The second edition of ‘Mistresses and Queens. The Power of Women’ by Benedetta Craveri is coming out on 19 January 2017. In October last year Via Lettera published the first edition, which instantly attracted a lot of interest among the other new titles. The book entered the list of the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers of Helikon bookshops as soon as its second week on the market.

The historical review of the most famous and intriguing ladies of the French royal court found a wide following among Bulgarian readers.

The Italian author, Benedetta Craveri, named after her renowned grandfather Benedetto Croce, is a professor in French literature. Her books and monographs are deeply connected to French culture and history and most of them are translated into many languages around the world. Craveri very skillfully manages to transform the purely academic language into an accessible, interactive and dynamic style of expression, which further enhances her popularity.

In ‘Mistresses and Queens’ the author presents to us an entire constellation of notable French women, each of them having held a special place in the heart of a French monarch. Some of these ladies were queens and legitimate wives, others were mistresses with far more modest origins but with beauty and ambition that helped them reach the top of the monarchy. From the distance of time, however, we can more clearly discern each of them for her particular contribution to the development of arts, literature, fashion and craftsmanship and also to the political life in France and Europe as a whole.