not without interest as a reflection of the taste of the time, but which contains, it must be confessed, little either to attract or to edify the modern reader. No critical edition of the original work has yet appeared, and the preface to a translation is hardly the place in which to enter minutely into its composition. Apart, however, from the Latin Vulgate and the theological writers whose names may be found in the index, there are three sources from which the matter appears to be mainly derived. Christine’s classical mythology, it is clear, comes almost entirely from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, but whether she had recourse to the original or to a moralized mediæval adaptation is a question not so easily determined. There is a work of the latter kind in French verse and of prodigious length, fourteen MSS. of which are known, including one in the British Museum (Add. MS. 10,324). By some misunderstanding it was formerly attributed to Philippe de Vitry, Bishop of Meaux (1351–1362). Modern criticism, however, has proved that it was really written by Chrétien Legouais, a Friar Minor, for the queen of Philip IV., Jeanne de Champagne, who died in 1305.[38] There was a copy in the library of Christine’s patron, the Duke of Berry,[39] but it was apparently acquired in 1403, after the “Épître d’Othéa” was written. Although it is quite possible that she had a direct knowledge of this poem, she is more likely to have used a moralized prose paraphrase of the Metamorphoses by the Benedictine Pierre Bersuire, who in his second edition, written at Paris in 1342, laid Legouais under contribution. Bersuire wrote in Latin, which language Christine certainly understood, and how soon his work appeared in French it is difficult to say. In the Berry Library there were three MSS. of the Metamorphoses apparently in vernacular prose,[40] any one, if not all, of which may have been Bersuire in a French version. There is also a French prose version in Brit. Mus. Royal MS. 17 E. iv. in company with the “Épître d’Othéa” itself, but the MS. is not earlier than the latter part of the 15th century. This version is closely connected with that printed at Bruges in 1484 by Colard Mansion, who supposed the original author to have been, not Bersuire, but Thomas Waleys or de Galles. The two are, however, not quite identical, and the former possibly represents an older version, which Mansion revised for printing. But whatever the particular form of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which Christine utilized, her naive interpretations of his mythological tales are no doubt largely her own. In this respect she was certainly not in advance of her age. In the usual euhemeristic fashion she regarded the classical deities and demigods as men and women who by the “prerogative of some grace” had raised themselves above their fellows and were for this reason accorded divine honours; or, on the other hand, they were mere inventions of the poets, who, for instance, by inverting the