In recent decades the medieval Italian poet and writer Christine de Pizan has been the subject of renewed interest, motivated by a feminist reappraisal of this remarkable, pioneering author who was as skilled in the business and politics of publishing as she was in her occupation as a courtly writer. For Dr Penelope Haralambidou, Professor of Architecture and Spatial Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, another role helps define Christine de Pizan: that of the ‘architect.’ While Christine may never have overseen the construction of any buildings, she understood that, as a metaphor and as a working practice, the architect was a potent symbol of power and creativity in late-medieval France. In her 1405 book Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) she used that symbol to create a complex allegory, where women were both the inhabitants and the building blocks of a new type of city, which recognised the potential and the achievements of other women. Christine’s riposte to the misogyny of her male contemporaries has resonated through the centuries; Simone de Beauvoir described it as ‘the first time a woman takes up her pen to defend her sex.’ Haralambidou’s own ongoing, cross-disciplinary research into Christine’s work has manifested in a wide body of design-led outcomes, including publications, talks and an exhibition at domobaal, London. In my conversation with Penelope, we discuss her research into Christine’s life, and the relationship she had with books and architecture.
Huw Lemmey: How did Christine de Pizan come into your life? How did you first develop your interest in her as a writer and thinker?
Penelope Haralambidou: My previous major piece of work was on Marcel Duchamp. I was looking at his final assemblage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Étant donnés (Given, 1946–66) – the one that you look at through peepholes. I did an analysis of that piece that had to do with the architectural representation and perspective and the body. The female figure in the work is made of vellum – animal skin that has been used in bookbinding – it’s the material that illuminated manuscripts are written on. Many manuscripts from the medieval era – but also architectural drawings on vellum and parchment – survive today because the material is so long lasting. I was doing research on vellum as an architectural drawing surface, and then I started looking at illuminated manuscripts in terms of how architecture was portrayed. I was really interested in the way that buildings become organising principles on the page, so I created a work in vellum, reflecting on the history of architectural representation. I started wondering whether women were involved; and, indeed, women were part of illuminator workshops. ‘Illumination’ is the term for miniature illustration, and this word relates to the fact that they were using gilding, which gives the pages a glow. If you see such books open on display in museums, they are quite visceral to look at.
Then I came across Christine de Pizan, who wrote in The Book of the City of Ladies that she had collaborated with a female illuminator. I had never heard of the book before, but as I investigated it I realised that it’s really significant for the history of architecture, utopias and female spatial imagination. It’s a very early chapter in those histories that I’ve never really come across as an architecture scholar or designer, and I thought that it would be a great opportunity to bring it to the surface for our field. My research practice is design led, so I look primarily at the visual material, but with a lot of research into the background of how this material was produced and, in a way, I try to recreate the illuminations. It’s very much design-driven, object-driven and making-driven research. So that’s how it started, through a series of coincidences that link to my focus on vellum, a material that has a central place in my reading of The Book of the City of Ladies. The installation I created uses whole sheets of vellum as drawing surfaces, but also as tablecloths on three tables that represent the structure of the book. My installation is an embodiment of the text in a three-dimensional form. It takes some object tropes, ideas and the illuminations themselves, and fleshes them out.
Still from City of Ladies digital film, 2020. Courtesy of Penelope Haralambidou and John Cruwys
Huw: It seems to me that Christine de Pizan’s work was very much related to the technological changes that were happening within literary cultures of the time, but also within changing architectural cultures of the Middle Ages. Was it unusual to be a female court writer at the time? Was she a pioneer? How did this woman born in Italy end up becoming a court writer in France?
Penelope: Yes, her family was Italian. Her father was an astrologist and physician, and these two terms were actually correlated at the time. He was well sought after; a couple of other kings were interested in his services, but he decided to go to the court of King Charles V of France. He moved there first, and then brought his family with him. Christine joined at the age of four. She received some education from her father, and she could read and write in French. She was married at the age of fifteen – happily, very happily – to Étienne du Castel, who was also a secretary in the court. But when she was around twenty-five, both her father and her husband died within a short period, which created a big problem for her as a widow. She went into a long period of litigation to be able to secure the property that both her father and husband had owned. I think that showed her the vulnerability of women, especially widowed women, who had no male protection. It created financial issues as well, so she decided to take up writing professionally to support her family. Her royal connections became powerful patrons, for whom she started writing courtly poetry. During this period, she was also educating herself further.
