Inside the City of Ladies | The Essay

Turkish Delight, please your Majesty
Rosa spp., Saccharum officinarum, 2026

G.C. Lewis, 2026

Surely every child who reads The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe wants to try Turkish Delight. The child is hungry. Something more is happening, but they cannot yet name it. By contrast, an adult reading the same scene might recognise what once felt like enchantment as something else entirely: the activation of internalised scripts for power, seduction, and control.

On Source Texts and the Grammar of Power

Inside the City of Ladies sent me on a somewhat wild journey in which I have time-travelled through medieval texts and poked around the dark edges of the manosphere. All of my research has centred on a core grammatical and symbolic construction: the use of poetic and personified allegory. The key component of this construction is that authors use capitalisation to signal that words are no longer ordinary.

The capitalisation is the mark of that crossing. The words become Vivid, Active, and Legible in a way that lowercase cannot achieve. Through the shift into uppercase, the abstraction has crossed a Threshold: it is now a named, specific force or reality. It has genuine existence, whether metaphysical, psychological, or cosmological.

danger becomes Danger.

reason transforms into Reason.

There is sensation: as I experience the complex viscosity of Turkish delight, it thickens and sets into Turkish Delight.

One of the most structurally significant examples of this mechanism in the English language is the shift from god to God. This shift from a little g to a big G has shaped how billions of people conceptualise divinity and religious authority, often without conscious awareness.

For Inside the City of Ladies, the two primary source texts are The Book of the City of Ladies and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

As a child, I was fed (and greedily consumed) C.S. Lewis by my father, J.A.H. Lewis. Dad was an architect. He held a PhD in Theology, authored The Architecture of Medieval Churches: Theology of Love in Practice, and was an independent scholar of medieval studies, theology, and Dante Alighieri. His reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would have been very different from my childish one.

Where I received the White Witch’s Turkish Delight as pure, visceral enchantment, Dad would have read the architecture of Narnia itself: the spatial theology, its hierarchies, and its world-building. What I received was the rush: a mainline of Turkish Delight directly to my veins; roses and sugar as Enchantment and Danger simultaneously.

Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies arrived differently: obliquely, through a conversation. I was around nineteen or twenty. It was airy-fairy, in the way ideas find you before you are ready for them. I was beginning to find my world. What stayed with me from that first encounter was the Magnificent Idea itself: a world populated only by intelligent, ethical, courageous, powerful Women.

Now that I have read her a little more intimately, I am inspired by de Pizan’s use of antiphrasis: the deliberate inversion of a hostile perspective, turned back upon itself as reclamation.

De Pizan does not argue against the misogynist tradition from outside it. She enters it, inverts it, and builds something new from its own materials. That intellectual architecture, and the courage that has carried it across six centuries, is foundational to this project.

My images function as a visual counter-narrative, directly subverting and reappropriating the source text to reclaim the concept from a distinctly female perspective

SOURCE CODE: BEFORE THE INTERNET, THERE WAS THIS

Le Roman de la Rose / The Romance of the Rose

Guillaume de Lorris, c. 1230, and Jean de Meun, c. 1275

Reduced to its framework, The Romance of the Rose is a French allegorical dream-vision in which the feminised Rose is desired, pursued, trapped, and, in many feminist readings, ultimately raped. Within its walls, Women are constructed as irrational, duplicitous, sexually instrumentalised, and less than fully human.

The Romance of the Rose was written behind an irony shield, it had an allegorical philosophical architecture, lending ideological respectability to sexual violence. It was often performed with music and dance in front of the court, cloaked under a masque of courtly love. There was elaborate scenery and machinery and crucially audience participation. The boundary between performer and audience melted.

The Romance of the Rose was wildly popular and influential. The poem contained more than 21,000 lines, and it was one of the most widely copied texts of the medieval period: by any measure, the bestseller of its age. Lorris and de Meun were the premier manosphere influencers of the thirteenth century.

THE GREAT DEBATE: THE MOTHER OF FEMINISM VS. THE INFLUENCERS

Querelle du Roman de la Rose / Epistles of the Debate over the Romance of the Rose

Christine de Pizan, 1401–1402

This was among the earliest recorded literary debates in the vernacular. The Querelle went viral when Christine de Pizan directly charged The Romance of the Rose and its defenders with the ethical and reputational libel of Women.

The Querelle was conducted through open letters addressed to named, specific recipients and circulated publicly within the Parisian literary and court culture of the time. By deploying the language of libel, de Pizan was making a public moral charge.

The significance of her courage cannot be overstated. De Pizan was the first Woman in European history to support herself through writing. She was a widow with a family of five, entirely dependent on court patronage, and the institutional risk she took on was considerable.

The men responded by deploying the full weight of their authority to discredit her: that The Romance of the Rose was high literary art and therefore above ethical challenge; that its obscene and misogynist passages were justified by allegorical framing; that de Pizan lacked the sophistication to read allegory correctly; and that her objections revealed nothing but her own failure of understanding.

De Pizan refused to be crushed by these men. She made a moral argument about the responsibility of authors, one that feminist literary theory would later name as foundational: language does not merely reflect social reality, but actively produces it.

THE MATRI·ARCHY

Le Livre de la Cité des Dames / The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan, 1405

Written in response to The Romance of the Rose and the wider misogynist tradition it exemplified, The Book of the City of Ladies is an act of systematic feminist counter-construction.

Within the medieval order, the capacity to build is the constitutive privilege of men. To construct architecture, world-systems, bodies of knowledge, and structures of cultural authority belongs to them alone. Architecture itself encodes this claim to power: the fantasy of mastery, origin, command, and governance.

