Christine de Pisan (1364–1430) is generally hailed by feminist historians as a brilliant pioneer in female literature and by all historians as an insightful, pragmatic, and shrewd commentator on the conditions of late medieval society. She was a French-Italian lady of noble birth who turned to writing as a way to make an income when her husband died of the plague. In addition to ballads, biographies, and treatises on war and governance, she also wrote moral commentaries and took up a critique of the famous Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun (1240–1305), whose passages often railed against the fickleness and “falsity” of women.