Image from City of Ladies installation at domobaal, 2020. Courtesy of Penelope Haralambidou and John Cruwys. Photo: Andy Keate
Huw: Am I right in saying that The Book of the City of Ladies is a response to another book written at the same time?
Penelope: It is original in its concept, in its vision of a female utopia. But there are a number of other books that The Book of the City of Ladies is quite closely based on. The main one is Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women, 1374). Both texts collect the stories of women. Christine uses the allegory of the Three Virtues, who visit her and commission her to build the city, to organise a rewriting of some of Boccaccio’s stories into three chapters. Each chapter is presided over by a different virtue who guides her in a different task. The first is to lay the foundations, the second is to raise the houses and the temples, and the third is to embellish the city. She includes more stories than Boccaccio’s book presents, and she rearranges them thematically rather than chronologically. Boccaccio’s text is quite misogynistic and carries on from the violent tradition present in the writing of Ovid onwards. The Book of the City of Ladies opens with Christine despairing about this overwhelmingly misogynistic tradition of male writers. She then rewrites these stories with a constructive attitude towards women, always presenting them in a positive light. Even women who are very troubled figures, like Medea, are read in a different way.
But there are also other books that influence the structure. I have written a paper comparing this book with her Le livre du corps de policie (The Book of the Body Politic, c.1407), which is more of a ‘mirror for princes.’ This phrase describes texts that offer guidance to young male princes on how to behave and become wise kings. Drawing on an ancient Greek myth by Aesop, she follows the structure of the head, the arms and the legs, comparing the body politic to a human body – obviously a male body. The head is the king, the arms are the army and the belly and the legs are the people. That tripartite structure in her book is somehow reversed, because the first chapter looks at mythological and pagan women, the middle part looks at sybils and women who were involved in making and invention, and the third part looks at saints. The Virgin Mary joins at the end as the head of this utopia of women. I think that The Book of the City of Ladies is somehow a mirror for princesses. She offered it to Queen Isabeau of Bavaria – and I believe it was written for her from the start – who was a very misunderstood figure. She has a very troubled image in history. Much of what has been written about Queen Isabeau is now considered slander, because she was queen regent for Charles VI, the son of the king that Christine’s father joined. He suffered from bouts of madness, and so the royal family, his uncles, his father’s brothers, were also making claims to the throne. The royal family, all of Christine’s patrons, were in conflict with each other. It was a very troublesome period. Supporting the idea of a queen and regent could be quite dangerous. In this sense, her text is both allegorical and diplomatic.
…Christine was sensitive to this negative function of architecture, and I think that she’s trying to reverse it, using the construction of architecture not only to protect women but also to empower them…
Huw: The book is operating as what we might call a proto-feminist, pedagogical text, when most of the literature that women would have had access to at that time came with this heavy misogynistic bent. I was reading that one of the influences she was writing against was Jean de Meun and his Le roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose) (begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and completed by de Meun approximately forty years later). Is there evidence that she was responding directly to that text? Because The Romance of the Rose was controversial at the time.
Penelope: Yes, definitely. She was writing lyric poetry for her patrons when she instigated The Romance of the Rose debate. She read the text and thought that it was misogynistic, vulgar and slanderous to women. She felt that the women were portrayed really terribly. Her The Book of the City of Ladies is a corrective text to this popular poem, and perhaps an antidote to its quite offensive imagery. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s The Romance of the Rose shows the female represented as if she’s part of the architecture that the protagonist destroys, so it’s an image of a rape in a way. The imagery links architecture with violence towards women.
Architecture plays an oppressive role, either entrapping women or expressing sexual violence in this text. Christine was sensitive to this negative function of architecture, and I think that she’s trying to reverse it, using the construction of architecture not only to protect women but also to empower them.
She was also interested in architecture as a higher intellectual pursuit. She had a lot of respect for King Charles V, the king who invited her family. She even wrote a biography of him, which was commissioned by one of his brothers who was against the queen. So it’s a complex relationship there. This biography is important historically; it reveals the inner workings of the court. Charles V was a builder king; apart from promoting the book industry, which is one of the main things that he was famous for – he was known as ‘the Wise’ – he was also interested in architecture and rebuilding the city of Paris. He expanded the wall of the city during his reign. In fact, Christine makes a point about this, and she uses the term architecteur to describe the king and his qualities. What is really interesting is this is the first instance that the word ‘architect’ appears in translation in French; before this, it only existed in Latin. Nikolaus Pevsner, the famous English–German architectural historian, suggests that she’s the very first person to introduce the term in the French language.
