By Anne Babson
Crusades were a physical attempt to hasten the second coming.
The City of Heavenly Jerusalem is female (and plural).
Medieval thought could hold disparate ideas at the same time.
Humans sit in heaven and still live their daily lives.
Church buildings were examples of heaven coming down to earth.
Jacob’s Ladder was a stone on the ground but also a stairway to heaven.
Williams points out that there is archetypal evidence of Jerusalem on earth and in heaven.
Meyers points out that private chapels of the wealthy were heavenly sites built in personal spaces.
Pen is a masonry tool and ink is mortar.
I will deliver you tools for the building, but also deliver you and deliver you tools.
subversive work because there was a demand for the inclusion of women in power, the perfect city state had exemplary women, defending the faith
Christine de Pizan writes that she considers her cell to be situated/surrounded by misogynist texts, so that she has residence in a pious place but is imprisoned in the books that would take away her choices.
Feminizes the word clerk to allow her to be a female cleric.
Ordains herself in the absence of men willing to do this.
God calls everything he has made good.
If she can defend her position through the Bible and God, she is correct.
She uses church rhetoric and the rhetoric of her most secular opponent to support her ideas.
Reason tells CdP that the story of Eve (and the fall) is repaired/countered by the story of Mary
Illuminations from the Queen’s Book of The City of Women were shown.