Participant Info

First Name
Annalisa
Last Name
Nicholson
Country
United Kingdom
State
Affiliation
King's College London
Website URL
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/annalisa-nicholson
Keywords
Early modern women, exiles, libertines, queer women, seventeenth-century France, seventeenth-century England, Huguenots, salons
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Annalisa Nicholson is a Research Fellow at King’s College London. She specialises in early modern women’s history and exile studies, and more broadly in the cultural history of Britain, France, and Europe from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Her interests include women’s networks, early modern French literature, displacement, epicureanism, libertinism, and manuscript culture.

Her first book, A Salon-in-Exile (Bloomsbury History, forthcoming in 2026), introduces the cosmopolitan circle of the Franco-Italian exile and royal mistress, Hortense Mancini, to offer a new account of co-existence and collaboration in seventeenth-century London. As an accompaniment to this book, Annalisa has edited and translated Hortense Mancini’s letters, which will appear with Iter Press in December 2025. Outside of these larger projects, she has published articles on seventeenth-century French salon culture and on the reception of Lucretius and Epicurus in early modern England. Her article on Hortense Mancini’s suicide, which uses the case-study of Mancini’s death to explore the stakes of speculative history, was awarded Honourable Mention for the Best Article of 2022 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG), while her work on Mancini’s salon was the Runner-Up in the Richard Parish Prize 2025. Extending her interest in exiles, she has co-edited – with Christophe Gillain – a special issue of Renaissance Studies on ‘Exile and Innovation in the Early Modern World’. Her research has featured in The Observer, History Today, and on BBC Radio 3.

Her next major project investigates minoritization in early modern France and French-speaking regions through a study of Huguenot (French Protestant) women’s writings. She is also beginning a separate project on the phenomenon of libertine women in Restoration England, from royal mistresses (Nell Gwyn; Barbara Villiers; Louise de Keroualle) and writers (Aphra Behn; Hortense Mancini) to celebrity criminals (Mary Carleton; Anne Manners).

Recent Publications
  • A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London (Bloomsbury History: forthcoming in 2026).
  • The Letters of Hortense Mancini: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, Iter Press: forthcoming in 2025).
  • With C. Gillain (eds), ‘Introduction’, Exile and Innovation: Special Issue of Renaissance Studies (online available 2024; print forthcoming).
  • ‘The Wordy Milieu of the Mazarin Salon: Queer Anti-Absolutism with Hortense Mancini, Charles de Saint-Évremond, and Jean de La Fontaine’, Early Modern French Studies, 46: 2 (2024).
  • ‘Like Mother, like Daughter: Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, and Marie-Charlotte de La Porte-Mazarin, Marquise de Richelieu’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16: 1 (2021).
Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
England, France, Russia, United Kingdom, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Gender, Literary History, Public History, Rebellion & Revolution, Religion, Sexuality, Women