Christine de Pizan was born in Venice, Italy, later becoming France's first professional woman of letters.
Christine de Pizan was born on 11 September 1364 in Venice, then an independent maritime republic, to Thomas de Pizan, a physician, astrologer, and court councilor. Her father's professional reputation soon carried the family beyond Italy.
Within a few years of her birth, Thomas de Pizan accepted a prestigious appointment as astrologer and physician to King Charles V of France, and the family relocated to Paris. This move placed young Christine at the heart of one of medieval Europe's most sophisticated royal courts, granting her unusual access to books, scholars, and the intellectual culture of the Valois monarchy.
Her Venetian birth and subsequent French upbringing gave Christine a bicultural formation that would later inform her cosmopolitan outlook and her ability to move between vernacular French literary circles and Italian humanist currents. Though women of her era were rarely afforded formal schooling, her father encouraged her intellectual curiosity, an unusual and formative circumstance given the period's norms.
Christine's birth marks the starting point of a life that would culminate in her recognition as one of the first women in Europe known to have earned her living by writing, and as France's first professional woman of letters, a legacy still celebrated by literary historians, feminist scholars, and institutions dedicated to women's intellectual history.
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