My personal rule for the TBR Triple Dog Dare is basically just: no library books. If it’s on my shelves, it’s fair game. This means that I’m fine with re-reading things during the time of the Dare, especially if I think that after a re-read, I might decide to give a book away and free up some shelf space.
Which brings me to The Book of the City of Ladies, which was written in 1405, and which I acquired and read for some class in college on medieval literature. I’ve moved it with me to four different apartments over the course of the almost-twelve years since I graduated, but I hadn’t felt compelled to re-read it until now. Christine’s a proto-feminist, and that’s pretty excellent. And for something written 600+ years ago, it’s surprisingly readable, though I’m not sure how much of it’s the style of Earl Jeffrey Richards’s translation and how much is the style of the book itself. But having re-read it now, I’m probably going to set my copy free.
But, anyway, the book. At the start, Christine-as-narrator talks about how she’s been feeling lousy about having been born a woman rather than a man, because all these male authors (including great philosophers and such) say bad things about women in their books, and surely they can’t all be mistaken, right? At which point three ladies, who turn out to be Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, appear to her in a vision, and tell her that they’ll help her to build a “City of Ladies,” which will be constructed of examples proving those slandering male authors wrong.
Some of the arguments that Christine makes through her three ladies are really great, including a passage near the beginning of the book where Reason explains that some older men say bad things about women because:
they are pained when they see that their ‘good times’ have now passed them by, and it seems to them that the young, who are now what they once were, are on top of the world. They do not know how to overcome their sadness except by attacking women, hoping to make women less attractive to other men. (Section I.8.5)
Reason argues that men and women have “wholly similar souls” (I.9.2), and that women can be brave, and also that there have been plenty of great women rulers, proving that women can handle law and government just fine, thanks. She also argues that women can learn things just as well as men can, if you have a culture that educates daughters and not just sons, and that if women know less than men, it’s because “they are not involved in many different things, but stay at home, where it is enough for them to run the household, and there is nothing which so instructs a reasonable creature as the exercise and experience of many different things” (I.27.1). In Rectitude’s portion of the book, there’s a whole section refuting the claim that “women want to be raped,” and yeah, it’s alarming that this is still relevant, all these centuries later. And then Justice wraps things up by talking about various female saints and martyrs. Christine is clearly writing in a very different time, and her values may differ from those of a 21st-century feminist, especially a non-religious one like me, but still, I’m glad I re-read this. (I was an English major/history minor in college, and that meant a lot of reading, and reading a lot of things at once, and writing a whole lot of papers. My memories of many of those things I read in college are fairly dim, and it’s nice to re-read some of them now, when I read only one book at a time, without any looming deadlines.)
Also: there’s one section of the book whose title is this, which is kind of the best thing ever: “How the strong Hercules and Theseus, his companion, went from Greece with a large army and fleet to the Amazons, and how the two maidens, Menalippe and Hippolyta, beat them, horses and all, into a heap” (I.18).
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