City of Ladies

City of Ladies is a cross-disciplinary research project, investigating medieval author Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405.

Overview

City of Ladies is a cross-disciplinary research project, investigating medieval author Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405. Haralambidou’s practice-led methodology aims to introduce de Pizan’s work to an architectural audience for the first time. In her celebrated text, de Pizan describes the construction of an imaginary city, a female utopia built and inhabited by women. Her work has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto, conflating the act of building with collecting stories of notable female figures from fiction and history and erecting a thesis against misogyny.

Haralambidou’s research builds upon existing scholarship on the relationship between image and text in de Pizan’s work. It proposes an innovative, design-led analysis of the architectural and urban allegory in her text and a spatial remodelling of the accompanying illuminations. Performing history and theory through design, the research establishes de Pizan as the first speculative female architect, while also attempting to project her spatial metaphor into the future. The research is significant not only for architecture, but also French and medieval studies, as it provides a novel architectural lens and uses methodological innovation to evaluate the iconographic programme of de Pizan’s work.

The first stage of the research is a close study of the original illuminated manuscript held in the British Library, Harley 4431. It brings together medieval drawing with cutting-edge digital manufacturing, imaging- and time-based techniques, culminating in a solo exhibition at the domobaal gallery, London.

Supported by a BA/Leverhulme grant, the second stage is a comparative analysis of the illuminations in all the rest of the extant manuscripts held in France and Belgium, which defines de Pizan’s original conception of the iconography: the drawing of the allegorical city.

People

Principal Investigator
Professor Penelope Haralambidou

Research Assistant
John Cruwys

External partners

BA/Leverhulme

Image credits

All images: Penelope Haralambidou, City of Ladies, 2020–22
Image 3: Photography: Andy Keate