Readers often find it puzzling—if not irritating—that Charles Perrault sometimes ends his fairy tales with two morals instead of one, and morals that seem ill matched to the story in some cases. Somet...

Chapter 4 of my current project, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault, centers on an overlooked gem in Perrault’s oeuvre: his poetic retelling of Genesis, titled Adam ou la création de...

In seventeenth-century France, a device was not a gadget. It was a way of thinking.A device was a compact symbolic construction made of three parts:a symbolic image, a short inscription or motto, and ...

Illustration for Cendrillon by Charles Perrault. Unknown illustrator, 1697.Honnêteté, Women, and Knowing Through AppearanceThere is a moment in research when an argument stops being purely conceptual ...

What if the fairy tale heroine wasn’t just born from imagination—but from the printing press?In my new project, Constructing Eve, I return to a neglected 1697 poem by Charles Perrault—Adam ou la créat...