Lori J. Walters Florida State University The Book as a Gift of Wisdom The Chemin de lonc estude in the Queen’s Manuscript, London, British Library, Harley 4431 4 This paper analyses Christine de Pizan’s inclusion and decoration of the Livre du chemin de lonc estude (Book of the Path of Long Study) in her masterpiece, the Queen’s Manuscript, London, British Library, Harley 4431. It shows how she directed the choice and placement of the miniatures in order to foreground the theme of her book as a gift of wisdom. A theme central to my own scholarship, whether that scholarship has been focused on Chrétien de Troyes, the Roman de la Rose, or Chris- tine de Pizan, 1 is that we cannot really know medieval literature unless we consider it in its manuscript context and understand in a concrete way how the text was constructed and transmitted as a physical object, painstakingly copied by hand and accompanied variously by rubrics, glosses, and illuminations. Christine de Pizan (1365–c. 1430) offers an excellent opportunity to illustrate how this works. 2 In her role as scriptorium head, Christine prepared forty-nine manu- scripts, all devoted exclusively to her own texts, for presentation to numerous royal patrons. 3 This total, however, includes only the extant copies. Counting in the other presentation copies that have been lost in the intervening six centuries, her achievement is all the more sig- nificant. 4 And this is not the whole story. Besides supervising the layout and execution of these numerous presentation copies, Christine herself transcribed, by her own hand, some twenty of them. She acted both as a manuscript’s mastermind and as a participant in the nitty-gritty of its physical making. Christine was a prolific publisher, whose presenta- tion copies greatly outnumber those of Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Digital Philology 5.2 (Fall): 228–246 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press 228