The Treasure of the City of Ladies: Or the Book of the Three Virtues by Christine de Pizan

Author:Christine de Pizan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays, History, Europe, Medieval, Literary Criticism, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, General
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2003-10-30T05:04:21+00:00

3. This explains the second point that is good for women of the court to observe, which is how they ought to avoid too many friendships with men.

The second point and teaching, as we have said, is that women of the court of whatever rank they may be must guard against having too many friendships with various men. We must give the reasons that move us to say this, for many women could perhaps imagine that it was more suitable and more permissible for them to be familiar with men than other women, but those who think so are deceiving themselves, and we will demonstrate it to you by two principal arguments.

The first is that above all other women, those of the court must preserve their honour (we will explain the other argument in a moment). We say that they must preserve their honour more than other women because their honour or dishonour reflects and rebounds upon their mistress, for if they are well or badly disciplined she will get either the credit or the blame for it. (This has already been mentioned in the first part of this book.) Now the fact is that there is no other lady to whom so much honour is owed as to a princess. It would be to her detriment if there was any blemish in her servants, for people would say, ‘Like mistress, like servant.’ And so I conclude that they ought to be more careful than others.

To come to our point, there is absolutely no doubt that women, whoever they may be, who delight in being friendly with many men, and even if they do not think that there is anything wrong with it, but rather that it is for laughter and amusement, will scarcely be able to continue these friendships without their being talked about unfavourably, and not only by envious strangers who ceaselessly consider how they can abuse others, but, indeed, even by many of those same men with whom the women are friendly. For women do not suspect that before these men have frequented them for very long some or most of them will try to seduce them if they can. When the men see that many frequent the place where they all would like to be received privately, they wickedly jump to conclusions and invent lies about one another. They make jokes behind the backs of the women, whatever polite manner they may have adopted towards them to their faces and however gracious they appear to be. And this is perfectly true: these jests and comments are reported in towns from mouth to mouth in taverns and other places, everyone adding to the story and putting in his own bit. In this way without cause and without reason as far as committing a sin is concerned, but only because of the simpleness of the women who do not think of the consequences, some are often accused wrongly, even by those to whom they are cordial and who would not believe the allegations if they stopped to think about them.

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