Kathryn McKinley
Christine de Pizan has received much attention in recent decades for her intervention in late‐medieval scholarly discourse on the “woman question.” Drawing extensively on Biblical narratives, classical mythology, and hagiography, Christine constructs an allegorical literary city, or citadel, which celebrates the considerable contributions of women in political, literary, and religious history. Her protofeminist revisions of narratives featuring mythological heroines, such as those found in Ovid, Jean de Meun, and Boccaccio, display an impressive command of late‐medieval rhetorical strategies. As much as her predecessors, Christine herself engages in myth‐making as she constructs a literary edifice that will protect women against history’s mischaracterizations. Like many medieval authors, Christine thinks in dialogue; she regularly writes her narrative in relation to the authors who have passed down these myths. Her work is a “compilation” of medieval renderings of myths, and she frequently establishes her authority by reference to her literary predecessors, whether Ovid, Virgil, or Boccaccio. Christine “thinks through” myth to claim a place for women’s voices in the making of history and their contributions to literary traditions.
Many medieval authors (St Augustine, Jean de Meun, Dante, Chaucer) employed architectural allegory, featuring castles, citadels, buildings, and palaces, to explore profoundly serious intellectual problems, and, as Christine did, to imagine a more complete vision of human society.1 Christine uses the building trope to redress manifold injustices perpetrated against women in literary and clerical tradition, but does so innovatively through her namesake narrator’s continued parlance with God, and with the ladies (Reason, Rectitude, and Justice) he sends to help her narrator construct the city. Earl Jeffrey Richards points out that Christine’s use of a “city” allegory is that of a “legal model,” since few cities in the later Middle Ages were inhabited by nobles; for Christine this metaphor reflected an ideal freedom and autonomy for women far superior to that of a convent (Richards 1994, 226–228).
Christine found ways not only to rewrite her predecessors’ fables about women, but to build something new. She made several major departures from Boccaccio in his De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women), in addition to the most central: recasting women as inherently virtuous. Rosalind Brown‐Grant points out that Christine established her new “cité” on both reason (raison) and a theological foundation (Brown‐Grant 1999, 150–152). Christine also depicts her namesake narrator, as Dante did in the Divine Comedy with Virgil, as the recipient of truths given by dream‐guides (Reason, Rectitude, and Justice in the Book of the City of Ladies) (Brown‐Grant 1999, 150–152). In addition, she not only supplies a multitude of exemplary medieval women in her work (something Boccaccio had omitted), but completes the architectural structure by adding a third tier, for holy women (Brown‐Grant 1999, 140–141). These are just some of the many ways Christine constructed a literary fortress unassailable by her enemies. Richards notes that in the Book of the City of Ladies she uses the verb of deffendre 13 times, and deffense and its forms ten times (Richards 1994, 229). This architectural framework is multivalent: while at first glance it implies protection and confinement, it also conveys a sense of freedom: an imaginary space, yet one created to reframe the “spaces” previously allotted to women in the history Christine charts. As Brown‐Grant emphasizes, this new city is established on the basis of the morality of women; grounded in reason, tempered with the moral right (droiture), and crowned with justice, the structure not only conveys safety for women but it reconstructs the very meaning of the feminine in later medieval France.2 Christine’s innovations in rewriting the nature of woman are so many that in a sense her “fortress” imagery is warranted, certainly from the standpoint of late‐medieval horizons of expectation regarding women.
Having created a new, well‐fortified intellectual space in which to carry out her revision of women’s history, Christine takes up a range of myths and tales and rewrites them. Often she engages and recasts myths Boccaccio had used in his De mulieribus, but she freely adds in other stories as well. Wendy Doniger has fruitfully distinguished between dogma and myth in ways that can be applied to Christine’s own “battles” in the Book of the City of Ladies. She argues that “where myth encourages a wide range of beliefs, dogma would narrow that range” (Doniger 1998, 100). What Christine really faced, by 1404, the date of the composition of the Book of the City of Ladies, was extremely entrenched dogma about woman’s nature. Her uses of myth show how she creatively resists such dogma. Doniger makes an important distinction about dogma in her assessment of Martin Buber; I will quote his discussion first:
All positive religion rests on an enormous simplification of the manifold and wildly engulfing forces that invade us: it is the subduing of the fullness of existence. All myth, in contrast, is the expression of the fullness of existence, its image, its sign; it drinks incessantly from the gushing fountains of life. Hence religion fights myth where it cannot absorb and incorporate it … It is strange and wonderful to observe how in this battle religion ever again wins the apparent victory, myth ever again wins the real one.
