Helen Carr picks Christine de Pizan at the Gloucester history festival

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0:37Hello and welcome to this free event on this blustery, blustery day. I'm here to welcome you to the recording of Great Lives here at the 15th Gloucester History Festival. Great Lives is a West Country show born and bred in Bristol. We've made over 600. Matthew has been by far the longest running presenter. 20 years. 20 years this year brilliant you're very good Matthew as you can see takes it very seriously enjoy yourself thank you very much and I must say this is the most wonderful hall just fantastic so hello to you the audience who've come to this year's history festival the 15th I believe

1:32And hello to our wider audience. I just wish you could see this absolutely amazing hall. It's such an honour to make the programme here. My guest is the historian Helen Carr, author of Red Prince, about John of Gaunt, and also of Sceptred Isle, a new history of the 14th century. I noticed recently, Helen, and that you posted about your love for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. So you're clearly quite a medieval person. Tell us whom you've picked and why. I have chosen Christine de Pizan, a female writer working in the late 14th and early 15th century. I have been inspired by Christine for most of my adult life.

2:21And I came across her for the first time when I was an undergraduate at York University and we went on a trip to the British Library. Inside that exhibition, in that incredibly dark, wonderful room that's got all these letters from Charlotte Bronte and extracts from Bede, is the open manuscript, the Queen's manuscript, which was by Christine de Pizan. And I was instantly drawn to it. And this was a woman who wrote about not traditionally female topics. and I found her fascinating. Are you stalking her or is she stalking you, do you think? I think I'm probably stalking her, to be honest with you.

3:02She has some claim to be the first professional, as it were, woman writer in Western history. Is that fair? I think that we know of certainly one of the most famous and I think what is interesting about her is the fact that she was a woman writer. that was something that didn't really exist in this period, that she was a novelty because of that and popular in her time because of that. And she wasn't writing cookbooks and things like that, was she? Certainly not. Quite a serious person. On a less serious note, I believe you've got a Christine de Pisa tattoo. I do. I don't know if my father's listening to this or if he's even aware of it, but yes, I do have one.

3:44So when I finished Septodile, writing this last book, I have a little dog and she has sat with me throughout writing the entire manuscript. She would curl herself. She's a little terrier, a little Jack Russell, and she curls herself around the back of my chair and sits there with her little head next to me. And in the Queen's manuscript, there is this wonderful illumination with Christine at her desk. And next to her, at her feet, is a little terrier. And so I decided to get a tattoo of that little terrier to commemorate that companion who sat with me. I don't know where you have this tattoo, but would it be indiscreet of me to ask you to show the audience?

4:25Of course, it's right here, it's just on my forearm. Oh yes! And anybody who would like to, please feel free to ask to see it at the end. I will, of course, show it to you. I think what it did was, it encapsulated how inspired I have been as a writer myself by Christine, but also my experience of writing about medieval history. What would you say is her most famous book, her most important book? I would say it is the book of the City of Ladies. City of Ladies? The City of Ladies. That's the one that she's most famous for. What's she saying in it? She's sitting in her study reading about how women are treated so misogynistically by male writers, the way that women are portrayed.

5:11You know, Eve being the original example, the temptress. and she says, you know, I wish I were a man and then she is visited by three women, I think they're supposed to be angels, I can sort of feel Charlotte on my right, the three virtuous ladies. The three virtuous ladies and they say to her, no, you're here for a purpose, the purpose is to build the city of ladies and this is supposed to be this space that women are able to live without the judgment of men, the criticisms of men. And this is the 14th century. I think she's writing from the later 14th century. Yes, yes. 1405. OK, sorry. There's a wonderful passage in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of St Louis Ray, describing an abbess who was concerned about the rights of women.

6:07And Wilder, the author, says she had the misfortune to have been born about two centuries ahead of the appointed time and place of her idea in human history and that she hurled herself against the spirit of the age. I think we could say that of your choice too. Yes, I could. Hurling herself against the spirit of the age. I want to know more about her life, but to do that, let's talk to Charlotte Cooper-Davies and I have a copy of your book about Christine, subtitled Life, Work, Legacy. But I'm told, and I can't resist starting with this, that in the past you've dressed up as our great life. So let's begin with that.

6:51What did she look like? What sort of clothes did she wear? So I should say I was tricked into dressing up as Christine for a Zoom quiz that we were putting on for our students. This was when I was a lecturer at the University of Oxford. Not the easiest thing to try and do. Christine is depicted in many of her manuscripts. so 54 manuscripts that she actually prepared herself still survive. And she's depicted in many of these. Now, Christine's representations are quite generic of a woman, typically depicted in a long robe with long trailing sleeves. She always has a bi-horned wimple, whether that means that she wore one...

