City of Ladies: Modern Artists Are Redefining a 15th-Century Call to Arms by an Early French Feminist

In this article for the University of Oxford’s TORCH humanities centre, French scholar Charlotte Cooper-Davis traces how Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies has been reimagined by contemporary feminist artists. Her subject is not a medieval text simply carried intact into the present. It is a change of form: Pizan builds an allegorical city by narrating the lives of women from history, while later artists use installation, objects, and living bodies to ask who can imagine a world, construct its spaces, and decide what deserves remembrance. Oxford published the article on 9 July 2020; its page notes that it first appeared in The Conversation.

Pizan’s City answers a culture in which women were repeatedly disparaged in writing. Cooper-Davis describes it as an anthology of historical, literary, and biblical women whose stories collectively challenge misogynist claims. The city’s walls work both as an allegory of protection and as a structure of knowledge: as women omitted or demeaned elsewhere enter the narrative, their lives become the building material. The metaphor is more than a list of evidence that “women were great too.” It makes writing into a collective practice of preserving, organizing, and displaying women’s histories.

Cooper-Davis follows that architectural metaphor through distinct artistic responses. Tai Shani’s DC: Semiramis expands Pizan’s imagined city through performance and sculpture, with the bodies of twelve real women helping to form an immersive environment. In recorded performance, women address the camera themselves, where Pizan’s historical figures had been recounted in the third person. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party organizes women’s history around a table rather than a wall, making historical figures its invited guests. Architect Penelope Haralambidou’s City of Ladies turns to a mirror, a ruler, and a vessel: how a ruler measures bodies, how a mirror structures looking, and how a vessel holds time become questions of spatial design. The gallery’s exhibition archive describes a practice bringing manuscript imagery, architectural research, models, objects, and film into one project.

These works do not merely illustrate an old book; they alter what a “city” is made of. The material shifts from women’s stories preserved in writing to bodies that speak, move, and occupy space; from a perfect architecture completed on the page to design questions about measurement, care, spectatorship, and living together. Feminist art here does not only ask established institutions to add women to their displays. It tests whether the display case, the city, and the historical narrative can be built to different dimensions.

The article appeared in July 2020, and its opening uses pandemic-era isolation to connect Pizan’s chosen study to contemporary experience. That moment is the article’s rhetorical entry point, not evidence that the two historical situations are equivalent. Another question is whether phrases such as “feminine dimensions” or “the female body” risk making women’s experience sound singular. Who can locate themselves in this imagined city across race, class, age, disability, and gender? Art can open political possibility, but a symbolic city cannot by itself redistribute housing, safety, accessible streets, care infrastructure, or urban labor. Cooper-Davis makes a persuasive case for the imaginative power of artistic reinterpretation; readers can also ask whose experiences become the new building materials through the artworks’ media, curatorial choices, and audiences.

If The City of Ladies is a project of building against misogyny by gathering women’s histories, Pizan’s sequel, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, turns toward how women are expected to live, work, and govern in the world around them. Reading the two together reveals a tradition concerned both with recovering excluded women and with organizing knowledge and institutions. It also reveals a difference: the sequel assigns conduct according to medieval social rank, and is not equivalent to modern egalitarian politics. Read The Treasure of the City of Ladies, then return to the Oxford TORCH article for its artworks and image notes.