In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf suggested that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” I found myself remembering her words as I began translating Anne of France’s lessons for her daughter, Suzanne of Bourbon. The process was a strangely intimate one: slowly, word by word, sometimes even letter by letter, I was deciphering the admonitions, advice, and warnings a fifteenthcentury princess directed to her daughter, all the while and against all logic hearing my own mother’s voice in my mind. And then one day, midway through the process of turning French into English, I looked away from my pile of dictionaries to the framed portraits of Anne and Suzanne that sat on the desk where I was working. Studying their faces, I knew I had to find the quotation that I remembered.

I did find it, about three-quarters of the way through the slim volume, as Woolf was describing the struggle of women writers. Although they were confronted by “discouragement and criticism,” Woolf wrote, “that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them . . . when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help.” And then the sentence: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

Anne of France’s text seems at first to challenge Woolf’s claim, for in composing a series of lessons for her daughter, Anne did have a tradition of women behind her, and a rather long one. As she wrote, she could “think back” to Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, written a hundred years earlier, a book that Anne had owned and read, a book that, in fact, she had inherited from her mother, Charlotte of Savoy, queen of France. And, although Anne addressed her lessons to her daughter, she clearly came to see herself contributing to the tradition she inherited, since her book was passed on to other daughters of other mothers: her lessons were published “at the request” of Suzanne, doubtless with her mother’s approval. This first edition, printed between 1517 and 1521, was followed by a second printing in 1534.