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Behind Every Man(Uscript) Is A Woman: Social Networks, Christine De Pizan, And Westminster Abbey Library, Ms 21, Elizaveta Strakhov, Sarah Wilma Watson

English Faculty Research and Publications

London, Westminster Abbey Library, MS 21, a French lyric anthology dating to the mid-fifteenth century, bears the names of two male figures. Thomas Scales (c. 1399–1460), an English war commander, had his name and personal motto elaborately incorporated into the explicit of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours. Decades later, a Tudor reader added the name “Wyllam courtnay” to the manuscript’s margins. These two male names, physically visible on the surface of the manuscript, represent stable points of provenance data that provide important information about the use, meaning, and circulation of this medieval miscellany and the texts it …