(Buber 1955, 11)
Doniger notes:
What Buber says about religion, I would limit to dogma. What that corrective, I think Buber’s statement a marvelous testimony to myth’s ability to keep open the doors of imagination within the most constricting dogmatic frameworks. It has been said that language is a dialect with an army; I would say that dogma is a myth with an army.
(Doniger 1998, 101)
I draw in Buber here since Christine is largely waging a battle against centuries of orthodox teaching about women, sanctioned and produced by the Church.3 By her time, the teachings on women had become “a myth with an army,” and it is against this overdetermined tradition that she constructs her intellectual citadel. She fills it with a multitude of myths (here in the sense of fables); and her uses of them falls under the category of “revolutionary myths,” which convey the fluxus quo, rather than the status quo – when used like this, myths “can subvert the dominant paradigm” (Doniger 1998, 107). This was the work of the Book of the City of Ladies, carried on within the spaces of its newly constructed intellectual fortifications.
We first meet the architectural trope early in the Book of the City of Ladies, once the narrator Christine in her discouragement has been visited by the three ladies, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. In Reason’s first dialogue with Christine, she explains why they have visited her: they come to eradicate “from the world the same error into which you had fallen” (Part I.3.3): believing negative discourse about women. The author Christine later cunningly characterizes this error as heresy: such thinking is theologically false. After Reason has cleared away much dirt and created a wide ditch, she bids Christine to place the foundation stones of the city (a foundation of reason, not false report), beginning with the first large stone (I.14.4). By this, Reason refers to the story of Semiramis, which forms the first tale in the Book of the City of Ladies. The widow queen Semiramis herself controlled armies and had defenses built around Babylon; she is also first because she is very ancient. Though Semiramis is also known for incest (marrying her son), some have seen her as significant in that she disrupted the traffic in women and would not allow herself to be bought in marriage as a queen. Presumably Christine selected Semiramis as the “first” stone because of her legendary work helping to build Babylon; she is also invoking Boccaccio in her placement of the heroine. Boccaccio himself places Semiramis second, only after Eve, in the De mulieribus claris (chapter 2); his chapter on the heroine is laudatory in its first half but devolves into condemnation of her “crime.”4 Christine omits the less salutary details, celebrating Semiramis for her wisdom, judgment, and influence as a queen. In the Book of the City of Ladies, both Arachne and Queen Dido (Part I.39, 46) also figure as mythological characters who, through their intellect, illustrate the ingenuity and excellence of womankind. In both myths Christine also directly rewrites Boccaccio. Just as Christine builds this new “city” through her pen and her intellect, Arachne “builds” meaning through her skill in weaving, also challenging Athena’s authority. Boccaccio’s tale of Arachne in De Mulieribus Claris (18) offers praise for her introduction of the “use of linen” and her invention of nets. She was also famed for her spinning, creating in her weaving “what a painter does with his brush” (Boccaccio 2001, 81). Boccaccio briefly traces her developing pride in her skill and her audacity in challenging Athena to a weaving contest. When she was defeated, she hung herself. Boccaccio ends the tale by condemning the folly of pride (“stultissimum hercle” 18.6). Boccaccio’s account departs from Ovid’s more nuanced one. In Ovid (Metamorphoses 6), the daring Arachne does challenge Minerva, but the textiles each weave play into Ovid’s larger themes of the deceptions of the gods and the sometimes greater piety of humans. There Arachne’s web depicts many tales of gods’ falsehoods; Minerva extols the virtues of the gods. Although Minerva finds no errors in Arachne’s weaving, she is offended by the sacrilegious nature of the scenes; she strikes Arachne repeatedly on the head with her shuttle until Arachne finally hangs herself (Metamorphoses 6. 121–150). Ovid’s empathetic portrait of the honest artisan highlights the fundamental dishonesty of Minerva and her abuse of her own power. Boccaccio does not devote space to describing the webs each wove and he eliminates Minerva’s violent actions. He offers two different readings of her hanging: an etiological one relating to spiders, that her name is connected to spiders, and that “Arachne, through the mercy of the gods, was turned into a spider and plies her former art with unceasing diligence.” He reports another tradition that servants kept her from suicide, and that “once she put aside her work, she was liberated from her anguish” (18.4). Yet his inclusion of this reading registers a possible anxiety about Arachne’s connections to her work, her artistry. Finally Boccaccio condemns the pride of this young woman for taking on heaven (as he says) and expecting God “to open the treasure of his munificence and bestow upon her all his favor to the exclusion of everyone else” (18.5). He ultimately likens Arachne to a “blockhead” (stolide mentis) for making such an assumption (18.8).
