Women in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men: Galleries Books and Political Allegories in Seventeenth-Century France
Fri, Apr 19, 2013
5:00 PM
The genre of illustrious men – exemplary heroes and heroines from biblical, classical, and medieval history – was imported into France in the mid-sixteenth century during a period of civil unrest. It has since been characterized as a way to anchor a political regime during a period of flux. Join Abby Zanger as she looks at a 17th-century print folio gallery of illustrious men, which includes three women in its pantheon. How does this print object manipulate and transform a lost historical site to create less a lieu de memoire than a lieu de passage? Zanger has much to reveal about gender, allegory, history, and political representations in early modern Europe.
Participants
Abby Zanger
Abby Zanger is author of Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford) as well as numerous essays on topics situated at the cusp of the fields of literature, history, visual studies, and gender theory. Most recently she has published articles and book chapters on topics such as women and iconography, witchcraft and placebos, the politics of the marriage plot, allegories of royal procreation, and the relations between print and theatre. She is currently working on two book projects, one on political allegory and the other on passages to print, both concerning early modern France. She has held academic appointments at Harvard University, Yale University, Tufts University, Boston University, Duke University, and the University of Iowa.