ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an examination of Christine de Pizan's approach to a pivotal conceptual question: the idea of justice. It begins with an overview of the concept of justice in general and some of its major contributing threads before turning to Christine de Pizan's own views. Discourse on law and justice was enriched by commentators as varied as Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome and Brunetto Latini. Most of the most important twelfth-century contributors to the development of ideas about procedural or legal justice were the canonists and the legalists, but as sources they would have had little direct impact on lay persons such as Christine de Pizan. Justice, whether presented as a virtue in her ostensibly moral works or as a legal process in her political works, always refers to procedural justice. In short, for Christine, justice is the maintenance of law and order.
