| Conduct books addressed to women have taken a long time to come to historians' attention. Even when the focus of historical study, they have been treated primarily as anecdotal matter. The Book of the Knight of the Tower illustrates this point. In 1371 Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, a minor Angevin nobleman, wrote a book for his daughters that would teach them how to read and to live honorably via positive and negative exempla. The resulting work found great popularity with medieval readers. After circulating as a French manuscript, the Book was translated into English and printed by William Caxton. A German nobleman translated the Book into German. It was printed with numerous woodcut illustrations in Basel. Although the Book was popular with readers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, modern scholars have found it to be overly pious and misogynistic. This dissertation moves beyond the relegation of such conduct books to domestic and feminine studies and utilizes codicological study to support the expansion of the Book's audience, traditionally assumed to be female, to include male readers. This dissertation argues that the authors of the Book sought to stabilize the concept of legitimacy through masculine control of female sexuality. In addition to adding several arguments to the current historiography of the Book, this dissertation broadens the current understanding of this text through the use of a variety of methodologies. This dissertation utilizes codicological study in combination with textual and graphic analysis. Unlike most traditional history of the Book, this dissertation analyzes the work as medieval readers would have experienced it, with text and image working together to suggest meaning. Although the Book has received increasing attention in the last two decades, much of that attention has been focused on the original French text. This dissertation examines the Book's complete textual history from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. |
