The twelve dense articles of this collection, fruit of a journée d’études held at Université Paris-Diderot in 2013, examine a little-studied work composed in 1410 by Christine de Pizan (ca. 1365–1431), the Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie. Several of the authors remark that this four-part theoretical and practical guide to conducting war has long been regarded as one of Christine’s driest. The essays, however, prove the claim to be false.

The first three essays deal with manuscript issues. In “La tradition textuelle du Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie de Christine de Pizan,” Gabriella Parussa calls for a collation of all twenty-two of the manuscripts to determine their relationships. A genetic edition, one that reconstructs the different forms of the text in progress, would be particularly appropriate given Christine’s habit of revising her work. Christine Reno’s “Les deux exemplaires originaux subsistants du Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie” examines Bruxelles, KBR 10476 and Paris, BnF fr. 603, originals of Christine that show interesting divergences. For example, the addition in KBR 10476 of a passage praising John of Burgundy’s victory over the Liégeois is absent from BnF fr. 603, indicating that the former was created to flatter John while the latter went to an Armagnac client. Karen Fresno studies three collections of manuscripts containing the Faits d’armes, BnF fr. 603, KBR 9009–9011, and Bordeaux, Bibliothèque municipale 815, considering the works with which it was bound to understand how the text was perceived by different audiences.

The first essay of “Histoire et politique,” the collection’s second section, is Thierry Lassabatère’s “La function de connétable et le commandement militaire dans Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie.” Testing the hypothesis that the text can help clarify the nature of the authority of the connétable in early fifteenth-century France, Lassabatère discovers that Christine’s use of the term translates military offices that she discovered in her earlier sources. “Pour un droit de la guerre?” by Loïc Cazaux shows that the work synthesizes sources on the arts and the laws of war to create a guidebook that was highly topical: the soldier that emerges is a professional. The right to arms in the heraldic sense in the Faits d’armes and two of its sources is the subject of Inès Villela-Petit’s “La Dame à la biche: Christine de Pizan et le droit d’armes.” The ways in which each of the three authors conceives of this right reveal something about their pride and social position.

The three articles devoted to “Compilation et réécriture” begin with Claire Le Ninan’s “Christine de Pizan entre clergie et chevalerie dans le Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie,” a compelling analysis of Christine’s narrator as a clerkly woman of war. Le Ninan concludes by noting the irony that this narrator made it all the easier to erase Christine from the B branch of manuscripts of the text. Surely Christine would not have appreciated this! In “Le Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie: droit et didactique,” Bernard Ribémont describes the text’s partition into, first, a treatment of the so-called just war conducted under the shadow of Minerva, and, second, a dialogue between disciple Christine and master Honoré Bovet, author of the Arbre des batailles. For Hélène Biu, author of “‘Et la gist la maistrie’: de L’arbre des batailles au Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie,” Christine creates the first French encyclopedia of military treatises and regenerates the dialogue form of Bovet’s Arbre, the disciple gradually gaining authority throughout.

Reception of the work is the subject of the final three essays. In “Le Jouvencel ou le Roman des faits d’armes et de chevalerie,” Michelle Szkilnik demonstrates that Jean de Bueil, author of the Jouvencel, relied on the Livre des faits d’armes even though he effaced Christine’s presence from the romance. Andrew Taylor’s “‘Dame Christine’ et la chevalerie savant en Angleterre” offers a fascinating speculation on the popularity of Christine’s works in late fifteenth-century England. The collection ends with “Le Livre des faits d’armes et chevalerie: une critique feminine cachée de la chevalerie?” by Liliane Dulac and E. Jeffrey Richards, who hypothesize that the effacement of Christine from the B manuscripts can be explained by the retrograde attitudes of the Burgundian court where a nostalgia for past chivalric glory reigned, making acceptance of Christine’s Minerva-associated narrator unlikely.

The collection, the first devoted to this work, is extremely welcome. The only absence I would cite is historical. The date of the text’s composition, 1410, marked a major turning point in the Armagnac-Burgundian feud, the details of which give life to many of Christine’s apparently abstract statements. An essay fleshing out in detail the crisis unfolding throughout the spring and fall of 1410 would have given additional food for thought. But the collection as it is represents an exciting addition to Christine scholarship.