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Christine de Pisan, Épître d'Othéa. Later scribal copy, finely illuminated for Sir John Fastolf, AD 1450 (MS. Laud misc. 570, fol. 23v)
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Zoom in
Christine de Pisan, Épître d'Othéa. Later scribal copy, finely illuminated for Sir John Fastolf, AD 1450 (MS. Laud misc. 570, fol. 24r)
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Christine de Pizan (1364–c. 1430)
Christine de Pizan began to write professionally to support her family after her husband’s death. She produced a large corpus of work in French verse and prose, often for patrons, becoming one of the first women in Europe to earn a living through writing. Her status as a proto feminist remains contested, but she is widely celebrated for, as Simone de Beauvoir subsequently claimed, being the first woman to ‘take up her pen in defence of her sex’.