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This paper examines how Christine de Pizan uses virtuous women as an allegory for all of humanity. Since she devotes only two chapters to men in all of the Livre de la Cité des Dames, it would seem at first view that she excludes men from her City even on the allegorical level. For this reason, the paper examines the implications of the terms book, city, and lady for Christine. It sees that the book as such was an attribute of the Virgin Mary, that Christine’s commission to write the book itself alludes to the Annunciation of the Virgin, and that this in turn helps us understand the City of Ladies as an allegory for the City of God. The paper then examines why Christine chose a city rather than a convent as a model for her idealized female space. This leads to a discussion of the history of the legal standing of cities in the late Middle Ages as places with special freedoms and privileges. The city is therefore for Christine a legal model rather than a social historical reality. The use of architectural and legal terms in Christine is also examined under this point, demonstrating that Christine had a sound knowledge of scholastic legal commentaries in her choice of Reason and Justice as two of the three Virtues who assist Christine in building her City. The third section of the paper examines how Christine uses the term lady to refer to women who are ennobled by their virtue rather than inheritance. This part of the paper links Christine to other medieval writers who criticized inherited nobility. The fourth and final section returns to the opening question of the paper, where are the men in the City? The answer is everywhere, since women demonstrate their virtue and thus nobility in the course of their historical experiences shared with men. Women and men both belong to the peuple de Dieu and Christine wishes to exclude neither women nor men from this body. In this sense, the Livre de la Cité des Dames looks forward to a reconciliation of the sexes at the moment of the realization of women’s freedom.
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