Theresa Varney Kennedy

Dramatic Proverbs (Iter Press, 2025)

Photo of the author, Theresa Kennedy alongside the cover of her book, Dramatic Proverbs

Theresa Varney Kennedy is Director of the Women's and Gender Studies minor program and Professor of French at Baylor University. Her research focuses primarily on early modern French theater, women playwrights, and the representation of women in early modern French theater. Kennedy has published articles in leading journals, including Yale French Studies, The French Review, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, Early Modern Women, and Women in French Studies. She is also the author of Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750) (Routledge, 2018).

Editorial Reviews

"These short playlets, written by Françoise de Maintenon as classroom exercises for younger students in the school she directed at Saint-Cyr, have great historical importance and are enjoyable to read. They are preceded by an excellent introduction that gives a thorough account of Maintenon’s biography and pedagogical ideas, as well as the significance of her texts." ~Perry Gethner (1947–2023), Former head of the Department of Languages and Literatures, Regents Professor of Foreign Language, Oklahoma State University

Award

2025 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Critical Editions

"Kennedy and Tierney’s excellent translation of Maintenon’s Dramatic Proverbs—classroom exercises built on active learning pedagogy—offers an accessible volume for use today. The thorough introduction contextualizes Maintenon’s social and educational ambitions, particularly for the impoverished girls at the boarding school she founded at Saint-Cyr. Modern students and instructors will benefit from this early modern model of girls’ role-play education. Emphasizing ‘readability and natural flow,’ the editors ensure the proverbs can be readily staged, with student actors in assigned roles. This edition invites embodied engagement with early modern women’s pedagogical initiatives and with the debates about women’s agency that they both inherited and reanimated." ~The Award Selection Committee

From the Back Cover

Madame de Maintenon’s Dramatic Proverbs provides unprecedented access to an important transitional marker between the society games of the salon and the education theater of the eighteenth century. Composed for the impoverished female pupils at the boarding school she and King Louis XIV founded at Saint-Cyr, Maintenon’s dramatic proverbs crucially reveal the values emphasized in female education at the end of the seventeenth century—a period plagued by economic crisis and growing aristocratic poverty. Some of the first to exclusively express a woman’s point of view, Maintenon’s dramatic proverbs challenged traditional female education and promoted improved conditions for women. The proverbs contributed uniquely to improvisational educational theater, inaugurating a tradition that continued well into the eighteenth century.