El conocimiento del pasado a través del Libro de la Ciudad de las Damas de Christine de Pizan

Abstract

At the end of the fourteenth century, Christine de Pizan wrote "The Book of the City of Ladies". It was a great literary contribution to the history of ideas in the Middle Ages. It is the book of the perfect city. The work shows encyclopaedic characteristics and is eminently allegorical, with undeniable precedents in classical Antiquity, in Biblical sources and in several Medieval authors. The account must not be understood exclusively as an argument in favour of women and against the misogyny triumphant in the intellectual milieux of the Late Middle Ages: it also offers the image of its maker, an intelligent and learned woman, a product typical of her time, who granted a great value to the world of art both in her written text and in the set of miniatures that illustrate it.