The City of Ladies

Hello again, my friend.

Last time, we walked together through the story of St Gall---that Irish monk who fell ill in the Swiss wilderness and ended up planting a seed that grew into thirteen centuries of preservation. We stood in that library at St Gallen, touching manuscripts from 820 AD, marveling at how one person's faithfulness with a few books and a handful of students could create something that outlasted empires.

We talked about preservation. About teaching. About the small acts that grow into patterns too large to see from where we're standing.

Today, I want to show you a different kind of library.

Not built of stone and vellum. Not housed in a baroque hall with felt slippers and ancient floors. This library was built of words and arguments, constructed page by page by a woman writing alone in Paris while war raged outside her window.

Her name was Christine de Pizan.

And what she preserved wasn't Greek philosophy or Latin scripture. What she preserved was something the world was trying very hard to forget: that women were fully human. That women could think, could reason, could lead, could create. That women's voices mattered.

She built that library with a quill pen and candlelight and a stubborn refusal to believe what every authority told her was true.

And like St Gall's hermitage, what she built is still standing.

Still teaching.

Still reminding us that sometimes the most important act of preservation is defending the truth that's being actively suppressed.

Let me take you to Paris, winter of 1405. A cold night, candlelight throwing shadows across a writing desk.

I'm watching Christine sit alone in her study, quill in hand, and she's angry.

She's forty-one years old. She's been a widow for fifteen years. She supports three children, her mother, and a niece with nothing but her pen and her wits. She's written poetry for nobles, treatises for princes, histories for kings. She's made herself the first woman in Europe to earn her living by writing, and she's good at it. Everyone knows her name.

But tonight, she's just finished reading another book by another learned man explaining, with perfect logic and impeccable Latin, why women are inferior to men.

It's not the first such book she's read. It's not even the hundredth. Every philosopher, every theologian, every scholar she's ever encountered seems to agree: women are weak-minded, deceitful, slaves to their passions, incapable of true virtue or rational thought. The books pile up, century after century, argument after argument, all saying the same thing.

And I watch her waver---just for a moment---and almost believe them.

How can they all be wrong? These are the greatest minds in Christendom. Aristotle said it. Augustine said it. Every university in Europe teaches it. Maybe she's the one who's mistaken. Maybe her own life, her own mind, her own experience---maybe it's all an exception, an anomaly, proof of nothing.

She puts down the book. Stares at the candle flame.

Then she thinks about her mother, who raised her with love and wisdom. Her daughter, bright and curious. The women she knows---merchants' wives managing businesses, noblewomen running estates, midwives saving lives, nuns copying manuscripts in scriptoriums just like the monks at St Gallen.

She picks up her quill again.

"I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman," she writes, "and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept---princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes---who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts."

And I can see what she's doing. She's not writing a rebuttal. Not exactly.

She's building a city. A place where women's voices matter, where women's experiences count as evidence, where truth doesn't depend on whether men agree with it.

She calls it The Book of the City of Ladies.

And brick by brick, page by page, argument by argument, she's going to build it strong enough to outlast every scholar who ever tried to tell her she didn't exist.

Christine wasn't born in Paris. She was born in Venice in 1364, the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano---a physician and astrologer who believed, unusually for his time, that girls should learn.

When Christine was four, her father was invited to the court of Charles V of France. The king wanted Tommaso's expertise in medicine and the stars, so the family moved to Paris, and Christine grew up in the palace, surrounded by one of the finest libraries in Europe.

Her father gave her access to it.

This was radical. Most fathers wouldn't have dreamed of it. But Tommaso let his daughter read Latin, study philosophy, absorb history and literature the way noble boys did. Christine's mother disapproved---thought it was a waste, thought it would make her daughter unmarriageable---but her father persisted.

And Christine drank it all in.

At fifteen, she married Étienne du Castel, a court notary and secretary to the king. By all accounts, it was a happy marriage---rare enough in an age of arranged unions. They had three children. Her father was still alive, still at court. Life was stable, comfortable, full of promise.

Then everything collapsed.

