Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1431) has long been recognized as
France's first professional woman of letters, and interest in her
voluminous and wide-ranging corpus has been steadily rising for decades.
During the tumultuous later years of the Hundred Years' War, Christine's
lone but strong feminine voice could be heard defending women,
expounding the highest ideals for good governance, and lamenting
France's troubled times alongside her own personal trials. In The
Mutability of Fortune, Christine fuses world history with autobiography
to demonstrate mankind's subjugation to the ceaselessly changing, and
often cruel, whims of Fortune. Now, for the first time, this poem is
accessible to an English-speaking audience, further expanding our
appreciation of this ground-breaking woman author and her extraordinary
body of work.