She uses it somewhat metaphorically. The structure of the book – setting the foundations, building the main houses and temples and then the embellishment – mirrors the way that the term ‘architect’ is described in an encyclopedia, which was the compendium that most medieval authors were consulting at the time. In a way, she takes that terminology – the etymology of the word somehow – and makes a whole book structured according to the way that the architect was known to work. The book is an impersonation of architecture as an idea. She uses it for female empowerment. Christine is commissioned by the Three Virtues, but they are guiding her in the act of building the city.
…The stories of the women and the women themselves become the material of the city, which is a very powerful metaphor…
Huw: So writing is almost like a work of speculative architecture for her – she sees herself as an architect, and the book itself as the city?
Penelope: Exactly, and she makes some other analogies too. She presents the stones as the women who build the city, and also refers to the buildings as the women. She uses these metaphors throughout the book. The stories of the women and the women themselves become the material of the city, which is a very powerful metaphor. I think she recognises how empowering building architecture is, and she wants to claim it for women. She talks about the more intellectual process of building the city. There’s this incredibly poignant image in the first illumination where she appears in the act of construction with a trowel. That image is unprecedented – the powerful image of a woman builder. I don’t think it had existed before.
Huw: It must have been very powerful for her to imagine herself as an architect while living under the reign of Charles V, whom she calls an architect. It’s not just her putting herself in a professional role but also perhaps making the power of women comparable to the power of kings. Moving on from this idea of the allegory, how does her vision of a city work in relation to medieval architecture? Does she have a working knowledge of architectural norms and practices of the time, and was she influenced by, for example, Charles V’s building programme in her descriptions of the city? Is it a practical guide to any extent?
Penelope: I have begun research on this by looking at the illuminations more closely. There were five versions of the text published in Christine’s lifetime, some of them in her hand, and all five were illuminated under her supervision. I’ve begun looking at the different versions comparatively and observing how the city is represented. The images of the city are quite rudimentary, as most of the representations were at the time. But I have started going through Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française (Dictionary of French Architecture), which was written around the mid-nineteenth century. Viollet-le-Duc was an architect, but also a scholar, involved in tracing and creating an encyclopedia of medieval architecture in France.
Courtesy of Penelope Haralambidou and John Cruwys
I’m really interested in what inspired the representation in the illuminations. Was it the real city of Paris? Was it other texts and illuminations? I think that it’s a mixture between observation of the city of Paris but also other texts, including more religiously driven books like St Augustine’s The City of God (ce 426), which presents a city in the heavens. Christine is definitely inspired by the city of Paris, especially by the Louvre. She writes extensively about the workings of the Palace of the Louvre in her biography of King Charles V. She details his everyday rituals, offering insight into how the palace was distributed at the time. There is something in her representation of the allegorical city that draws upon Paris as a walled city, but also the Louvre as a smaller walled structure within it, the ‘thing within the thing’ somehow. Another reference that I have been looking at is the monastery as a protective structure. Christine’s daughter was a nun. In one of her poems she describes visiting her daughter in the convent, which I think also became a reference for her. What I would like to prove is that there is an original concept of what this city is that is entirely Christine’s. Yet I’m also intrigued by how she borrows from whatever is around, both in terms of the real city and its representation as the allegorical city.
Huw: You seem to be touching on this idea of the city as a disciplinary structure for women. There is this idea that, as urbanisation increased, women played less and less of a role in public life and more of a role in domestic life. It might be counterintuitive for us to imagine today, but perhaps convents were not understood as restrictive by the women who lived inside them because actually they were spaces in which women had a lot more power and opportunity. Is that notion of the medieval city as a disciplinary structure for women overplayed, especially in relation to Christine’s work? And do you think that she felt, for example, that the Louvre was itself a city that disciplined women?
Penelope: It’s true that the city is a relatively new structure and concept, and the way that women behave within the city is probably something that was being formed at the time. She doesn’t actually describe the urban behaviour of these women. I haven’t really come across any passage that talks about how the city functions in the book. The outer walls offer positive protection, but mainly it’s safe because it’s inhabited only by women. If it was a walled city occupied by both men and women, then maybe that would present a different situation. But if it’s a walled structure and they’re all women, notionally, then that is a positive.
Huw: Much like a convent?
