A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FEMINISTS, 

 CHRISTINE DE PISAN 



CHRISTINE DE PISAN, Italian by birth, French 

 by adoption, may be regarded not merely as a 

 forerunner of true feminism, but also as one of 

 its greatest champions, seeing that in her judg- 

 ment of the sexes she endeavours to hold the 

 scales evenly. Possessed of profound common 

 sense and of a generous -hearted nature, she 

 is wholly free from that want of fairness in 

 urging woman's claims which is so fatally pre- 

 judicial to their just consideration. Although, 

 strictly speaking, Christine was not original, she 

 was representative, and interests us for that very 

 reason. She was perhaps one of the most 

 complete exponents of the finer strain of thought 

 of her time. She stands before us, at the dawn 

 of the fifteenth century, Janus-headed, looking 

 to the past and to the future, a woman typical 

 of a time of transition, on the one hand showing, 

 in her writings, a clinging to old beliefs, and on 

 the other hand asserting, in her contact with 

 real life, independence of thought in the dis- 

 cussion of still unsolved questions. 



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