Her intention was to defend unwarranted attacks on the characters of women and to provide examples of the unquestionable virtue of her sex. Though this seems like a lofty and daunting goal, it is grounded in a specific response to contemporary events surrounding her life as a writer in France. The Book of the City of Ladies, as a philosophical treatise, can be seen as directly answering the writer Jean de Meun, who between 1269 and 1278 wrote a more than 17,000-line continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s epic poem The Romance of the Rose, initially completed in the 1230s.
