The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (34 page)

C
HRISTINE DE
P
IZAN
, M
ISOGYNY, AND
S
ELF-KNOWLEDGE

Alone in her room, books proudly proclaiming the biological inferiority and inescapable sinfulness of women surrounding her, Christine carefully dramatizes the plight of women who have heard nothing but misogynist slander their entire lives. “Alas God,” she
writes, “why did You not let me be born in the world as a man, so that all my inclinations would be to serve you better, and so that I would not stray in anything and would be as perfect as a man is said to be?”
⁵⁰
But Christine does not mean this, and she knows that it is men who lie to women, who lie about women. Christine takes it upon herself to reveal and prove those lies for what they are.

Unlike John of Salisbury in the
Policraticus
, unlike her own book,
The Treasure of the City of Ladies
, in
The Book of the City of Ladies
, Christine does not ask if it is acceptable to lie. Instead, she wants women to see themselves for what they really are and the world for what it really is. In this sense,
The Book of the City of Ladies
is, at one and the same time, critique, diagnosis, and therapy. The actions women can take to confront an aggressively deceptive world depend entirely on the possibilities they find within themselves, on the self-knowledge that generates those possibilities. The practical importance of this kind of knowledge appears in
The Treasure of the City of Ladies
, the handbook for women that Christine presents as the companion piece to
The Book of the City of Ladies
. In the former, Christine advises that the noblewoman must know who she is and whether she is best suited to the contemplative or the active life. While the contemplative life is dearer to God, the “active life has more use in this world.” If a woman opts for the active life, she must be completely clear about her standing at court. She must be able to distinguish what is truly good from what only appears to be good, and having made these discriminations, she must know how to respond.
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She must, in other words, possess and exercise the faculty of prudence, the faculty that, as Thomas Aquinas notes, allows us to match proper means to proper ends. But this is precisely the faculty that the misogynists, drawing on both biblical exegesis and natural philosophy, so strenuously asserted that women lacked. Without it, women can only be cunningly disguised deceivers, incapable of either virtue or honesty, little different from the Devil in the Garden of Eden.

In
The Book of the City of Ladies
Christine, along with three allegorical figures—Ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who
appear suddenly and without warning in her locked study—sets herself the task of undercutting and refuting misogynist claims that women lack prudence.
⁵²
She adopts a variety of strategies to accomplish this. Among other things, she questions the misogynists’ motives. Why do men say such hateful things about women? Some men slander women in a misguided effort to help other men, demeaning the object of their lust to help free them from the sinful chains of desire. Other men are simply cruel and vicious, taking pleasure in slander and vice. Some, having led dissolute lives in their youth, wantonly deceiving and seducing women, are now old and decrepit, impotent, angry, and unrepentant as they vainly recall past pleasures forevermore out of reach.
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This was certainly the case with Matheolus, Lady Reason tells Christine, “who himself confesses that he was an impotent old man filled with desire.” Whatever the cause, she assures Christine that such blanket condemnations can arise only from a wickedness of heart that blinds a man to “the good deeds which women have done for him” and, without doubt, such assertions are contrary to nature, “for there is no naked beast anywhere, nor bird, which does not naturally love its female counterpart.”
⁵⁴

Highlighting the motivations behind male misogyny, Christine highlights something else as well. The misogynist always moves from the particular to the universal, generalizing from one bad experience with some specific woman (whether imagined or real) to universalizing claims about all women. Just as Tertullian and Jerome had indulged in this tactic so many centuries before, so do Christine’s contemporaries. In
The Letter to the God of Love
, a poem Christine composed in 1399, several years before beginning work on
The Book of the City of Ladies
, she had already pointed out this dubious practice, bemoaning its presence in the sorts of poems and verses that fill the workbooks assigned to young boys in school. The clerics who write these books, Christine complains, fill them with doggerel like “Adam, David, Samson, and many other men were deceived by women both early and late: what living man will escape? Others say that women are very deceitful, crafty, false, and worthless. Still others say that they are highly
untruthful, changeable, inconstant, and flighty.”
⁵⁵
More galling is the double standard that allows men to make these generalizations about women, never about themselves. Late in
The Book of the City of Ladies
, Lady Rectitude points out that men seem to expect and demand more from women than they do from themselves and other men. When men waver, when men sin, they brush it off as nothing of consequence, as being simply the result of human nature. By contrast, when “a few women lapse (and when these men themselves, through their own strivings and their own power are the cause), then, as far as these men are concerned, it is completely a matter of [feminine] fragility and inconstancy.”
⁵⁶
As Tertullian had it, every woman is an Eve.

