[EARLY WOMAN PRINTER ~ 1694: WOMEN'S SELF ESTEEM]. Les differens caracteres des femmes du siecle avec la description de l'amour propre Pringy, Jeanne-Michelle (nee Hamonin de Maranville), Madame de (1660-1709) Boston Book Fair 2025,Women's Studies

12mo. [12] ff., 180 pp. a12 A-G12 H16, COMPLETE. Contemporary French calf (spine repaired), edges sprinkled (accidental sprinkling to back pastedown and verso of final blank leaf), text clean and the paper stock fresh, free from stains or blemishes. WRITTEN BY A WOMAN, PRINTED BY A WOMAN, AND DEDICATED TO A WOMAN, A BOOK OF UNDENIABLE SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL VALUE. This is the first edition of an extraordinary treatise in which the author calls on women to become self-aware and to take responsibility for their own vices (all of which are caused by "Self-love" or vanity) and for the salvation of their own "Female" souls. The work has only recently been recognized for its significant contribution to our understanding of societal pressures on, and cultural conditioning of women during the late 17th century. This book of "Proto-Feminism" was written by Jeanne-Michelle Pringy, dedicated to the Duchesse de Nemours, and printed by Anne-Genevieve Coignard, constituting a rare moment in pre-1700 literature (French or otherwise). While claiming that social institutions have done nothing to discourage women's "natural" vanity or self-love, our author argues that the burden to correct behavior lies on women rather than on society. "Madame de Pringy seems to accommodate herself to societal rules then in force, to the limits imposed on women, but beneath this approval, the shadow of revolt is already looming." (Winn, p. 17). Beneath Pringy's ostensible instruction to behave within the norm, Winn argues, lie the seeds of a call for women to find their emancipation in their own self-empowerment. Madame de Pringy's treatise is composed of two parts. The first is an often ferocious analysis of six types of deplorable women that the author observed in her time. The second part focuses on self-love (particularly among women), and provides descriptions of the virtue that should help correct this "defect." Women, she says, were born with frivolity, and the poor education given to girls only aggravates this unfortunate trend. For instance, she evokes the disorder of coquetry and its grave consequences throughout the world, and claims that modesty is the only antidote. A contemporary reviewer of the 1699 edition stated that "It would be difficult to express in a single work the characteristics that distinguish women. Madame de Pringy has marked in this one book the principal traits by which they can recognize either the faults they have, or the virtues they should have" (Mercure de France). It would take more than 300 years for the significance of this text to be recognized and understood by academics, and indeed it remained completely unknown to historians of feminism until Constant Venesoen's critical edition appeared in 2002, featuring seven (!) chapters of analysis and commentary (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2002, reprinted in 2022; see also Donna Kuizenga's review in Renaissance and Reformation). Karen Santos da Silva explains: "Pringy's text is not so much a form of rebellion [.] as much as a conception of emancipation and freedom that both requires self-reliance and is interior. The modernity of her text lies in that it exposes, through its internal tensions, the insolubility at the heart of the question of gender, still relevant today, as to whether or not gender is tied to an essence." THE PRINTER: The life and work of Anne-Genevieve (Henault) Coignard has been shamefully neglected in France and elsewhere. Indeed, we have found almost no substantive information about her whatsoever. We do know she was born (date uncertain) into the printing and bookselling trade, the daughter of the Parisian printer Jean Henault, and she married a distinguished printer, Jean-Baptiste Coignard. On the death of husband (1689/90), she inherited his presses, retaining the coveted exclusive licenses of Imprimeur et Libraire du Roi, and also the Imprimeur de l'Academie française, the highest cultural institution in France. By 1694 she oversaw five working presses an