This translated edition of Madame de Maintenon’s school plays showcases their emphasis on the importance of girls’ self-reliance and resilience in an accessible and engaging format for modern students.

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.

This edition of the plays aims to privilege accessibility and accuracy so that twenty-first-century students can act out, interpret, and discuss these historical texts.