The Female Body Politic: Enacting the Architecture of The Book of the City of Ladies

Abstract

This visual essay and explanatory text presents my practice-led research focusing on two works by medieval author Christine de Pizan. Conflating the act of writing a book – a thesis against institutional misogyny – with the construction of an imaginary city, the first work, The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto. I focus on the under-researched architectural and urban allegory depicted in the text, which imagines a utopia inhabited solely by women and constructed for them by a woman and on the manuscript's accompanying illuminations displaying three different stages of the construction of the city. Inspired by Aristotle’s Politics and revisiting the ancient Greek metaphor, by which a state or society and its institutions are conceived of as a biological human body, in The Book of the Body Politic, 1404, de Pizan offers her version of a medieval political theory, which I connect with her allegorical city.

Keywords:

• Christine de Pizan
• architecture
• feminist city
• body politic
• allegory
• practice-led research
• digital film

Notes

1. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), 11–12.

2. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1998).

3. For other feminist analyses of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of The City of Ladies, see: Jody Enders, “The Feminist Mnemonics of Christine de Pizan,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1994): 231–249; Judith L. Kellog, “Le Livre de la cité des dames: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Reimagining Gendered Space,” in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara K. Altman and Deborah L. McGrady (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003); Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité de dames (Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

4. For a discussion of the illuminations in this version of the book see: Sandra L. Hindman, “With Ink and Mortar: Christine De Pizan's ‘Cité des Dames’,” Feminist Studies 10, no. 3 (1984): 457–483. For a broader discussion of the role of illumination in de Pizan’s work, see: Charlotte Cooper, “A Re-Assessment of Text-Image Relationships in Christine de Pizan’s Didactic Works” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2017).

5. I have previously used a design-led approach to art-historical research in my monograph: Penelope Haralambidou, Marcle Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2013).

6. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, ed. and trans. Kate Langdon Forhan, series: Cambridge texts in the history of political thought (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

7. The research was kindly funded the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Architecture Research Fund, and culminated with an exhibition, “City of Ladies” hosted by Domobaal Gallery in January–February 2020.

8. In an email exchange (26 January 2020), professor Earl Jeffery Richards very rightly observed that: “scholars in French and Italian prefer to refer to ‘Christine’ rather than ‘de Pizan’ – this is because Christine in her works speaks of herself as ‘Je, Christine’, interpreted as a solemn affirmation of her identity.” Furthermore, he suggested that “‘de Pizan’ is not a family name as such, but an indication that she, Christine, is noble.” However, in this essay I chose to keep this use of two names so as to stress the distinction between the author and her auto-characterisation.

  9. Nadia Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).

10. Christine McWebb, ed., Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology (New York: Routledge, 2007).

11. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. Frances Horgan and Based on the French edition by Félix Lecoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

12. Mirrors for princes was a literary genre of political writing during the Middle Ages, which took the form of a textbook aimed to instruct a young king or prince on certain aspects of rule and behaviour by creating images of kings for imitation or avoidance. A few of Christine de Pizan’s most famous texts are mirrors for princes: The Epistle of Othea to Hector: Or the Book of Knighthood (c. 1400), Book of the Body Politic (1404–1407), The Book of Peace (between 1412 and 1414). See, Christine de Pisan, The Epistle of Othea to Hector or The Boke of Knyghthode, ed. George F. Warner, trans. Stephen Scrope (Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg, 2019). Retrieved 3 August, 2020, from www.gutenberg.org/files/60567/60567-h/60567-h.htm; de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic; Christine de Pizan, The Book of Peace, ed. Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, and Janice Pinder (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

13. See Kate Langdon Forhan, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 45.

14. Tsae Lan Lee Dow, “Christine de Pizan and the Body Politic,” in Healing the Body Politic: The Political thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Karen Green and Constant J. Mews (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 229.

15. The Hundred Years’ War, 1337–1453 was a series of conflicts in Europe between the House of Plantagenet, rulers of England, and the French House of Valois, over the right to rule the Kingdom of France. Significantly the official pretext to the start of the conflict was an interruption of the direct male line of the Capetian dynasty, which led to an ambiguity about succession and the reinstatement of the Salic law, forbidding not only inheritance by a woman, but also inheritance through a female line.

16. de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, xxii.

17. Forhan, Political Theory of Christine de Pizan, 45.

18. Cary J. Nederman, “Living Body Politic: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in Nicole Oresme and Christine de Pizan,” in Healing the Body Politic: The Political thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Karen Green and Constant J. Mews (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 33.

19. Ibid., 33.

20. See, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Printed for A. Crooke, 1651) and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, intro. Christopher Brook (London: Penguin, 2017). The iconic frontispiece by Abraham Bosse, with creative input from Hobbes, features a composite image including a representation of the Sovereign King figuratively constituted by the individual bodies of the citizenry.

21. Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan, 61.

