A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London

(Hardback)

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This open access book re-evaluates the influence of the Ancien rgime salons, which were the foremost cultural centres in early modern France. Presided over by women, these salons carved out spaces for poetry recitals, performances, and scientific lectures amid polite conversation, enabling mixed-gender intellectual exchange. But what happened when salon attendees were banished from France and exported the salon to a new national audience How did visitors of different creeds and nationalities share this space In other words, what happened when the salon model itself went into exile In A Salon-in-Exile, Annalisa Nicholson explores the translation of the salon from France to England in the late-17th century via the first book-length study of the Mazarin salon. Hosted by Hortense Mancini (Duchess of Mazarin) and Charles de Saint-vremond, the Mazarin salon quickly became one of the most celebrated salons in Europe and the most vibrant Francophone community in London.

Across the chapters, Nicholson examines the establishment of the Mazarin salon in 1676 and the activities that it offered from conversation and gambling to performance and literary collaboration. As a space that brought together the capitals community of French and European exiles with Restoration Londons elite, the salon fostered engagement with European thought, French literature, and epicurean philosophy to wield an authoritative influence on continental culture in England. Attending to this oral and written exchange, A Salon-in-Exile provides a new account of co-existence and collaboration in early modern society with analysis of a wide-ranging corpus spanning letters, memoirs, plays, operas, and essays. By investigating what happens when the model of the salon moved beyond France's borders, Nicholson argues that the salon transformed into a distinctively pan-European space that accommodated its multilingual and multi-confessional membership.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

Author Bio

Annalisa Nicholson is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London, UK. Her research focuses on early modern women and French diasporas. Her work has featured in The Observer, History Today, and at The Cambridge Festival.