A researcher and expert on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France has been awarded a prestigious scholarly prize for her most recent book - and told it could change the way women's writing is understood and taught all over the world.
Judges at the Society for French Studies said Dr Helena Taylor's book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France, stands to make a lasting contribution to the field of French studies.
In awarding it their 2025 R. Gapper Book Prize, they said it had "expertly recreated the neglected history of the role played by early modern French women in the study of the classical world".
The R. Gapper Book Prize was inaugurated in 2001 and is presented annually by the Society to recognise the most distinguished book published in the field of French and Francophone studies.
Dr Taylor, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, will receive the prize at the Society's annual conference this month, hosted at the University of Leicester.
"I am delighted and honoured to have won this award," said Dr Taylor, of the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies. "It was honour enough to be shortlisted and to be on such a shortlist! It truly is a career highlight.
"I'm grateful to the jury for all their work, and to the Society for French Studies and the Gapper Charitable Trust."
Published by Oxford University Press in 2024, Women Writing Antiquity explores the history of the figure of the female intellectual by focusing on women's own representations of that figure in seventeenth-century France. It covers a range of authors and genres, as well as offering a detailed history of the term 'savante'.
The judges said the book's impact may be felt well beyond the field of modern studies.
"Dr Taylor demonstrates, from the perspective of this longer history, that the questions at the heart of the book continue to shape the gendering of learning to this day," they said. "She shows, too, how the misogynistic attitudes that these women often encountered have long persisted within the critical tradition of classical reception studies."
