Christine de Pizan (c.1364-1430) was France's first professional woman of letters. Her pioneering Book of the City of Ladies begins when, feeling frustrated and miserable after reading a male writer's tirade against women, Christine has a dreamlike vision where three virtues - Reason, Rectitude and Justice - appear to correct this view. They instruct her to build an allegorical city in which womankind can be defended against slander, its walls and towers constructed from examples of female achievement both from her own day and the past: ranging from warriors, inventors and scholars to prophetesses, artists and saints. Christine de Pizan's spirited defence of her sex was unique for its direct confrontation of the misogyny of her day, and offers a telling insight into the position of women in medieval culture. THE CITY OF LADIES provides positive images of women, ranging from warriors and inventors, scholars to prophetesses, and artists to saints. The book also offers a fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture.

Written by Europe’s first professional woman writer, The Treasure of the City of Ladies offers advice and guidance to women of all ages and from all levels of medieval society, from royal courtiers to prostitutes. It paints an intricate picture of daily life in the courts and streets of fifteenth-century France and gives a fascinating glimpse into the practical considerations of running a household, dressing appropriately and maintaining a reputation in all circumstances. Christine de Pizan’s book provides a valuable counterbalance to male accounts of life in the middle ages and demonstrates, often with dry humour, how a woman’s position in society could be made less precarious by following the correct etiquette.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.

An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

"Fresh, accurate, and engaging, this new translation of the Book of the City of Ladies helps us to understand what made Christine de Pizan so popular with her fifteenth-century contemporaries. The editors provide a rich historical and philosophical context that will be very useful to both students and scholars of the history of political ideas. The translations themselves gracefully navigate the fine line between accuracy and readability with considerable charm. Rounding out this portrait of the turmoil of fifteenth-century France, the volume is enriched by excerpts from other works, Christine's Vision, the Book of the Body Politic, and the Lamentation on France’s Ills." —Kate Forhan, Emeritus, Siena College CONTENTS:IntroductionA Note on Translating the Book of the City of LadiesChristine de Pizan: Her works, Her TimesSuggestions for Further ReadingFrom Christine's Vision (1405)The Book of the City of Ladies (1404–1405)From The Book of the Body Politic (1404–1407)From Lamentation on France's Ills (1410)Index

Transcendence in general and transformation in particular have long been established as key motifs in apocalypses. The transformation of a seer during a heavenly journey is found commonly in such esoteric apocalypses as I Enoch. No heavenly journey occurs in the apocalypses treated here. Rather, symbolic women figures--"ladies" in the classical sense--who are associated with God's city or Tower, undergo transformation at key points in the action. The surface structures of Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and The Shepherd of Hermas are traced, and the crucial transformation episodes are located within each structure. Transformation of figures which represent God's people points to the significance of identitiy within the apocalyptic perspective. Earlier analyses have demonstrated that the apocalyptic perspective urges the reader to consider life from a different stance in time and in space ("temporal" and "spatial" axes). The present analysis suggests that the apocalypse also charts its revelations along an "axis of identity" so that the reader is invited to become, as it were, someone more in tune with the mysteries he or she is viewing. Of special interest is the treatment of the increasingly well-known romance Joseph and Aseneth alongside apocalypses, a parallel which is fruitful because of the curious visionary sequence, closely related to apocalypse in content and form, which is found in the inner centre of that work.

In the days before organized political parties, the social machine built by these early federal women helped to ease the transition from a failed republican experiment to a burgeoning democracy.