Dramatic Proverbs (Volume 111): Rehearsing for the Future (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series) - Softcover

Marquise De Maintenon, Françoise D’Aubigné

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1649591284 ISBN 13: 9781649591289

Publisher: Iter Press, 2025

Synopsis

This translated edition of Madame de Maintenon’s school plays showcases their emphasis on the importance of girls’ self-reliance and resilience in an accessible and engaging format for modern students.

Madame de Maintenon’s Dramatic Proverbs provides unprecedented access to an important transitional marker between the society games of the salon and the education theater of the eighteenth century. Composed for the impoverished female pupils at the boarding school she and King Louis XIV founded at Saint-Cyr, Maintenon’s dramatic proverbs crucially reveal the values emphasized in female education at the end of the seventeenth century―a period plagued by economic crisis and growing aristocratic poverty. Some of the first to exclusively express a woman’s point of view, Maintenon’s dramatic proverbs challenged traditional female education and promoted improved conditions for women. The proverbs contributed uniquely to improvisational educational theater, inaugurating a tradition that continued well into the eighteenth century.

This edition of the plays aims to privilege accessibility and accuracy so that twenty-first-century students can act out, interpret, and discuss these historical texts.

About this title

About the Author

Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719) was the second wife and untitled queen of King Louis XIV of France. She became a powerful female figure at Versailles and founded the Maison royale de Saint-Louis-in-Saint-Cyr, a boarding school for impoverished aristocratic girls. Theresa Varney Kennedy is a professor of French at Baylor University and the author of Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750). Paige Tierney is visiting assistant professor of French at Wake Forest University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Iter Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1649591284
• ISBN 13: 9781649591289
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 346
• Editor: Kennedy Theresa Varney