ABSTRACT
Christine de Pisan was the first French professional woman writer. A near-contemporary of Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich, she was born in Venice c. 1365. Her father was a university lecturer in astrology at Bologna but soon moved to France to become physician to Charles V. His daughter received a good education and when she was left a penniless widow in her early twenties, she supported her three small children, mother and niece by working as a copyist. She also began to write courtly lyric verse and engaged in a literary quarrel over the thirteenth-century allegorical dream poem Le Roman de la Rose, which she and others regarded as slandering women. Charles’s son, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, commissioned her to write a eulogistic biography of his father, and from then on Christine regularly composed works that she presented to members of the French court and for which she was rewarded. In her later years she retired into the royal convent of Poissy, where her daughter was a nun, and she was dead by 1434 (see Willard 1984 and The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, pp. xiii–xviii).
