Le Livre de la Cité des Dames
Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Women) is a work by the Italian-born author Christine de Pizan who came to France as a child . It was completed around 1405 and is now considered to be one of the first feminist works in European literature and the starting point for the Querelle des Femmes , a debate about the gender order that had been going on in Europe since the 14th century and especially in the 17th century.
Christine wrote it, as she says, after reading the misogynistic book Lamentationes Matheoli by the clergyman Matthaeus from Boulogne-sur-Mer . The first-person narrator, who is intended to be identical to the author, reports how, in her anger and despair, three distinguished ladies appear to her: reason , righteousness and justice . This encourages her and announces the building of a city of women, which should offer a refuge from the slanderers and haters of the female sex.
The book on the city of women is divided into three parts. In each of them, the first-person narrator describes how she built the city with the help of one of the female figures. The building material is not stones, but heroic women from biblical, ancient and recent history. These are presented and their deeds praised, so that a reader is created about numerous famous women.
In 1513 the city of Tournai bought a series of tapestries with the theme of the city of women from the artist Pasquier Grenier to present it to the regent of the Spanish Netherlands, Margaret of Austria .
expenditure
- Christine de Pizan: The book of the city of women . 4th edition. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-423-02220-5 (Middle French: Le Livre de la Cité des Dames . Translated by Margarete Zimmermann).
Web links
- Text excerpts from Frauenmediaturm.de
Remarks
- ^ Ute Gerhard: Gender dispute and clarification. In this. (Ed.): Women's movement and feminism. A story since 1789. 2nd edition. CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-56263-1 , p. 11 .
- ↑ Susan Groag Bell: Lost Tapestries and Political Symbolism. The Cité des Dames of Margaret of Austria.