The tragedy of being a historical creature: Gender and history in Nicolas de Montreux’s La Sophonisbe (1601)

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between gender and history in Nicolas de Montreux’s historical tragedy La Sophonisbe (1601), specifically how the drama uses the historical female figure of Sophonisbe to negotiate what it means to take part in history. By engaging Walter Benjamin’s notion of the chaste martyr and her affinities with history in the German Trauerspiel, the article draws novel attention to historico‐philosophical elements in Montreux’s drama and begins an analytical exploration of the often noticed but unexplored question in modern scholarship of gender in French humanist drama.

The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010)

“…While character importance is an established concept of literary analysis ( 43 ), there is no agreed-upon formal measurement. Building on recent work that has highlighted the potential of network-based measures for this purpose ( 44 – 46 ), I operationalize the extent to which a work focuses on a character with three conceptually distinct measures. First, I measure character degree, defined as the number of actions a character is involved in within all its relationships.…”