Woman Triumphant: Feminism In French Literature, 1610-1652
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
In the tumultuous decades between the assassination of Henri IV and the dawn of the Fronde, a remarkable literary battle was waged across the salons and printing houses of France — a battle over the nature, worth, and destiny of women. Ian Maclean's Woman Triumphant chronicles the vibrant feminist discourse embedded within French literature of the early seventeenth century (1610–1652), presenting a richly detailed portrait of how writers, poets, and philosophers of the era argued for, against, and around the emerging concept of feminine authority and virtue. Drawing on a vast corpus of primary sources — from courtly romances and moral treatises to medical texts and philosophical dialogues — Maclean reconstructs a cultural landscape in which the querelle des femmes was not a marginal curiosity but a defining intellectual preoccupation. Maclean writes with the precision of a scholar and the insight of a cultural historian, illustrating how literary conventions, scientific ideas, and social norms intersected to shape — and constrain — the image of women in early modern France. Woman Triumphant stands as a landmark contribution to the study of gender in pre-Enlightenment Europe, situating proto-feminist thought within the broader currents of Renaissance humanism and Baroque sensibility. For readers drawn to the hidden genealogies of feminist thought, this meticulous and revelatory study poses an irresistible question: how much of the modern debate was already being fought, centuries before we thought it began?
Author: Ian Maclean
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
In the tumultuous decades between the assassination of Henri IV and the dawn of the Fronde, a remarkable literary battle was waged across the salons and printing houses of France — a battle over the nature, worth, and destiny of women. Ian Maclean's Woman Triumphant chronicles the vibrant feminist discourse embedded within French literature of the early seventeenth century (1610–1652), presenting a richly detailed portrait of how writers, poets, and philosophers of the era argued for, against, and around the emerging concept of feminine authority and virtue. Drawing on a vast corpus of primary sources — from courtly romances and moral treatises to medical texts and philosophical dialogues — Maclean reconstructs a cultural landscape in which the querelle des femmes was not a marginal curiosity but a defining intellectual preoccupation. Maclean writes with the precision of a scholar and the insight of a cultural historian, illustrating how literary conventions, scientific ideas, and social norms intersected to shape — and constrain — the image of women in early modern France. Woman Triumphant stands as a landmark contribution to the study of gender in pre-Enlightenment Europe, situating proto-feminist thought within the broader currents of Renaissance humanism and Baroque sensibility. For readers drawn to the hidden genealogies of feminist thought, this meticulous and revelatory study poses an irresistible question: how much of the modern debate was already being fought, centuries before we thought it began?