7:29Sorry, say that again, a bi-horned wimple. So a wimple is a medieval head covering that would have covered your neck as well, and she always has two kind of cornets on her head. It doesn't mean that she necessarily dressed like this day to day. It must have been quite cumbersome. But it certainly shows a woman who was quite aware of the kind of character that she wanted to project in her work. So she's coming across as very knowledgeable. She's often depicted with a book. She often has her small dog showing that she's wise, that she's virtuous, that she's knowledgeable. And to your embarrassment, I actually have a photograph of you dressed as her in the byhorned wimple.

8:13I'm just going to show this to Helen. Is that how you imagine her, Helen? No. Christine would have looked a lot more self-assured than I do there. I love it. Now, let's get serious, Charlotte. Where does she come from? When was she born? So Christine de Pizan was born around 1364 in Venice. We don't know the identity of her mother, but her father was Tommaso de Benvenuto da Pizano, Thomas de Pizan, as he became known in French, and the family moved from her native Venice to Paris when she was four years old. Thomas got a job as the court astrologer for King Charles V. She was the Russell Grant of her age.

9:03Yes, I mean, astrology, if you were the court astrologer in the Middle Ages, you did a lot more than just looking at the stars. Very serious job, I think. Really? And her family then moved to France? They moved to Paris to the court of Charles V, and she spent the next 50 years or so of her life in Paris. She was based at the court, she did all of her writing for members of the court, until 1418. A hundred-year war was going on, and she fled along with the rest of the royal family. She married Charlotte when she was 15? 15, yes, which, I mean, sounds horrific to us. Not uncommon in the Middle Ages, where, you know, anything from 12 upwards was legal.

9:45So, yeah, and she was incredibly happily married, according to her own account. She married a royal secretary named Etienne de Castel. Had three children together. They were married 11 years, and he died during an outbreak of, yeah, an epidemic when he was away on royal business somewhere. She describes her husband as pleasant-looking. Good for her, yeah. Here from your book, Charlotte, is an account of this time. The debtors who owed money to her husband's estate avoided and eluded her. She was in her mid-twenties with children. She was a widow. How did she climb out of this financial mess? It took her a little while.

10:34It should be said, she was never completely destitute. You know, when her father died, her and her two brothers inherited various properties in France and in their native Italy. So, you know, she was never on the streets. She was looked after, she was provided for. But her financial situation had been severely affected. It did take her a few years. It took her around a decade before she actually started writing. And she began composing just, she refers to them as Chaux-Saint-Plettes, which is incredibly humble of her because even her earliest poetry is really very good and very moving. And she talks about widowhood and that sort of thing.

11:14And later on starts writing these much bigger books, things like The City of Ladies, which is three books in one. But she begins by writing poetry and gaining patronage through that. It's been an obsession of mine with this series, how often our great lives have been in some way cast or formed by a catastrophe in the life of the individual, either in childhood or, in this case, in her 20s. In her book of fortune's transformation, She creates the allegory of a sea voyage and a shipwreck which throws the captain, which is presumably her husband, overboard. And after a long period of mourning, fortune intercedes.

12:01I'd like you to read this, Helen. Of course. I felt my limbs to be stronger than before, and the great pain and lamentation which had earlier dominated me, I felt to be somewhat lessened. Then I felt myself much lighter than usual, and I felt that my flesh was changed and strengthened, and my voice much lowered, and my body harder and faster. I felt that I had become a true man. There are kind of two schools of thought on this. I'm afraid I really don't like to take trans heroes and heroines away because there aren't that many. But gender in the Middle Ages was seen as not so much a biological thing but a position that you adopted in society.

12:57So when Christine says, I'm afraid I still think of it in French, I felt that I had become a true man. What she means to me is I became the man of the house. I became the breadwinner. I was the head of the household. I was as good as a man. Exactly, yes, but I don't think she ever saw herself as literally becoming a man in that way. You're listening to The Great Life of Christine de Pizan, and my guests are Charlotte Cooper-Davis and... Christine de Pizan. Surprise! And here she is. And my guests are Charlotte Cooper-Davis and Helen Carr. How, Charlotte, did Christine fund her writing, assuming she needed patrons?

13:49Ah, this is a really difficult question, because patronage in the Middle Ages, we tend to think of it as a patron going to a writer or an artist or a composer or whatever and saying, hello, I'd like you to write this thing for me. And that did happen a little bit, but what tended to happen more was an artist would create a thing, present it to a patron, expecting something in return. And that something in return was rarely just hard cash. It was more often, I'll protect your family, I'll give you somewhere to sleep. Feels a bit like publishing today, to be honest. A little bit, it's not dissimilar.