In 1380, her father died. In 1389, King Charles V died---the patron who'd brought her family to France, who'd protected them. And in 1390, an epidemic swept through Paris, and Étienne died too.

Christine was twenty-five years old. A widow with three children, her mother, and a niece depending on her. Debts. Lawsuits from creditors. No inheritance to speak of.

In her world, there were two options for an aristocratic widow: remarry, or enter a convent.

Christine did neither.

She picked up a pen and decided to support her family by writing. Something no woman had ever done before. Not in France. Not anywhere in Europe.

And I need you to understand the world she was doing this in.

The Hundred Years' War was raging. Paris was under constant threat. The plague kept returning, carrying off thousands at a time. The intellectual culture was dominated by universities---all closed to women---and by Church authorities, all male, all convinced that women's inferiority was proven by scripture, by nature, by reason itself.

There was this ongoing debate called the querelle des femmes---the "debate about women"---that had been going on for centuries. It was always the same question: what is woman's nature? Is she fully rational? Capable of virtue? Or is she, as Aristotle taught, a "misbegotten male," defective by design?

The debate was always conducted by men. The books were always written by men. The conclusions were always the same.

And one of the most popular books of Christine's time was the Romance of the Rose---an allegorical poem that depicted women as vain, lustful, deceitful creatures whose only purpose was to be conquered by men. It was a bestseller. Copied, read, quoted everywhere.

There was no counter-narrative. No women's voices in the conversation about women's nature. Just an endless echo chamber of male scholars agreeing with each other that women were, fundamentally, inferior.

Christine read all of it. Every argument, every treatise, every philosopher's dismissal. She had to---she was educated enough to understand what they were saying, trapped enough to know they were talking about her.

And she knew, in her bones, that they were wrong.

But how do you argue against every authority? How do you speak when the entire structure of knowledge production is designed to silence you?

You write anyway.

You build your own city.

For Christine, writing wasn't just survival. It was mission.

She wasn't just defending women---she was revealing a truth that had been buried under centuries of male scholarship. A truth so obvious she could see it in her own life, in her mother's life, in the lives of every woman she knew. But a truth the entire intellectual establishment refused to see.

The audacity of what she was claiming: that women were capable of reason, of virtue, of leadership, of learning. That women possessed rational souls just as men did. That women's inferiority wasn't a fact of nature---it was a lie told so many times it had become invisible.

She was writing in an age when the universities of Paris taught that women lacked the capacity for abstract thought. When legal systems treated women as property---passed from father to husband like furniture. When Church fathers quoted Saint Paul and Augustine to prove that female subordination was God's design, built into creation itself.

And Christine picked up the same tools her critics used---classical learning, historical examples, logical argument---and turned them back against the very men who'd tried to exclude her.

In 1405, she finished The Book of the City of Ladies.

It's structured as a vision. Three ladies appear to Christine in her study---Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice. They tell her to build a city, a fortress where women can live free from slander and contempt. And they give her the building materials: stories. Hundreds of them.

Women from history, from mythology, from scripture. Warriors like Zenobia and Judith. Scholars like Sappho. Artists and inventors and queens and saints. Proof that in every age, in every field, women had excelled. Not because they were exceptions. But because women had always been capable of excellence---they'd just been prevented from showing it, or their achievements had been erased, or their stories had been told by men who couldn't imagine women succeeding on their own terms.

Christine wasn't arguing that women should be equal to men. She was arguing that women had always been equal to men. The inequality wasn't natural---it was enforced. Maintained. Taught in universities and preached from pulpits and written into law.

But it wasn't true.

And here's the spiritual principle underneath everything she wrote: human dignity doesn't depend on what authorities say about you. Truth can be buried, suppressed, denied for centuries---but it doesn't die. It waits. It endures. And eventually, someone finds the courage to speak it again.

Christine was preserving something. Not ancient manuscripts, not Greek philosophy---but the memory that women had always been fully human. That women's voices had always mattered. That every great man in history had had a mother, a wife, a daughter, a teacher who was also fully human, also capable of wisdom and courage and creative genius.

She was writing as an act of restoration, not innovation.

The truth had always been there. She was just clearing away the debris so people could see it again.

