Letters

Hortense Mancini

ISBN 10: 1649591314 / ISBN 13: 9781649591319

Published by Iter Press, US, 2025

About this Item

The first translated collection of Hortense Mancini's correspondence. During the seventeenth century, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646-99), became an icon of women's emancipation. In 1668, she shocked Europe when she fled her coercive husband and began a nomadic exile. Her notoriety increased in 1675 with the publication of her memoir-one of the first to appear in French by a woman-and was later magnified by her stint as the royal mistress of Charles II of England and by her establishment of a freethinking salon in London. As a salonnière, an exile, and a litigant fighting for legal separation from her husband, Mancini's letters were a means of connection, collusion, and survival as well as cultural collaboration. Collected and translated here for the first time, this correspondence charts her struggle for autonomy in her own words.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781649591319

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Letters
• Publisher: Iter Press, US
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1649591314
• ISBN 13: 9781649591319
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 286 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The first translated collection of Hortense Mancini’s correspondence.

During the seventeenth century, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646–99), became an icon of women’s emancipation. In 1668, she shocked Europe when she fled her coercive husband and began a nomadic exile. Her notoriety increased in 1675 with the publication of her memoir—one of the first to appear in French by a woman—and was later magnified by her stint as the royal mistress of Charles II of England and by her establishment of a freethinking salon in London. As a salonnière, an exile, and a litigant fighting for legal separation from her husband, Mancini’s letters were a means of connection, collusion, and survival as well as cultural collaboration. Collected and translated here for the first time, this correspondence charts her struggle for autonomy in her own words.
 

About the Authors

Hortense Mancini was Duchess of Mazarin and the author of a memoir and many letters.

Annalisa Nicholson is a British Academy Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is the author of A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London as well as articles on Charles de Saint-Évremond and Madeleine de Scudéry.