Christine de
Pizan (1364
- c. 1430) wrote The
Treasure of the City of Ladies (also known as The Book of the Three Virtue, and A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor) in 1405 to offer practical
counsel to women of every class in medieval society. Of particular interest to scholars and
students today is the attention she pays to middle and lower class women in The Treasure. Hers is not the first such book to advise
women on their proper behavior and duties. Manuals written by men to mold their
wives and daughters were numerous in Europe from the time of ancient Rome
through the Middle Ages, including works by such well known individuals as
Tertullian in the second century, St. Jerome in the fourth and Louis IX
himself, both saint and king, to his daughter Isabelle in the thirteenth.[i]
While Christine's curriculum in The
Treasure of the City of Ladies does
not endorse Cicero and the classics, it does recommend the study of finance,
military defense, and estate management along with fewer than the usual religious
admonitions.[ii] As
companion texts, The Book of the City of
Ladies and The Treasure of the City
of Ladies (1404-5), first celebrate
the history of women and then guide them with practical advice on how to
live. This two-pronged approach creates
an advocacy for women’s education not seen in the western world prior to
Christine’s utopist and practical vision. Charity Cannon Willard concurs:
"No such comprehensive description of women in these sections of society
had been attempted previously."[iii] Also
noteworthy, many of the surviving manuscripts of The Treasure of the City of Ladies have some connection with Margaret of Burgundy and her sisters, all of whom made powerful
marriages, disseminating The Treasure
throughout Europe.[iv] The significance of women book owners on the
cross-fertilization of artistic styles cannot be overemphasized. Noblewomen often moved as young girls to
distant lands to become familiar with the court and culture of their future
husbands. They sometimes traveled with an entourage of guardians, fine goods,
and dowry books inherited from their mothers.[v]
 |
| Figure 1 |
The
Boston Treasure miniature is the earliest known illustration of
Christine's vision of a “College of Ladies” (PL MS fr. Med. 101, f. 3, 1405-10,
Boston Public Library) (Fig. 1). The single miniature for the Boston Treasure contains two separate scenes,
and was painted under Christine's supervision by The City of Ladies Master circa 1410.[vi] Perhaps Christine had her text illustrated
with only a single miniature in order to underscore the egalitarian scope of
her college. Dress and demeanor are
crucial to understanding the visual mode of discourse during this period, as
they act as metaphors of emblematic significance with regard to social
status. Additionally, an analysis of
composition provides a key to understanding the degree of adherence to
Christine's vision of education for all women.
The
activity of the Prologue is the subject seen at the left of the Boston Treasure. Christine reclines on a bed
trying to rest after finishing The City
of Ladies. The impatient Virtues crowd by her bedside—one pulls Christine
from her bed, enjoining her to get to work before she falls prey to
laziness. In the Prologue Christine
writes that she wanted only to rest for a while, as she felt exhausted
after writing The City of Ladies.
[vii] The Virtues have no intention of allowing her to rest, as
all three say to her in unison, “have you already put away the tool of your
intelligence and consigned it to silence?”[viii] Christine, easily identified by her uniform
of blue and white, rests on a canopied bed.
The Virtue awakening Christine gives her such a mighty tug that she
pulls her into an upright position, commanding:
Take
your pen and write. Blessed will they be
who live in our city to swell the numbers of
citizens of virtue. May all the feminine
college and their devout community be apprised
of the sermons and lessons of wisdom. First of all to the queens, princesses
and great ladies, and then on down the
social scale we will chant our doctrine to other ladies and maidens and all classes of women so the syllabus of
our school may be valuable to all.
Amen.[ix]
The right side of the Boston Treasure miniature portrays all of the women addressed in the
text. The middle class women are seated
on a bench in the foreground, with their backs to the viewer. Three of these women wear hoods with long liripipe tails hanging down their backs. These hoods indicate their lower status - one
never sees an aristocratic pictured in such a hood! There are several women on the bench with
white horned headdresses identical to the one our author wears, spelling out their
slightly higher status as servants of the court, or members of the affluent
middle class.
 |
| Figure 2 |
L.M.J.
Delaissé believes that the artist of the Brussels Treasure (Brussels, BR 9551-2, f. 66, 1420-30. Royal
Library of Albert 1st) is from the workshop of Guillbert de Metz, a Burgundian
painter working in Flanders circa 1430 during the reign of Philip the Good
(Fig. 2).[x] This artist expanded the Boston Treasure prototype miniature (Fig. 1)
from one to three in order to illustrate more fully the students addressed in
each of the text’s three parts. The
feathery brushstrokes used to delineate the figures in each miniature also
demonstrate a more elegant aesthetic at play.
