ABSTRACT
In 1669, the Parisian publisher Claude Barbin printed a set of five letters supposedly written by a Portuguese nun named Mariana Alcoforado to her lover, a French officer serving in the Portuguese army. The work seems to be an epistolary fiction and its author has been identified as Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues, a minor French nobleman and diplomat. The letters became a sensation across Europe and their style of declamatory lovelorn despair seems to have appealed to a European readership that was fascinated by the inner lives of individuals and experiences in which the mental feelings of individuals are mingled with bodily sensation.
