A01=Hortense Mancini
Author_Hortense Mancini
Category=CB
Category=DND
Category=DNT
Category=JBSF1
Early modern Europe
Early modern women
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Exile
Salon hostess
Product details
- ISBN 9781649591319
- Weight: 286g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Iter Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
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.
