Left Unsaid Research Articles

What Is Left Unsaid: Ongoing Tacit Knowledge Loss from the Pandemic

ABSTRACTRemote work and its challenges have been around for decades, yet the COVID19 pandemic brought these challenges to the fore and prompted organisations to address them. One of the challenges is the potential loss of tacit knowledge (knowledge that resides in the heads of “knowers”) among knowledge workers by shifting from in‐person to remote work. This paper reports on the initial findings of a pilot study that interviewed knowledge workers about the interruption of information sharing, the importance of technology to resemble in‐person working, and organization adaptability. The findings highlight the importance of in‐person interactions to exchanging tacit information but indicates that for organisations that are resilient, technology can mimic in‐person sharing.

Dis/Connected in Diaspora

Reflecting on the nature of my ethnographic research comprising open-ended biographical narrative interviews and participant observation, this article explores what transpires between people who are socialized in broadly similar postcolonial, multilingual, and multireligious environments yet meet for the first time away from “home.” What do they share; what divides them? Where do their paths converge; where do they fork? How do they connect to each other; wherein lies the disconnect? “Home,” in this case, is the Indian subcontinent—India for me and Sri Lanka for my interlocutors—and the new location abroad is Germany. In the context of academic research, both my research subjects and I detected several commonalities and differences, some overt and unwittingly acknowledged, but most covert and left unsaid. I argue that the dissimilarities, the distance perceived, and the disjunct between the life-worlds, real or imagined, enabled my connection to different women from Sri Lanka. Aged between twenty and sixty, they had arrived through various modes as refugees, tourists, or marriage migrants from the 1980s onwards. Subsequently, they settled in Germany and saw themselves as a refugee community connected with fellow exiles across continents. Viewing the narratives and reflections of Tamil women refugees in terms of their diasporic memories and transnational citizenship, a distinction emerges between concrete, transient, and symbolic sites of memory with their own varying shades of gendering. This article takes up encounters with differentinterlocutors and illustrates the wide-ranging connections that materialized in the diaspora context. For the sake of narrative brevity, I shall focus on, firstly, the shared language, Tamil, with different vocabularies, secondly, the insights as a translator and facilitator, and thirdly, the nature of diasporic connections and memories across nation-states.

Humanitarian protection activities and the safety of strangers in the DRC, Syria and South Sudan

AbstractMany contemporary humanitarian organisations derive their legitimacy from their claims to protect civilians. Yet, what these organisations do in its name includes a diverse and contested range of activities that are often far from what global publics and affected populations understand as constituting protection. As others have argued, this detracts from honest discussions about when and how humanitarians are well placed to keep civilians safe from violence and threats. To begin to address this gap, we review what three well‐known humanitarian organisations publicly say they have done to protect strangers across three violent protracted crises. We capture how they portray their activities, the logics they attribute to them and what is left unsaid. Our findings suggest that humanitarians must, once again, collaborate over a shared protection framework that better signals what others can expect from them. We also identify an emerging convergence around the notion that peer‐to‐peer denunciations, conflict resolution, supporting self‐protection and community protection strategies and improving state‐society relations can be important forms of protection activity. There is, therefore, a need for a public stocktake over what can, cannot, should and should not be done to protect civilians in such contexts.

Causal inference in ethnographic research: Refining explanations with abductive logic, strength of evidence assessments, and graphical models.

In their classic accounts, anthropological ethnographers developed causal arguments for how specific sociocultural structures and processes shaped human thought, behavior, and experience in particular settings. Despite this history, many contemporary ethnographers avoid establishing in their work direct causal relationships between key variables in the way that, for example, quantitative research relying on experimental or longitudinal data might. As a result, ethnographers in anthropology and other fields have not advanced understandings of how to derive causal explanations from their data, which contrasts with a vibrant "causal revolution" unfolding in the broader social and behavioral sciences. Given this gap in understanding, we aim in the current article to clarify the potential ethnography has for illuminating causal processes related to the cultural influence on human knowledge and practice. We do so by drawing on our ongoing mixed methods ethnographic study of games, play, and avatar identities. In our ethnographic illustrations, we clarify points often left unsaid in both classic anthropological ethnographies and in more contemporary interdisciplinary theorizing on qualitative research methodologies. More specifically, we argue that for ethnographic studies to illuminate causal processes, it is helpful, first, to state the implicit strengths and logic of ethnography and, second, to connect ethnographic practice more fully to now well-developed interdisciplinary approaches to causal inference. In relation to the first point, we highlight the abductive inferential logic of ethnography. Regarding the second point, we connect the ethnographic logic of abduction to what Judea Pearl has called the ladder of causality, where moving from association to intervention to what he calls counterfactual reasoning produces stronger evidence for causal processes. Further, we show how graphical modeling approaches to causal explanation can help ethnographers clarify their thinking. Overall, we offer an alternative vision of ethnography, which contrasts, but nevertheless remains consistent with, currently more dominant interpretive approaches.

Clarice and the sweet pea of her sexual desires

In the aftermath of Iran's Islamic revolution, the representation and expression of women's sexuality have undergone stringent official censorship. Zoya Pirzad stands out among Iranian female authors for subtly challenging the Islamic regime's censorship of Iranian women's bodies and sexuality in her writings. In Things We Left Unsaid (2012), while articulating the sexual desires of her protagonist, Pirzad adeptly employed indirect writing techniques to safeguard her work from censorship. This article delves into the author's nuanced literary techniques, including similes, metaphors, idioms, symbols, allusions, haptic perception, and the portrayal of bodily effects, as means to subvert Iran's official censorship. Pirzad employs these literary tactics to discreetly depict her protagonist's illicit sexual relationship, interwoven with the author's critique of the government's repressive policies on women's rights. To understand the intricate dance between the said and unsaid in Pirzad's work, this article draws upon the insights of affect theory.

Preaching as Protest against the Apophatic Silencing of God’s People

Throughout church history, there have been those who stressed the limits of our ability to speak with confidence about God and extolled the nobility of silence in the face of God’s ineffability. Dionysius the Areopagite famously asserted, “With regard to the divine, negations are true, whereas affirmations are inadequate”. Apophatic silence is presented as respectful of the mysterious otherness of God. Christian preaching is a practice that refutes all attempts at negative, apophatic theology. Every sermon participates in the wonder of the uniquely Jewish and Christian claim that God not only speaks but also invites, even commands, humanity to speak about God as well. Christian preaching is suspicious of any attempt to sentimentalize silence in the name of humble acknowledgement of human limitations to speak truthfully about God. Preaching therefore requires the courage to speak up and speak out with the God who, in Jesus Christ, has spoken to us. The silencing of the voices of women, persons of color, and others who claim to know that God is with them is an aspect of neocolonial oppression that preaching cannot abide. Preaching is a protest against all those who would tell the voiceless that some things are better left unsaid.

Transforming the Unsaid into Action in Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

It is often the act of listening that can transform silence into speech. Nam Joo Cho’s 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sparked a feminist movement in South Korea. Instead of creating a character who is clearly articulating a feminist cause, Cho finds ways to speak of gendered injustices by using alternative modes of communications such as silence, howls, psychotic breaks, and footnotes. Jiyoung’s omission of speech externalizes what is thought and felt by many Korean women but left unsaid. The novel ultimately asks readers to hear the unsaid, react to Jiyoung’s experienced injustices, and turn what Jiyoung struggled to articulate into a collective act of solidarity, collective voice, and feminist action.