Christine’s response to this homogenizing account of women is telling. Taking her lead from scripture as opposed to biology, she stresses God’s power and perfection. God would never make something evil or imperfect, and those men who suggest that God created women as flawed versions of the human species demean him and his goodness.
⁵⁷
Christine’s argument is more nuanced than the one the misogynists put forth. On the one hand, her emphasis on God’s power, goodness, and perfection undercuts the misogynists’ belief that biology necessarily makes women evil. God created both men and women perfectly and in accord with his wishes. On the other hand, she does not counter their stereotyped depiction of all women as essentially evil with another stereotype of her own portraying all women as essentially good. It is not our sex that makes us saints or sinners, she writes, it is what we do, what we make of ourselves. “The man or woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher,” Lady Reason tells Christine, “neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.”
⁵⁸

As both a writer and thinker, Christine’s inclination is to avoid generalizations and to dwell with the particular, to move away from the demands of universal law and toward the demands of the moment. At one point, for example, Lady Reason explains that “God has ordained man and woman to serve him in different offices” and that this is why it “would not be at all appropriate for
[women] to go and appear so brazenly in court like men, for there are enough men who do so.” But, Lady Reason immediately adds, what is generally the case need not always be the case. “If anyone maintained that women do not possess enough understanding to learn the laws,” she continues, “the opposite is obvious from the proof afforded by experience, which is manifest and has been manifest in many women.”
⁵⁹
Natural and divine hierarchies matter, but they are not absolute, and in extraordinary circumstances women must act in extraordinary ways. Lady Reason assures Christine that “a woman with a mind is fit for all tasks,” and the bulk of
The Book of the City of Ladies
bears this claim out as the three allegorical ladies provide example after example of women who performed remarkable and virtuous actions when circumstances demanded it. Christine relates stories of empresses and queens who, suddenly finding themselves widowed, threatened on all sides, take control of their countries, rule them wisely, develop laws, defend them from attacking enemies, and conquer neighboring countries.

But if these stories are meant to demonstrate what women can do, they also, crucially, demonstrate what women are. However diverse their motives or flawed their logic, the lies men tell about women are grounded in stories that reveal famous women to be nothing but liars and temptresses. History seems to support misogyny and, as Jean de Meun wrote in defense of his accounts of deceitful woman, his stories are true so long as the “worthy men who wrote the old books did not lie.” If the misogynist argues from example to rule, Christine’s final move is to undercut their examples, to demonstrate that the very stories men tell to demonstrate that all women are liars are themselves lies, mistruths, and implausible exaggerations. History itself becomes the battleground to disprove the misogynist reification of women into deceitful woman. Until now, Christine claims, no one has contested the slanderous histories men write, so their unchallenged lies thereby become authorities, and such authority is the guarantor of truth. “Just as you yourself once said regarding this question,” Lady Rectitude says, reminding Christine of her earlier poem
The Letter of the God of Love
, “whoever goes to court without an opponent pleads very
much at his ease.” In that earlier poem, Christine had no doubt that “[i]f women had written all those books, I know the works would read quite differently, for well do women know this blame is wrong.”
⁶⁰

