"Bastille Witness: The Prison Autobiography of Madame Guyon"

When writing her Autobiography, Madame Guyon included a section about her second arrest and her incarceration in three different places: the Vincennes, a nunnery, and the Bastille.  When her Autobiography was published, this long section was deleted.  With the publication of this book, for the first time this section of Madame Guyon's Autobiography is available to read in English.

A colleague, Dr. Sharon Voros, and I translated this book and included an introduction describing the history of this.

It really is an amazing document.  Guyon talks about her arrest and long interrogations.  She describes the dreadful experience of going through eight to ten hour interrogations by both church and secular authorities.

Here is the press release about the book.  I'll write more about this tomorrow.

Bastille Witness
The Prison Autobiography of Madame Guyon

(1648-1717)

This translation of Madame Guyon’s prison autobiography provides a compelling account of her eight years of incarceration from 1695 to 1703. Her style is conversational and personal with a keen sense of spirituality in the midst of adversity. Madame Guyon’s lack of formal education, which was not offered to women especially in matters concerning theology, caused her published works to become suspect, confiscated, and condemned. These memoirs were never published in her lifetime and only came to light when the French scholar Marie-Louise Gondal identified the manuscript as a copy of the fourth part of her autobiography. Madame Guyon consistently maintained that she was innocent of all charges. She shows great courage and faith in these prison memoirs that shed light on her most difficult years, including the interrogation practices, the criticism of her writings, and the circumstances for her release. This text is a testimony to her perseverance and a tribute to her writing ability in those times of stress and constant humiliation.

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Nancy Carol James received her PhD from the University of Virginia and wrote her dissertation on Madame Guyon. She serves as priest associate at St. John’s, Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C.

Sharon D. Voros, professor of Spanish and French at the United States Naval Academy, holds a PhD from Columbia University in New York City.  Her current scholarship focuses on seventeenth-century women writers in Spain and France.

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UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA

An Imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780761857730

December 2011 v 140 pages

978-0-7618-5772-3 v $50.00 v Cloth

eBook Available