A leading figure of the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot fearlessly provoked the wrath of the French establishment through his writings. Aristocratic privilege, religious authority and obscurantism, colonialism, militarism, European assumptions of moral authority, the subordinate role of women, all were examined in a flow of polemical and innovative works in all genres (including the massive "Encyclopedie" of which he was the prime mover). "La Religieuse" (1760) was banned for many years because of its depiction of the cloistered fate forced upon many women, entombed in an atmosphere of neurosis and sexual repression. This controversial eighteenth-century work is now put under a modern theorist's microscope with the full critical apparatus that university students need.
