Sheila Delany

"In pre-revolutionary Paris, a young woman falls for a handsome young priest. To be near him, she dresses as a man, enters his seminary, and is invited to become a fully ordained Catholic priest, a career forbidden to women then as now. Sylvain Maréchal's epistolary novella offers a biting rebuke to religious institutions and a hypocritical society; its views on love, marriage, class, and virtue remain relevant today. The book ends in la Nouvelle France, which had become part of Canada during Maréchal's lifetime. With thorough notes and introduction by Sheila Delany, this first translation of Maréchal's novella, La femme abbé, brings a little-known but revelatory text to the attention of readers interested in French history and literature, history of the novel, women's studies, and religious studies."--

"Jews were expelled from England in 1290, about half a century before Geoffrey Chaucer's birth. But Jews and their culture continued to play in important role in the English Christian imagination throughout the late Middle Ages, in the work of Chaucer and his contemporaries. How were writers enabled to represent Jews in their absence, and why did they want to do so?". "These questions are explored for the first time in a pioneering collection of essays edited by Sheila Delany. Contributions from eminent historians and literary scholars examine the influence of theology, politics, folklore, visual art, and domestic and social life in producing a multivalent tradition of representing Jews in medieval English literature. Chaucer's work is the main focus of the volume, and other late medieval texts offer further avenues of investigation. Two essays on current pedagogy conclude the volume, bringing its subject into the range of immediate concerns of teachers today. Chaucer and the Jews will be a discovery for readers seeking a fresh perspective on Jewish studies, medieval literature, and life in medieval England."--BOOK JACKET.

"In this first translation of Sylvain Mare chal's Bible commentary, Sheila Delany offers an important document in the history of modern European secularization and rationalist Bible criticism. Editor of one of France's best-known radical journals, Re volutions de Paris, and author in many genres-drama, poetry, journalism, treatise-Mare chal (1750-1803) embraced the revolutionary egalitarian ideas of Franc ʹois-Noe l "Gracchus" Babeuf. As an atheist, he witnessed with dismay the advent of Napoleon and the post-revolutionary return of Catholic fervor. For and Against the Bible was his protest, his reminder of what the nation had endured and of what, at the opening of the nineteenth century, it might still accomplish. Delany's introduction and annotated English translation will be of great interest to all interested in Jewish or Christian Bible studies, history of Bible criticism, eighteenth century European rationalism, French atheism, modern European secularism"--