Response To Christine De Pizan

Dylan Madden Word Count: 406

Christine de Pizan Response

4 December 2017

Unlike the previous works we’ve read about marriage, the response toward Christine de Pizan shows yet the continuous attack toward women. From Thiebaux’s point of view, she mentions Christine and how her life and work served as one of the many women, being newly discovered by readers of today, who had help start the sequence of events that led to the women’s movement. She too had once gone through events where she was unable to receive “a formal education because of her sex” (Thiebaux 413) back when she was a child. As she grew older, she began her work in several books and poetry that focus on the lives of several women from our history; some of which we read about including: Medea, Dido, Penelope, etc. Each of her works had the theme of love, marriage and how their lives were affected by their actions. One of her works was a book called The book of the City of Ladies. Among the lives mentioned in her book, Thiebaux mentions two of them in section 13 of the chapter, mainly the two saintly lives: Justine and Clothilda. The story of Justine talks of how she defeated a necromancer named Cyprian, who

Christine spoke about the men and how their words, their writing, could lead to “so many wicked insults about women and their behavior” (Christine de Pizan 4). With the “knowledge and intelligence” (432) that god had given to women, as both Christian and Thiebaux pointed out, it makes us wonder why women had to be given the worst possible treatment in every piece of history we read about and even in real life. Women like Medea, Dido, and the many others we’ve discussed were and done the things they’ve done because of the actions that men had pressured them into doing so. Men, in the old days, treat women as housewives, nurses, sex objects, prizes, etc. They also had their rules for women not even receiving