14:29So with Christine, we know that both of those models happen. So she tells us about the Duke of Burgundy coming to seek her out and saying, I want you to write a book about my brother, Charles V. and she writes this biography of King Charles V of France. So that did happen. But we also know that there's records of her getting an aiguillaire en argent, so a little silver needle holder that she was given in exchange for one of her works. And her family were able... I mean, I think the most significant thing for Christine, she was able to stay at court. She was able to stay living in Paris right up until the Queen had to flee during the Civil War and then they all fled together.

15:10So I suppose we've reached the stage in her life where she has been reborn as a professional writer. Alone am I and alone I wish to be. Alone my gentle love has left me, she wrote. Who was she writing for? Who was reading this? That, we don't know who those really early poems were for. It's possible that they were part of kind of poetry competitions that happened quite often. Do you think they might have just been for herself? Yeah, I suspect they probably were to begin with. And who was the City of Ladies for? Oh, I can't think that there's a dedicatee for that. Didn't she present it to the Queen?

15:51She did. I can't remember if the earliest manuscript was. There is, from the book of the City of Ladies, though, one of the most iconic illuminations is women building the city and they are carrying the bricks and they're building the walls of the city. And that is also just one of my favourite manuscript illuminations. And it just speaks volumes about the strength of women and what women can achieve. I love it. It's worth saying you were talking about the City of Ladies earlier. And yes, the City of Ladies is both a city to protect women from misogyny, a city where they can seek refuge, but it's built, the bricks that go into building the city are individual women from history.

16:36So you start with Eve. Yes, I'll come on to Eve. Then you have women from myths and legends, so people like Helen of Troy. And then the top tier and the roofs are the holy women, so Eve, the Virgin Mary, all of the saints and so on. But I love this idea that it's a city to protect women and it's built by women for women and it's made of women as well. And it's Christine's mission to move against the way that men have talked about these women, Eve obviously being an example, but also even figures like Medea. She really does sort of stride in, in the defence of these women who have been so ill-treated.

17:22I think one of the best quotations from Christine, my favourite, I would get this tattooed if I were a tattoo sort of person, maybe one day, is if women had written the books, they would have written something different. So women didn't make the books, but if we had. But what is interesting about Christine as well is that that has always made people believe that she was, quote, unquote, an early feminist. And I think that there are two sides to that argument. Tell me what they are. Well, there's obviously the argument that she was writing in defence of women, but then she also had some pretty traditional, what would be considered by today's terms as quite misogynistic views.

18:06I think the most famous one is the example of a woman who is ill-treated in her marriage. She doesn't encourage a woman to leave her husband. She says, no, you have to respect the institution of marriage and you have to ultimately respect your husband. You must obey, she actually says. She would have had that in her wedding dress. Yes, but to that extent, she was a woman of her time. Exactly. I suppose you can't expect her to have broken completely. But I think that's where... Those cultural assumptions. Today, though, that's where the confusion lies because I think people often consider her as a feminist even by today's standards, whereas I would question by today's standards whether she was a feminist.

18:48Yeah, I mean, she never talks about equality. There's never any idea in her mind that men and women are equal. She would see them as different, and she's arguing that women should be respected. And she is quite indignant, and one of the texts that introduced me to Christine is her epistle of the God of Love and in that she's writing as the God of Love to the people of France to tell them to treat women better. And there's this wonderful passage in there where she says, you know, men are claiming that women are coming and seducing them kind of as if by force and she says, well, how are they doing this?

19:27Are they breaking into your chambers? Are they taking you by force? Well, no, they're clearly not doing this. She is also in the physicality of women and this idea about weakness and feminine strength and how she, and this is me terribly paraphrasing because I do not have the depth of knowledge as Charlotte, but just because a woman is physically less able, it doesn't mean that she lacks a different way of a means of strength. She must, Charlotte, have met a certain amount of resistance in her writing and her ideas. Do we know anything about the criticism that will have greeted some of her thoughts?

20:08We know, if you're talking about in her lifetime, she met a lot of criticism in the 20th century as well. So a French literary historian called Gustave L 'Anson famously left her out of his history of French literature because he said, you know, she's a hideous blue stocking. I kind of want nothing to do with that. Really? It's really horrendous stuff. During her lifetime, Christine actually generated the first literary debate in French history. They loved to get into big literary debates. And Christine triggered the first one. And this was somebody called Jean de Montreuil published a treatise in praise of a very misogynistic text called The Romance of the Rose.

