The other voice in early modern Europe

Two 17th-century French stories about an admirable poet from Mytilene in Lesbos.

"Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere, a semi-autobiographical novel, portrays an enterprising woman who writes the story of her life, a complex tale that runs counter to social expectations and romantic conventions. A most striking work, the novel skillfully mixes real events from the author's lifetime with entirely fictional adventures. At a time when few women published, Villedieu's Memoirs is a significant achievement in creating a voice for the early modern woman writer. Written while the French novel form was still in its infancy, it should be welcomed by any scholar of women's writing or of the early development of the novel."--Jacket.

Emilie Du Châtelet was an accomplished scientific and philosophical writer whose contribution to French intellectual life in the first half of the 18th century has long been obscured by her association with Voltaire. This volume of her writings will help re-establish a reputation that has long been overshadowed.

"Financially unable to enter the convent, Cecilia Ferrazzi (1609-1684) refused to marry, and as a single laywoman set out in pursuit of holiness. Eventually, she improvised a vocation: running houses of refuge for young women at risk of being lured into prostitution. Despite the socially valuable service she was providing, not everyone was convinced that she was a genuine favorite of God. Denounced to the Venetian Inquisition in 1664, she requested and obtained the unprecedented opportunity to defend herself through a presentation of her life story."--BOOK JACKET.

"In seventeenth-century France, aristocratic women were valued by their families as commodities to be married off in exchange for money, social advantage, or military alliance. Once married, they became legally subservient to their husbands. The duchesse de Montpensier - a first cousin of Louis XIV - was one of very few exceptions, thanks to the vast wealth she inherited from her mother, who died shortly after Montpensier was born." "In the daring letters presented in this bilingual edition, Montpensier condemns the alliance system of marriage, proposing instead to found a republic that she would govern, "a corner of the world in which... women are their own mistresses," and where marriage and even courtship would be outlawed. Her pastoral utopia would provide medical care and vocational training for the poor, and all the homes would have libraries and studies, so that each woman would have "a room of her own" in which to write books."--BOOK JACKET.

"Originally published in 1529, the Declamation of the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex argues that women are more than equal to men in all things that really matter, including the public spheres from which they had long been excluded." "Rather than directly refuting prevailing wisdom, Agrippa uses women's superiority as a rhetorical device and overturns the misogynistic interpretations of the female body in Greek medicine, in the Bible, in Roman and canon law, in theology and moral philosophy, and in politics. He raises the question of why women were excluded and provides answers based not on sex but on social conditioning, education, and the prejudices of their more powerful oppressors. His declamation, disseminated through the printing press, illustrates the power of that new medium, soon to be used to generate a larger reformation of religion."--BOOK JACKET.