New Observations on the French Language, with Praises of Illustrious Learned Women

Marguerite Buffet’s fascinating text allows today’s readers to experience the vibrant and provocative salon culture of seventeenth-century France by bringing to life its sounds, conversations, and participants. Lynn S. Meskill’s elegant and faithful translation conveys the voices of Buffet’s female contemporaries as they shape French language and engage fully in early modern culture wars. Buffet’s text forces a reexamination of long-held views about salon culture and women’s roles in seventeenth-century France, freeing the salon from satirical portraits of Molière and succeeding centuries. Meskill’s exemplary introduction provides the tools to understand this work in its complex literary and historical context. Women regain their place as the masters of conversation and a major force that shaped the French language.
-Faith E. Beasley, Professor of French, Dartmouth College

Little is known about Marguerite Buffet except that she lived in Paris and taught French to women during the reign of Louis XIV. Her New Observations on the French Language offers a rare glimpse into the life, habits, and culture of seventeenth-century France thanks to Buffet’s vivid examples of proper language use at the time. Her Praises of Illustrious Learned Women, long considered a valuable source for biographies of some of her contemporaries, lauds an array of women exemplars of erudition, wit, and conversation. The present volume presents Buffet’s work in its near entirety for the first time in English.

LYNN S. MESKILL is Associate Professor of English Literature and Translation at Université Paris Cité. She is the author of Ben Jonson and Envy (2009), as well as articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton.