ABSTRACT
In these flaming words Christine de Pizan decried the prevailing vilification of the female sex . The passage is from an open letter she circulated at the French court in 1 40 1 . 1
Six centuries and the barrier of cultural otherness stand between us and Christine de Pizan . Nevertheless we cannot fail to recognize a feminist voice here. Pizan's text might figure in an anthology, side by side with, let us say, Marie de Gournay, Fran9ois Poulain de la Barre, Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Astell, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millet. At the same time, however, numerous passages in Christine de Pizan's work are not immedi ately accessible to us. They evoke a mental universe and an intellectual context so different from ours that it cannot be readily located within the orbit of feminist discourse as we at present understand it. Christine de Pizan, then, appears to us as both a familiar and an enigmatic a companion in arms from an alien and distant world, voicing feminist concerns in the forgotten allegorical language of courtly love.
