ABSTRACT
Christine de Pizan was born in 1364 in Venice, but from the age of four she spent her entire life in France, primarily in Paris. The literature on Christine de Pizan is enormous. Among works in English, the best place to begin is probably Charity Cannon Willard's magisterial and influential Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works, both for its biographical detail and its superlative contextualization of Christine's work. Mob violence was now seen by Christine as an extremely dangerous aspect of political life, which represents a tempering of the view presented in Corps de policie, written only five years earlier, where she recommends that the common people's complaints be presented to king via intermediaries from merchant class. From our perspective it is possible to see positive side as well; indeed, one could well ask if Christine was witness to waning of Middle Ages or beginning of Renaissance, revitalization of culture and art that freed European culture from dark superstition.
