Licentia. Female Speech and Critical Knowledge in Marguerite de Navarre and María de Zayas
University of Cologne, since 2024
How does a woman come to speak in the early modern period, and what kind of knowledge arises where she takes the floor? The project pursues this question in the framed novella collection: in works that stage storytelling itself as sociable speech, with rules for who narrates, who listens and who judges. At its centre stand Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1559) and the two collections of María de Zayas: the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) and the Desengaños amorosos (1647). Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), queen of Navarre and sister of Francis I of France, left the Heptaméron unfinished, and it appeared posthumously. Of María de Zayas, a Madrilenian of the Siglo de Oro, almost nothing is known beyond her books, which were among the most widely read of their century. The term licentia, which gives the project its title, meant two things in the period: a freedom of speech and a permission that had to be obtained.
Three approaches interlock in my analysis: a historical semantics of licentia, reaching from the rhetorical tradition to the dictionaries of the age, a narratology of the frame, asking who listens and who speaks in these texts, and a reading of the minor female characters, in whom the reach and the limit of this staged women’s knowledge can be read.
Courses taught
- Summer semester 2026, advanced seminar: Romane von Frauen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert: Sand, Caballero und Lopes de Almeida (University of Cologne)
- Winter semester 2025/26, advanced seminar: Personagens femininas do romantismo ao realismo nas literaturas francesa, espanhola e brasileira (University of São Paulo)
- Winter semester 2025/26, introductory seminar: Das Leben der Frauen in den Romanen von Balzac, Clarín und Alencar (University of Cologne)
- Summer semester 2025, introductory seminar: Der Realismus bei Eça de Queirós, Émile Zola und Pardo Bazán (University of Cologne)
- Winter semester 2024/25, advanced seminar: Die weiblichen Protagonistinnen von Flaubert, Galdós und Machado de Assis (University of Cologne)