Christine de Pizan: Medieval Philosopher

Christine de Pizan was a moralistic philosopher who was born in 1364 and died in 1431; she intended to display and teach a lifestyle that future generations would find appealing and fulfilling. I will show how her philosophical approach paralleled in many ways one embraced by others living in her time. That philosophy enabled Christine to survive life-changing events and to produce a body of works that enriched the fifteenth- century scholarship she was a part of and is still relevant to medieval research today. I assert that Christine was not unlike other medieval philosophers in that she lived the philosophy she proposed, wrote about it in many works, and engaged in public debates. I propose to reveal the philosophical stance she created using a combination of autobiographical memory, the philosophical characteristics of her contemporaries, and the religious trappings common to medieval philosophers. Notably, contemporary events inspired her to sometimes think out of the confines of the societal norms of her day. I maintain that although Christine’s gender prohibited her from fulfilling fifteenth-century requirements for philosophic standing in the way medieval society mandated, she nevertheless succeeded in measuring up to these criteria by circumventing cultural obstacles. Those impediments included misogyny, religious tests for heresy, the stigmatism of poverty and widowhood, educational deficiency, and lack of formal collegiate training. I argue that being strongly motivated by the desire to communicate her ideas to future generations, Christine de Pizan created a philosophical persona, an epitaph, lived the lifestyle defined by that persona, and wrote the works that identify her as the moral philosopher she was.