Christine instead presents Arachne as one of many heroines gifted as artists. Reason tells the story of Arachne, who was famed for her “marvelously subtle mind” (81). Arachne was “the first to invent the art of dyeing woolens in various colors and of weaving art works into cloth, like a painter, according to the ‘fine thread’ technique of weaving tapestry” (Book of the City of Ladies 1.39.1). Here Christine identifies the mythic heroine who first gave women the skill and art of weaving (39.2). She “discovered an even more necessary science,” being the first to develop the process for “cultivating flax and hemp,” and used nets, snares, traps, and the art of fishing and trapping (39.2). Christine dismisses Boccaccio in a phrase by saying that he believed that “the world was better off when people lived only from haws and acorns and wore nothing more than animal skins than it is now that they have been taught to live in greater refinement” (39.3). Christine displays Arachne the textile artist and inventor, concluding that earthly goods and favors granted by God are not inherently evil in themselves, but require the possessor to make proper use of them in her service to God. Interestingly Christine does not deal with the detail of pride that appears in both Ovid and especially in Boccaccio. Her emphasis instead is what skills and gifts Arachne contributed to the world, from her ingenuity.
Boccaccio also relates the story of Queen Dido in several works, among them the Amorosa Visione (ca. 1342–1343) and the De mulieribus Claris.5 In the De mulieribus claris (ca. 1361), Boccaccio’s tale of Dido is uniformly flattering, but that is because it leaves out any mention of Aeneas. Some say that Boccaccio evolved in his thinking about Dido. In his earlier works, such as the Amorosa Visione and the Fiammetta, he depicts the “unchaste” Dido, who loves Aeneas; there he seems to have followed both Ovid and Dante’s approaches. Robert Hollander argues that a letter from Petrarch to Federico Aretino (ca. 1364–1367) turned Boccaccio away from this version of the Dido tale and towards one that was then considered more “historically” accurate: the story of Dido as a “chaste” widow who dies of suicide without ever having met Aeneas (since the two would have lived several hundred years apart). Such a shift to a more “historically” accurate version would have been important to the emerging humanist Boccaccio. Craig Kallendorf (1985) has also traced the shift in Boccaccio’s views of the heroine, seeing it as part of Boccaccio’s response to the demands of emerging Italian humanism. The “chaste widow” Dido of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, then, is the result of Boccaccio’s shift towards Petrarch on this question. Yet this “historical” tradition on Dido, in which she displays absolute fidelity to her first husband to the point of committing suicide before remarrying, also highlights one of the abiding problems of medieval misogyny: the hostility towards remarriage, and the idea that the only good widow was one who never remarried.
Christine’s narratives in the Book of the City of Ladies reveal that she preferred to present both Didos. In Part I. 46, for the “chaste widow” version of Dido as queen and city‐builder, Christine draws on the De mulieribus claris; but for the rendering of Dido in Part II.55, she brings in the Dido who later loves Aeneas. Closer analysis of Boccaccio’s two works, however, challenges the old commonplace of Boccaccio as the unchanging sign of “misogynist author,” one whom Christine always resisted.6
Part II of the Book of the City of Ladies commences with Lady Droiture (Rectitude) instructing the Christine‐narrator to “mix the mortar in your ink bottle so that you can fortify the City with your tempered pen.” Here Rectitude educates Christine about the importance of sibyls in history, “foremost among the ladies of sovereign dignity” (II.1.3). Christine presents narratives about these ancient female prophetesses, such as Almathea, and states that the sibyls were more effective than the traditional Old Testament prophets (II.1.3). This leads into her discussion of women prophets in Hebrew and classical tradition.
