King's College London

Despite the vast literary output of Huguenot, or French Protestant, women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, no substantial study has sought to compare a range of these authors. This project brings together Huguenot women writers for the first time to investigate the forms and styles of their works, which were produced within a landscape of persecution. It explores a mixed-genre corpus of writings authored between 1500 and 1700 by six women in Huguenot literary circles from a range of social backgrounds. Registering the transnational reach and lively rhetoric of these writings, the project analyses the extent to which the writers’ doubly minoritized statuses – as women and as religious minorities – counterintuitively afforded them the circumstances to forge livelier and bolder works for their impressively large continental audiences.