should meddle with that which is committed to men to do, but doubts not but that if they had equal experience they would be equally full of knowledge. And she quotes many examples of women "illumined of great sciences," from Sappho down to Christine's countrywoman Novella d'Andrea, daughter of a Professor of Civil Law at Bologna, who lectured to her father's students with a curtain before her, that her beauty might not distract the attention of the young men. But Christine, resolved to meet boldly the worst things said of the female intellect, demands next "if there was ever woman that found anything of herself that was not known before." То this Reason promptly answers that the Roman letters were invented by Nicostrata, otherwise called Carmentis ; that Minerva invented iron and steel armour, Ceres the tilling of the earth, Isis gardening, Arene the shearing of sheep, Pamphila the weaving of silk; that Thamar was a mistress of the art of painting, and that Sempronia knew Greek and Latin and was a most accomplished musician. After enlarging on the wealth that has come to the world through the inventions of these noble ladies, Reason has a fling at the "evil-saying clerks"-"they should be ashamed and cast down their eyes, seeing that the very Latin letters, upon the knowledge of which they pride themselves, were invented by a woman."

Such were the foundations of Christine's city of refuge for ladies. When Reason has laid the foundations the walls are raised and crowned with most prosperous speed. Her sisters Righteousness and Justice dispose easily of the arguments of those who deny the moral qualities and the piety of women. All the gibes of monastic cynicism are triumphantly refuted by examples. The work runs to considerable length, as Christine has gathered into it all the materials she used in her numerous battles on behalf of her sex. We dare say it will

be news to many of the modern advocates of the cause that it found so eager and thorough a champion nearly five hundred years ago. Christine's city is a large and rambling range of building, with many quaint towers and turrets, but though time has undermined some of its argumentative defences, one is astonished to find how much of it is still suited for modern habitation.

It

Another of Christine's works enjoyed a still greater reputation in its day. The manual of military tactics and international law is perhaps the most surprising of her achievements. is the book known to antiquaries in Caxton's translation as 'The Boke of Fayttes of Armes and Chyvalrye.' The importance and authority attached to the work may be judged from the fact that it was at the desire of Henry the Seventh that Caxton undertook the translation. To describe it as a manual of military tactics and international law is strictly correct. The productions of Caxton's press are oftener referred to than read, and the common impression about the Boke of Fayttes, derived from a fanciful construction of the title, is that it is a collection of stories of chivalrous

exploits. It is a grave, solid, systematic treatise, handling many topics of the highest policy, from the manners of a good general and the minutiæ of siege operations to the wager of battle, safe-conducts, and letters of marque.

For a woman to attempt the compilation of a soldier's manual was such an extraordinary undertaking that Christine felt bound to make an apology before she went beyond her prologue. She appealed again for her main justification to Minerva, the goddess of war, "the inventor of iron and of all manner of harness." A woman might fairly write about the laws of war when it was a woman that invented its chief implements. But Christine did not profess to be original. She trusted partly to recog nised authorities and partly to the

In

This

kind offices of knightly friends. deed, when she was half through her work, it seems to have occurred to her that she might be accused of plagiarism, and she prepared an ingenious defence, in which the vexed question how far an author may help himself from the works of others is solved with great plausibility. One evening after she had completed the second of the four parts of the book she fell asleep, and a venerable figure appeared to her in her dreams which she recognised as the impersonation of her master Study. "Dear love, Christine," he said to her, "I am hither come to be thy help in the performing of this present book. It is good that thou take and gather of the Tree of Batailles that is in my garden, some fruits of which thou shalt use." was the master's figurative way of saying that Christine was now to have recourse, for that part of her work which dealt with political questions arising out of war, to Honoré Bonnet's 'Arbre des Batailles.' Hitherto she had been chiefly indebted to Vegetius and Frontin. 66 But, my master," she objected, "I beg you to say whether any rebuke will be cast at me for using the said fruit." " By no means,' Study replied. "It is a common use among my disciples to give and impart one to other of the flowers that they take diversely out of my gardens. And all those that help themselves were not the first that have gathered them. Did not Maister Jean de Meun help himself in his Book of the Rose of the sayings of Lorris, and semblably of others? It is, then, no rebuke, but it is laud and praising, when well and properly they be applucked and set by order. And there lieth the maistrie thereof. And it is better to have seen and visited many books."

To the statement of this theory of literary communism it ought to be added that Christine not only shows her "maistrie in "applucking " skilfully, but is most explicit in the acknowledgment of her obligations. The knights who assisted her

in her elaborate directions for siege operations-certain knights wise in these feats of arms-did not desire their names to be known, but everybody else from whom she borrows receives due credit.