Throughout the Book of the City of Ladies, Christine presents a range of exempla, drawn from historical, religious, and classical traditions; thus queens from medieval history may be found next to mythological persons. In Part II, there are many fewer mythological heroines than there were in Part I, a trend that will be even stronger in Part III, peopled almost entirely with Christian holy women. In Part II Christine includes Penelope, Medea, Dido, Thisbe, and Hero.
Christine’s Penelope is drawn largely from Boccaccio, who features her as an illustration of wifely fidelity (De mulieribus claris XL). Christine (the author) offers Penelope similarly (II.45.1), to disprove the historic claims of women’s infidelity—claims that Christine‐narrator raises in her dialogue with Rectitude. Penelope’s story is placed side by side with those of Sarah, Ruth, Rebecca, Mariannes, and Antonia. Later, as Rectitude answers Christine‐narrator, she presents the tales of Medea, Dido, Thisbe, and Hero (Part II. 55–58). Indeed, all of these mythological heroines form part of a rebuttal in the larger narrative to misogynist claims about women’s infidelity. This is the work of “dismantling” that makes up the larger narrative.
Since space does not permit analysis of all five mythological heroines, I will treat here only Christine’s depictions of Medea and Dido. She features Medea briefly in Part I, in her discussion of learned women: there Medea is famous for her knowledge of magic and spells (I. 32). In Part II, however, Medea is rather uneasily presented as an exemplar of fidelity in love. Christine elides the parts of Medea’s story that are less flattering: her dismemberment of her brother Absyrtus, her killing of Pelias, and her killing of her two sons. Such details are found in Ovid, Metamorphoses book 7 as well as in Amorosa Visione, chapter 21.51–88, which nevertheless reworks Medea’s lament in Heroides 12. In Part II.56, Christine presents only the story of Medea’s faithful love of Jason; she describes Medea as the “daughter of the king of Colchis … who possessed such great knowledge, [and] loved Jason with a too great and too constant love” (II.56.1). Much of Christine’s narrative is set in Colchis, where the young Medea first sees and falls in love with Jason. Here Medea resolves to defy her father and save the life of the young Greek, employing her magical arts to protect him from the dangers relating to the enchanted Golden Fleece. Christine continues to fill the narrative with empathetic intensifiers: “too much pity overwhelmed her at the thought that this knight would have to die in such a way.” The tale ends swiftly with Jason’s betrayal of his promise to marry her; Christine does not detail their trip back to Corinth, and his desertion of Medea there for Glauce. Medea merely “turns despondent, nor did her heart ever again feel goodness or joy.” In sanitizing myth, Christine had plenty of medieval precedents, for medieval authors saw myth as infinitely malleable for different narrative ends.7 Christine appears not to have drawn on the Ovide moralise or the De mulieribus claris. In the latter work, Boccaccio (perhaps seeking a Petrarchan tone) had excoriated the Colchean heroine (chapter XVII) for her treachery, greed, brutality, and above all, her morally lax gazing on Aeneas in the beginning. That being said, he also devotes space to Medea’s abandonment and suffering in Amorosa Visione, Canto 21. 51–88. Christine presents a wholly positive portrait of Medea; although she does not draw much detail from the Amorosa Visione, which imitates the speech in the Heroides, she manifests something of its sympathetic tone.
When Christine returns to Dido in Part II.55, she details her relationship with Aeneas, and her final days. In this way Christine takes up Boccaccio’s positive account (in De mulieribus) of Dido’s early days as chaste widow‐queen but also in the same work completes the history, showing Dido as an even greater heroine. Here Christine rejects the humanist impulse to offer a more historically “accurate” account of the Dido tale, which recognizes that Dido and Aeneas could never have met, living several hundred years apart. Christine instead, like Boccaccio of the Amorosa Visione and like Chaucer, embraces the fictional love story of Dido and Aeneas, to her own ends.
