Christine de Pizan in Bruges: "Le livre de la cité des dames" as "Het Bouc van de Stede der Vrauwen" (London, British Library, Add. 20698) by Orlanda S. H. Lie et al.

This book is a monograph on a beautiful and very interesting manuscript at the British Library (Add. MS 20698) containing a translation in Middle Dutch of one of Christine de Pizan's best known works, The Book of the City of Ladies. The volume has four co-authors whose individual contributions are not specified, though the particular fields of expertise of each are briefly mentioned.

The first part of the book, "The Codex in Context," is the main one of three. Twelve sections lead the reader through various aspects of the manuscript: the text, the translation and the translator, the commissioner, the codex, the illumination and the illuminators, the contents, and the general context. The second part reproduces all forty-one illuminated leaves of the manuscript (very handy, though it can be regretted that the order of the illustrations does not always follow the order of the folios). The third part consists of the reproduction and the "bilingual edition" (that is, the transcription and the English translation) of the text on leaves 329v–333r. These last two chapters of the Bouc van de Stede der Vrauwen were added by the translator to Christine's original (unfortunately, some confusion on the chapter numbers remains in the comments). The volume is completed with appendices (a detailed codicological description, a list of contents, and a list of the miniatures of the manuscript), bibliography, and summaries in Dutch and French.

The book offers a fine example of the complicated choices that have to be made in our era in which digital and printed publications are finding ways to coexist. The volume could make a very nice introduction to a text edition of the Bouc van de Stede der Vrauwen, but this edition is not added—quite understandably, because it is available online.¹ But then, the British Library offers a digitization of the whole manuscript, and the publisher deserves applause for having been willing to publish this richly illustrated book anyway.²

The volume is a nice book: a handy, beautifully illustrated, detailed, and inexpensive monograph on this manuscript. But interdisciplinary consideration of all aspects of a complicated manuscript in fewer than forty pages is ambitious. Despite the fact that the authors have (at least in part) been working for two decades on the manuscript, some lacunae have to be mentioned when judging the volume as a scholarly enterprise.

The authors have chosen a rather limited bibliography. That is no problem per se in a book intended to be accessible and not too extensive. Some notable omissions should be mentioned, however. On the Bruges illuminators and on Louis of Bruges's commissions, the authors have not used Manuscrits enluminés des anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux: I, Louis de Bruges, the essential 2009 catalogue by Ilona Hans-Collas and Pascal Schandel. When writing about Guy de Brimeu (p. 41, n. 89), surprisingly Werner Paravicini's Guy de Brimeu: Der burgundische Staat und seine adlige Führungsschicht unter Karl dem Kühnen is not cited, whereas a review of this book is. Another important missing title is the 2012 study by Laura Rinaldi Dufresne, The Fifteenth-Century Illustrations of Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies" and "The Treasure of the City of Ladies": Analysing the Relation of the Pictures to the Text.

After the introduction, the book starts off with the context of book culture in Bruges around 1475 and the manuscript patronage of Jan III de Baenst (ca. 1420–1486). The authors paint a general picture and deal with the several other known manuscripts bearing Jan de Baenst's ownership marks. De Baenst is an interesting figure who, as a member of the city elite of the town of Bruges and councilor of the duke, built his book commissions on the bibliophile culture developed at and around the court of the Burgundian duke Philip the Good. Book-linked ties with fellow citizen Louis of Bruges seem to have been close, but in commissioning a Dutch translation of Christine's text, he also distinguished himself from the Francophone Burgundian culture. He showed himself to be a self-conscious Flemish townsman. The authors do touch upon this aspect, but they could have gone a bit deeper into the interesting subject of the nature of De Baenst's bibliophily. De Baenst's specific social setting (as studied in recent publications by Céline Van Hoorebeek, Frederik Buylaert, and Jonas Brakevelt, which are cited only in part) should be distinguished from the high nobility to which Louis of Bruges belonged. These differences are not to be underestimated.

Giving some attention to early print culture would have given a more balanced contextualization of the Bouc van de Stede der Vrauwen. This richly illuminated book in Dutch seems quite an exception when seen only within manuscript culture, but it is less so when seen in relation to the boom in vernacular illustrated incunabula editions starting directly after 1475 (Mansion, Leeu, Bellaert, and so on).

Concerning the illumination, the illustration program, the iconography, and the use of models are extensively discussed. The authors show how various illustration traditions were drawn upon and combined. The stylistic part, however, is insufficiently documented and developed. It would, for example, have been interesting to include the styles of the marginal decoration (at least five hands are distinguishable) and the attributions of the miniatures in the table of appendix I.

The frontispiece miniature is attributed to the group of the Master of Margaret of York, but we do not read much more about him. Many hands could have been discussed within this group.³ Only Brinkmann's attribution to the "painter of the Vie de Sainte Colette" (p. 36, n. 74) is mentioned in a footnote, without further comment. On the other hand, the authors draw on Brinkmann's monograph to give more attention to the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, though, rather surprisingly, it remains unclear exactly which miniatures are concerned.⁴

A "different hand" is introduced for several miniatures (p. 36; p. 40, n. 85) and the reader would like to hear more about him. It is the Master of the Chroniques d'Angleterre, an interesting and prolific hand who deserves more than the mere remark in a footnote that the authors find this hypothesis unconvincing, without offering an alternative.⁵ Indeed, I think that fifteen miniatures (on folios 5, 7v, 11, 64v, 68v, 73, 84, 85, 87v, 90, 222, 231v, 240, 247, 248v) can be attributed to this hand, thus making him the most fruitful painter of the manuscript.

But of course the book has, as said before, many strengths as well, especially concerning the programmatic (text and illustrations) and literary analysis. The addition of the last two chapters of the manuscript and their interpretation are very interesting. The authors note a shift in the intended audience between Christine's original French version and the Middle-Dutch translation. Christine wrote a woman-oriented text to send a positive message to all women, offering them self-confidence and models of behavior, but the (probably male) translator takes a more conservative approach. He not only feels the need to add a disclaimer concerning the author's views, even arguing that women should certainly not feel superior or equal to men, but also addresses Christine's text, more negatively, to women so that they can try to correct themselves. An interesting tension is thus created between on the one hand the commissioner's enthusiasm (as described by the translator) and the splendid manuscript, and on the other the translator's ambivalent opinion about the contents.

My criticisms do not keep the book from being an attractive and interesting volume. But the evaluation can follow two paths. As a complement to the online text edition and the online digitization it has much to offer. As an in-depth, collaboratively written monograph, the volume is not completely balanced: strong in several areas, particularly the textual analysis and the literary interpretation, but insufficiently developed in others. One can, however, and probably should, see this book as a detailed and attractive general introduction making known a manuscript that deserves to be so. In this, a fine job has been done.