Annalisa Nicholson

Annalisa Nicholson is a historian and Research Fellow in French at King’s College London. She specialises in the cultural history of Britain, France, and Europe from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Her first book, A Salon-in-Exile (Bloomsbury History, 2025), introduces the cosmopolitan circle of the Franco-Italian duchess and royal mistress, Hortense Mancini, to offer a new account of co-existence in seventeenth-century London. This research has featured in the Observer, History Today, and on BBC Radio 3. Her current academic project, supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, looks afresh at the French Wars of Religion through the perspectives of Huguenot women. Alongside her academic work, she is writing her first trade book on the phenomenon of libertine women in Restoration England, from royal mistresses (Nell Gwyn; Barbara Villiers; Louise de Kéroualle) and writers (Aphra Behn; Hortense Mancini) to celebrity criminals (Mary Carleton; Anne Manners).