At that time, the most popular type of literature in Western Europe was courtly love poetry, which dealt with themes of idealized romance. Christine disagreed with many of the principles behind such poetry, as she would later reveal, but she had to write material for a buying audience. In modern times, a writer sells his or her work to a publisher, who distributes it to a wide public; but in the medieval world, there simply was no wide reading public. A writer such as Christine composed her verses for nobility and royalty, who acted as her patrons, financially supporting her work.
Christine soon broadened her output to include short narratives or stories, and didactic works, or writings meant to instruct. The latter was another popular format in medieval times, an era that saw the beginnings of what modern people would call "self-help" literature. One type of didactic writing, for instance, was the courtesy book, a sort of how-to manual for people who wanted to learn how to behave around the higher classes of society. She augmented her writing with an extensive program of study, and by the turn of the fourteenth century, when she was about thirty-five, she began to write the first of her more mature works.
Among these were works such as The Book of Changes in Fortune (1400-3), in which she questioned the power of fate to alter human affairs, as it had her own. Using a practice
Common to many medieval writers, she represented Fortune as a Roman goddess, and examined Fortune's effect on events throughout history. Another work from this period was The Book of the Road of Long Study (1402-3), which was an allegorical piece along the lines of the Divine Comedy by Dante (see entry)—in other words, it used characters and actions to illustrate ideas. Both books achieved wide acclaim, and therefore King Charles VI commissioned her to write a biography of his predecessor, which became The Book of the Deeds and Virtues of the Wise King Charles V (1404).
World History
