Christine de Pizan 

Christine de Pizan is an extraordinary woman who, struck by fate, thanks to her tenacity, to her intelligence and love for study, becomes the first woman writer in Europe who lives off her writing job and the first woman author of historical and political books. She was born in Venice in 1364, daughter of Tommaso from Pizzano, in the province of Bologna. Her  father, doctor and scientist, after living in Bologna and Venice, in 1369  moves to Paris with his family at the proposal of Charles V. The young woman, thanks to her father, learns how to read and write and has the possibility  to attend the French Court but her husband’s unexpected death troubles her life. At the age of 25 she ends up a widow, fatherless, in economic constrains and in the condition of having to support three very young children, her mother and a niece. After months of discomfort and humiliations, she takes control of her own life and doesn’t rest, like the customs of the time, but she decides to become an autonomous and independent woman, able to provide for the family with her job as a writer and entrepreneur. Infact she leads a scriptorium of prestigious copyists, male and female miniaturists and writes works in poetry and prose about various topics where she doesn’t omit to denounce how women are little appreciated and how century-old prejudices weigh on the female sex. The recognition of her literary and historic accomplishments is achieved when she is assigned the drafting of a work about the achievements and virtues of King Charles V which gets great success. Between 1404 and 1405 she writes her masterpiece, Le livre de la citè des Dames where she imagines to build a fortified city with the help of three ladies, Reason, Righteousness and Justice, inhabited only by women who with their life show the groundlessness and absurdity of misogynist positions and show the value of the female gender in an irrefutable way. Christine dies in Poissy in 1430.