front cover of Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast
The Original Story
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve
Iter Press, 2020
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the little-known author of Beauty and the Beast, was a successful novelist and fairytale writer in mid eighteenth-century France. While her novels are rarely read today, her compelling fairytale has become universally recognized. This edition is the first integral English translation of Villeneuve’s original tale. The introduction seeks to illuminate the publication of Beauty and the Beast in its historical and literary context, and brings to life the dynamic female characters that first populated this enchanting tale: the courageous Beauty, the Fairy Queen, the Amazon Queen, the Lady Fairy, and the powerful, but mischievous elderly fairy.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series volume 74
[more]

front cover of Book M
Book M
A London Widow's Life Writings
Katherine Austen, Edited by Pamela S. Hammons
Iter Press, 2013
This excellent piece of work brings a new and fascinating seventeenth-century voice to twenty-first-century readers interested in women’s studies, literature, and history. Book M by the London widow Katherine Austen lends itself well to modernization, which Professor Hammons has handled in a light and tactful manner. This book will be an excellent choice for classes on life writing in general and on early modern women’s writing in particular, and it will be a great contextual reading for courses on British Restoration culture and literature.
—Margaret J. M. Ezell
Distinguished Professor of English and John and Sara Lindsay Chair of Liberal Arts
Texas A&M University
[more]

front cover of The Book of the Body Politic
The Book of the Body Politic
Christine de Pizan
Iter Press, 2021
The first political treatise written by a woman.

Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the Body Politic is the first political treatise written by a woman. It not only advises the prince, but nobles, knights, and common people as well. It promotes the ideals of interdependence and social responsibility. Rooted in the mindset of medieval Christendom, The Book of the Body Politic heralds the humanism of the Renaissance, highlighting classical culture and Roman civic virtues. This new edition and translation offers a faithful rendering of Christine de Pizan’s writing, as well as a thorough contextualization of her career as a political writer at the end of the Middle Ages in France. The Book of the Body Politic resounds to this day, urging for the need for probity in public life and the importance of responsibilities and rights.
 
[more]

front cover of The Book of the Mutability of Fortune
The Book of the Mutability of Fortune
Christine de Pizan
Iter Press, 2017

Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1431) has long been recognized as France’s first professional woman of letters, and interest in her voluminous and wide-ranging corpus has been steadily rising for decades. During the tumultuous later years of the Hundred Years’ War, Christine’s lone but strong feminine voice could be heard defending women, expounding the highest ideals for good governance, and lamenting France’s troubled times alongside her own personal trials. In The Mutability of Fortune, Christine fuses world history with autobiography to demonstrate mankind’s subjugation to the ceaselessly changing, and often cruel, whims of Fortune. Now, for the first time, this poem is accessible to an English-speaking audience, further expanding our appreciation of this ground-breaking woman author and her extraordinary body of work.

[more]

front cover of The Buffoons, A Ridiculous Comedy
The Buffoons, A Ridiculous Comedy
A Bilingual Edition
Margherita Costa
Iter Press, 2018
This translation makes The Buffoons, the first female-authored comedy printed in Italy, available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Published in 1641, this burlesque play depicts the mismatched sexual desires of a prince and princess. Although set in northern Africa, the comedy satirizes the Florentine court of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, one of Costa’s several elite patrons. By featuring the clownish antics of an unconventional cast of dwarfs, hunchbacks, and buffoons, it reflects the bizarre appetites and grotesque entertainments of the day. Ribald puns and commedia dell’arte-inspired slapstick abound, presenting the reader with a comic alternative to decorous women’s writing in early modern Italy.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter