Alessandra Ferraro

Alessandra Ferraro is a Professor of French and Francophone Literatures at the University of Udine. Her research focuses on early modern women’s religious writing, especially spiritual autobiographies, female mysticism, and overlooked women’s literary corpora. She has led several research projects, including a PRIN (Italian National Research Project, 2022) on rethinking the literary canon from a gender perspective. One of the outcomes of this project is the multilingual online Répertoire de l’écriture des religieuses à l’époque de la Contre-Réforme.

The project

Title: The Confiscated Word: Writing, Authority, and Female Mysticism in Jeanne Chézard de Matel (1596–1670), Founder of the Order of the Incarnate Word

"This project builds directly on research conducted within the PRIN 2022 project (Bringing Out an Invisible Female Literary Corpus: Religious Writing in the French-Speaking World at the Time of the Counter-Reformation. Census and Repertoire of a New Corpus. Towards a Reorganization of the Canon in a Gendered Perspective), led by Alessandra Ferraro, which resulted in the online repertory Répertoire de l'écriture des religieuses à l'époque de la Contre-Réforme. It focuses on Jeanne Chézard de Matel (Roanne, 1596 – Paris, 1670), founder of the Order of the Incarnate Word, a largely overlooked yet theologically and literarily significant figure of Counter-Reformation France. Her work is examined through the lens of ecclesiastical censorship and the marginalization of female mysticism in seventeenth-century French culture. In particular, the confiscation of her writings by Cardinal Alphonse-Louis de Richelieu in 1641—despite papal approval of her Order in 1633—illustrates the structural suspicion directed toward women claiming spiritual and intellectual authority. Based on original archival research, the project offers the first comprehensive textual, theological, and literary analysis of her writings—Autobiography, Spiritual Journal, Treatise on Marriages, and Commentary on the Song of Songs—none of which has yet received a critical edition. These works reveal a rigorously articulated theology combined with notable literary sophistication, at the intersection of mystical thought, poetic meditation, and reflection on the Incarnation. While Italian and Spanish female mystics are fully integrated into the canon, seventeenth-century France has largely marginalized its own. By restoring Jeanne de Matel’s voice, this project seeks to recover a neglected female spiritual tradition within French literature and to open a comparative European perspective on Catholic mystical writing."

Hosting institution: FIRL — "Formes et Idées de la Renaissance aux Lumières" (EA 174), Sorbonne Nouvelle 

Selective Bibliography

• Una voce attraverso il velo. Il linguaggio mistico e missionario di Marie de l’Incarnation. Venice: La Toletta, 2014.
• Marie de l’Incarnation, Relation de 1654, ed. by Alessandra Ferraro. Montreal: Boréal, 2016.
• Présences, résurgences et oublis du religieux dans les littératures française et québécoise, edited by Alessandra Ferraro, Gilles Dupuis, and Klaus-Dieter Ertler. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017.
• L’écriture des moniales. Répertoire des textes personnels en langue française à l’époque de la Contre-Réforme, by Alessandra Ferraro, Federico Regattin, Amandine Bonesso, Francesca Todesco. Bologna: I Libri di Emil, 2019.
• Directrices de conscience, théologiennes et prédicatrices au XVII^e siècle dans le monde francophone, edited by Alessandra Ferraro and Chiara Rolla, Publifarum (Genoa), 43/1, 2025 
• Répertoire de l’écriture des religieuses à l’époque de la Contre-Réforme. Padua: Linea, 2025.
• Multilingual online database : Répertoire de l’écriture des religieuses à l’époque de la Contre-Réforme (French, English, Italian)