Un

The life of this remarkable woman has attracted very little notice from English writers. Horace Walpole touches lightly on her career in his Royal and Noble Authors, commenting with polite levity on the attachment entertained for her by the Earl of Salisbury. This is the only notable reference to her in English literature, and it might have been more respectful. But in France Christine has naturally received more attention. Her biography rests upon autobiographical passages in her own writings, most of which are accessible only in manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Roi. The antiquary Boivin the younger led the way in exploring these at the beginning of last century. His paper on Christine and her father, Thomas de Pisan, printed in the Transactions of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, restored the once famous authoress from her obscurity. fortunately, though the Abbé Boivin produced a curious scrap of biography, he did not perform his task with sufficient care. Doubtless with the best of intentions, he killed Christine's husband thirteen years before, according to Christine herself, his death actually took place. Nobody has discovered on what authority Boivin fixed the date. It may have been that he considered it necessary to account for Christine's resort to authorship as a livelihood. It may have been that he considered it necessary to account for the warmth of the language used by the Earl of Salisbury in his love songs to Christine. At any rate it was unfortunate, for it gave Horace Walpole an opportunity for sneering both at Christine and at her lover. The amiable cynic of Strawberry Hill was under the impression that Christine was a widow when the earl addressed her, and expressed some little con

tempt for him because he could not persuade the mother to leave Paris, and consoled himself by taking her young son under his protection. The truth is that Christine's husband, Etienne du Castel, was alive at the time. This fact was brought to light by the writers of the notice of Christine in the Petitot collection of memoirs. But Boivin's paper, being first in the field, has continued to be the basis of notices of Christine de Pisan in dictionaries of biography, although an excellent monograph has since then been written by Mme. Raimond Thomassy.

It is indeed a very interesting life. By birth Christine belongs to the illustrious company of Italian women who adorned the early years of the Renaissance. She was a native of Italy, and, though she wrote in French, her place is with the female poets, jurists, and scholars whose learning and talents excited the admiration of the Italian courts and universities in the middle ages. Her father, Thomas de Pisan, was a renowned astrologer. To the modern ear this is as much as to say that he was a disreputable quack. The whirligig of Time and the researches of the Psychical Society may bring round its revenges to astrology, but it is difficult nowadays to attach even the idea of respectability to this occult art. It was otherwise in the reign of Charles the Fifth of France. The latter half of the fourteenth century was the palmy period of astrology. Its position then was an adumbration of the position now occupied by science. All the honours now paid to men of science were then absorbed by the astrologers. The catalogue of famous astrologers drawn up by Simon de Phares, and the recital of their achievements in predicting great events and detecting great criminals, commanded as much respect as would now be given to a catalogue of European men of science and their most notable discoveries. The feats of Nicolas de Paganica and Mark de Gênes in foretelling births

and deaths in royal families passed from gossip to gossip, and from writer to writer, like the fame of Helmholtz or Pasteur. For a time all the affairs of life, public and private, were regulated by the advice of the stars. Charles the Fifth, who had an especial respect for the science, kept many astrologers on handsome pensions. Such a patron as he, with men always about him to make the requisite calculations, would not have undertaken a journey, or made a present of a jewel, or put on a new robe, would not even have gone outside the gates of his palace, without first ascertaining whether the aspect of the heavens was favourable. And every great baron, every dignitary of the Church had at least one astrologer in his pay, and would not have dreamt of making an addition to castle or chapel until this authority had selected the propitious moment. Chaucer may or may not have meant to be ironical when he said of his doctor

"Well coude he fortunen the ascendant

Of his ymages for his patient." But fashionable patients undoubtedly expected as much of their doctors in Chaucer's time. Wars were undertaken and battles begun only with the same high sanction.

In these palmy days of astrology, Thomas de Pisan, according to his daughter, was at the very top of his profession. She says that in the opinion of experts entitled to judge there was not in his own generation, and there had not been for a hundred years before, a man of such profound knowledge in mathematical science and astrological calculation. She mentions one great proof of his skill that could not easily be surpassed. He predicted the hour of his own death, and he died punctually at the appointed time. Respect for his art could not have been carried farther. Christine is suspected of having been guilty of a little exaggeration in her description of her father. Other contemporary chroniclers do not assign him the same

prominent place. It is remarked that she speaks in terms of very high praise of all her relations- an amiable feature in her character. Concerning Thomas de Pisan she even goes so far as to say that the great prosperity of the reign of Charles the Fifth was chiefly due to his counsels. If that monarch undertook affairs of moment only when his favourite astrologer told him that the conjunctions were propitious, this is at least an evidence of the good judgment of Thomas de Pisan. Putting aside the question whether Christine was misled by filial affection, her account of her father is to the following effect. He was a native of Bologna, where he had considerable property. He married the daughter of a Venetian doctor, a councillor of the republic, and, fixing his residence in Venice, was himself soon promoted to the same dignity. In a few years his reputation as an astrologer and an adept versed in all the sciences spread beyond Italy. Having occasion to visit his native city of Bologna, he there received at the same time pressing invitations from the King of Hungary and the King of France to pay them a visit. He decided in favour of the King of France, being influenced to this decision partly by Charles the Fifth's great repute as a patron of science, and partly by the high character of the university of Paris, which he wished to see. He did not propose to stay more than a year in France, and left his wife and children behind him in Bologna, but Charles was SO charmed with his conversation that he resolved to attach Thomas de Pisan permanently to his court. The astrologer received, besides his courteous entertainment, the substantial temptation of a most munificent salary; so he sent for his family and settled in France.

