Summary
Following Lady Rectitude is Lady Justice, who announces that she will help Christine complete the finishing touches on the City of Ladies.
Her words, she says, will help construct the details of the city like roofs, doorways, and gates.
Lady Justice brings with her the Queen of Heaven (the Virgin Mary) to serve as the guide to the City of Ladies.
She then launches into a catalogue of women who have become martyrs and saints. These women, Justice explains, were met with the challenge of worshipping false idols or renouncing their faith in Christ. Despite the torture and intimidation that was lodged at these sainted women, they were unwavering in their commitment to God and Christianity.
Lady Justice distinguishes between women's physical bodies – which were abused and tortured by religious heretics – and their spiritual bodies, which transcend the physical realm and are actually made stronger by these trials of faith.
The women who have become saints, Justice explains, experienced unparalleled pain, with some having to witness the deaths of their children before being put to death themselves.
These women were all virginal and committed to Christ, and went to their deaths willingly and stoically in the name of God.
Analysis
When Lady Justice carries on her conversation with Christine, she brings with her the Queen of Heaven to rule over the City of Ladies. While the text does not refer to the Queen as the Virgin Mary, it strongly suggests that this is the case. Mary has played, until this point, a significant role in the construction of the City of Ladies, and therefore the text as a whole. Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice all make frequent reference to Mary in their speeches. In fact, she is the the person mentioned the most throughout the entire book, even more than God or Jesus Christ.
This veneration of Mary is in keeping with the intentions laid out at the beginning of the book, in which the Ladies encourage Christine to build a city where women are safe from men's criticisms but also free to practice their faith and virtue among one another. For the Ladies, Mary is a figure who represents the ideal woman: faithful, virtuous, strong, and resilient.
Along with her praise of Mary, Lady Justice also focuses on spirituality and women's roles in Christian history.
Refuting once more the claims laid out by Mathéolus at the beginning of the book, Lady Justice showcases how women are not only capable of Christian devotion but have become memorable figures of sacrifice in the name of the Christian faith. She describes the gruesome and cruel punishments women withstood at the hands of accusers who pushed them to renounce their faith, emphasizing these female martyrs' profound inner strength that allowed them to transcend physical pain.
Alluding also to childbirth and the way it endows women with unparalleled mental fortitude, Lady Justice suggests that Christian women are integral to the survival of the faith, as they possess the ability to separate body from spirit and remain dedicated to Christ no matter what challenges they face on earth.