This artist makes a variety of changes from the
prototype image by the City of Ladies
Master (Fig. 1). First, the format is
changed from a single miniature to three miniatures with four scenes. The artist invents an entirely new look for
the Virtues, who are now slender-posed figures with long, blond hair
surrounding their oval heads, always tipped in one direction or the other. These
three angelic-looking Virtues are still identical to one another in
physiognomy, just as Christine states in the text. In all three miniatures,
the Virtues appear to the left of their pupils and stand in a meadow. They also hold no attributes, yet each have slightly different hand gestures.
This miniature for the Brussels Treasure addresses the education of
middle class and merchant women (Fig. 2).
The scenes is set entirely in a garden-like field. This time all the students stand outside
together in one space under the open sky.
Seven women are pictured; the three Virtues, dressed in pallid gowns and
four animated and well-dressed students from the lesser nobility or
bourgeoisie. The students to the right huddle together in
obvious discussion, harkening back to many of the miniatures accompanying The City of Ladies. The formality of the previous two classrooms (not
pictured here) is relaxed in this composition.
All of the students wear simple, plain colored though well-cut gowns,
yet the elaborate crimped and layered veils of some convey the wealth such
fashion requires. At least two, on the
right, wear liripipped hoods associated
with the lower middle class. All are now seen from the front, in contrast to
the Boston Treasure miniature from 20
years before, and all turn and pose
decoratively in accordance with this artists charming style.[xi] Clothing distinctions between the lesser
nobility and the powerful members of the merchant class are the hardest to
identify and regulate through sumptuary laws. These students in the third
miniature of the Brussels Treasure represent
the class to which Christine herself belonged as the wife of a clerk at court. The
Virtues in the third miniature appear less severe in
their lectures, for it is this section that addresses women from the lower
ranks of society, from merchants’ wives to the chambermaids, although the
artist only depicts wealthy bourgeois ladies in this miniature. The artist has not pictured the
laborers and serving women Christine also addresses in Part Three of the text. The
Virtues appear more at ease before their lower class students. Two hold their hands together gently before
them; only the first, on the left, extends her hand out in a gesture indicating
declamation. As tempting as it might be to look for a wealthy middle
class patron for this manuscript due to the prestige given to our bourgeois
students in this miniature, its provenance is well known. This
sumptuous manuscript was owned by the de Croy family and later became the
property of two famous women and book collectors, Margaret of Austria and later Margaret of Hungary, noblewomen of
the highest rank.[xii]
 |
| Figure 3 |
The final miniature of the four
created for the Beinecke Treasure,
circa 1475, located in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (MS 427, f. 72), presents another variation of the visual
models discussed so far (Fig. 3).[xiii] This deluxe Treasure has wide
borders reminiscent of those found in the Hours of Margaret of Burgundy.
It may be a manuscript long presumed lost, belonging at one time to an
admirer of Christine's works, Anne of France (1461-1522).[xiv] Anne of France, inspired by Christine, wrote
a book entitled Anne de France’s
Teachings to her Daughter, and she was a well-known advocate for women’s
education among the nobility.[xv] The high quality of the Yale manuscript
resulted in many speculative attributions concerning its provenance until John
Plummer's definitive attribution of the miniatures to the Master of the Amiens
200.[xvi]
The further away from the original source,
the author herself, the less compulsion the artist has to follow the dictates
of a deceased authority, preferring to update the text with miniatures
expressing the tastes of the day. So luxury fabrics and fine, fashionable
clothing abound in the miniatures of the Beinecke Treasure, for pleasing the patrons was more important to the
artist’s livelihood than obeying the sanctions of the author who, however
revered, was no longer alive to halt the process. Christine's arguments against
extravagance in dress in the Treasure
are based on financial concerns rather than the sin of vanity. Considering that during the fifteenth century
fine Italian textiles cost as much as a jeweled necklace, her warnings appear
quite practical. Following Christine's
admonitions, the women in the final miniature of the Beinecke Treasure are conservatively
dressed. There are no brocades or ermine
or sable, and the furs, restricted by sumptuary laws to the nobility, are
evident. Only the tight-fitting green
dress of the young girl with the dog and the woman behind her betray current
fashion. Several women wear looser robes
and flat topped hoods suggesting the garb of nuns or more likely regional
tastes. Like all the other miniatures of The
Treasure, the artist does not represent the laborers and serving women
Christine specifically includes in the final section of the text. The addition of two children and a dog in
this miniature constitute a delightful touch. The toddler, most likely a girl
given the nature of the text (boys and girls dressed similarly until about age
six), wears a blue robe and seems more captivated by the dog rather than the
lecture. Christine advises working women
to
...have their children instructed
and taught first at school by educated people so that they may know God...it is a great sin of
mothers and fathers, who ought to be the cause of the virtue and good behavior of their children, but they are
sometimes the reason (because of bringing
them up to be finicky and indulging them to much) for their wickedness and ruin.[xvii]
The Master of the Amiens 200 provides us with delightful, genre-like scenes
of Christine’s utopist educational vision delineated so thoroughly in The Treasure of the City of Ladies—providing
school rooms for every woman in society from pompous princesses to toddlers
distracted by puppies. Christine would
be delighted.[xviii]
[i] For a
longer list see Diane Bornstein, The Lady
in the Tower, Medieval Courtesy
Literature for Women (Hamden Connecticut:
Archon Books, 1983), 134.
