La Cité des Dames and the triumph of Christine de Pizan's women: Aspects of a female city founded on the demolition of the legacy of medieval misogyny

Abstract

From the perspective of an intertextual reading, this article aims to question and reflect about the idea of ​​ city in The City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan, idealized in 1405. The purpose is to discuss the construction of this female city through a critical reading that gives a new meaning to the realities of women exposed by the ideology of the medieval misogyny. To this end, some themes and issues pertinent to views of representatives male figures of this medieval misogynist literary genre will be identified and discussed whose antifeminine pronouncements are present in the book. The article discusses as Christine de Pizan’s main contribution her originality in arguing and proposing the construction of a city favorable to the idea of ​​inclusion and dialogue by and for women. It is a city designed to promote, through its example, the emancipation of women from the misogynistic yoke of the traditional male views. In this sense, pioneering and adventitious for its time, the metaphorical construction of Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies resignifies the arcane symbolism of the female weaving of misogynistic shape to propose a possible female consciousness of the historical and cultural conditions of the women in those times of robust vernacular adaptations of the legacy of misogyny in the late literary Middle Ages. Mutatis mutandis, had it not been for the question of epistemological property, Christine de Pizan would have been, at the end of the Middle Ages, a voice of decoloniality of the hegemonic misogynistic discourse, if, as it will be seen, she had not reproduced in her discourse traditional ways and forms of being of the traditional discourse of the coloniality of women.