The Treasure of the City of Ladies

"The Treasure is a handbook written primarily for princesses and noblewomen (with much shorter discussions concerning other classes of women). Christine takes as a given that you don’t have to be a nun to live a religiously satisfying life. She asks: ‘What does the noblewoman or princess have to do to be virtuous?’ What’s great about her advice is how canny it is. Princesses and noblewomen were often stuck in arranged marriages, living away from their homes and families in distant courts or manors. They would have been strangers in their new homes, surrounded by people jealous of their position and envious of their access to the king or lord. Christine describes it as a situation full of uncertainty and lurking danger. Christine asks how the noblewoman can live virtuously in a world in which she can’t be sure of anything. She argues that the noblewoman’s prime social goal is to be virtuous and charitable, to create social harmony. She is the key to maintaining peace in a court filled with intrigue and backbiting and envy. It is a perilous situation and in perilous situations often the moral command to be charitable will outweigh the demand to be truthful. In such cases, she argues the noblewoman must dissemble, sometimes lie, to protect herself, but always with the larger goal in mind of protecting her husband and the harmony of the court. She tells the noblewoman that she should go to church, but only when she knows people will be there so that they’ll see how virtuous and religious she is. Christine advises giving donations when people will see you do it. She says at one point that this may sound like hypocrisy, but that’s ok. She’s a wonderful writer. In the Treasure she doesn’t, because she’s already dealt with those problems in the book that precedes it: The City of Ladies . The reason women were thought to be natural born liars is because they were thought to lack prudence. Prudence is the virtue or ability to discern the proper course of action at the proper moment. The prudent man can know when circumstance requires him to lie. Since women lack prudence, so this misogynist tradition runs, they just lie all the time. As I read it, The City of Ladies proves that women possess the virtue of prudence. Therefore when a good woman lies, it’s because the situation demands it. Having demonstrated women are rational and prudent in the City , Christine writes the Treasure to teach them how to put that prudence to work. There’s this old idea — it can already be found in Revelation — that not only is the Bible the inspired word of God, but that to change one word of it, one comma, is to defy God. A strand of early Christian thought, drawing on the idea that there are two divine books — the book of nature and the Bible, contended that when a woman makes up her face or dresses in fine clothes she is silently critiquing and amending God’s creation — arguing, in effect, ‘God could have made me better had he added this .’ Of course men do the exact same thing and Christine points this out. But it’s subsequent writers, particularly late in the Sixteenth Century, who really begin to point out that style and adornment are not feminine things, they’re human things. I trace this to two Venetian women, Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte, both writing around 1600. Fonte’s work, The Worth of Women , is framed as a dialogue among women to demonstrate all they know but the subtext is much darker as it constantly highlights how men limit what women can do and think, that men are more dangerous deceivers than women. She is a feminist to the extent that she is very explicit that women can do all the things men can and that when women have had to rule countries, or make laws, or save their families, they have done as well as or better than men. On the other hand she believes late medieval society is set up as it is for good reasons. I think it cuts both ways with her."