In 1504, Antoine Dufour, a Dominican at the French court, offered a book containing the lives of famous women to Anne, duchess of Brittany and queen of France. This beautiful manuscript is preserved in the Musée Dobrée in Nantes. In 1506, it was illuminated by Jean Pichore, an artist managing a workshop in Paris. According to the prologue, Dufour was complying with Anne's desire when he undertook to write his collection and she probably chose Jean Pichore, who was already quite famous, as the illustrator.

Compiling lives of famous women is no original endeavor at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Since Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus in the mid-fourteenth century, many writers had attempted to compose their own series of biographies of women: Christine de Pizan in the Cité des Dames, Martin Le Franc in the Champion des dames, and one year before Dufour, Symphorien Champier in his Nef des dames vertueuses. This trend took on different meanings at different times. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Christine wrote her passionate defense of women in the midst of the querelle du Roman de la Rose; in the mid-fifteenth century, Martin Le Franc's text might have been fueled by another controversy, this one around Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy. When Dufour composed his own text, the topic did not seem to have the same burning significance it carried earlier. Considering the number of similar undertakings in the sixteenth century, one wonders if it had not become a fashionable literary genre, aimed at flattering powerful women, but devoid of real conviction, although by the mid-sixteenth century yet another controversy erupted, la querelle des femmes. If Dufour was responding to a precise demand from the queen, he certainly intended to satisfy his royal patron. But did he merely undertake this assignment as a way of ingratiating himself with the queen, or was it an opportunity to develop positions of his own? It looks as if Anne elicited other similar undertakings, whether formally or not, since she was given an anonymous translation of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus, printed by Anthoine Vérard in 1493, and received a copy of Christine de Pizan's Trésor de la cité des dames. As for Champier's Nef des dames vertueuses, it was not dedicated to Anne de Bretagne but to Anne de Beaujeu.