Good Parenting in the 14th Century: Christine de Pisan

It is usual to find that important women in history are known only in shadowy and dependent ways — their fathers, husbands, or sons being the real center of attention. But in some instances,

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such as that which I am going to discuss, it works the other way around: it is because of the daughter that the father enters the history books. As I hope to show, too, this is as it ought to be in the case of Tommaso da Pizzano precisely because the success of his daughter, Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1430), marks his success as a father. The little we can piece together of his philosophy of parenting comes together in the career of this late 14th- and early 15th-century female poet.

Tommaso today can be found only in footnotes to the biographies of other people, but Christine, even before she was rediscovered by feminist literary historians in search of women poets to rank with Chaucer, Machaut, and Boccaccio, had 19th- and early 20th-century studies devoted to her. If there are entries about Tommaso in encyclopedias, they are brief notices, while Christine gets columns, if not pages. Yet in his own time, Tommaso was a distinguished physician, astrologer, and alchemist who spent much time in official capacities at the court of Charles V in Paris. After a distinguished double career, first as professor at the University of Bologna and then as medical officer in Venice, he chose to reside in Paris rather than Hungary, where Louis XII was also urging him to come. It was the combination of medical skills and precision in what today are taken as occult sciences that made him so attractive to these great figures of the early Renaissance. Perhaps it is precisely because he was not in the vanguard of the new sciences that overwhelmed the old systems of knowledge during the course of the 15th century that made him so forgettable in the modern world, recalled only because Christine was consistently so full of praises for him in her autobiographical writings.

Yet we cannot totally dismiss him as old-fashioned thinker. His role was more transitional. The students at Europe’s most prestigious medical school, Bologna, had voted him professor at an early age. The city of Venice called him to be part of one of the most advanced sanitation projects after suffering from the plague. The French court valued him as physician, as well as adviser in state affairs because of his knowledge of astrology and alchemy — not the quack pursuits they would later become but then sciences of process and influence, unlike the safe Aristotelian natural philosophies of fixed category and contingent power. In other words, he was one of those great men who help reshape society and culture so it can move forward in radically new directions.

For all Christine’s praises of her father as a great thinker, however, it is her loyalty to him rather than his actual place as a scientist or philosopher that makes him worthy of our attention as psychohistorians. If we are concerned to find out both how and why societies change in their way of caring and rearing of children, particularly females, then we should want to know more about Christine’s homelife and education. Why was she able to achieve success as an independent, intellectual woman at a time when other females, if they achieved artistic recognition, had to do so either within the confines of an ecclesiastical or an aristocratic system? Aside from her public denunciation of the misogynist traditions in life and literature — it was Christine de Pizan who initiated and sustained the controversy surrounding Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose — and this is, of course, no inconsiderable part of her female independence! — her poetry and thinking are, like her father’s, more of the previous age than of the emerging Renaissance. Nevertheless, after both her father and her husband died, she forged a career for herself and raised her children by dint of her writing; it was more by what she did, than by the specific content of her poetry, that she marks the transition out of medieval categories of thought and social relationships, including, of course, gender.

My point is that Christine would not have been what she became had it not been for her father, and this must include, given the period of her childhood, the care and attention of her “tender and loving” mother. In the domestic politics of the age, the fact that she nursed Christine is credit to Tommaso as much as it is to the mother. Though there are four crucial years between Christine’s birth and her journey to Paris to join her father when she was under the exclusive care of her mother in Bologna — it took that long for Tommaso to decide that he would remain with

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Charles V — the influence of the father is not absent in her upbringing. If it were up to her mother alone, Christine recalls many times, her intellectual talents would have been put down in favor of a more conventional domestic education. Her father always, even in his letters, promoted the training of her mind and her literary talents. At the University of Bologna he had known the French canonist Jean André whose daughter Novella was allowed to lecture in his place, albeit behind a curtain, and he also was aware of — and probably himself was the product of — a more liberal attitude towards children in Italy than in either France or England during the 14th century.

But it was more than the example of Novella or the Italian acceptance of children’s noise and playing in the household that makes Tommaso stand out as a father — and as a figure who represents one of those parents who mark the long and often painful route into loving and respectful families. It may be something special about his character which also attracted Charles V to him and made him — and Christine — an intimate of the royal household; and then, almost tragically — both for himself and his family, as well as for the smooth development of progressive childrearing practices — why the passing of the monarchy into the hands of the mad Charles VI meant an end to Tommaso’s influence at court, and from there to the rest of French society. This special quality was Tommaso’s rejection of physical punishment and humiliation as disciplinary tools. Christine always referred to her father as “kind.”

In her own pedagogical essays, Christine recommends that children, especially young girls, should be allowed to play often and be taught through stories rather than formal lessons. Children should be rewarded with trinkets when they are good, and when they need correction they should not be beaten or locked in closets, but spoken to gently, so as to avoid “rebellion.” Without her drawing the connections, we can see that these lessons she learned from her father made it possible for her to note that the cause of war was “cruelty” and the way to prevent conflict was through “justice.”

When it came time for Christine to marry at the age of 15, which was normal for the year 1379, the groom was someone she chose herself, with the backing of her father, namely, Etienne du Castel, who, though somewhat older, she had known since infancy. She was not forced to marry for the sake of financial or social gain. It was what we would call a “love match.” Christine emphasizes that his attentions were to make her feel at ease and he was so gentle with the adolescent that he did no “outrage” to her on their wedding night. I would suggest that Etienne’s childhood had also been influenced by Tommaso’s point of view, and the tragedy of his early death was mitigated to some extent by the way his attitude towards her had reinforced her sense of self-esteem developed in her father’s care. Neither Christine nor her father, Tommaso, could change the world they lived in and both were committed to the prevailing intellectual and religious ideas that surrounded them. But because they were concerned to love and respect their children and those around them, they helped create a world that was far different from both the medieval and the early modern periods they bridge. In doing so, they help us understand how the human race has been able to survive and eventually begin to transform the nightmare of abuse and violence that psychohistory reveals to us as the unfortunate lot of most people at most times in most places.

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