I – The Founding: The Field of Letters – How the City Was Begun

"Take the pickaxe of your understanding and dig well." – Lady Reason to Christine, *The Book of the City of Ladies* (1405)

SURVEY ENTRY – Bureau of Impossible Geography FIELD AGENT: Dr. Eleanor Hartley, Senior Cartographer SHARD: CITÉ DES DAMES STATUS OF AGENT ON ARRIVAL: Refused entry I was refused at the Gate. I put it first because it is the only fact in this report I can vouch for completely. The Gate stands at the southern edge of a wide green plain, the Field of Letters, where a shallow river runs between poplars and the grass, seen from the walls, grows in the shapes of words. The Gate is Gothic, pale limestone, flanked by carved women who have been stopped in the act of speaking. Above the arch is a sentence in the French of 1405: no one enters here who cannot name a forgotten woman. Under the arch sits a tall woman in a white cap, knitting. She asked me for a name. I gave her Marie Curie. She smiled and said that one was not forgotten, child, and asked for another. I gave her Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Frida Kahlo, Joan of Arc. She told me where each of them lived. I could not think of a woman nobo...

From the lore of Cité des Dames.