De Pizan’s response is to claim that entitlement, and in doing so she writes herself into her book as the Architect. Through this usurpation, she builds something radical: the City of Ladies is a fortified space of protection and exclusion. It is governed by the three great virtues of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, and populated by Women drawn from classical myth, hagiographic tradition, and vernacular literature. They are warriors, scholars, prophetesses, artists, and saints.

Within its walls, de Pizan systematically reclaims these Women, reconstructing them not as allegorical objects of male desire, but as agents, founders, and moral authorities in their own right. Where The Romance of the Rose had built its architecture of desire on the erasure and violation of Women, in The Book of the City of Ladies, de Pizan builds hers on their restoration.

Inside the City of Ladies takes that architectural proposition seriously: that an image, like a city, can be built as a defence, an argument, and a threshold.

THE GENTLEMAN SCHOLAR’S TOOLKIT: SOME REGRETTABLE THEOLOGICAL CLUMSINESS

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

C.S. Lewis, 1936

Granted canonical status within the academic study of medieval literature, The Allegory of Love established a dominant framework through which scholars would discuss courtly love. It remains a touchstone of the tradition it helped to institutionalise.

In his text, Lewis codifies a system built around a man wanting a woman who will not have him, constructing an entire ethical and aesthetic heteropatriarchal system around the cultural legitimacy of his wanting. From the present, this looks uncomfortably like the ideological DNA of incel culture: a grammar in which male desire is treated as destiny, and female refusal as the problem requiring interpretation, conquest, or correction.

•     The Woman is constructed as a Rose. Her conversion into solely an object of beauty is read as an achievement: as aesthetically pleasing writing, and as a mark of literary skill.

•     Christine de Pizan is not mentioned. The Woman who mounted the most significant literary challenge to the tradition he was canonising is ignored.

•     Lewis attributes Jean de Meun’s misogyny to theological confusion. Systematic ideological violence becomes an unfortunate side effect of medieval intellectual awkwardness.

Together, these three dick moves constitute a complete exoneration: the first aestheticises, the second erases, and the third excuses. By the time Lewis has finished, the most violently misogynist text in the medieval French tradition has been rehabilitated as formal achievement, with some regrettable theological clumsiness attached.

“Clumsiness is the characteristic vice of his work. He is a bungler.
His hand is heavy and his fingers, as they say, are all thumbs.”

C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

FREE SWEETIES: EVERYTHING IS FINE IN HERE

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C.S. Lewis, 1950

As a major medieval allegory scholar and a devout Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis well understood the mechanisms of allegorical world-building he was deploying.

The entry point into Narnia is a codified erotic landscape. Behind the wholesome wrapper - it is only a children’s story, only a fantasy - Lewis constructs a comprehensive ideological sweet shop, delivered through the one condition that makes it irresistible: childhood innocence. The child reader’s openness and imaginative surrender ensure the ideology arrives whole and unexamined.

“...instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon...
he was quite warm now, and very comfortable.”

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Through a magician’s sleight of hand and the good old switcheroo, what was in the box is an entirely different confection. It is a fully encoded patriarchal taxonomy of gender roles, which today’s toxic male culture can recognise as its own.

The hierarchy is already legible: Aslan as divine paternal authority; Peter as ordained masculine rule; Edmund as the fallen boy, susceptible to female seduction. Around them, the female figures form a warning system: the White Witch as power outside patriarchal order; Susan as a troubling image of feminine maturity; and Lucy as goodness expressed through faith, obedience, and belief.

The natural world withholds under female sovereignty and blooms only when the correct order is restored.

The racial coding of good and evil is structural. Patriarchy, class, and imperial authority are rendered not as human arrangements, but as cosmic law.

It is the will of Aslan, a beautiful and Magical Cat.

FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT

The Faun, the Pill and the Manosphere

Antiquity–present

After pushing through the furs and finding yourself standing at the lamppost, you are waiting for the Faun: a creature whose classical ancestry carries the charge of rustic appetite, pursuit, and sexual threat.

This is not a straight line of descent so much as a recurring grammar: masculine Order against feminine Chaos; seduction as fall; obedience as restoration; revelation as the reward for submission to the code. The trail from C.S. Lewis to the contemporary manosphere can be tracked down the rabbit hole to what the manosphere calls its Gateways:

•     Jordan Peterson, who references C.S. Lewis, and whose foundational binary of masculine Order against feminine Chaos is structural Lewisian metaphysics in secular drag.

•     John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, which quotes C.S. Lewis to enshrine male aggression and female rescue as the hardwired design of God.

•     The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which has used Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis to argue that male headship is the universal teaching of Christianity across all times and places.

Once you have passed through a Gateway, you are confronted with the Red Pill.

What may prove to be a deliciously inconvenient truth to some is that The Matrix (1999), from which the Red Pill is taken, is now widely read, including through the later comments of its makers, as a cinematic transgender allegory about living inside an architecture built for you without your consent.

The Red Pill was leeched directly from The Matrix, and it has become one of the manosphere’s primary myths of origin: slithering out from a uterine pod, floating in amniotic fluid, connected by umbilical cables. The manosphere suckled from the bottle without checking the toxin label and has created an ultra-processed vomit, which it has packaged up and sold back to itself as The Truth.

The Red Pill has become a metaphysical claim: it has crossed a Threshold and transformed into a named Force, acquiring the weight of revelation rather than opinion. You are no longer Blue Pilled, no longer an unconscious sleepwalker.

You have been Awakened.

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