The “continuation” of Dido’s life in the Book of the City of Ladies Part II has been called Christine’s “invention” of Dido, a somewhat conventional critical approach by which Christine “improves” upon the “chaste widow” of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus.8 Marilynn Desmond notes “Boccaccio’s privileging of the historical over the Virgilian version of Dido’s story”; she argues further, that in the Book of the City of Ladies “where Christine programmatically reads history from a female subject position, she ‘invents’ a version of Dido that is quite distinct from any other representation.” This “new” Dido is both an exemplar for Christine’s own “self‐fashioning” as author, and a female character of considerable agency, yet who is neither deprived of her sexuality (as in the historical version) nor defined by it (the original Virgilian version). To some extent, Desmond is correct insofar as Dido can represent Christine’s own authorial position; yet once one considers the vastly different treatment of Dido in Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione it becomes clear that the situation is more complex than many scholars have recognized. Given Christine’s reading knowledge and extensive use of the Italian Decameron in addition to the De mulieribus, it would be surprising if she did not have access to the Amorosa Visione as well. It cannot be decisively shown in the Dido passage of Part II that Christine was using the Amorosa Visione’s account; what we do know is that in Part II.55 she offers an account valorizing Dido’s love for Aeneas and her tragic death. Even if Christine did not use the work, however, it is important to draw in Boccaccio’s portrait of Dido in the Amorosa Visione for a number of reasons.
Boccaccio’s dream vision presents a long gallery of classical characters, many of whom engage in speech‐giving, as the narrator views their stories painted on the walls of the chamber before him. In the first part of the poem, as the narrator learns about the nature of worldly glory and fame, he views a long (interminably long, for many modern readers) panorama of such classical figures. The Amorosa Visione is generally characterized as an “artistic failure” (Hollander 1977, 202.57; Houston 2010, 164)9 among other pejorative phrases. I don’t wish to dispute that modern assessment; yet it is likely to have inspired Petrarch’s Triumphi (Branca 1941, 681–708). The conventional wisdom is that in Boccaccio’s later years he was moving towards a more humanist conception of poetry, towards Latin poetry, and away from the amatory “light” verse of his youth. What is significant about this, whether Christine drew on the work in this instance or not, is that she did not wholly “invent” the treatment of Dido in Book of the City of Ladies Part II. The Amorosa Visione reworks the Heroides 7 depiction of Dido in love at some length: Boccaccio devotes 118 lines (Cantos 28 and 29) to this story. His depiction of the widow Dido in Carthage frequently employs laudatory language: “she enabled Carthage to advance in a beneficial and beautiful site’ (7–8); ‘honoring Aeneas and hismen generously’” (11–12); he depicts her “shining visage” and “benevolent expression” (25–26) in welcoming Aeneas. Christine too employs the word “honneur” and its variations three times in her relatively short account (55 lines) of Dido’s reception of Aeneas.10 Boccaccio renders their love with some sympathy and ambiguity, even while implying Aeneas’ actions would prove false:
There it seemed that Dido first to Aeneas
was saying many loving words,
after which she made known her desires;
where Aeneas seemed to hear such things and embrace her tenderly,
to accomplish what she had proposed to him.
Coming then to their royal palace,
staying there long in happiness,
taking the fill of pleasure from one another,
in that very place seemed changed the appearances of one
and the wishes of the other. (49–60)
Boccaccio then moves swiftly to Dido’s sight of Aeneas’ departure. Significantly, too, from the standpoint of Chaucer in his House of Fame Book 1, Boccaccio gives Dido a moving speech (taken in part from Heroides 7) lamenting Aeneas’ desertion of her (28.65–88):
Ah, Aeneas, what did I do to you
that by fleeing you desire my death?
this is not keeping the pact between us
which you made with me; now is apparent
the deceit which you hid behind false action.
Oh, do not flee! If by chance you do not wish
to be courteous to me, oh, at least let pity for
your men overcome you, for you see the many dangers
with which the salty waves of the sea
still menace you, now that harmful winter begins […]
Rest yourself awhile, and your fleet;
allow me at least to learn to blame myself,
picturing my perpetual grief;
and then, if you wish, you may leave me.
(65–75; 85–88)
Christine does not often give her classical heroines lengthy speeches, while Chaucer follows Boccaccio’s decision to include such laments.
