This essay focuses on what may seem an ideologically narrow genre: the conduct book, offering a broad and complex interpretation of the texts and their place in medieval culture. Ashley ranges across European examples, especially French works that were later translated into English, beginning with the celebrated early example of the book written by Dhuoda, a Carolingian noblewoman for her son. Louis IXߣs Enseignemenz (Teachings), by contrast, provided advice for both his son and daughter. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the readership of conduct books expanded to include the middle classes. The conduct works of Christine de Pizan illustrate the growing popularity of the genre, reflecting an assumption that the lower classes will learn from the examples set by aristocratic women. Ashley demonstrates the appeal to a wider readership of the late-fourteenth-century book of Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, written for his three daughters and focused on marriage rather than life at court, while, in the same period, Le Menagier de Paris provides an example of a work addressed to a bourgeois audience that anticipates the development of ߢhousehold anthologiesߣ.