Almost everything known of Christine de Pizan's life is derived from references she makes in her works. The year of her birth—either 1364 or 1365—has only been determined from her statement that she was widowed at the age of twenty-five when her husband died while accompanying the French king Charles VI to Beauvais. Since a royal visit there occurred between 29 October and 7 November 1390, this produces an approximate date, which is confirmed by Christine's remark from 1403 that she had then mourned her husband for thirteen years.

She was born in Venice, where her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was a salaried counselor. Christine benefited all her life from her father's connection to northern Italian intellectuals, especially at the University of Bologna. Her Parisian contemporaries regarded her as a link to the new ideas coming from Italy that were later referred to as “humanism”: the return to pagan Latin and Greek...