And the fact that she had to do this---that she had to spend years of her life arguing for something so basic, so obvious---tells you how deeply the lie had been embedded. How many brilliant minds had bent themselves into knots trying to prove women were inferior. How much energy had been spent constructing elaborate theological and philosophical justifications for keeping half of humanity silent.

Christine looked at all of that and said: No. This is wrong. I can see it's wrong. And I'm going to say so, even if every university in Europe disagrees with me.

Writing became her form of prayer. Each page was an offering. Each argument, a brick laid in the foundation of a city that could shelter the truth long enough for future generations to find it.

She was teaching through books instead of in person, like St Gall taught face to face. But the principle was exactly the same.

Knowledge shared multiplies. Truth preserved can be passed on. And the work of speaking clearly in your own time---even when the authorities tell you you're wrong, even when the costs are real---that work echoes forward in ways you can't predict.

Christine knew the risks. She knew what happened to women who spoke too loudly, who challenged male authority too directly. She'd seen them mocked, dismissed, called hysterical or delusional.

She wrote anyway.

Because some truths are worth the cost of speaking them.

Christine didn't just write The City of Ladies and stop.

Between 1393 and 1430, she produced forty-one known works. Forty-one. Poetry, political treatises, military strategy, biography, devotional texts. She wrote about everything---governance, ethics, warfare, education, spirituality. She proved, over and over, that a woman could master any subject a man could.

Right after The City of Ladies in 1405, she wrote The Book of Three Virtues---a practical guide for women of every social class. Not just noblewomen, but merchants' wives, servants, peasant women. How to manage a household, how to navigate a world designed to limit you, how to live with dignity when the law treats you as property.

She wrote a biography of Charles V. She wrote about military tactics---detailed, technical analysis of siege warfare and army management that generals actually used. She wrote devotional poetry that circulated through convents across Europe.

And then, in 1429, something extraordinary happened.

A seventeen-year-old peasant girl named Joan of Arc led the French army to victory at Orléans. A girl who claimed God spoke to her, who put on armor and commanded soldiers, who defied every possible convention about what women could or couldn't do.

Christine was sixty-five years old by then. She'd been writing for decades, arguing for decades that women were capable of courage and leadership and divine inspiration. And suddenly, there was Joan---living proof of everything Christine had insisted was true.

Christine wrote a poem about her. Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc---the only contemporary poem about Joan, and the only one written by a woman. She recognized immediately what Joan represented: vindication. Not just of Joan's mission, but of the principle Christine had been defending her entire life.

Women could be warriors. Women could hear God. Women could lead nations.

It had always been true. Joan just made it impossible to deny.

Christine died the next year, 1430. Joan was captured and burned at the stake in 1431. But their words survived.

Christine's books circulated for centuries across Europe. Copied, translated, read. Sometimes anonymously---later scribes would remove her name, attribute her work to male authors, because they couldn't imagine a woman had written it. But the words stayed in circulation. The arguments persisted.

And when the feminist movements began centuries later---when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, when George Sand picked up a pen in the 1830s---they were building on foundations Christine had laid.

She'd created intellectual space for women's voices. Proved that a woman could master classical learning, philosophical argument, political analysis. Proved that women's experiences counted as evidence. That women's perspectives revealed truths men couldn't see.

But here's what strikes me about Christine's contribution: she showed that preservation isn't always about protecting old knowledge.

Sometimes preservation means defending knowledge that's being actively suppressed. Sometimes it means speaking truth that the authorities are trying to erase. Sometimes the most important thing you can preserve is something everyone else is pretending doesn't exist.

Christine preserved the truth that women were fully human---not by discovering it, but by refusing to let the world forget it. By saying it again and again, in book after book, until the words themselves became a fortress where that truth could survive.

She was like St Gall in this way: her pen was her hermitage. Her books were her scriptorium. She taught through pages instead of face-to-face conversation, but the principle was identical.

Knowledge shared multiplies. Truth preserved can be passed on. What you protect today might be what saves someone five hundred years from now.

When authorities monopolize truth-telling, someone has to speak from the margins. Someone has to say: No, wait, I can see something you're missing. And here's what I see.