Ismene, Interrupted

Abstract This article studies the usage of the particle μέν as a discourse marker in the speech of Antigone and of Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone, focusing on the prologue and the final dialogue between the two sisters. By demonstrating how the discursive practices of the sisters reflect their respective styles of reasoning, particularly through their differing usages of the particle μέν, this article explores how the construction of μέν solitarium can reveal what is left unsaid in order to show how the sisters engage in a coded conversation before Creon in their final dialogue, ultimately working in solidarity to resolve their fates, however tragic.

The Discourse of Sighs in Medieval English Literature

ABSTRACT The very ubiquity of references to sighing in medieval English literary culture has meant that the significance of sighs has remained hidden in plain sight. Yet the introduction of sighs into medieval reimaginings of biblical and other sources underlines how much sighing is part of late medieval affect. A dual quality to sighs makes their interpretation depend on context: sighs may express negative or positive responses. As nonverbal vocalizations, sighs constitute a mode of communication, while in devotional tradition the penitent’s sighs may offer a means of bringing into being a desired spiritual state. Chaucer’s poems show him aligning sighs with significant speech, most intensively in Troilus, where Chaucer suggests sighs’ communicative role and their different kinds, while exploring their interconnections with breathing and emotion, and how sighs can powerfully transcend speech with what is left unsaid.

What is left unsaid: Omissions in biographical narratives

When we ask people to tell us the story of their lives, it is not the full extent of their biographies that we have access to, but only a partial version of it. Biographical narratives are permeated by processes of selection that imply highlighting some things while omitting others. Most of the time, what is left unsaid cannot be fully acknowledged, precisely because it is not explicitly verbalised. In the scope of the research project Biographical echoes, we were able to identify significant events and relationships in a person’s life that were not disclosed in autobiographical accounts but were unveiled in hetero-biographical ones by close people who were interviewed about that person’s life. The triangulation of data allowed us to access elements of a biography that would otherwise have remained unseen. By taking omissions as units of analysis, we characterised their main features and identified three distinct profiles of omissions using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis: relational, light and taboo. We argue that the act of omitting something is a meaningful social action with implications at both the biographical and analytical levels.

Artist's Statement: Asthma.

During my pediatrics rotation at a community hospital in Baltimore, I was able to witness the high prevalence of asthma in the youth of the city; I saw patient after patient present to the emergency department in respiratory distress from asthma exacerbations. Upon arrival, they received nebulizer treatments that would envelop them in a cloud of bronchodilator spray seeping out from their masks. My digital painting Asthma, on the cover of this issue, represents a composite of my experiences seeing patients with asthma, or indeed any patient burdened with medical equipment. The girl in my portrait is wearing a nebulizer mask, which I implied to be the source of the mist obscuring her. However, I also wanted to give the sense that she is being suffocated by her environment through my portrayal of her eyes piercing through the mist. The round shapes of her curly hair echo the shimmering clouds, as if they are each an extension of the other. The past few years of near-constant masking due to the COVID-19 pandemic have forced us to become accustomed to seeing faces with the lower half entirely covered, with only the eyes exposed. So much can be communicated through the eyes, yet there is still more left unsaid when they are all we can see.Asthma

