold waiting for me at the
library, and "the romance of the rose"-- I had a Shakespeare professor in college
that talked about that all the time, so I don't know why I haven't read it yet, but
I will probably check back in at some point when I read more of these kind of
medieval texts and kind of just work on this project a bit more: to learn more
about medieval conceptions of gender. And before I go ahead and sign off, I would
like to thank Fariba at The Medieval Reader-- I will link her channel down
below-- for pretty much just sparking my interest in picking this book up. I've
wanted to read it for such a long time and I don't know why I haven't. And she
is getting a PhD in French and reads and reviews a lot of texts in
French from the medieval and early modern and Renaissance periods. So I
would like to thank her for reigniting my interest in this period of history, in
this period of literature. And please do go check out her videos. Give her a sub
because she does make very good quality content on this wonderful thing we call
booktube. So that is going to be all for today. I hope that you continue to enjoy
your Women's History Month. Have a happy International Women's Day. Don't forget
to go out and do something that day that will bring about greater equality and
justice between genders-- woohoo! Equal rights, good stuff. All right, thank you
all so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one. Bye!
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