Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies in Early Modern England

Abstract

In the study of women writers in early modern England, Christine de Pizan is everywhere and nowhere. Whereas she presides as first feminist over her descendants, and her City of Ladies is used as a model for their work as well as for that of scholars today,1 research has not yet clarified the extent to which her works could have been known in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 In this essay, I hope to demonstrate that the Tudor courts were familiar with the idea of a “city of ladies” in a limited but definite way, and that manuscripts of her works including the Livre de la eite des dames were available in the royal libraries. Therefore Elizabeth I and others associated with the court, including Aemilia Lanyer, could have read Christine’s text. I will also argue that William and Margaret Cavendish owned the important Harley manuscript collection of Christine’s work. This account of Christine’s legacy is formulated as an alternative to the search for “sisterly precursors” developed by critics like Gilbert and Gubar.3 Instead of offering a refuge from the “anxiety of authorship,” Christine’s work and the concept of the “city of ladies” most likely provided the Tudor courts with an unidentified, generic defense of women and a compendium of rhetorical strategies.