Designing women: the unillustrated moral devices of Perrault’s Fairy Tales
Designing women: the unillustrated moral devices of Perrault’s Fairy Tales with Jennifer Taylor, University of Reading (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing) & Warburg Institute, University of London (PhD, Art and Intellectual History). University of Glasgow Library, Archives and Special Collections Seminar Room (Level 12). A Stirling Maxwell Centre Spring 2026 Seminar Series event.
College of Arts School of Modern Languages and Cultures Stirling Maxwell Centre
Date: Thursday 19 February 2026
Time: 17:00 - 18:00
Venue: Archives and Special Collections Seminar Room (University of Glasgow Library, level 12)
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Jennifer Taylor (University of Reading & Warburg Institute)
Document: Designing women event poster
This talk explores the visual and rhetorical aesthetics of Charles Perrault and suggests that the morals of his famous fairy tales are indeed devises without illustrations. The morals have two halves and conform to the idea of the two sides of a coin. Focusing on his lesser-known poetic and artistic production under Louis XIV, the talk more broadly examines how allegorical design—on ceilings, in verse, and in rhetorical structures—helped shape cultural conceptions of female agency and moral authority in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on interdisciplinary research in art history, literary studies, and embodied methods, the talk reveals how Perrault’s use of “design” operates on multiple levels: as artistic form, ideological framework, and gendered strategy.
A selectin of works from Charles Perrault from Archives and Special Collections will be on display in the Seminar Room.