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Abstract
Colin Morris in his The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 points out that the crucial part of the beginning of individualism in the twelfth century is peoples shift of focus from solely that with the divine to their relationships with others, and with society. The idea of the individual flourished in social relations as well as in religious practice and literature. When it comes to the reading of medieval literature that centers on the subject of women, the discovery of the individual has often been overlooked because of the omnipresence of misogynistic traditions. Boccaccios Famous Women, Chaucers The Legend of Good Women, and Christine de Pizans The Book of the City of Ladies form a group of texts that point to these writers awareness of their identity as writers under the influence of the development of the individual. Boccaccio writes about famous women as metaphors of his concepts of history, trying to differentiate his own role as a humanist writer from that of his predecessor, Petrarch. Chaucer writes about faithful women as metaphors of the relationship between authorship and readership, trying to define his own position as both a translator and a writer in his time. Christine de Pizan writes of virtuous women who made contributions to civilizations as direct representations that help her to define her role as that of a female professional writer. Beyond the subject of women, these different portrayals of women represent various fashions of the discovery, as well as presentation, of a medieval writers individuality.