Editing The Book of the City of Ladies (section)

===Part I===
Part I opens with Christine reading from [[Mathieu of Boulogne|Matheolus's]] ''Lamentations'', a work from the thirteenth century that addresses marriage and argues that women make men's lives miserable.<ref name="Brown-Grant, Rosalind 1405">*Brown-Grant, Rosalind. Introduction. ''The Book of the City of Ladies'' by Christine Pizan. 1405. Trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant. London: Penguin, 1999. xvi-xxxv. Print.</ref> Upon reading these words, Christine becomes upset and feels ashamed to be a woman: "This thought inspired such a great sense of disgust and sadness in me that I began to despise myself and the whole of my sex as an aberration in nature".<ref name="Pizan, Christine 1405">*De Pizan, Christine. ''The Book of the City of Ladies''. 1405. Trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.</ref> The [[three Virtues]] then appear to Christine, and each lady tells Christine what her role will be in helping her build the City of Ladies. Lady Reason, a virtue developed by Christine for the purpose of her book, is the first to join Christine and helps her build the external walls of the city. She answers Christine's questions about why some men slander women, helping Christine to prepare the ground on which the city will be built. She tells Christine to "take the spade of [her] intelligence and dig deep to make a trench all around [the city] … [and Reason will] help to carry away the hods of earth on [her] shoulders."  These "hods of earth" are the past beliefs Christine has held. Christine, in the beginning of the text, believed that women must truly be bad because she "could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex. [Therefore she] had to accept [these authors] unfavourable opinion[s] of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions."  Christine is not using reason to discover the merits of women. She believes all that she reads instead of putting her mind to listing all the great deeds women have accomplished. To help Christine see reason, Lady Reason comes and teaches Christine. She helps Christine dispel her own self-consciousness and the negative thoughts of past writers. By creating Lady Reason, Christine not only teaches her own allegorical self, but also her readers. She gives not only herself reason, but also gives readers, and women, reason to believe that women are not evil or useless creatures but instead have a significant place within society.

====Women discussed====
The following 36 women are discussed in Part I of the ''Book of the City of Ladies''.<ref name="penguin">[http://cn.penguinclassics.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140446890,00.html?sym=TAB Table of Contents] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140514092023/http://cn.penguinclassics.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0%2C%2C9780140446890%2C00.html?sym=TAB |date=2014-05-14 }}</ref>
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* [[Mary Magdalene]]
* [[Queen of Sheba]]
* [[Fredegund]]
* [[Blanche of Castile]]
* [[Jeanne d'Évreux]]
* [[Blanche of France, Duchess of Orléans|Blanche of France]]
* [[Marie of Blois, Duchess of Anjou]]
* [[Semiramis]]
* [[Amazons]]: [[Tomyris|Thamiris]], Menalippe, [[Hippolyta]], [[Penthesilea]], Synoppe, [[Lampedo|Lampheto]], [[Marpesia]], [[Orithyia (Amazon)|Orithyia]]
* [[Zenobia]]
* [[Artemisia II of Caria]]
* Lilia, mother of Theodoric
* [[Camilla (mythology)|Camilla]]
* [[Laodice of Cappadocia]]
* [[Cloelia]]
* [[Cornificia]]
* [[Faltonia Betitia Proba]]
* [[Sappho]]
* [[Manto (mythology)#Daughter of Tiresias|Manto]]
* [[Medea]]
* [[Circe]]
* [[Carmenta]]
* [[Minerva]]
* [[Ceres (mythology)|Ceres]]
* [[Isis]]
* [[Arachne]]
* [[Pamphile]]
* Thamaris
* Irene
* [[Iaia]]
* [[Sempronia (wife of Decimus Brutus)|Sempronia]]
* [[Woman of Valor]]
* Gaia Cirilla (also known as [[Tanaquil]])
* [[Dido]]
* [[Ops]]
* [[Lavinia]]
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