Women and Power at the French Court, 1483--1563 explores the ways in which a range of women " as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage " wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.

Despite her chronic illness, the French composer Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was able to overcome great obstacles and to achieve an unusual degree of both artistic success and public acclaim during her very short lifetime. This phenomenon is the more remarkable in that her chosen field is one in which, even today, women find it difficult to be evaluated solely on artistic merits. At the age of nineteen she was the first woman to win the prestigious Premier Grand Prix de Rome in composition, an award carrying with it extended residence at the famous Villa Medici in Rome. Even before this recognition was accorded her, some of her compositions had been performed by outstanding artists of the day and had received critical praise. This first full-length study of the life and works of Lili Boulanger is based almost entirely on sources that have hitherto been unavailable, such as family photographs, records, and documents in the possession of her only surviving relative, the eminent music pedagogue Mlle Nadia Boulanger, as well as on personal reminiscences both of Nadia Boulanger and of friends of the Boulanger family. Further information was secured from newly discovered library and archival sources in addition to the young composer's personal memorabilia, correspondence, and manuscript scores, which have never before been made available for study. In order to describe accurately the ambience of the places visited by Lili Boulanger during her life, the author not only undertook the necessary archival research, but also personally retraced the travels of the composer through six European countries, using the same means of transportation that the young composer had used. Born into a family with a long tradition of artistic accomplishment, surrounded during her twenty-four years by a devoted family and friends, Lili Boulanger became a creative, productive human being. The best of her works--especially those she wrote after winning the Prix de Rome in 1913--display firmness, delicacy, strength, and mastery of compositional technique. Lili Boulanger's musical style ranges from impressionism, to a Wagnerian vocabulary, to post-impressionism and growing chromaticism in her last compositions. As Debussy observed, her music "undulates with grace." The author's analysis of the 91 musical examples from the oeuvre of Lili Boulanger, and the 53 illustrations, many drawn from among old family photographs and other privately held manuscript sources, provide two of the many highlights of this superior biography.

A novel of a twentysomething, Algerian-born woman living on the edge in France, from “one of the hottest literary talents of multicultural Europe” (Sunday Telegraph). When Ahlème’s mother was killed in a village massacre, she left Algeria for France with her father and brother and never returned. Now, more than a decade later, she is practically French, yet in many ways she remains an outsider. Ahlème’s dreams for a better life have been displaced by the harsh realities she faces every day. Her father is unable to work after an accident at his construction site and her brother boils over with adolescent energy, teetering dangerously close to choosing a life of crime. As a temporary resident, Ahlème could at any moment be sent back to a village and a life that are now more foreign than Paris. In Some Dream for Fools, Faïza Guène explores the disparity between the expectations and limitations of immigrant life in the West and tells a remarkable story of one woman’s courage to dream. “With a keen eye for detail and a sharp narrative tone, [Guène] gives voice to a hurt too long unrecognized. . . . [She] takes us into another world—a world that no nation today can afford to ignore.” —The Christian Science Monitor

Originally published in 1955, this introductory text was created for the general reader or students of the classics seeking a greater understanding of Ovid.

Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts—including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.

Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.

Don Celestino is old and bitter and afraid, an impossible man. An anarchist who has been in exile from his native Spain for more than twenty years, he lives with his daughter in Paris, but in his mind he is still fighting the Spanish Civil War. He fulminates against the daily papers; he brags about his past exploits. He has become bigoted, self-important, and obsessed; a bully to his fellow exiles and a tyrant to his daughter, Pascualita. Then a family member dies in Madrid and there is an inheritance to sort out. Pascualita wants to go to Spain, which is supposedly opening up in response to the 1960s, and Don Celestino feels he has no choice but to follow. He is full of dread and desire, foreseeing a heroic last confrontation with his enemies, but what he encounters instead is a new commercialized Spain that has no time for the past, much less for him. Or so it seems. Because the last act of Don Celestino’s dizzying personal drama will prove that though “there is nothing serious . . . , there is tragedy.” An astonishing modern take on Don Quixote, Chaos and Night untangles the ties between politics and paranoia, self-loathing and self-pity, rage and remorse. It is the darkly funny final flowering of the art of Henry de Montherlant, a solitary and scarifying modern master whose work, admired by Graham Greene and Albert Camus, is sure to appeal to contemporary readers of Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño.