[5] Part I opens with Christine reading from Matheolus's Lamentations, a work from the thirteenth century that addresses marriage and argues that women make men's lives miserable.

[6] Upon reading these words, Christine becomes upset and feels ashamed to be a woman: "This thought inspired such a great sense of disgust and sadness in me that I began to despise myself and the whole of my sex as an aberration in nature".

She tells Christine to "take the spade of [her] intelligence and dig deep to make a trench all around [the city] … [and Reason will] help to carry away the hods of earth on [her] shoulders."

Christine, in the beginning of the text, believed that women must truly be bad because she "could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex.

[Therefore she] had to accept [these authors] unfavourable opinion[s] of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions."

This part ends with Christine addressing women and asking them to pray for her as she continues her work with Lady Justice to complete the city.

She also warns the women against the lies of slanderers, saying, "Drive back these treacherous liars who use nothing but tricks and honeyed words to steal from you that which you should keep safe above all else: your chastity and your glorious good name".

[8] Christine's main source for information was Giovanni Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women), possibly in the French version, Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes.

[9] Boccaccio states that girls should be "well brought up from childhood in their father's home and taught honesty and virtuous behavior.

Boccaccio's outlook was however, according to Margaret King and Albert Rabil, "misogynist, for it singled out for praise those women who possessed the traditional virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience.

Women who were active in the public realm ... were depicted as suffering terrible punishments for entering into the masculine sphere.

This text is the French translation of the historical portions of Speculum Maius, an encyclopedia by Vincent of Beauvais that was begun after 1240.

The book, and therefore the city, contains women of past eras, ranging from pagans to ancient Jews to medieval Christian saints.