Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan on famous women (De mulieribus claris és La Cité des Dames)

Abstract

Christine de Pizan is a prolific writer and one of the first representatives of feminist literature. In La Cité des Dames (The City of Dames), written in defence of women, she selects famous female figures from ancient authors and from Boccaccio's various works on female heroes, but especially De muleribus claris, but interprets their roles and fates in a very different way from the Italian humanist who served as a model. The paper will introduce the structure and the imaginative construction of La Cité des Dames, and will then illuminate the different approaches of Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan through the examples of Dido and Lucretia.