22. Two versions are kept at the Bibliothèque National de France, Paris BnF 1179, 1405, and Paris BnF 1178, 1413.

23. de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 11.

24. For a detailed list of the women portrayed in the book, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_City_of_Ladies

25. Mark Cruse, “The Louvre of Charles V: Legitimacy, Renewal, and Royal Presence in Fourteenth-Century Paris,” L'Esprit Créateur 54, no. 2 (2014): 19–32.

26. Books of Hours were prayer books for lay people, containing cycles of prayers to be read at set hours throughout the day. They were often beautifully illustrated to complement the texts and focus devotion and became very popular in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Tr%C3%A8s_Riches_Heures_du_duc_de_Berry_octobre.jpg

27. See, Christine de Pizan, Book of the Deeds and Good Practices of the Wise King Charles V, 1404. https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2016/06/from-the-louvre-to-treasures-gallery.html

28. Kellog, “Le Livre de la cité des Dames,” 140.

29. Margarete Zimmermann, “Christine de Pizan: Memory’s Architect,” in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara K. Altman and Deborah L. McGrady (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003).

30. For a full list of all the women mentioned in the book, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_City_of_Ladies

31. Penelope Haralambidou, “City of Ladies,” Domo Baal gallery, January–February 2020. https://www.domobaal.com/exhibitions/112-20-penelope-haralambidou-01.html

32. Link to the digitised version of the manuscript at the British Library: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_4431

33. Christine Sciacca, Building the Medieval World (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum and London: British Library, 2010).

34. For more on the use of architectural motifs in illuminated manuscripts see: Penelope Haralambidou, “With-drawing Room on Vellum: The Persistent Vanishing of the Architectural Drawing Surface,” in Drawing Futures: Speculations for Contemporary Art and Architecture, ed. Laura Allen and Luke Pearson (London: UCL Press, 2016), 82–89.

35. For more on vellum and its use as an architectural drawing surface, see: Haralambidou, “With-drawing Room on Vellum.”

36. I obtained the three pieces of whole skin vellum from the last remaining producer in the UK, William Cowley, http://www.williamcowley.co.uk/

37. The piece was exhibited as part of Works & Words 2019, 2nd Biennale for Artistic Research in Architecture, KADK https://kadk.dk/en/calendar/works-words-2019, see exhibition catalogue: https://kadk.dk/sites/default/files/downloads/event/workswords_2019_-_final_28.11.19_0.pdf

38. Margolis, Introduction to Christine de Pizan, 71.

39. The work was developed in close collaboration with research assistant John Cruwys.

40. This a further allusion to another example of Christian iconography: The Adoration of the Magi.

41. For an exploration of the significance of the different parts of the body in the Middle Ages, see: Jack Hartnell, Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages (London: Wellcome Collection, 2019).

42. The design of the vessel was expertly realised by glassblower Graham Reed at Jaytec Glass.

43. De Pizan’s tripartite structures are directly reflected in my design research presented in the portfolio of images preceding the text and described in detail in the third part of this visual essay. The research is, therefore, primarily “figural,” see Penelope Haralambidou, “Allegory, Architecture and ‘Figural Theory’,” in Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research, ed. Florian Dombois, Claudia Mareis, Michael Schwab, and Ute Meta Bauer (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2011).

44. For which see City of Ladies, https://vimeo.com/444331957

45. As one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper has very poignantly commented, this “re-enactment” of the relationship between Christine and the virtues might inform a different type of practice: “one in which the dynamic between collaborators is of a different (non-hierarchical) order. The author’s invitation to collaborate (in the manner of the virtues) is therefore a potential contestation of the traditional (gendered) role of the architect as master-builder. This, it seems to me, is where the question of a new collective might be addressed: in a mode of practice that both echoes the ‘equity’ the author describes as key to de Pizan’s philosophical position, and that contests models set out by Hobbes (and others) in which a sovereign (a head) determines collective action.”

46. The second allegorical female figure, Rectitude, urges Christine to start work constructing the main body of the city. I have deliberately removed the beginning part of the second sentence here: “With the Grace of God” to accentuate the contemporary tone of her writing. See, de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, 91.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Penelope Haralambidou

Penelope Haralambidou is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Culture and Director of Communications at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She coordinates MArch PG24, where she promotes a highly innovative research-based teaching methodology that uses digital film and immersive environments to re-think architectural design through time. Her research employs architectural drawing, model-making and digital film as investigatory tools to analyse ideas and work, not only in architecture, but also visual representation, the politics of vision, art and cinema. Her work has been exhibited internationally, she is the author of the monograph Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2013), and she has contributed writing on themes, such as architectural representation, allegory, figural theory, stereoscopy and film to a wide range of publications. Her solo show, “City of Ladies,” presenting her practice-led research of Christine de Pizan’s proto-feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, was hosted by DomoBaal gallery in January–February 2020.