IF Mary-Jo Arn had not already devised the appropriate title of Fortunes Stabilnes for the sequence of English poems in MS Harley 682, attributed to Charles, duke of Orleans, I would have liked to call the collection The Duke's Book for the sake of the parallel with The Kingis Quair, the contemporary poem attributed to King James I of Scotland. These two fifteenth-century books have many similarities. John Burrow has discussed both as products of that period just before the introduction of printing, ‘when the production of manuscript books had reached its highest degree of organisation and efficiency’, and as instances of what he calls ‘bookness’, works that significantly depend for their effect ‘upon their own material existence as books – as volumes of paper or parchment, … held in a reader's hand or lying on his desk’. Conscious textuality is certainly an important feature of both works: the writing of its component parts, many of them fictive letters or documents, is a recurrent theme of Fortunes Stabilnes, while The Kingis Quair purports to tell the story of its own composition, and Burrow notes the striking effect of the cross written in line 91 beside ‘and thus begouth my buke’ to mark the author's decision to begin writing this very book about his own experiences. Both are first-person compositions associated with documented historical events, yet the authorship of both has been persistently questioned.