Editing Xanthippe (section)

==Legacy==
Medieval authors who mention Xanthippe largely repeat the ancient anecdotes about her, and follow the example of Xenophon and Diogenes Laertius in portraying her as a difficult wife.  In the [[Wife of Bath's Tale]], for example, [[Geoffrey Chaucer]] retells Diogenes' story of Xanthippe pouring a water-jug over Socrates' head, though in his version the jug is filled with urine.  This story has also historically been popular with visual artists.  The first positive portrayal of Xanthippe comes from the 1405 [[Book of the City of Ladies]] by [[Christine de Pizan]]: her version of Xanthippe attempts to save Socrates from death by taking the poison from him.{{sfn|Strobl|2015}}

This portrayal of Xanthippe continued into the early-modern period. [[William Shakespeare]], for instance, cites her as a proverbially bad wife in ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]''. During the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]], some followed in the tradition of a shrewish Xanthippe – such as [[Pieter Langendijk]] in his ''Xantippe, of het booze wyf des filozoofs Sokrates beteugeld''. Others, however, began to treat her more sympathetically: the German scholar [[Christoph August Heumann]] was the first to question the historicity of the negative ancient anecdotes about her.{{sfn|Strobl|2015}}

From the 19th century, feminist authors have also portrayed Xanthippe sympathetically: for instance in the Victorian poet [[Amy Levy]]'s poem ''Xanthippe: A Fragment''. Some feminist portrayals of Xanthippe present her traditional assertiveness as a positive characteristic: in [[Cynthia Ozick]]'s "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" the golem Xanthippe chooses that name in recognition of her own independence from her creator, as "Xanthippe alone had the courage to gainsay Socrates". In modern feminist thought, Xanthippe has been taken as emblematic of the history of women's subjugation.{{sfn|Strobl|2015}}

In his essay "The Case for Xanthippe" (1960), [[Robert Graves]] suggested that the stereotype of Xanthippe as a misguided shrew is emblematic of an ancient struggle between masculinity (rationality, philosophy) and femininity (intuition, poetry), and that the rise of philosophy in Socrates' time has led to rationality and scientific pursuit coming to exercise an unreasonable dominance over human life and culture.