Tension Analysis in Survivor Interviews: A Computational Approach

This study aims to develop computational techniques to analyze and identify points of tensions in interviews with survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Oral history interviews are a dialogical source composed of questions and answers, producing a conversational narrative. Yet survivor testimony is often approached as though the questions did not exist. This article examines a digital tool that helps us visualize and better understand the underlying interview dynamic that is the heart of oral history and qualitative research more generally. Our tension detection tool identifies those moments in the interview when the interviewer and interviewee are trying to pull the conversation in different directions. This is part of the natural give-and-take of the interview. Hedging, deflection, hesitation, and boosting are all critical components of this interviewer-interviewee tension. By making the interview dynamic central to our analysis, we aim to better understand how the interview dynamic shapes what is being said and what is left unsaid. In this study, we address key components of interview tension and propose a natural language processing model that can efficiently incorporate these components in text-based oral history interviews to identify tension points. With experiments on an annotated transcript, we verify the efficacy of our model. This model provides a framework that can be utilized in future research on the dialogic of the interview.Cette étude vise à développer des techniques computationnelles pour analyser et identifier des points de tensions dans des interviews avec des survivants du génocide rwandais en 1994. Les interviews d’histoire orale sont une source dialogique composée de questions et de réponses, ce qui produit une narration conversationnelle. Cependant, le témoignage de survivant est souvent traité comme si les questions n’existaient pas. Cet article examine un outil numérique qui nous aide à visualiser et à mieux comprendre la dynamique d’interview sous-jacente qui est au cœur de l’histoire orale et, plus généralement, au cœur de la recherche qualitative. Notre outil détecteur de tensions identifie ces moments dans l’interview lorsque l’intervieweur et l’interviewé sont en train d’essayer de guider la conversation dans des directions différentes. Cela fait partie de l’interaction bidirectionnelle naturelle d’une interview. Le non-engagement, le détournement, l’hésitation et l’exagération sont tous des composants essentiels dans la tension intervieweur-interviewé. En mettant la dynamique d’interview au centre de notre analyse, nous aspirons à mieux comprendre comment la dynamique d’interview structure ce qui est dit et ce qui n’est pas dit. Dans cette étude, nous abordons des composants clés de la tension d’interview et proposons un modèle de traitement de langue naturelle qui peut incorporer de façon efficace ces composants dans des interviews d’histoire orale numérisées afin d’identifier des points de tensions. Avec des expériences sur un transcrit annoté, nous vérifions l’efficacité de notre modèle. Ce modèle fournit un cadre à utiliser dans de futures recherches sur la dialogique de l’interview.

In Search of a Feminist Theory of Expression

In the Tractactus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein concludes that what cannot be spoken about is better left unsaid, which would correspond to everything that is not scientific language susceptible of being formalized in the propositional framework. It is not until Philosophical Investigations that he will find the formula of the “expression” taken in an encompassing sense with its notion of “seeing aspects”. For his part, in his course “Le problème de la parole”, Merleau-Ponty, elaborates a reflection on language that begins with the consideration of the scientific and logical naivety of language, in relation to Saussure's linguistics, and ends with the comparison between Proust and Stendhal. In this last part, he proposes that literature, as a creative language and an expressive operation, is both true life, connected with the ontological foundation of what exists, and phenomenology that shows the institution of that life. In both authors, the logical consideration is overwhelmed by the expressive power of language. Our contribution will make a comparison between Wittgenstein's and Merleau-Ponty's reflections on language and expressiveness. With this, we will seek to propose the bases of a feminist theory of expression, that is, a theory that seeks to show the particularity of female expressiveness.

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

The importance of developing healthy personal boundaries of students for building a sustainable work-life balance

The research deals with the importance of formation of students personal boundaries to build sustainable work-life balance in their future careers. The paper investigates types of personal boundaries and ways of defending them. This goal is achieved by solving the following tasks: learning the main theoretical approaches to describing the concept of students personal boundaries; identifying types and functions of personal boundaries; analyzing violations of personal space; considering ways of defending boundaries. Emphasis is placed on identifying the presence of personal space and the ability to defend social boundaries among students. Students are in the age of their personality development, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and therefore their psychological state is especially contradictory: the foundations laid down by their parents are fading into the background, and everything left unsaid is replenished through personal ambitions and personal study of the world around them. Often, the wrong parents approach to bringing up children in the past is reflected in the present and can sometimes become the main cause of the violation of personal boundaries, which often has a significant impact on students life and future work. Therefore, the study of the topic of sovereign space among students becomes relevant. The following methods for studying this problem were used: a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical foundations of the topic of personal boundaries and the surveys results, which confirmed the assumption of importance, its deeper coverage and further research. In future, such methods can be useful for implementing a competent approach to raising people with a stable and healthy psyche, which will have a positive impact on their position in a society and ability to work.

Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers

Reviewed by: Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom. By Larry Eugene Rivers. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 311. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-4030-9.) Despite the prominence of Afro-Protestantism in the historiography of Black religion in the United States, few studies devote more than a chapter to the lives of individual enslaved and freed Christians, on account of the scarce and disparate nature of sources by and about them. In Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom, Larry Eugene Rivers uses James Page's rare autobiographical account and a range of supporting sources to offer a full-length biography of the preacher, starting with his enslavement and extending through the postemancipation era. Described by Rivers as "a committed father and husband, a teacher, a sexist, a segregationist, a moralist, a pluralist, a pragmatist, an overseer/manager, and a conservative political leader," Page led a life that typified the lives of other late-nineteenth-century enslaved and freedpeople in its precariousness, yet it evinced uncommon privilege on account of his literacy and relationship with slaveholders (p. 232). Through his narration of Page's extraordinary life, Rivers offers an in-depth look into how slavery's rigors shaped Christianity among the enslaved and at the proliferation of Afro-Protestantism in the wake of emancipation. Following the arc of Page's autobiography, Rivers traces the preacher's life in slavery from his birth in Richmond, Virginia, in 1808 through the Civil War—in the process revealing as much about the lives of bondpeople held by slaveholder John Parkhill as about Page's emergence as a spiritual leader. Throughout the biography, Rivers strives to paint a sensitive yet accurate portrait of Page as a young man striving to carve out a space in the world amid the uncertainties and negotiations endemic to life in slavery. Despite Page's atypical privileges, many familiar historical experiences and events are threaded throughout the narrative. Born to an enslaved woman and a free man, Page apparently remembered little of his parents, despite spending much of his early years with his mother, Susie Page, and younger brother, Tom. Rivers depicts Page's life as being heavily shaped by his slaveholder John Parkhill, whose conversion to Christianity, marriages, investment failures, economic growth, and death determined Page's literacy, separation from his mother and brother, movement from Virginia to Florida, elevation to the role of overseer, and ordination. Attending to Page's words, while filling in what might have been left unsaid, Rivers narrates Page's growth as a Baptist preacher in slavery and as a reluctant political leader afterward. Page's role as overseer on Parkhill's Florida plantation coincided with his ascension as a spiritual leader, and Rivers appropriately questions whether fear, as opposed to devotion, compelled Page's flock. According to Rivers, Page developed a Trinitarian, spiritually egalitarian, otherworldly theological stance that reflected his careful negotiation of his position within enslaved and slaveholding, Black and white societies. Rivers unabashedly brands the preacher a conservative both in terms of his adherence to patriarchal gender norms and in his continued economic and political partnerships with former slaveholders after freedom. Juxtaposing [End Page 552] Page with his more progressive African Methodist Episcopal Church counterparts, Rivers presents the varied ways Black Protestant leaders responded to freedom in the South and offers insight into how denominational affiliations aligned with sociopolitical stances. Page's extraordinary sociopolitical career as the founder of Bethel Baptist Sunday School, a registrar, and a justice of the peace in Leon County, Florida, cautions against one-dimensional portraits of historical figures and the all-encompassing projections of terms like conservative and progressive. In the end, Page was a complex individual whose measured political activities were a part of a larger landscape of Black people striving toward economic and political freedom, even as his relationships with former slaveholders enabled him to plant Baptist churches throughout the South. Besides adding to a corpus of knowledge regarding Afro-Protestantism, Rivers models the methodological creativity necessary for excavating details about the lives of people...

