Christine de Pizan Writes The Book of the City of Ladies

1401

A Venetian-born widow writing in French composed an allegorical defense of women's intellectual capacity, cataloguing heroic and learned women from antiquity to her own day. It was the first major work of feminist argument in the European literary tradition, written by a woman who supported her entire family through her pen alone. The book circulated in manuscript across the courts of France and Burgundy.