| Sumario: | This article focuses on the progress made by author Christine de Pizan as a publisher in France. The interest of art historians has tended to focus not on the earliest manuscripts which are decorated with pen-and-ink drawings or with relatively undistinguished miniatures but on the more ambitious volumes of high artistic quality in which de Pizan's works were copied from 1403 or 1404 onwards. Textual studies and critical editions of works by de Pizan have also cast light on the way in which she wrote her works and prepared them for publication. The very substantial analysis of the manuscript tradition of the Epistre Othea, published in 1967, includes comprehensive descriptions of all the known manuscripts. In the Avision Christine which she wrote in 1405 de Pizan looked back to 1399, when her literary career had begun, and described those six years as a period of intense activity. All the experience which she gained in the preparation of the manuscripts must have led her to see each of her works not just as an artistic creation but also as a physical unit which needed a precise space, measured in lines, folios, and quires, the exact numbers depending on the format chosen. The preparation of a manuscript required careful planning. The work of transcribing the text or texts had to be allocated: where one scribe might copy a single work or a small collection as a unit, it might be more convenient, in the case of a large collection, to use more than one scribe and to divide the material into sections to be copied separately.
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