Geoffroy de La Tour Landry

Born before 1330, Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry was a French knight and nobleman from Anjou who fought in the Hundred Years' War. He is best known today not for his military career, but for writing Livre pour l'enseignement de ses filles around 1371–1372, a book meant to guide the upbringing and behavior of his daughters.

That work, often known in English as The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, blends moral instruction with anecdotes, cautionary tales, and observations drawn from aristocratic society. It became one of the better-known medieval conduct books for women and has remained valuable to readers and historians because it shows how one father in the late Middle Ages thought about family, religion, manners, and social life.

The exact year of his death is uncertain, but sources place it between 1402 and 1406. Even with so few personal details surviving, his book has preserved a distinct voice: practical, stern, sometimes surprisingly intimate, and deeply revealing of the world in which he lived.