In two remarkable images in London, BL MS Harley 4431, the manuscript Christine de Pizan produced between 1410 and 1415 for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of the French king Charles VI, Christine depicts two circles of women readers: one real and one ideal.

Although Christine de Pizan often describes herself as a solitary reader, in the frontispiece to Harley 4431, fol. 3r, we see her in the Queen's bedchamber, kneeling in a deeply respectful attitude before her intended readers, Isabeau of France and her circle of six ladies, whose relative status is indicated by their position, size, coifs, and the degree of luxury of their clothing (fig. 1).

The Queen's chamber itself is fully depicted, from the red and green rafters that frame the gold barrel-vaulted ceiling to the wall-hangings of tapestries adorned with the royal fleur de lys, to the open windows where lattices show sunlight and suggest a breeze, to the heraldic bedcover and tester of the splendid bed to the right, and finally to the figured carpet that lies along the lower margin of the image.

Reading has not yet begun in the frontispiece. In the center foreground, Christine is recognizable in her “uniform,” a blue houppelande [long gown]and white cornette [two-horned headdress]. She holds out her large, gilt-edged book whose clasps hold a richly decorated velvet binding. Before her, the Queen, wearing a crown-like bourrelet [a padded, heart-shaped headdress] and an embroidered houppelande with flowing, ermine-lined sleeves, is seated on a long couch, her little dog perched on its arm. A greyhound, lying to the lower right with his muzzle on his front paws, completes the atmosphere of quiet stillness. The moment is important. the ceremony of book presentation is fully realized, yet intimate. Reading has begun in the second image under consideration (fig. 2), an illustration of chapter 23 of Christine's Epistre Othea copied in Harley 4431,4 a book-length letter of moral advice and spiritual teachings for knights, addressed to the young prince Hector of Troy. Against the richly diapered background of a space that is both more abstract and even more exalted than that of the frontispiece, the goddess Diana leans comfortably over her cloud as she reads with seven women.