1. See Deuteronomy 17: 6.
2. Antiphrasis refers to a rhetorical and polemical practice of reading whereby a text is deliberately interpreted to mean the opposite of what it explicitly seems to say. In the City of Ladies, Christine thus chooses, at times, to read misogynists’ criticisms of women as praise rather than condemnation.
3. Christine compares her rescue of women from the attacks of misogynist writers to the deliverance of the Jews from the slavery imposed on them by Pharaoh, King of Egypt. See II Kings 17: 7.
5. The medieval view of woman as a flawed being, a kind of deformed male, was largely derived from Aristotle. In his view, menstruation in particular was a sign that the female sex did not match up to the physiological perfection of the male sex. However, On the Secrets of Women, which Christine quite rightly says was not written by Aristotle, takes these arguments about female physiology to extremes by claiming, amongst other things, that menstrual blood can seep out of the eyes, poison children and induce madness in dogs. See glossary.
4. Christine here paraphrases Mary’s reply to the Angel of the Annunciation. See Luke 1: 38.
6. Christine here refers to the medieval theological dispute on the interpretation of Genesis 1: 27, ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’, and I Corinthians 11: 7, man ‘is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man’.
7. Christine here wrongly refers to Cato the Elder by the name of his great-grandson.
8. The denier, or silver penny, was introduced by the Carolingians in the eighth century and became the main unit of currency in medieval western Europe.
9. See Matthew 18: 2–4, Mark 9: 33–7 and Luke 9: 46–8.
10. The Latin proverb is ‘fallere, flere, nere, statuit deus in muliere’.
11. Martha and Mary’s brother was called Lazarus. See John 11: 1–44.
12. See Luke 7: 12–15.
13. See Matthew 15: 22–8.
14. See John 4: 7–29.
15. See Luke 11: 27.
16. The seven liberal arts comprised the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).
17. See n. 16.
18. See Proverbs 31: 10–31.
1. These words are the beginning of Simeon’s prayer to God to let him die in peace now that he has seen the Saviour. See Luke 2: 29.
2. Christine’s brothers, Paolo and Aghinolfo, returned to Bologna after the deaths of her father and her husband to look after family property there.
3. In her original text, Christine uses the Old French neologism, ‘Feminie’, meaning land of women, which is derived from femina, the Latin word for woman. This term, used to refer to the land of the Amazons, was coined by Benoit de Sainte-Maure, the twelfth-century French author of the Roman de Troie, a verse narrative about the Trojan war. I have followed Benoit’s lead in translating ‘Feminie’ by an equally made-up word in English which both refers to women and has an ending typical of the name of a country: ‘Femininia’.
4. The classical theory of dreams was popularized in the Middle Ages by Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, which was written around AD 400. Macrobius divided dreams into five types, three of which are significant and two of which are insignificant. The somnium or enigmatic dream, the visio or prophetic vision, and the oraculum or oracular dream, all have a prophetic value for the dreamer. The insomnium or nightmare, and the visum (also referred to as the phantasma) or apparition, have no prophetic value as they have a purely physiological or psychological origin.
5. See Luke 6: 41 and Matthew 7: 3.
6. This is a reference to the wife of Guillaume de Roussillon (Decameron IV, ix).
7. Charles VI, King of France, was born in 1368 and reigned 1380–1422. He was married to Isabeau of Bavaria in 1385 and later suffered from periodic bouts of madness which eventually led the other royal princes, most notably his brother Louis, Duke of Orleans, and his nephew, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, to battle for control of the French crown.
1. The calends are calculated as the number of days up to and including the first day of a particular month. The seventh of the calends of July is thus 25 June.
2. The apostle referred to is Saint Paul. See I Corinthians 11: 15.
3. In the Middle Ages, the monastic day was divided up into hours at which certain prayers were read, starting in the very early hours of the morning with matins or lauds, then followed by prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline. Terce corresponds roughly to 9 a.m. and none to 3 p.m. Saint Fausta was thus tortured for the best part of six hours.
4. Martyrs, and later monks too, were commonly known as ‘soldiers of Christ’, or milites Christi, for they were deemed to be engaged in the fight against the Devil.
5. A cubit is between 18 and 22 inches in length. The flames of the furnace into which Euphemia was thrown were thus about 60 feet high.
6. The term ‘publican’ means tax-gatherer, a profession which, along with that of the prostitute, was particularly despised by the Jews.
7. ‘Glorious things are spoken of thee, O City of God’ (Psalms 87:3). Christine is probably also alluding here to Saint Augustine’s City of God, a highly influential text in the Middle Ages, which posited the need to found the Heavenly City on earth in the form of the Christian church.
8. See the Vulgate Old Testament, II Esdras 8: 56–8.
9. See Psalms 7: 16. The Psalmist himself is traditionally thought to be David.
10. Christine would seem here to be deliberately parodying Genius in the Romance of the Rose, who actively discourages men from having anything to do with women by comparing the female sex to snakes in the grass: ‘Fly, fly, fly, fly, fly my children, I advise and admonish you frankly and without deceit to fly from such a creature’ (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, Frances Horgan, trans. and ed., World’s Classics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 256, ll.16548–50).