City of Ladies: modern artists are redefining a 15th-century call to arms by an early French feminist

Over the course of our recent enforced and necessary isolation, several news outlets have pointed out the productive potential of quarantines for Boccaccio and Isaac Newton, both of whom composed their magnum opuses from a place of seclusion. Christine’s vision was given allegorical shape in her work of 1405, The Book of the City of Ladies – a work whose proto-feminist stance has inspired modern artists to creatively imagine how the world might be created differently for women. Christine’s City of Ladies is, in essence, an anthology of good women drawn from historical, literary and biblical sources whose combined stories counter the misogyny found so often in medieval literature.