The Burial of Ambivalence in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Cask of Amontillado, Fortunato’s captivity by Montresor in the middle of a carnival with no explanation amazes readers and leaves many unanswered questions in readers’ minds, thereby leading to reductionist interpretations of the story. Each of these readings leaves some elements in the story in ambiguity, failing to integrate them into a totalizing interpretation of the story. The reading of the story in relation to the Freudian concept of the uncanny, however, helps us to understand the motive behind the murder, by revealing the unconscious mechanisms at work. In light of this, this study argues that as a murder story involving the cruel death of a helpless victim on the surface level, The Cask of Amontillado is based on what is left unsaid in the narrative. It arouses the sense of the uncanny, as what Montresor says on the conscious level in the guise of the heimlich turns out to be, on the unconscious level, actually a phantasy of acting out the repressed wishes that he had pushed back to the darkest recesses of his psyche because of their disturbing threat to his egotistical unity.

What cannot be said?

What cannot be said?

Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom ed. by Jeffrey Dirk Wilson

Reviewed by: Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom ed. by Jeffrey Dirk Wilson John Marenbon WILSON, Jeffrey Dirk, editor. Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xi + 262 pp. Cloth, $75.00; eBook $75.00 This book is somewhat less schematic and coherent than the subtitle might suggest. It collects seven essays by different authors, some published previously. Four of them address particular areas and themes in the history of philosophy. Jeffrey Wilson argues that Plato and Aristotle valued Homeric myth by contrast with the demythologizing philosophers who preceded them. Donald Verene also writes about metaphysics and myth, developing ideas from Vico, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, and Cassirer. William Desmond looks at Heraclitus, partly through the eyes of Hegel and Nietzsche. Eric Perl contends that the question "Why is there anything at all?", taken in its "absolute" sense not restricted to concrete objects, is not "distinctively modern" but "has scarcely been asked since the Middle Ages," except by Heidegger. These pieces could be regarded as examples of "history of philosophy as pursuit of wisdom" in practice. It is in the three remaining essays (and the editor's long, programmatic introduction) that the volume makes its theoretical claims. In "What is Philosophy?" Philipp Rosemann does not directly answer his ambitious question but tells us that philosophy is one of four axes, along with "the narrative, the religious, and the political," found "in every field of human experience." The philosophers he considers in this vein are a few celebrated figures of the distant and more recent past: Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (all figures, interestingly, from outside Rosemann's medieval specialism). His most telling point is perhaps all the stronger for being left unsaid. The three dimensions he specifies are all areas usually neglected by analytical philosophers and historians of philosophy—although politics is indeed frequently treated by them as a special topic, Rosemann has in mind the political dimension of any philosophy, as evinced by Leo Strauss. In his "Guide for the Perplexed," the historian of ancient philosophy John Rist explains "how to present or pervert the history of philosophy." Rist is especially interested in the perversions, as practiced by "sophists," ranging from the assumption that a later philosopher must have read an earlier one, to constructing "dustbin" philosophers to whom a variety of [End Page 609] fragments can be attributed, to the type of charitable interpretation by which a thinker who lived centuries ago is recognized as having produced "a poor man's version of what is better spelled out" by a much more recent one, to the interpretative ruthlessness by which whole passages in old texts are dismissed as "ridiculous" and ignored. The students who can recognize and avoid sophists can genuinely learn philosophy, which Rist, unlike Rosemann, is willing to define: "a love of truth which drives us to try to understand, not various sets of facts about the world, but what the world is, if possible why it is, and what we are ourselves." Rist clearly believes that being taught philosophy, so understood, involves intensive study of past philosophers, because modernity—which he dates to the "new science" of Bacon and Descartes and the "new morality-substitutes of Machiavelli and Hobbes"—is not the only way forward, and it is one of the basic duties of philosophers today to challenge modernity's assumptions. Timothy Noone defends, more explicitly than Rosemann and Rist (who just take it for granted), the view that doing philosophy involves, centrally, studying texts from the past. Noone sets up his own position by contrast with that of another well-known medievalist, Jorge Gracia. For Gracia, although philosophy of the past can have some direct use in suggesting ideas and arguments to philosophers today, and in training students in the art of reasoning, its main value is related to the fact that philosophy is grounded in particular cultures. A knowledge of its history helps us to transcend cultural provincialism. Noone finds that this answer alone does not allow history of philosophy to be sufficiently intimate with and indeed "constitutive of" philosophy. In Noone's view, philosophy is...

Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court by Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars

Reviewed by: Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court by Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars Gabrielle Verdier Gigault de Bellefonds, Marie, Marquise de Villars. Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court. Ed. and trans. Nathalie Hester. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 80. Iter Press, 2021. Pp [i]-xi; 100. ISBN 978-1-64959-010-7. $41.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-64959-011-4 (eBook). Bellefonds-Villars, as Nathalie Hester calls Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars to distinguish her from her husband, the Marquis Pierre de Villars, Ambassador to Savoy and Spain, was a member of the illustrious coterie of female letter writers in seventeenth-century France that included Madame de Sévigné. Unlike them and Madame de Coulanges (wife of Sévigné's first cousin) to whom she addresses thirty-seven letters from her time in Madrid (November 1679-May 1681), Bellefonds-Villars occupied a perilous position at a sensitive time in Franco-Spanish relations, one that had worldwide implications. She joined her husband at the royal court in Madrid several months after the ambassador had arrived to prepare the marriage of Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Louis XIV's niece, to the king of Spain, the disabled Carlos II. Would the French princess produce a successor to the Habsburg dynasty in Spain? Who would inherit the vast Spanish Empire, from Peru to the Philippines? As a woman, Bellefonds-Villars had special access to the young Queen's private spaces, which was denied the ambassador in the strictly gendered Spanish court. Bellefonds-Villars's writing is as delicate as her position at court, as Hester so deftly analyzes in her twenty-page introduction. Though ambassadrice (the title given to the wife of the ambassador), she should in no way be perceived as influencing the French princess in her new role as queen of Spain at a court and with a king who hated the French. Yet Louis XIV expected her to watch, guide, [End Page 194] and report on eighteen-year-old Marie-Louise who turned to her mature compatriot for company and comfort. Bellefonds-Villars's familiar letters to her friends in France thus become subtly diplomatic letters that inform while concealing by omission, indirection, and irony. The writer invites her readers to read between the lines, even to understand the opposite of what she writes. The unusual relation between Carlos and Marie-Louise—his probable impotence, her flourishing health, their paltry amusements, prescribed travels to three royal palaces, suffocating court etiquette and intrigues, worsening economic misery in Spain, and deadly boredom—all must be understood on several levels, including what is left unsaid. Hester's rich notes uncover these layers of meaning. Since letters to individual correspondents were read out loud in the salons and beyond, Bellefonds-Villars's information was bound to reach the Sun King. At stake were her own reputation and the Villars's future, as she suggests in apprehensive comments. Indeed, what she feared would come to pass. Complaints about the ambassadrice, attributed to Carlos II, reached Louis XIV; to maintain diplomatic relations at all costs, the Sun King recalled his ambassador, and Bellefonds-Villars was scapegoated. She left Madrid in May 1681; her husband followed in August of the same year. While anchoring Bellefonds-Villars's letters within seventeenth-century French women's social epistolary writing, Hester rightly highlights their unique nature, their diplomatic role. Bellefonds-Villars was the only épistolière who was also an ambassadrice. Not only does she observe—and influence—historical figures, the Villars endure the hardships of ambassadorial life with a miserable income in Spain and frequent hostile attacks on their person and household. Thanks to such revelations and their exquisite style, Bellefonds-Villars's surviving letters to Mme de Coulanges were published posthumously in 1759 by Denis-Marius Perrin, the editor of Mme de Sévigné's letters, and reprinted several times. In the nineteenth century, they were included in three collections, along with letters by Mmes de La Fayette, de Tencin, de Coulanges, and Ninon de l'Enclos. Alfred de Courtois's comprehensive scholarly...