The exquisite manuscript copy of Christine de Pizan's Collected W greatest treasures of the British Library (Harley MS. 4431), is well kn late medieval literature and art. 1 A splendid frontispiece depicts the Isabeau of Bavaria, the wife of King Charles VI of France (fig. 1). Seated i her bedroom, Isabeau receives the large book from Christine, who wrote prominent in royal circles between 1399 and 1416. A special dedicati precedes twenty-nine separate works by Christine, which together co version of her writings up to 1410-15, the date of its completion. 2 N volumes and containing 398 folios of large format, the British Library m the culmination of Christine's literary career, which effectively began husband, a royal secretary, died while on a mission for the King. 3 B difficulties, she became a writer in order to support herself and her following ten years of study, the still-young widow had produced her fir balades with which the Harley manuscript opens. These 100 poem autobiographical content wherein she mourns the loss of her husband, are British Library codex by later ballads, plusieurs autres balades and enc These poems, sometimes political in nature, include compositions wr Other short verse texts, such as the Epistre au dieu ď* amours (¿'1399 amans (1401), and the Livre des Hi. jugemens (1400), treat the chivalric co emerged in this period. The British Library manuscript concludes wi copy of a love story in verse, the Cent balades de dame et diamant (pr Most of Christine's major prose works are also present in this compendium interspersed with the poetry in a roughly chronological order. Near th volume is her first prose composition, the Epistre Othéa (¿'1400-1), an in which the goddess Othea presents a letter to Hector, heir to the Trojan prose works follow: the Livre du chemin de long estude (1402-3), an allego about the next ruler of the world; the Epistles on the Roman de la correspondence on the subject of Jean de Meun's view of women in the R trois vertues (1405), a treatise on the virtues; and the Cité des dames (140 defence of women, using examples of famous women from antiquity unt This manuscript additionally preserves many lesser prose and verse