This is one of my favorite illustrations from Medieval history, from _The Book of the Queen_, and shows Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) — the first woman professional writer in French — standing in a celestial sphere surrounded by the sun, moon, and stars. The miniature features a scene from an allegorical tale by de Pizan called “Le chemin de long estude” or “The Path of Long Study.” It’s trippy, full of appreciation for study of the cosmos, and a unique window into the imaginative ideas that a Medieval aristocratic woman might possess.
Christine de Pizan based “The Path of Long Study” partly on Dante’s work. She tells the story as a dream, which was as close to science fiction as possible for her time. Although no feminist (she consistently reminds the reader that she is a humble woman), de Pizan creates a female-oriented universe, where she is the main character, the human explorer, guided by the Ancient (female) Sibyl of Cumae.
In the part of the dream where Christine explores the cosmos, a ladder representing “imagination” comes down from the firmament-sky, and she climbs up and sees the world as a globe below her (it had been widely known since the Greeks that the world was not flat), and the planets and stars soaring around her. At one point she writes: “I then saw the extremely beautiful circle that, with its shining whiteness, lords it over all the others . . . . It is called the Galaxy: it is grand and beautiful and wide. Many have called it the Milky Way because of its whiteness.”
The craving for knowledge that Christine de Pizan shows particularly resonates — she declared that “I was so desirous to know, to understand, and to perceive all the aspects of this heaven that I would have liked, if it were possible, for all of my bodily parts to be transformed into eyes, in order better to observe the beautiful things that I could see . . . .”
De Pizan appreciated and desired knowledge about the natural world. And it feels humbling to know how much more access I have to studying these subjects than did she, as a woman who lived 600 years ago.
Source(s): For image, British Library MS Harley 4431, fol 189 v. _The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan_ Ed and trans by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, “The Path of the Long Study”, pp 59-87