Penelope: Like a convent. The scholar Kevin Brownlee has written about the contrast between Christine’s very strong support for the female gender and the hiding of her sexuality, and Diane Wolfthal about her attitude towards rape. In the Ovid and Boccaccio stories, there is a strong portrayal of rape, both in the text and the illuminations. The stories describe sexual violence, which at the time wasn’t perceived in the same way that we understand it now. Christine was really sensitive towards it and often expressed that it was the worst thing that could happen to a woman. Being a widow was a very vulnerable position, so she’s careful in walking that tightrope of promoting female values while completely hiding her sexuality and presenting herself as a chaste woman who should not be thought of in a sexual way.
Huw: It’s interesting relating that back to the illuminations from The Romance of the Rose, and how women are portrayed as architecture that can be put under siege or breached, and then how Christine depicts women again as architecture, but in such a way that it protects women’s modesty and virtue, as those attributes would have been understood during that era. Relating back to the function of romances in French literature, not just as representations of chivalric and behavioural codes, but also producing them through the literature, do you think that there’s a sort of allegorical form where she thinks of architecture itself as something that could be inherently empowering for women?
Penelope: Definitely. In the other books, architectural structures are built by men to entrap women, whereas Christine is reversing this by claiming the making of architecture by women for women. She recognises the empowering quality of being an architect, shaping space and jewelling a city, but she wants to claim it for women, and I think this is unprecedented. By engaging with her text, you realise that even today most of our cities are entirely conceived by men, physically constructed by men. Our experience of urban space is coloured by a male imagination and male touch. The female imagination has not yet been expressed in our urban fabric to a great extent. I don’t know if that will ever be possible. There is also the question of how you start imagining a female urban fabric. Is there something that separates female spatial imagination from male? I can’t really answer that. In my analysis of Christine’s text, I especially wanted to highlight how when the Three Virtues appear to her for the first time they bring three gifts: a mirror, a ruler and a vessel. They describe these as measuring devices, and in each chapter there are passages that describe how she should use them to imagine, plan and then embellish the city. In my work, I tried to reinterpret them, so I made a mirror, a ruler and a vessel, and I explained each. I see them as ways of trying to think beyond. I see the mirror as a kind of perceptual matrix of how we think in terms of vision and whether vision is a construct, and whether there is a way that we can imagine a visual system of understanding that goes beyond the Cartesian understanding. Then the ruler is a measuring system, measuring lengths and surface, and I talk about how most measuring systems in the past were based on the body, but usually always the male body.
Huw: That still happens today. I read recently about how crash test dummies that were based on ‘female’ physiques were only introduced two or three years ago. Women are much more likely to die in car crashes primarily because crash test dummies have always used ‘male’ anthropometric measurements.
Penelope: It happens in everything, like temperature, medicine, pills, and I think it’s telling. Then the third gift is the vessel, which I see more as a gauge of female values against male values. One last thing to mention in terms of gender and sexuality is connected to this idea of reversals of gender. In Le Livre de la mutation de fortune (The Book of the Mutation of Fortune, 1403), Christine describes turning into a man, or perhaps a virile woman. Usually, it was the virile male and the fertile female, but she presents herself as a virile female, which is especially resonant after her husband dies and she needs to take this role of protecting the family by fighting to secure property.
Huw: I’m fascinated by how your research manifests in a more experiential way, a different form that includes ideas around modelling and mapping.
To what extent do you see your re-search as a continuation of some of the practices that Christine used herself?
Penelope: This has been mentioned to me before. It’s as if I’m doing another version of that manuscript. I’m really interested in how an engagement with the visual, images and making unlocks a way of thinking about her work but also perhaps her as a character. I see it somehow as an embodiment that allows me to become Christine, or at least it’s role play or fiction that you as a researcher place yourself in.
Huw: Could you call it channelling?
Penelope: In my research I look at all these outputs – the manuscripts and images, engaging with the deep textual research. There are many connections of meaning, but I think there is something so potent in engaging with the work directly through making, and the objects and visual material that result from that. Historical images and objects have a life in them too; they carry knowledge and exist in a realm that we can all engage with. Our previous knowledge might lead us to receive and project meaning in ways that are unnameable or not possible to express through words. For example, take the mirror, the ruler and the vessel – these objects have a lot of historical meaning attached to them. Today, we might consider these objects as categories of thinking, symbols and maybe theo-retical concepts too. They have this metaphorical presence as well, and they shape us.