Two decades ago, while I was teaching women’s studies in California, my university established a collaborative project with a local high school. The high school had launched an initiative to increase students’ literacy and interest in reading, and invited faculty to volunteer to read books aloud to a freshman English class. I chose passages from the Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies to share.
Selecting a European book from the 15th century to read to a classroom of modern teenagers who were mostly English as Second Language (ESL) speakers from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America might seem an odd choice, but I’d only recently discovered de Pizan myself, and what I’d read surprised me. In many ways, her critique of patriarchal assumptions about women’s achievements marked her as ahead of her times. In other ways, she was a typical medieval woman. For instance, she defended women’s contributions in politics and the arts, but supported the idea of a wife’s “obedience” to her husband. Nonetheless, I knew I could read certain passages that would sound anachronistic to this group of teenagers when I revealed the century in which the woman writer who had penned the words had lived:
I have long wondered about the reasons why so many different men, learned and nonlearned, have been and are so ready to say and write in their treatises so many evil and reproachful things about women. (de Pizan)
The students were amazed to discover that Christine had written those words in the early 15th century and wanted to know more about this woman, widowed at the age of twenty-five and with three children and a mother to support, who had become such a prolific and highly regarded author that she supported herself and her family on commissions earned for her books.
I trace the germ of the idea for my novel, Cities of Women, back to that incident. Only much later did that seed blossom into the outlines of a novel about a contemporary woman scholar named Verity Frazier, who becomes obsessed with the idea that the artist responsible for illuminating the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan was a woman named Anastasia.
The novel is out with Keylight Books, an imprint of Turner Publications, Sept 5, 2023. Available for pre-order here.