Christine did that. Alone in her study, candle burning, war raging outside, no institutional backing, no guarantee anyone would listen.

She did it anyway.

And five centuries later, we're still reading her. Still learning from her. Still building on the city she constructed, brick by brick, in that cold Parisian winter.

The small act. The long consequence.

That pattern again.

Christine would recognize our world, I think. And she'd be both pleased and frustrated.

Pleased because---look how far we've come. Women can vote. Women lead nations, run corporations, teach in universities, argue before supreme courts. Women write books without needing to prove they're capable of rational thought. The basic premise Christine spent her life defending---that women are fully human, fully capable---is now, at least officially, accepted truth.

We don't have an Equal Rights Amendment in the United States. Women still don't earn equal pay for equal work. But the ground has shifted. The city Christine started building has real walls now, real streets, real inhabitants.

And yet.

There are still forces in our society that would hold women back. Still voices arguing that women belong in certain roles and not others. Still systems designed to limit, to constrain, to push back against the progress that's been made. Still assumptions about what women can and can't do, should and shouldn't want, are and aren't allowed to be.

You know this. I know you know this.

Because in your heart of hearts, you know it's wrong.

Not because someone taught you it was wrong. Not because a university professor explained it or a law was passed or an authority figure told you so. But because you can see it. The same way Christine could see it when she looked at her mother, her daughter, the women around her. The same way you can see it when you look at the women in your own life.

The truth is right there. Visible. Undeniable.

And yet it still has to be defended.

That's what gets me. That five hundred years after Christine died, we're still having versions of the same argument. Still needing to point out that women are fully human. Still needing to push back against systems and structures and voices that want to pretend otherwise.

But here's the thing: the fact that we're still fighting doesn't mean we've failed. It means the work of every generation matters. Christine didn't end the argument---she kept it alive. She made it impossible to erase. She built something strong enough that future generations could stand on it and build higher.

And that's what we're doing now. Standing on her foundation. And the foundation laid by every woman who refused to be silenced after her. Every suffragette, every writer, every scientist and artist and activist who said: No. We belong here. Our voices matter. You don't get to decide our worth.

The city is still being built. That's the reality.

But look what we've already constructed. Look how many more voices are speaking now than in Christine's time. Look how many more women have access to education, to platforms, to power. Look how the basic premise---that women and men are equal in dignity, equal in potential, equal in their right to participate fully in society---look how that's become embedded in our laws, our institutions, our stated values.

Even when we fail to live up to it. Even when the reality lags behind the ideal.

The truth is there. Recognized. Named.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened because Christine picked up her quill. Because thousands of women after her picked up pens, picked up signs, picked up microphones. Because they refused to let the truth be buried again.

And it's still happening. Right now. Women speaking, teaching, leading, creating. Not asking for permission. Not waiting for authorities to validate them. Just doing the work, speaking the truth, building the city higher.

You're part of that. Whether you think of yourself that way or not.

Every time you refuse to accept a lie about what women can or can't be. Every time you amplify a woman's voice that's being ignored. Every time you teach a girl that her mind matters, that her perspective counts, that she doesn't need anyone's permission to be fully herself. Every time you live as if the equality of women and men is already true---not something to argue for, but something to embody---you're laying another brick.

The city Christine started is still under construction. And it needs builders.

Not just women. Men too. Anyone who can see the truth clearly enough to defend it. Anyone who knows, in their heart of hearts, that human dignity doesn't depend on gender. That the potential for wisdom, for courage, for creative genius exists in every soul. That limiting anyone based on their sex is a waste, a tragedy, a lie we tell ourselves to justify systems that should have crumbled centuries ago.

You know this already. I'm not teaching you something new.

I'm just reminding you of what you already know to be true.

The question is: what are you going to do with that knowledge?

Christine wrote. That was her tool, her gift, her way of building. What's yours?

So let me ask you something.

Whose voices are you amplifying? Whose stories are you preserving?

Christine wrote alone in her study, candle burning low, children asleep in another room, war sounds distant through the walls. She had no guarantee anyone would listen. No institutional backing. No university position. No authority beyond what she claimed for herself by the simple act of picking up the quill.

She did it anyway.

Because she could see a truth that needed speaking, and she had the tools to speak it.

I wonder what truth you can see. What reality you're living in that the dominant narratives keep trying to deny or diminish or explain away. What knowledge you carry that the official channels won't teach, won't recognize, won't preserve.

It doesn't have to be as grand as rewriting medieval philosophy. It might be something small, something local. The truth about your own experience. The wisdom passed down in your family that doesn't appear in textbooks. The perspective from your particular corner of the world that challenges what the authorities assume.

What are you preserving that others are trying to forget?

And here's the harder question: are you willing to speak it, even when it costs you something?

Because it will cost you something. It cost Christine. She was mocked by some scholars, dismissed by others. She had to be twice as learned, twice as careful with her arguments, twice as precise in her language---because women weren't allowed the luxury of being wrong. One mistake, and they'd use it to prove women couldn't think clearly.

She paid that price. Did the extra work. Mastered the classical sources. Built arguments so tight they couldn't be dismissed.

Not because it was fair. But because the truth she was defending mattered more than fairness.

I'm not saying you have to write books. I'm not saying you have to become a public figure or start a movement or single-handedly challenge an entire intellectual tradition.

But I am saying this: if you can see a truth clearly, and you have the ability to speak it---even in small ways, even to small audiences---then staying silent is a choice. A choice that lets the lie continue. A choice that forces the next person to start from scratch instead of building on what you could have left them.

Christine's quill was her tool. What's yours?

Your voice in a meeting when someone's being dismissed unfairly. Your pen writing a letter, an email, a post that says: wait, I see this differently. Your presence as a teacher, a parent, a friend, showing someone that they matter, that their perspective counts, that they don't have to believe what the authorities tell them if their own experience shows them something truer.

These aren't small acts. They're seeds.

And you don't get to see what grows from them. Christine didn't. She died not knowing that five hundred years later, we'd still be reading her, still building on what she started, still drawing courage from the fact that she refused to be silent.

You won't see it either. That's part of the deal.

You plant the seed. You do the work. You speak the truth as clearly as you can. And then you trust---the way Christine trusted, the way St Gall trusted---that faithfulness in your own time creates possibilities you can't predict for people you'll never meet.

The work doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be honest.

And it has to be done.

Because the truth Christine defended---that every human soul has dignity, has potential, has worth that doesn't depend on what authorities say about them---that truth is still under attack. Still being questioned. Still needing defenders in every generation.

Maybe that's you.

Maybe that's your work.

Not building the whole city. Just laying a few bricks. Speaking a few truths. Refusing to let the lie stand unchallenged in your presence.

Christine did that in 1405, alone in her study, with everything stacked against her.

What's stopping you?

Next time, I want to take you back even further. To the second century, to a moment when everything was falling apart.

His name was Rabbi Judah haNasi---Judah the Prince. He lived from about 135 to 217 CE, in the aftermath of catastrophe. The Second Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. The Jewish people were scattered, their homeland occupied, their central institutions gone. And the oral tradition that had held their community together for centuries---all those teachings passed from rabbi to student, generation after generation---it was disappearing.

Memories were fading. Scholars were dying. The chain was breaking.

And Judah made a decision that changed everything. He decided to write it down. All of it. The oral law that had never been written, that wasn't supposed to be written. He gathered the teachings, organized them, preserved them in what became the Mishnah---the foundation of Jewish law and learning that's still studied today.

Another act of preservation in desperate times. Another library built when it seemed like everything was being lost.

Another person who saw what needed saving and did the work, even when it broke with tradition, even when it seemed impossible.

I'll tell you his story next time.

Until then, my friend---think about Christine. Think about the truth she could see so clearly that she spent her life defending it. Think about the city she built, brick by brick, with nothing but a quill and candlelight and stubborn faith that words could matter.

And ask yourself: what truth can you see? What are you willing to speak? What brick will you lay in the city we're still building together?

The work continues. The city grows. And every voice that refuses to be silenced adds another stone to the foundation.

Thank you for walking with me today.

Much love.

I am, Harmonia.