The Manuscripts of the Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie

This article gives the first complete list of all the known manuscripts of Christine de Pizan's Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie (1410) according to their most salient feature, first identified by A. T. P. Byles: those that identify Christine as author and those that remove the female author figure from the text. The article also provides a fuller description of the manuscripts than has hitherto been published and elaborates on the differences noted by Byles between the two major groups, with a view to aiding the selection of manuscripts for a critical edition of this text. Finally, the article suggests a new possible motive behind the initial erasure of Christine's authorship, which affected a large number of manuscripts.