It is, at first glance, a curious strategy. To counter traditional claims that women are liars, claims rooted in long-accepted histories, stories, and exempla, Christine will rewrite those stories, rewrite accepted history to exonerate women. On the surface, it seems she is doing little else than confirming worst suspicions, countering authority with falsification, creating fictions to counter truths, lying to prove women aren’t liars. Christine, unsurprisingly, deflects these claims, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. On a number of occasions she looks to her own experience as a woman, her knowledge of herself and of other women, to justify her alterations to commonly told stories. Lady Justice reminds her, for example, that all she needs to do is think about herself and her own body to know that
Women’s Secrets
is nothing but a pastiche of absurd and puerile fantasies, just as all she needs to do is reflect on the lives of friends and acquaintances to know that more often than not women, far from ruling their husbands like the serfs of imperious queens, suffer more from their husbands’ cruelties and beatings “than if they were slaves among the Saracens.”
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Often reflection on the lives of her contemporaries serves as the basis for making sense of the lives of women long since dead, a reflection rooted in the commonly held belief that human nature remains constant over time.
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Nowhere is Christine’s dependence on her own experience to rewrite history more evident than in the story of the young and beautiful Tertia Aemilia, who learns that her aged husband, the legendary Roman general Scipio, has taken up with a mere servant girl. Giovanni Boccaccio had included this story in
Famous Women
, a sort of encyclopedic collection of brief stories of well-known women that he composed between 1361 and 1362. Boccaccio praises Tertia’s loyalty to her husband. She lets no one know about the affair, concealing her own emotional pain in order to protect the reputation of her much-respected husband. Having
lauded her discretion, Boccaccio cannot help but move from Tertia’s story to general reflections about women. Tertia, Boccaccio suggests, like all women, was a weak and suspicious creature suffering from low self-esteem, and this makes her actions all the more marvelous precisely because they are so unexpected from a woman. Had she been like most women, she would have called in her family and friends, filling “their ears with slander and complaints” while harassing her “husband in public with tearful protests,” ruining the reputation of a person “who in all other respects was a man of spotless honor.”
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For her part, Christine, who composed
The Book of the City of Ladies
with a copy of Boccaccio’s work at hand, praises Tertia, who “never ceased to serve her husband loyally, to love him, and to honor him.” Unlike Boccaccio, rather than assess Tertia’s behavior in light of some abstracted conception of feminine nature, Christine simply notes that her behavior is hardly uncommon. “I have seen similar women,” she tells Lady Rectitude, including most recently a young and beautiful countess in Brittany who “thanks to great constancy and goodness did the same.”
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Christine emphasizes examples of constancy to counter claims that all women are fickle and inconstant. These claims found their biological support in a theory of complexion that held women to be moister than men and, therefore, less rational, less able to retain moral lessons, and all too easily led astray by the senses and physical pleasures. As Albert the Great, John Buridan, and a host of others had surmised, the female body itself renders women merely cunning, never prudent, naturally prone toward evil and every sort of deception. Christine attacks these ideas at the very beginning of her biographies, when she praises Eve’s body. The first woman was created in paradise itself, not from vile mud, but from “the noblest substance which had ever been created … the body of man.”
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Nor did she deceive Adam, Christine argues in
The Letter to the God of Love
. She believed what the serpent said, repeated it to Adam in good faith, with neither fraud nor guile, and things said with no hidden spite “must not be labeled deceptiveness.”
⁶⁶

Perhaps Eve was not deceitful, but this account of her actions certainly opens her to charges of dull-wittedness and inconstancy. No doubt with this concern in mind, Christine quickly turns to the story of Semiramis. Following the death of her husband, King Ninus of Nineveh, Semiramis took control of his empire, expanded and secured its borders, built fortresses, and founded cities. A notoriously infamous figure, Boccaccio had already included her story in
Famous Women
, suggesting that Semiramis initially took control of Ninus’s army through deceit, pretending to be her young beardless son. While this example of feminine wile does not seem particularly to perturb Boccaccio, Semiramis’s private life is another matter. “Like others of her sex,” he writes, “this unhappy female constantly burned with carnal desire and it is believed she gave herself to many men,” including her own son, whom she eventually married. Appalled, Boccaccio asserts that Semiramis’s lust deranged her judgment. She became “heedless of time or circumstances” as base pleasure dragged her ever closer to the abyss. In a cunning attempt to cover her crimes, she passed laws allowing every sort of sexual impropriety, hoping her own sick pleasures might pale in comparison with those of her subjects. No good could come from any of this and, in the end, her own son slaughtered her, whether through fear others would interfere with his incestuous nights or because he had grown disgusted with himself Boccaccio refuses to say.
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Overflowing with deceit, lust, and depravity, Boccaccio’s telling of Semiramis’s life seems perfectly modeled on Scholastic accounts of woman, all women. They lack prudence and have no concern with the common good. They desire nothing but their own satisfaction, never hesitating to employ corrupt means for even worse ends.