The first book-length study of a seminal 'feminist' text from the Middle Ages.

Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cite des Dames (1405) is justly renowned for its full-scale assault on the misogynist stereotypes that dominated the culture of the Middle Ages. Rosalind Brown-Grant locates the Cite in the context of Christine's defense of women as it developed over a number of years and through a range of different texts. This study shows that Christine's case for women nonetheless had an underlying unity in its insistence on the moral, if not the social, equality of the sexes.

While French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have long enjoyed a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been largely neglected by modern scholars, despite their central role in the chivalric culture of the day. In particular, although this genre has been seen as providing a forum within which ideas about masculine and feminine roles were debated and prescribed, little work has been done on the gender ideology of texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This study seeks to fill this gap in the scholarship by...