Dante et le Donne: A Comparison of the Treatment of Women between Dante Alighieri and Christine de Pizan

            The representation of women by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy can be said to be lacking substance. Dante has no trouble creating interesting and complex men throughout the three canticles, such as his nuanced portrayal of Ulysses or the ambiguity of which he has Ugolino tell his story. While the episode with Francesca da Rimini in Canto V of The Inferno has been the inspiration for artists and writers since it’s appearance in The Divine Comedy, there are few fully fleshed out women in the work afforded the opportunity to speak for themselves. Thomas Goddard Bergin claims that “the range of female characters in the Comedy is limited because the range of a woman’s activities in Dante’s time was limited” (Bergin 85). While Bergin is not incorrect about the limitations put upon women during Dante’s time, I disagree when he says that “we should give thanks rather for the few [fleshed out female characters] we do have” for which he lists five and then proceeds to posit that these five are “as varied a group as a medieval poet could have given us”. He finishes the chapter by claiming that Dante could include more fleshed out female characters if he wrote today [Bergin was writing in the late 1960s] but then ended on the rhetorical question “can a woman’s world produce a Divine Comedy?” (Bergin 86). I obviously take umbrage with this idea and how easily Bergin “lets Dante off the hook” for his lack of female representation in The Divine Comedy. Dante mentions a fair number of women, but he does not take the time he could have to write them as fully realized human beings in the same way he does with the men. Bergin’s excuse that women in Dante’s time did not lead lives that would not translate well into fictional representations does not hold water. Using The Book of the City of Ladies by Italian writer Christine de Pizan, I will give three examples of where Dante Alighieri had the opportunity to create fully realized female characters but chose to overlook them. I will also observe the similarities and differences between the way that the two authors write about these same women.

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1365, exactly 100 years after the birth of Dante Alighieri, meaning that the two were obviously not contemporaries. They are connected through the poet Boccaccio who wrote De Mulieribus Claris which Pizan directly references throughout The Book of the City of Ladies. Christine de Pizan grew up in the French court of Charles V where her father was an astrologer. She was afforded access to an extraordinary education and became one of the first professional female writers in the western hemisphere after the deaths of her father and husband. We know for certain that Christin de Pizan knew about Dante and had read at least part of The Divine Comedy because she directly refers to Dante’s first meeting with Virgil in her poem Chemin de long estude (The Book of the City of Ladies xliii). The Book of the City of Ladies is her defense of women in reaction to the multitude of manuscripts that go out of their way to vilify all women. Pizan gives examples of many virtuous women within the book and also finds ways to acquit some of the most infamous women found in history and mythology history. Many of these women are also mentioned by Dante without that same depth afforded to them. While neither Pizan nor Dante creates a situation where these women are allowed to speak for themselves, the ways in which they write about their stories, or don’t write, about their stories are vastly different.

The first woman I would like to look at is Arachne, a weaver who according to myth challenged Minerva to a weaving contest and was turned into a spider for her hubris. Dante puts her at fault when he writes:

oh mad Arachne, so I saw you, already half a

spider, sitting wretched on the shreds of the work

you made to your own ruin! (Purgatorio 12.43-45)

Dante does not see any reason not to question Minerva’s punishment of Arachne nor does he afford her the opportunity to speak about the unjustness of her fate. Dante does allow other characters from mythology to speak, such as Ulysses, so the problem isn’t that her story involved a pagan religion. On the other hand, Christine de Pizan calls Arachne’s story a fable but also claims that she “was the first to invent the art of dyeing woolens in various colors and of weaving art works into cloth, like a painter, according to the ‘fine thread’ technique of weaving tapestry” (Pizan 81). Pizan then goes on to defend Arachne against authors such as Bocaccio who claimed that the world would have been better off without a knowledge of weaving by saying that Jesus Christ’s use of robes proved that weaving was a good and lawful occupation. Although I don’t know if the debate about the merits of weaving existed during Dante’s time, I still think that the comparison between the brief mention of Arachne where he blames her for her fate verses the praise and validation that Pizan grants her speaks volumes about the difference in their relationships with women.

