Prolific and versatile poet and author whose diverse writings include numerous poems of courtly love, a biography of Charles v of France, and several works championing women.
Her Italian father was a astrologer to Charles V, and she spent a pleasant studious childhood at the French court.
At 15 she married Étienne du Castel, who became court secretary. Widowed after 10 years of marriage, she took up writting in order to support herself and her three young children.
Her first poems were ballads of lost love written to the memory of her husband. These verses met with success, and she continued writing ballads, rodeaux, lays, and complains in which she expressed her feelings with grace and sincerity.
Among her patrons were Louis d´Orléans, the Duc de Berry, Philip the Bold, and Queen Isabella of Bavaria and in England, the Earl of Salisbury.
In her Épistre du dieu d´amours (1399) she defended women against the satire of Jean de Meun in the Roman de la rose. In Cité des dames (1405) she wrote from all over the world made famous by their heroism and virtue. Livre des trois vertus (1406) was a collection of moral instructions for women in the various social spheres. La Vision de Christine (1405) is the story of her life, told in a strange, allegorical manner, as a reply to her detractors.
At the request of the regent, Philip, duke of Burgundy, Christine wrote the life of the deceased king Charles -Livre des fais et bonnes moeurs du sage roy Charles V (1404), a firsthand picture of Charles V and his court.
Christine was devoted to France and during the civil wars she wrote Lamentation (1410) and Livre de la paix (1413), in which she urged harmony among the men of her country. After the disastrous Battle of Agincourt in 1415, she retired to a convent.
She lived long enough to witness the early victories of Joan of Arc, and her last work was a lyrical, joyous outburst inspired by Joan´s triumph.
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