Rebecca’s Reviews > Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy > Status Update

This book gets better as it goes along. I do wish she had spent a bit longer on Christine's earlier works and other genres. The main focus is as usual on the pro-woman aspect of her works. This is also something the author mentions as being a problem in Christine de Pizan studies, and yet she does it too. Of the books on Christine I've read, this is the most balanced one, even though it barely acknowledges religion.

Chapter Three is quite good, however where she see's prudishness, I see an attempt at discussing how vocabulary can be overly sexual/ pornographic, which may not sound quite right to modern readers because she talks about it differently than we do. Also, there is an overall lack of engagement with how her religion shaped her work. There is no discussion of her theological opposition to the Romance of the Rose.

Interesting if a bit dry, but not really what I'd call a biography. Also limited discussion of her faith and then also potentially getting some details wrong. My limited understanding is that Mary is venerated not deified, so referring to Mary as a deity is incorrect. My Catholic friends who know more about the history of Marianism may feel free to add commentary.

Dry, slow going, very academic, not sure the average reader is going to like this, and in an attempt to set the scene and take us back in time reads more like a travelogue rather than a biography. I get what she's trying to do. Alas, she is not succeeding at helping one get into a medieval French mindset.

I'm going to need maps of both late Medieval Paris and Modern Paris because trying to visualize her descriptions of both is just making my head hurt rather than giving me an idea of scale. This is probably because I've never been to Paris.