The Italian-born French poet and prose writer Christine de Pizan completed her landmark work Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) around 1405, constructing an allegorical city populated by virtuous and accomplished women drawn from history and legend. Written in direct response to misogynist literature prevalent in the period — including the Roman de la Rose — the work was a sophisticated defence of women's intellectual and moral capacity. It stands as one of the earliest sustained feminist texts in European literature and an extraordinary example of a woman using poetry and prose to argue for her own sex's dignity.

Christine de Pizan's literary achievement directly challenged a dominant tradition of anti-feminist verse that stretched from Ovid through Jean de Meun, and her willingness to engage the canon on its own terms gave later women writers a model of intellectual confidence. Her earlier ballade sequences and lyric poems, composed after the death of her husband left her a widow dependent on her pen, established her as the first known professional woman writer in France. The City of Ladies influenced later defences of women in humanist and Renaissance writing, and Christine's example as a poet-survivor became a touchstone for feminist literary history.