The absence of Dido in The Divine Comedy is fairly conspicuous considering how large a role she plays in The Aeneid.  How interesting would it have been to have Virgil come face to face with Dido, whose story he immortalized? Instead, Dido is relegated to a passing mention in Canto V of The Inferno where she is oddly placed in the circle of Lust even though she committed suicide. Bergin also raises this question, since the general logic in The Divine Comedy is that people are put in the circle that corresponds with their worst sins. Bergin asserts that

Dante saw the three Oriental queens [Dido, Cleopatra, and Semiramis] as lustful creatures first and foremost because it in was the love relationship, and that alone, that he thought of women. … we find the souls of women only in the circles of lust, flattery, and soothsaying. (Bergin 70-71)

On this point I don’t disagree with Bergin. I think that he is right to say that Dante only sees women in their context with men and the ways that they can manipulate them. It seems almost irrational that Dante would put Dido in the circle of lust instead of the forest of suicides since doing so could create a dramatic situation like no other. In comparison, Christine de Pizan speaks for a considerable amount of time about how wise and clever Dido was, giving the readers a few examples including her trick of acquiring the land for Carthage by cutting a cow hide into a very thin strip. Christine de Pizan claims that “because of her prudent government, they changed her name and called her Dido, which is the equivalent of saying virago in Latin, which means ‘the woman who has the strength and force of a man’ (Pizan 95). It is only later that Christine de Pizan mentions Dido’s time with Aeneas and subsequent suicide. She does not reduce this strong and wise Queen to a lovesick woman who was driven only by her carnal desire. How powerful could it have been to have another tree alongside Pier della Vigne to show the fate of those who commit violence against themselves?

The oddest mention of a woman I am going to discuss today is the way that talks about, or rather doesn’t talk about, Medea. Her name is mentioned once in the eighteenth canto of The Inferno when it is said that Jason is being punished in part for his crimes against her. Medea is mostly known for killing the children that she had with Jason, but she is not found in the deepest circles of hell alongside those who murder family members. I haven’t been able to discern why she would be absent from that group of people. It is possible that the version of her story that Dante knew did not include her murder of her children since not all of them did. I wish I had more time to investigate this glaring omission since it raises so many questions. Christine de Pizan also handles Medea in an interesting way. She praises Medea for her wisdom and knowledge of herbs and medicine, along with mentioning the assistance she renders Jason during his quest for the Golden Fleece but also omits the small fact that she killed her children. Like with Dante, it is possible that the version of Medea’s story that Christine de Pizan knew did not include that detail. With Christine however, I am more inclined to believe that this is a lie of omission rather than a difference in story version. There are a few points within The Book of the City of Ladies where Christine will not mention the more unsavory details of the lives of the women that she is defending. Regardless, thinking over this question has made me curious about the other ways Medea has been represented in literature throughout human history.

After comparing the ways Dante Alighieri and Christine de Pizan discuss the same women in their works, I find myself almost mourning The Divine Comedy we could have had. In omitting women as much as he did, Dante did himself and his life work a disservice. Including women in the full compacity of which he included men would have made The Divine Comedy an even better work. I wish that I had a strong point to make as a solid conclusion to this paper, but it was almost impossible for me to find something to argue. Instead, I decided to question how Dante addressed women compared with another medieval writer I was interested in. I think that there is more work to be done in this area that was just outside of the scope of my paper and hope that I may end up being the one to continue the investigation.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Edited by Robert M. Durling et al., Oxford University, 1996.

Bergin, Thomas Goddard. A Diversity of Dante. Rutgers University Press, 1969.

Pizan, Christine de. The Book of City of Ladies. Edited by Earl Jeffrey Richards and Marina Warner, Persea Books, 1982.

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