[ii] Christine
de Pizan, The
Treasure of the City of Ladies. Translated by Sarah Lawson. New York:
Penguin Books, 1985. 76-77.
[iii]
Charity Cannon Willard, "A Fifteenth-Century View of Women's Role in
Medieval Society: Christine de Pizan's Livre des Trois Vertus" in The
Role of Women in the Middle Ages, edited by R.T. Morewedge (Albany: State University of New York, 1975), 100.
[iv] See Edith Yenal, Christine de Pisan: A
Bibliography (London: Scarecrow,
1982), 43-44, 46-47.
[v] Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Women Book
Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and
Ambassadors of Culture," Signs 7
(1982): 763-764.
[vi]The City and The
Treasure, as well as other manuscripts by Christine are painted by one of
her favorite artists named The City of
Ladies Master by Millard
Meiss, "The Exhibition of French Manuscripts of the XIII-XVI Centuries at
the Bibliothéque National," Art
Bulletin XXXVIII (1956): 153.
[vii]The
Treasure, 31.
[viii] Ibid.
31.
[ix] Ibid.,
36
[x]Brussels
BR 9551-2. Charles de Croy’s signature is on folio 104v & family arms on
folios 2, 46 and 66. L.M.J. Delaisse, La Siecle d’or de la miniature
Flamande: Le Mecenat de Philip le Bon (Bruxelles: 1959), 35-36.
[xi]
The headdress is not only a valuable dating tool, but it is the best indicator
of class distinction. The crimpled veils
are the same as those worn by the bride in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding of
1430. Gowns fashionable in Paris in 1410 are seen in The Netherlands and
Flanders in 1430 accompanied by regional headgear, Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion. London:
British Library, 2007, 125-26.
[xii] (M. Debae, xvii, & 56.) Margaret of Austria acquired the de Croy library in
1511. (Delaissé, "Le Siècle d'or …
Flamande, 35-36, no. 27.)
[xiii] Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 427, fols. 16, 49v, 72. c. 1460. This codex may be one presumed lost, once in
the Bourbon Library and owned by Anne of France (1462-1522).
The Yale University Library
Gazette, 54, no. 4 (1978): 244.
[xiv] The
Beinecke Treasure
was virtually unknown until its appearance at a sale in Paris in 1968. The Yale University Library Gazette, 52,
no. 4 (1978): 244.
[xv]
Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of
The City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan's
Renaissance Legacy. Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 2004, 75.
[xvi] The
Treasure, 244.
[xvii] Ibid., 168.
[xviii] For more on this topic see The Fifteenth-Century Illustrations of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of
the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies,
Laura Rinaldi Dufresne, Edwin Mellen
Press 2012.
Figures
1.
The Three Virtues Return to Christine; The College of Ladies The Boston Treasure of the City of Ladies,
Boston, PL MS fr. Med. 101, f. 3, 1405-10, The City of Ladies
Master. Permission of the Boston Public
Library.
2.
The College of Ladies; The Three Virtues Lecture Bourgeois Women;
The Brussels Treasure of the
City of Ladies, Brussels, BR 9551-2, f. 66, 1420-30. Permission
of the Royal Library of Albert 1st, Brussels
3.
The College of Ladies, Lecturing Bourgeois and Common Women; The Beinecke Treasure of the City of
Ladies, Yale Univ., Beinecke
Library, MS 427, f. 72, 1475. Permission of the Beinecke Library.
