In The Book of the City of Ladies France's first professional woman of letters confronted head-on the misogyny of fourteenth-century Europe. Here, with the help of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan constructs an allegoricaL city in which to defend womankind, using examples of female virtue and achievement both from the past and her own clay as the stones with which to build the city's walls and towers.This key text in the history of feminism not only provides powerful positive images of women -- ranging from warriors, inventors, and scholars to prophetesses, artists, and saints -- but also offers fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture, which viewed female nature as wholly given up to vice. This Penguin Classics edition also includes a superb Introduction that sets the work within its historical and intellectuaL context, annotations, a Glossary, and a Bibliography.