I. a) Origins of the current critical debate over real and fictitious letters and b) the publication history and fortunes of Abelard and Heloise's Letters
II. Letter Writing and the beginnings of the Querelle des femmes
III. The Courtly Model of Letter Writing
IV. The Love Letter: Rewriting Ovid's Heroides
V. Mme de Sevigné's Correspondence
VI. The Painted Letter:
VII. The Purloined Letter
VIII. The Epistolary Novel

I. a) Origins of the current critical debate over real and fictitious letters
b) the publication history and fortunes of:

Abelard and Heloise's Letters

Film: Stealing Heaven

II. Letter Writing and the beginnings of the Querelle des femmes
a. Introduction to the controversy: readings from Linda Timmerman's L'Accès des femmes à la culture (1598-1715) (Paris: Champion, 1993) a remarkable thèse d'Etat on secular and religious women's writing in seventeenth-century France

b. Helisenne de Crenne's Familiar and Invective letters (1539)
I use the out-of-print translation by M. Mustacchi and P. Archambault (Syracuse UP, 1986). It has an excellent introduction to Crenne and the genre of the familiar and invective letter.

III. The Courtly Model of Letter Writing:
a. Excerpts from 16th century formularies and court manuals: Etienne du Tronchet, Lettres missives et familieres (Paris: Lucas Breyer, 1569) and Gabriel Chappuys, Le Secrettaire, comprenant le stile et methode d'escrire en tous genres de lettres missives, extraicts de plusieurs sçavans hommes (1568) (Paris: Abel L'Angelier, 1588)
I have transcribed letters to and by women in Du Tronchet's work as well as several letters in Chappuys's text.

b. Les Dames des Roches's Missives (1586), ed. A. Larsen (Geneva: Droz, 1999) (selection)

c. Veronica Franco's Familiar Letters (1580), trans. Ann R. Jones and M. Rosenthal (U. Of Chicago P, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, 1998) (Selection)

d. Archangela Tarrabotti's Lettere familiari e di complimento (1650), trans Meredith Ray and Lynn Westwater (Reader for NEH Institute: A Literature of Their Own?, July 2001; to be used with permission) (selection)

e. Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz: Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz,in Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream (Penguin Books, 1997)

IV. The Love Letter: Rewriting Ovid's Heroides

Madeleine de Scudéry: Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641)
(I plan on transcribing selected letters)

V. Mme de Sevigné's Correspondence: Lettres or Belles-Lettres? ( a selection from Lettres choisies, Classiques Hachette, 1996)

Film: Vatel

VI. The Painted Letter:
The function of letters in paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch and eighteenth-century French artists; writing women in emblem books

VII. The Purloined Letter:
Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678)

Film: La Lettre

VIII. The Epistolary Novel:

a. Guilleragues: Lettres portugaises (1668), in Lettres portugaises, Lettres d'une Péruvienne et autres romans d'amour par lettres, ed. Bernard Bray (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1983)

b. Aphra Behn: Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, ed. Janet Todd (Penguin Classics, 1993) (selection)

c. Mme de Graffigny: Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1752), ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy Miller (MLA Texts and Translations, 1993)
The course includes a workshop at the Newberry Library on early modern printed books.