20:51And Christine wrote a letter to him criticising it. Various people wrote back and she wrote again. Christine didn't shy away from that criticism. On the contrary, she compiled those letters and published them. She gave a copy of these letters to the Queen of France. I think that's such a clever political move. And her confidence. Absolutely. I mean, it should be said, she also acted as an editor for these letters. So she probably left some things out. But she did choose to include some incredibly scathing comments made against her. And one of my favourite that stands out is one of the Cole brothers, that was Pierre and Gantier Cole, wrote against her.

21:36And kind of said, how dare you, a woman, criticise this great master who wrote this masterpiece? And it's that sense of, you don't have, you're not a cleric, you're not a man, you're not one of us, how dare you get involved? But she was quite happy to publish that. But in a sense of saying, look what I'm up against, I suppose. Well, that sort of became her armour, I think, in a sense. She was quite political, wasn't she? Yes, she became a very political writer. What about? War, essentially. So her final work is called, in English, it's The Tale of Joan of Arc, Le Ditié de Jeanne d 'Arc in French.

22:16Before then... Was this before Joan of Arc had been... It was, yes. So Christine, we believe, died in around 1430, 1431. Joan of Arc appeared on the scene in 1429. And she admired Joan of Arc, presumably enormously. Enormously. It's a wonderful appraisal of Joan, for sure. And I think she appears to have seen Joan as the feminist figure that she'd been waiting for. Absolutely. and a woman who was not afraid to take on the very male-dominated sphere of war and politics and place herself at the centre of it. She would have been horrified at what happened to Joan of Arc. In her tale of Joan of Arc, she wrote, I will change my language from weeping into singing.

23:15she obviously felt that Joan had been sent by God to bring victory in that war and she loved the fact that God had chosen a woman to do it I think a lot of people thought Joan had been sent by God I don't think Christine was alone in that and I think that a lot of people, women particularly, were intimidated but inspired and fascinated by Joan and I think Christine encapsulates that within her book. Were she a more modern figure, were she a contemporary figure, we would at this stage in our discussion be asking who her influences were, where we can see the origins of her writing. Was she original?

24:04What do you think, Charlotte? In some ways we can be quite sure of a lot of her influences because she quotes a lot of her sources kind of verbatim So she was heavily inspired by Boccaccio, by Boethius, by Dante, numerous other kind of sources. The pro-feminine stuff is quite original, though. I don't think there was really a precedent. I mean, there were a lot of things. I first encountered Christine in a course called The Debate About Women in the Middle Ages. And I'd been really disappointed because up to this point in the course, there had been no debate. even things that claimed to be pro-women were just deeply misogynistic and then Christine came onto the scene and she's actually writing things that are pro-women and not kind of veiled misogyny so I don't think there really was a precedent for that and this is what strikes me so forcibly at this stage I have to make a confession I had never heard of Christine de Byssen and I've it's wonderful that you brought her to our attention but what I wonder is where did this come from her background seems to be quite conventional quite traditional she comes from an entirely traditional and rather successful family and suddenly she's writing these things and thinking these things that were just not written and not thought in her time where do you think it comes from?

25:36Well, she was educated. I think for a start, her father was insistent that she was given the same level of education as a son would have been given. So she was an avid reader. And I think she read an extraordinary amount and informed herself. I also think that the court at the end of the 14th century, as briefly mentioned, was really riding this wave of the emerging Renaissance. And what you were seeing was a lot more of a cultural boom, which is aligned with the post-plague world. And she was experiencing that and sort of imbibing so much, I think, from her surroundings. What do you think she would think of this occasion in a great hall that's actually older even than her?

26:32older even than me. What would she think about three people, two of them women, sitting around discussing her life and her contribution? Do you know I think she'd take it in her stride. She'd be proud, but she'd also tell us everything we'd gotten wrong. Many centuries later, Simone de Beauvoir said she was the first woman to take up her pen in defence of her sex. It's an incredible story. really and I'm sorry no one has nominated her before. I could wish that a man had nominated her but I'm so pleased Helen that you have. We struggle sometimes on this program to get men to nominate women so perhaps we haven't come quite as far as Christine born in 1364 might have hoped.

27:24Completely agree. She'd be furious. She'd be saying come on guys. Put your thinking hats on. and I'm sure you can come up with some good nominations. Well, let's hope we have a few men listening to this. My thanks to you, Helen, and also to you, Charlotte, and I recommend your book, Christine de Pisa, Life, Work and Legacy. Goodbye.