1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1928), 76.
2. See, for instance, Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Katharina M. Wilson, Medieval Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and Carolyne Larrington, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
3. For standard studies of the life and works of Christine de Pizan, see Enid Mc Leod, The Order of the Rose: The Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976); and Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984).
4. For an anthology of Christine’s works translated into English, see Charity Cannon Willard, ed., The Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: Persea Books, 1994).
5. For an excellent sourcebook of works in the misogynist tradition, see Alcuin Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
6. For editions of Christine’s works, see the bibliography below.
7. See Glenda K. Mc Leod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogues of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).
8. For editions of works by Matheolus and other authors cited in this introduction, see the bibliography below.
9. See, for example, Sheila Delany, ’“Mothers to think back through”: Who are they? The ambiguous case of Christine de Pizan’, in her Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 88–103.
10. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and for a succinct account of medieval ideas on women, S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (London: Macmillan, 1995), 246–52.
11. See Vern L. Bullough, ‘Medieval medical and scientific views of women’, Viator 4 (1973), 485–501; and Claude Thomasset, ‘The Nature of Woman’ in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed., A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1992), 43–69.
12. See Blamires, Woman Defamed, 43–5.
13. See Three Medieval Views of Women: ‘La Contenance des Fames’, ‘Le Bien des Fames’, ‘Le Blasme des Fames’, Gloria K. Fiero, Wendy Pfeffer and Mathé Allain, eds. and trans. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).
14. Norris J. Lacy, ‘Fabliau women’, Romance Notes 25 (1985), 318–27.
15. See Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); and Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
16. For extracts from Ovid, see Blamires, Woman Defamed, 17–25.
17. For extracts from Theophrastus, see Blamires, Woman Defamed, 70–2. See also Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
18. See Elizabeth Robertson, ‘The corporeality of female sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret’, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 268–87; and The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century, Brigitte Cazelles, trans. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
19. See R. Howard Bloch, ‘Medieval misogyny’, Representations 20 (1987), 1–24.
20. See Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman.
21. Albertano’s Book of Consolation and Advice (1246) is a debate between the impetuous Melibeus, who wants to avenge himself on his enemies, and his sensible wife, Prudentia, who counsels him not to take any rash action. In the course of their dialogue, Prudentia refutes many of the misogynist arguments which her husband initially uses in order to belittle her advice before eventually winning him over to her point of view. For extracts from this text in English translation, see Blamires, Woman Defamed, 237–42.
22. This type of modern feminist theory is most closely associated with French thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. For an introduction to their work, see Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981); and Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985).
23. See V. A. Kolve, ‘The Annunciation to Christine: authorial empowerment in the Book of the City of Ladies’ in Brendan Cassidy, ed., Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 171–96.
24. Maureen Cheney Curnow, ’“La pioche d’inquisicion”: legal-judicial content and style in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames’ in Earl Jeffrey Richards et al., eds., Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 157–72.
25. Sandra L. Hindman, ‘With ink and mortar: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames: an art essay’, Feminist Studies 10 (1984), 457–84.
26. See Rosalind Brown-Grant, Reading Beyond Gender: Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
27. See Patricia A. Phillippy, ‘Establishing authority: Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames’, Romanic Review 77 (1986), 167–93.
28. Liliane Dulac, ‘Un mythe didactique chez Christine de Pizan: Sémiramis ou la veuve héroïque (du De Claris Mulieribus à la Cité des Dames)’, Mélanges de philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux (Montpellier: Centre d’Etudes Occitanes, 1978), 315–43.