C'est l'histoire de Xavier, un être possessif, jaloux, calculateur, avare, lâche, égocentrique, sans ambition, hypocrite, menteur, méchant. Agnès sa femme est jolie, gentille et intelligente. On se demande comment, elle peut rester avec lui. Personne ne l'aurait voulu pour ami et il n'a aucun ami ; aucun père pour fils, même pas son propre père ; aucune mère, sauf la sienne qui l'idolâtre aveuglément. Une seule fois dans sa vie, sur son fils, elle ne se trompera pas ; le jour où elle dira lors d'un repas familial : « Vous verrez; bientôt mon Xavier vous montrera ce dont il est capable ! » Xavier aura un accident de moto, déclaré mort, il reviendra à la vie après avoir vécu une extraordinaire expérience aux frontières de la mort. Après son retour sur terre, il montrera effectivement ce dont il était capable. Il révélera ce qu'il y avait au fond de lui-même ; en définitive, si nous cherchons bien, ce que nous avons tous...

During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women’s freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon’s writing from two works—Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700)—and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer. Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English.

Among the imperial states of the ancient world, the Roman empire stands out for its geographical extent, its longevity and its might. This collective volume investigates how the many peoples inhabiting Rome's vast empire perceived, experienced, and reacted to both the concrete and the ideological aspects of Roman power. More precisely, it explores how they dealt with Roman might through their religious and political rituals; what they regarded as the empire's distinctive features, as well as its particular limitations and weaknesses; what forms of criticism they developed towards the way Romans exercised power; and what kind of impact the encounter with Roman power had upon the ways they defined themselves and reflected about power in general. This volume is unusual in bringing Jewish, and especially rabbinic, sources and perspectives together with Roman, Greek or Christian ones. This is the result of its being part of the research program "Judaism and Rome" (ERC Grant Agreement no. 614 424), dedicated to the study of the impact of the Roman empire upon ancient Judaism.