The Book of the City of Ladies (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

The Book of the City of Ladies (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Christine de Pizan
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411474222

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Cover of SparkNotes Guide to The Book of the City of Ladies by SparkNotes Editors

The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7422-2

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Context

Some critics consider Christine de Pizan, born in around 1364, to be France’s, if not the world’s, first professional female author. In addition, her classic work, The Book of the City of Ladies, is commonly held to be the first feminist text written by a Western woman. In it, she directly confronts the sexism and misogyny that characterized and plagued not only the literature of her day, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, but representations of women reaching back into antiquity.

Her intention was to defend unwarranted attacks on the characters of women and to provide examples of the unquestionable virtue of her sex. Though this seems like a lofty and daunting goal, it is grounded in a specific response to contemporary events surrounding her life as a writer in France. The Book of the City of Ladies, as a philosophical treatise, can be seen as directly answering the writer Jean de Meun, who between 1269 and 1278 wrote a more than 17,000-line continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s epic poem The Romance of the Rose, initially completed in the 1230s. The Romance