Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies is a direct refutation of the pervasive tradition of literary misogyny in medieval Europe. Misogynistic ideas were popularized by influential medieval texts like Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, which portrayed women as inherently duplicitous. An tiny elite shaped the whole of the European literary tradition. This was overwhelmingly formed of rich, educated men, as even most wealthy women in medieval and pre-medieval times were denied access to education, and women were expected to engage in family duties rather than intellectual pursuits. (Mark, Joshua J. “Women in the Middle Ages.” World History Encyclopedia, 2019). The exclusion of women from philosophy, theology, and literature perpetuated both conscious and unconscious bias toward women, and their role, purpose, and value.

In 15th-century Europe, this misogynistic literary approach drew its main authority from the twin paternalistic traditions of Classical science and medicine and Judeo-Christian theology, which underpinned medieval philosophy, doctrine, and socio-legal norms. Classical medical science, based largely on the writings of Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Galen (129-216 AD), defined women as “defective” or “incomplete” males, asserting that they were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior. (Connell, Sophia. “Aristotle and Galen on Sex Difference.” Academia, 2000). The biblical narrative of Genesis, portraying Eve as susceptible to temptation and leading Adam into disobedience, was taken as definitive proof of women’s weakness: As a result, Eve—and by extension all women—was held responsible for mankind’s expulsion by God from the Garden of Eden, and therefore for “original sin” and the evils of the world (A. Enright. “The Genesis of Blame.” London Review of Books, 2018). These pervasive ideas shaped the roles of women in medieval literature, and in the real world, as they were used by many writers as authorities to “prove” female inferiority as a supposed historical constant. Christine herself gives these cultural phenomena as the—mistaken—reason why “so many men, both clerks and others, have said and continue to say and write such awful, damning things about women and their ways” (6). As a one of the few pre-modern women to be given a scholarly education, Christine instead draws on classical and Biblical sources to create an alternative catalogue of exemplary women, to prove examples of female virtue and assert male bias in the depiction of women through history.