Women’s Stories from Le Mercure Galant: A Critical Translation of Four Seventeenth-Century Nouvelles

FAIN: FT-291371-23

Deborah Bess Steinberger
University of Delaware (Newark, DE 19711-3651)

Research and writing leading to the translation of four early modern French periodical stories from Le Mercure Galant and the development of a translation apparatus for an anthology. 

What do women want to read? Jean Donneau de Visé (1638 – 1710), founder and editor in chief of Le Mercure Galant, one of France’s first newspapers, was arguably the first journalist to ask this question, and to recognize the influence of female readers and their social networks. By performing the act of listening to women, Le Mercure Galant situates itself as an intermediary, using the nouvelle (short story) as a vehicle to amplify women’s voices. Through these fictions, presented as contemporary true stories, readers learn of situations that in real life women often endured silently: domestic violence, romantic betrayal, dishonor, or simply loneliness. To increase awareness of this important chapter in the history of journalism, I propose to translate four of these tales, texts that are unavailable in a modern edition and have never appeared in English. This is the first step in a larger collaborative project, a bilingual critical anthology of twelve nouvelles from Le Mercure Galant.