Christine de Pizan

Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan) (1363 – c. 1430) was a Venetian-born late medieval author who challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the late medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day.
Her early courtly poetry is marked by her knowledge of aristocratic custom and fashion of the day, particularly involving women and the practice of chivalry. Her early and later allegorical and didactic treatises reflect both autobiographical information about her life and views and also her own individualized and humanist approach to the scholastic learned tradition of mythology, legend, and history she inherited from clerical scholars and to the genres and courtly or scholastic subjects of contemporary French and Italian poets she admired. Supported and encouraged by important royal French and English patrons, Christine had an influenced fifteenth-century English poetry. Her success stems from a wide range of innovative writing and rhetorical techniques that critically challenged renowned male writers, such as Jean de Meun who incorporated misogynist beliefs within their literary works.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 that Épître au Dieu d'Amour was "the first time we see a woman take up her pen in defense of her sex" making Christine de Pizan perhaps the West's first feminist, or protofeminist as some scholars prefer to say.