Throughout the first half of the Amorosa Visione, Boccaccio the author is much concerned with depicting the outcomes of tragic loves, and this often involves the incorporation of Heroides‐inspired speeches (Hypsipyle, Medea, Laodamia, Dido, Deianira, Briseis). This extended focus on the plights of many female characters in the Amorosa Visione, a nod to Ovid, shows us a somewhat different Boccaccio from the author who composed the De mulieribus claris in 1361. As Virginia Brown has pointed out, the misogyny of the De mulieribus is considerable, but also widespread within fourteenth‐century literary culture. She goes on to say, however, that “in general he is much more expansive than his sources in praising women’s intellectual powers or their literary accomplishments or their moral virtues or their artistic creations” (Boccaccio 2001, xix). The Amorosa Visione, for its part, continues to offer a major hermeneutic challenge to its readers. Does the dreamer/lover learn to reject earthly love at the end of the erotic dream and the end of the work? Or does the poem instead present the polarizing clerical understanding of love (virtuous love = non‐sexual; sinful love = erotic) as, finally, inadequate? Although the work is aesthetically not in line with modern tastes, it does share the feature of the repetitive catalogue seen in the Book of the City of Ladies as well. But apart from its final success or failure as a work of poetry, it seems very clear that Boccaccio the author saw the lamenting classical heroine’s situation as a central means to stage his desire for a secular, vernacular poetry. As Jason Houston argues, in the Amorosa Visione, Boccaccio’s largest battle was between Dante’s vernacularity and Petrarch’s classicism (Houston 2010, 164). I would add that Ovid also played a considerable role in this “battle.” The moral ambiguity of the ending of the Amorosa Visione in its treatment of human love, largely aided by the pathos of the abandoned heroine passages, would leave a powerful legacy for Chaucer, who would himself employ classical myth in much the same way.11 Dido, in the Amorosa Visione, is only one of many mythological heroines given space to lament; their laments, in fact, form an important part of Boccaccio’s struggle to legitimize an ethical yet secular vernacular poetics, a struggle that led to internal crisis at various points in his literary career.
Christine’s portrayal of Dido in Part II.55, in its affirmation of her faithful loving of Aeneas, is in some ways a daring move for a sometimes‐traditional author. When Aeneas arrives at the port, Christine highlights Dido’s recognition of Aeneas’ stature in the world:
And when, out of fear of inadvertently landing without permission, he sent to the queen to know whether it would please her that he come into port, the noble lady, full of honor and valiance and well aware that the Trojans enjoyed a better reputation than any other nation of the world at that time and that Aeneas was of the royal house of Troy, not only gave him leave to land but also went out with a most noble company of barons and ladies and maidens to the shore to meet him and there received him and his entire company with the greatest honor. She brought him into her city and honored and feasted him and put him at ease […] Dido and Aeneas spent so much time with one another that Love, who knows how to subjugate all hearts with the greatest of skill, made them become enamored of one another.
In this version Christine includes the Virgilian detail of the role of Cupid, whom Venus used to cause Dido to fall in love with Aeneas. In the Amorosa Visione, Boccaccio likewise incorporates the intervention of the god of Love:
I seemed then to see
much clasped Cupid held in her arms,
whom she thought was Ascanius;
kissing him frequently, she took in
unknowingly a great amount of his fire, all the while
keeping it closed in the depths of her heart.
(Canto 28.13–18)
Soon after this in Christine’s work, Dido’s love for Aeneas “was far greater than his love for her”; he broke his “pledge,” only after receiving “property and ease, ships refreshed […] treasure and wealth.” He set sail secretly “without farewells and without her knowledge. This was how he repaid his hostess.” Christine notes with uncertainty both versions of Dido’s death – fire or sword. Ultimately she valorizes the childless widow Dido, who is nevertheless characterized by lasting desire for her beloved. Christine ends the narrative by lamenting that “the noble queen Dido died in such a pitiful manner, who has been honored so greatly that her fame has surpassed that of all other women of her time”; the highest praise she offers to any of her characters, other than the Virgin Mary.
