The Book of the City of Ladies
70 pages • 2-hour read
Christine de PizanThe Book of the City of Ladies
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination.
The City of Ladies
The City of Ladies is the book’s central symbol, the narrative framework for Christine’s treatise. An allegorical fortress built to provide women with a physical defense against misogynistic slander, this “city” represents the book itself, as an intellectual safe space created to defend and fortify women against their accusers. The city becomes an extended metaphor, as the “stones” of its foundations, walls, and buildings are the stories of virtuous and accomplished women, transforming history itself into a protective structure. It therefore symbolizes the beginning of a female literary and historical tradition, a secure space from which women can draw strength and refute their detractors. By housing pagan warriors, inventors, devoted wives, and Christian saints together, the city creates a new, collective community, based on female identity.
Significant to her work’s overall purpose, Christine’s “City of Ladies” also creates a feminized parallel to the ubiquitous medieval depiction of the “City of Heaven,” or “Heavenly Jerusalem” in literature and art, which portrayed heaven as a city or palace where God was king and the (male) saints and other virtuous men dwelt alongside him. This concept built on canonical imagery from the Book of Revelation and the writings of Saint Augustine. While the Virgin Mary is the “Queen of Heaven” in this established version, second only to God himself, Christine effectively promotes Mary in her female-only version of this city, making her its supreme ruler. Although Mary is an appropriate and pious choice for a medieval female writer, it also is reflective of Christine’s proto-feminist and subversive repurposing of male-centric learning and culture for The Book of the City of Ladies.
The Act of Building
The act of building is a second extended symbol that provides the book’s narrative structure and represents the intellectual labor required to construct a new history for women. The symbol unfolds in three distinct stages that correspond to the book’s three parts. First, Christine must dig the foundations, a process Reason equates with intellectual inquiry when she instructs Christine to “take the spade of your intelligence and dig deep to make a great trench” (16). This stage involves clearing away the “earth” of misogynistic lies and establishing a solid base with stories of powerful female rulers and inventors. Second, Rectitude guides Christine in constructing the city’s houses and buildings, representing the systematic effort of “populating” this new history with examples of the virtuous women who will “dwell” there. Finally, Justice helps complete the high turrets, bringing in references to the Virgin Mary and female saints who will live there.
In making herself and her allegorical Ladies “builders,” Christine claims a symbolic role that was considered purely masculine at the time. This building role acts as a parallel—and possibly as distraction—from Christine’s real challenge to gender norms, her authorship of a professional philosophical work. This symbol therefore doubly reflects her argument that women are as capable as men and are only unable to achieve what men achieve as a result of prejudice and, subsequently, lack of opportunity. As such, it supports Misogyny and Proto-Feminism as Alternative Narratives.
Scholarship
Scholarship acts as a constant motif throughout the work, both as the source of misogynistic oppression and the potential tool for women’s liberation. The narrative begins with Christine’s despair after reading texts by Matheolus and other male authors whose authority seems irrefutable. These books symbolize a powerful, male-dominated intellectual tradition that systematically denigrates—and excludes—women. Christine feels crushed by their collective weight, lamenting that she “could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex” (6). This overwhelming textual evidence forces her to doubt her own experience and conclude that so many learned men could not possibly be wrong, leading her to despise herself and her entire gender. At the outset, therefore, this motif frames scholarship as a bastion of male privilege and prejudice.
The arrival of the three Virtues—Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—transforms the motif into a sign of hope, showing how Christine, and all women, may engage with scholarship without succumbing to self-loathing. The Ladies encourage Christine to have confidence to critique male scholarship and, most importantly, to write her own contribution, demonstrating Education as the Key to Female Liberation. The creation of the three Ladies acts as a permissive allegorical device, portraying Christine as the modest “servant” of the Ladies, and her transgressive criticism of male scholarship as a God-ordained instruction. Following this, the motif moves to celebrating women like Carmentis, whose invention of the Latin alphabet is foundational to all Western knowledge, and therefore key to scholarship.
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