Appearing Virtuous: Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre des trois vertus and Anne de France’s Les Enseignements d’Anne de France

Abstract

Medieval and early modern French courtesy books for females, even those written by women, seem to place a monotonous emphasis upon the importance of conforming to traditionally feminine ideals of comportment. In Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnais et d’Auvergne, à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon (ca. 1505), the work’s narrator, presumably Anne de France, Duchess of Bourbon, advises the work’s presumed reader, Anne’s daughter Suzanne: