Upcoming Book Insights: What to Expect from Designing Women

What if we viewed 17th-century aesthetics not as static ornament but as dynamic sites of gendered meaning? My upcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault, begins with this question. Chapter One uncovers how design—visual, poetic, and rhetorical—shaped ideas of sex, power, and perfection in the court culture of Louis XIV.

Perrault, long celebrated as the father of the literary fairy tale, emerges here in a different light: as a court designer whose poetic allegories, medals, and tapestries helped construct a gendered politics of image-making. The chapter explores how his work, from devices for coins to myth-infused tapestries, reveals a philosophy of art rooted in duality—divine and earthly, male and female, material and immaterial. His vision of la belle nature and his use of androgyny suggest that the visual arts had not just decorative but moral and metaphysical stakes.

From the garden paths of Versailles to the pages of emblem books, Perrault’s designs invite us into a world where allegory did cultural work—and where women, both real and symbolic, were central to the drama.

Engraving by F. Chauveau after a design by Charles Le Brun to illustrate La Peinture: Poëme by Charles Perrault. circa. 1668.

The Author Behind Designing Women

Before opening the pages of Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault, it is essential to understand the vision behind it. Dr. Jennifer Davis Taylor, whose haunting compositions and original research have been recognized in both academic and creative circles, brings a rare sensibility to the literary and intellectual landscape. Her work lives at the intersection of trauma studies, mythopoesis, and visual poetics.

Previous Works: Echoes & Foundations

Taylor's recent long-form poem The Coin & the Fish: A Songbook [submitted to Long Poem Magazine] is a layered narrative of divine encounter and loss. It engages sacred archetypes, feminine mythos, and spiritual longing with a disarming clarity. In Midge After Vertigo, a literary after-tale to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Taylor interrogates female identity and cinematic memory through a psychoanalytic lens, exploring embodiment, madness, and the split self with compassion and control.

These works reveal a writer attuned to the symbolic and the sensory, moving fluently between high theory and high feeling. Designing Women deepens this trajectory from within the discipline of historical research.

Themes Explored in Designing Women

More than a scholarly study, Designing Women is an excavation of meaning—an inquiry into the visual, rhetorical, and symbolic forces shaping femininity in seventeenth-century France. Through Charles Perrault’s lesser-known works, the book reanimates a world where ceilings, poems, and design theory converge to stage a debate about female power.

Allegory, Design, & Female Agency

At the heart of Designing Women is a radical re-reading of Perrault—not as mere fairy tale author, but as a theorist of design. His poetic treatises and allegorical interiors reveal a visual rhetoric that champions the femme forte and reclaims the sacred semiotics of women’s speech. What does it mean when a ceiling becomes a moral argument? Or a decorative scheme a feminist intervention?

Typology & the Sacred Body

Perrault’s work is steeped in biblical typology, court iconography, and the legacy of classical reception. His portrayals of women—heroines, allegories, saints—are not passive figures, but symbolic keys in a rhetorical system where design mediates between the earthly and the divine. The book decodes these symbols, offering a visual grammar of power and embodiment.

Material Culture & Intellectual Authority

Designing Women weaves together the arts of design: painting, engraving, bookmaking, poetry. Drawing from Perrault’s collaborative studio practices, the book explores how material media—ceiling, page, body—become sites of authorship. Here, aesthetic choices are political acts, and gendered meaning takes shape not only in what is said, but in how it is composed.

The Author as Designer

This is not just a study of Perrault. It is a statement on what it means to write, to design, and to make meaning as a scholar and a woman. Like Perrault’s heroines, the author moves between roles—reader, maker, interpreter—constructing a form of scholarship that is embodied, interdisciplinary, and luminous with intention.

For Readers of Visual Culture, Gender Theory, & Poetic Thought

Designing Women speaks to those drawn to the hidden architecture of meaning. It invites readers to see literary and visual forms not as separate disciplines, but as entangled tools of cultural memory and transformation.

Conclusion: A Feminist Iconology of Design

This is a book about what it means to craft beauty with purpose, to argue through ornament, and to reimagine women's creative authority through visual poetics. Whether you come from early modern studies, feminist theory, or art history, Designing Women opens a new allegorical ceiling—and invites you to look up.