Christine was five years old when, in 1368, she was presented along with her mother at the court of Charles. She does not forget to say that they were magnificently apparalled à la Lombarde. Although a somewhat

ostentatious man, with a turn for magnificence, and careless of the money liberally bestowed upon him by the king, Thomas de Pisan was a good father. He took great pains with Christine's education, taught her French and Latin as well as Italian, and made her study science as well as belles lettres. She acknowledges also that he acted wisely in the choice of a husband for her. She had many offers, knights, nobles, and rich officials being among her suitors. "Let it not be supposed that I boast of this," she writes in recording the circumstance, "for the authority of the honour and great love that the King showed to my father was the cause, not any worth of mine." This was Christine's modesty, for in addition to her brilliant talents and vivacity, she thanks God elsewhere that she had a person free from deformity and pleasing enough, and a complexion that was not in the least sickly. The extant portraits represent her as a comely woman, with regular features and a tendency to embonpoint. Whatever her personal attractions, she, or her father for her, with her subsequent approval, declined all the "chevaliers and riches clercs in favour of a young Picard gentleman, a man of good family, greater in virtues than in wealth, by name Etienne du Castel. Through the astrologer's influence he was appointed one of the financial secretaries of the king. Christine was only fifteen years old at the time of her marriage.

It was well for Christine that her father had taken pains with her education. Two years after her marriage, in 1380, Charles the Fifth died, and with him departed the good fortune of the family of Thomas de Pisan. The astrologer, with his turn for magnificence, had always lived up to his income, and his son-in-law as well as himself found much less lucrative employment after the King's death. Thomas de Pisan soon followed his patron to the grave. Christine's

husband was disabled by ill health, and it fell upon her to support the family. Her mother and two poor relations, beside three children of her own, were dependent on her. She undertook the duty with heroic energy. She had acquired a reputation as a writer of ballades, virelays, and other poetry. but she resolved to qualify herself for what seems to have been more profitable work, and, counting all that she had learned in her youth as insufficient, she set herself, as she tells us, anew to the abc of learning. "I betook myself to ancient histories from the commencement of the world, the histories of the Hebrews, the Assyrians, and the principal empires, proceeding from the one to the other, descending to the Romans, the French, the Britons. and other subjects of chronicle; then to the problems of the sciences, as far as the space of time that I studied could comprehend them; finally to the books of the poets. The number of authors that Christine refers to furnishes an index to the extent of her studies. M. Petitot has compiled a list of them :— Among Greek authors one remarks the names of Homer, Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Chrysostem, &c. She mentions even several sayings and maxims attributed to Socrates, to Democritus, to Diogenes, to Pythagoras, and several other philosophers. Among the Latins, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus, Juvenal, Lucan, Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, Seneca, Boethius, Apuleius, Vegetius, Pompeius Trogus. The works of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose were familiar to her. Her writings prove that she had not only read these various authors, and many others that we cannot add to the list, but that she had made a profound study of them, and one cannot but feel a certain astonishment when one finds in a woman of the fourteenth century an erudition such as is hardly possessed by the most laborious men.'

66

That Christine had read in the

to

original every passage from every author that she quotes it would be too much to believe. There were compendiums in those days by the aid of which it was possible to make a great display of learning at small expense; and students were necessarily very much dependent upon these compendiums, copies of the originals not being accessible to everybody. But with every allowance for this, it is obvious that Christine was a great reader, and for her age a very accomplished scholar. There is an air of scholarly substantiality, an amount of literary flesh on the bones of her works, very rare in the middle ages. All the writers that were known in France in her time were known to her. Charles the Fifth had a collection of nine hundred volumes in the Library Tower of the Louvre. She had access this, and through her friend Gerson, the chancellor, to all the literary treasures of the University of Paris. Christine shows not only great skill in the handling of her materials, but unmistakable evidence of businesslike industry in the accumulation of them. When she had bravely made up her mind to subsist by her pen, Anthony Trollope himself did not go to work with steadier energy and purpose than Christine de Pisan. She reminds us frequently of Trollope in her precise enumerations of the quantity of work accomplished in a given time. Her first six years of authorship, begun after the above elaborate preparation, were especially prolific. "Between the year 1399," she says, "and the year 1405, during all which time I never ceased, I compiled fifteen principal works, without counting other occasional little writings, amounting altogether to about seventy quires of large size." This period of vigorous industry was distracted by the death of her husband in 1402, by lawsuits following thereupon, and by the death of her most munificent patron, Philip of Burgundy, in 1404: but misfortunes only stimulated the courageous woman to increased exertions.