This is the third and last in a set of translations of texts by Sylvain Maréchal, all of them engaging issues of sex and gender, religion and politics, in varying proportions. I’m grateful to the University of Alberta Press for taking a risk on this now obscure but once well known French revolutionary writer, in publishing the first two: Anti-Saints (2012), a translation of Maréchal’s Nouvelle Légende Dorée (1790), and The Woman Priest (2016), a translation of his La Femme Abbé (1801). Subventions from Simon Fraser University and the Canadian government assisted these publications.
The foundation of all my work on Maréchal, his work and times is the generous support from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) that over a period of several years enabled me to consult original editions of work by Maréchal, his sources, and his contemporaries as well as rare secondary sources at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, and the New York Public Library. Later, in 2014, participation as faculty in a National Foundation for the Humanities project at Oxford provided an opportunity for further research there and at the British Library. The University of British Columbia library here in Vancouver kindly granted me extended loans for their original edition (1801) of Pour et Contre la Bible; special thanks to librarian Keith Bunnell for facilitating this. At Simon Fraser University, Ivana Neseteo was, as always, wonderfully helpful in turning up obscure locations and publications.
There are few Maréchal scholars worldwide. Prima among us is dixhuitièmiste Professor Erica Joy Mannucci of Milan, biographer of Sylvain for our day. Erica’s encouragement and advice have meant much to me along the way: mille grazie! My friend Chantal Pourcelot of Nice and Naisey-les-Granges assisted with translation of several puzzling colloquial phrases; Susan Weber and Karyn Huenemann provided indispensable IT help. Yaffa Goldfinger’s rapid and thoughtful initiative, on the eve of closure of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art due to the COVID pandemic, enabled my use of El Lissitzky’s wonderful illustration as my cover art.
I thank Warren Goldstein, editor of the series in which this volume appears, for shepherding my proposal through his editorial board and for his meticulous editing; Tessa Schild at Brill for her patience in responding to questions about format and production; as well as the two erudite Brill readers whose suggestions made this a better translation, and whose generous appreciations were exhilarating and fortifying.
Sheila Delany
Vancouver, 2020