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Print Price: $93.50

Format:
Hardback
168 pp.
3 mm x 3 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199841127

Publication date:
December 2011

Imprint: OUP US

The Prison Narratives of Jeanne Guyon

Ronney Mourad and Dianne Guenin-Lelle

Series : AAR Religions in Translation

This book presents the first-ever English translation of the Prison Narratives written by the seventeenth-century French mystic and Quietist, Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717). Although she was marginalized and ignored by French historians for two centuries after her death, Guyon became a major figure in the development of transatlantic Protestant spirituality in the eighteenth century, and her writings have remained popular among English-speaking audiences.

Guyon's narrative describes her confinement between 1695 and 1703 in various prisons, including the dreaded Bastille. It also maps, in moving and unforgettable detail, the political and religious hegemony that sought to destroy her reputation and erase her from history. Although she published an autobiography in 1720, Guyon kept the part that described her experience in prison private and the text remained undiscovered for almost three centuries - until an archival version was found and published in 1992 under the title Récits de Captivité (Prison Narratives).

Mourad and Guenin-Lelle provide here not only a translation of the full Narratives but a thorough introduction, including a brief biography of Guyon, an analysis of the Quietist Affair (the religious and political conflict responsible for her persecution), and a summary of the key historical, literary, and theological aspects of Guyon's prison writings. The introduction represents the most detailed examination of the Prison Narratives presently available in either English or French.

Readership : Scholars and courses on: religious studies, women's and gender studies, and French literature and cultural history; early modern Christian thought or spirituality, Christian mysticism, or prison literature. It will also interest the non-academic audience that already exists for Guyon's writing, including charismatic and evangelical Christians, Protestants, and Quakers.

1. Vincennes
2. Vaugirard
3. Missing Evidence
4. The Confessor
5. The False Letter
6. The Bastille
7. The Abyss
8. Deliverance

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Ronney Mourad serves as associate professor of Religious Studies at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He writes about the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology with particular interest in religious experience, epistemology, and faith.
Dianne Guenin-Lelle received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in French and is a professor of French at Albion College. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century narrative and has published on the French Comic Novel and on Jeanne Guyon, as well as francophone Louisiana and multicultural pedagogy.

Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing - Richard Parish
Invitation to Christian Spirituality - Edited by John R. Tyson
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin

Special Features

A scholarly interpretation of the "Prison Narratives" and Guyon's better-known "Life of Mme. Guyon."
This is the first English translation of this text, which was discovered relatively recently and published in French in 1992.
The authors' introduction includes a new theory as to why the text was hidden, and a new analysis of the Quietist affair.