Ruelle
A ruelle (diminutive of the French rue "street", so "Sträßlein", "Gasse", also the free space between the bed and the bedroom wall) was a special form of the salon and meant the bedchamber ("little chamber") used as a reception room for women in high positions France during the 17th and 18th centuries.
In contrast to the salon that offered ruelle of that socializing culture a more intimate setting for social gatherings and belles lettres was specific female and also in some ways emancipatory connotations. The ruelle as a space for exchange between women played an important role in the ideas of a so-called precious society that emerged in the late 1650s . Ways of life, feelings and expressions of extreme or exaggerated sophistication were considered to be precious ; these were previously ascribed to the Parisian salon culture, and the terminology was used in particular for a female audience, which is said to have stood out in the aforementioned manner in a most noticeable manner.
The word appears in the title of the novel La Précieuse, ou le Mystère des ruelles (1656–1658) by Abbé Michel de Pure . The four-volume novel takes place in the thematic world of querelle des femmes (the debate about the position of women compared to men, which has been going on since the 16th century) and lets its spiritualized heroines live an emancipatory utopia at the end of a winding plot. In 1660, the author Antoine Baudeau de Somaize published a clef de la langue des ruelles ("Key to the language of the little chambers"), which was used as a translation aid for many of the expressions and phrases that were described as typically precious because of their twistedness and pomposity , linguistic artistry and bizarre metaphors pretending to serve.
literature
- Wolfgang Zimmer: The literary criticism of preciousness. (= Studies on Romance Philology. Vol. 12). Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1978, ISBN 3-445-01503-1 (also dissertation, University of Saarbrücken, 1973), pp. 153–158.
- Roger Duchêne: Les Précieuses ou comment l'esprit vint aux femmes . Fayard, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-213-60702-8 .