Madeleine de Scudéry’s Sappho and the Rise of the Novel in Early Modern England: Transnationalism, Catalogic Networks, and Intergeneric Nodes

Abstract

In this article, I reconsider the early modern reception of Sappho by situating her emergence as a narrative character in the larger context of the transnational formation of the English novel. Focusing on the first translation of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1653), I argue that Sappho’s entry into English prose fiction partakes in the novel’s formative development as a genre shaped by translation, cultural transfer, and French literary models. To further contextualise Scudéry’s narrative in translation, I depart from classical intertextuality by adopting a network-based methodology that reconstructs the circulation of Sapphic texts in England from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. This approach results in a carefully annotated catalogue that reveals Sappho as a bridging figure between antiquity and modernity, lyric and prose, erotic excess and moral restraint. I show that, measured against this large catalogue, Scudéry’s Sappho represents an original reworking that challenges Ovidian paradigms with a meticulous portrayal of intellectual autonomy, female friendship, and emotional complexity. I close the study by placing this narratively complex Sappho in dialogue with English works by John Lyly and John Donne in order to illustrate the possible interpretative connections—around female homosociality and desire—that early modern readers could readily establish with the wider body of Sapphic material circulating in their own literary milieu.