The Dido myth is central in Christine’s imaginary because Dido helps to construct the city of Carthage and also because Dido as a widow is more than just self‐sacrificing in her sexual chastity as the De mulieribus claris has it – she actually loves again after her marriage and remains faithful to her lover. This is Christine’s way of embracing the dominant, albeit “false” version of the Dido myth, to attack medieval misogamy and medieval clerical hostility to widows remarrying and continuing to be sexually active. Christine’s choice to include the “unchaste” story of the widow Dido’s life is born of her own identity as a widow who faced extreme legal and social difficulties in French society, after the premature death of her husband Etienne.12 As Desmond has observed in Christine’s case, “Dido […] becomes the originary literary figure who engenders the late medieval feminist writer.”13 Dido is ideal as a narrative choice in the Book of the City of Ladies as a queen known for her “prudence” and ingenuity; she oversees the building of the walls of Carthage; but even more, she loves after her first marriage, and Christine portrays her only flaw as “loving too much.” In this way Christine can “dismantle” and “rebuild” prevailing medieval notions about female sexuality, purity, and widowhood. As Brown‐Grant observes, Christine’s vision is progressive, directed to women readers, and situated in the ordinary: “in spite of [social] constraints, her female readers can still aspire to and achieve moral virtue in their own particular sphere of influence.”14 For all of the holy women in Part III, whose devotion to God alone guaranteed the highest clerical approbation in the Middle Ages, Dido of Part II stands as perhaps Christine’s most radical use of myth in challenging medieval biases against marital sexual love and against widows acting on their own volition to enter love relationships.
Christine completes her larger project by “enhancing” Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris through the addition of a third tier to her city: that of holy women. Part III opens with Justice presiding and explaining how and for whom “the high roofs of the towers were completed.” Justice invites the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, to dwell among them (III.1.2). Even as Christine opens the Book of the City of Ladies with the narrator’s recognition that misogyny is heresy, and unsupportable theologically, she closes the work with a powerful rhetorical argument: the vindication of woman through an array of holy Christian women. Justice herself has completed the roofs and towers (III.18.9). The women of part III, including Saint Christine, Saint Barbara, and Saint Catherine, represent the ascetic devotion that was believed to operate as an antidote against woman’s more inherently sinful nature. Christine’s careful situating of her holy women segment as her final rhetorical move is designed to win the approbation of the doubting, predominantly male, readers of her day.
Yet although one can understand Christine’s logic in placing these holy women last, the Dido figure (the remarried or sexually active widow) continues on as an absent presence in Part III. As many have noted, the Christine‐author makes a specific address to her married female readers at the end of the work. In III.19.1–6, the “author” addresses successively a range of classes of female readers, including married women, virgins, and widows. The preponderance of her advice goes to married women (III.19.2); while many modern readers have found fault with her counsel to married women to accommodate themselves to abusive husbands, Christine clearly elevates these women over both virgins and widows, thus challenging the preferred hierarchies in clerical teachings of her day. This final section is not without difficulties for the modern reader, yet it reflects Christine’s determination to reconstruct the sexual hierarchy, valorizing the married woman.
In her uses of myths, Christine often engages in a dialogue with her predecessor Boccaccio. In one respect, her lofty tier of holy women forms a rebuttal to the absences in his writings on women in the De mulieribus claris, and in some sense “trumps” that work theologically. Yet in another respect, Boccaccio’s writing in the Amorosa Visione forms another type of discourse about mythological heroines, one which was very sympathetic to Christine’s own project of recuperating their voices and dignity. The Book of the City of Ladies, in itself quite mythical, forms a powerful rewriting of women’s history. Ultimately it also functions to advocate for the lowliest of type of woman in medieval culture: the married woman. Dido champions Dido above all, for her daring choice to love even in widowhood, to love on even after betrayal. Throughout the Book of the City of Ladies, Christine simultaneously dismantles even as she builds; her construction of the mythic city depends upon her rewriting of many social and mythological narratives long considered correct and mainstream.
For biography and overview of Christine’s writings, see Willard (1984) and Margolis (2011). Brown‐Grant (1999) remains one of the best studies of Christine, including her uses of classical myth. Collections of criticism include Altmann and McGrady (2003), Desmond (1998), and Richards (1992). Studies with a political focus include Adams (2014) and Forham (2002). On the medieval reception of classical myth, see Blumenfeld‐Kosinski (1997, chapter 5), Clark et al. (2011), Desmond and Sheingorn (2006), and Minnis et al. (1992). For Boccaccio and Christine, see Franklin (2006). On gender in Boccaccio, see Miguel (2003); for further contexts on Boccaccio, see Kirkham et al. (2013). For a study of Christine’s uses of mnemonics in architectural allegory, see McCormick (2003).