CHRISTINE DE PISAN 



woman even if, as some think, he personified 

 some abstract quality and placed her in heaven 

 beside the Deity. Chivalry had also idealised 

 woman, but in an exotic, exaggerated manner, 

 which was bound to reach its zenith, and bound 

 also to have its darker side. So we find that to 

 speak good or ill of womankind became a con- 

 ventionalism in the Middle Ages. Black or 

 white was the tone chosen by the artist in 

 words. There was no blending, no shading. 

 Women were either deified, or held to be evil 

 incarnate. The material side of life men under- 

 stood, and could depict with some exactness, but 

 to grasp in any way its subtler aspects required 

 an education which could be attained only by 

 slow degrees, since it meant the gradual modi- 

 fication of the long-cherished illusion that brute 

 force is the world's only weapon. A want of 

 capacity to discern is often responsible for a 

 depreciatory opinion, and we can but ascribe 

 this strangely narrow - minded and superficial 

 attitude towards woman to some such want. 

 Christine set herself the task of trying to remedy 

 this evil, not by shouting in the market-place, 

 but by studying men and women as God made 

 them and as she found them. Before she began 

 her work, a new day seemed to be dawning. 

 Just as, when classicism was in full decadence, 

 Plutarch wrote De mulierum virtutibus (of the 

 virtue of women), so, in the fourteenth century, 

 Boccaccio gave to the world De claris mulieribus 

 (of right-renowned women). We do not expect 



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