BLOUSE ROUMAINE selected and introduced by Constantin Roman. This is a collection of biographical essays of 114 Romanian women, from antiquity, through the middle ages to the present-day, with the greater emphasis on modern and contemporary women. Each entry is accompanied by a series of quotations and by a selected bibliography, or as the it may be in the case of musicians by discography and by music credits of performances. This is very much an overview intended to incite the reader to look deeper into the cultural, social and historic background of Romania and by no means it intends to be exhaustive. The slant of the biographical notes relates especially to the relationship between each individual woman and the Romanian society, but more so the relationship with the officialdom of the day; what achievements were made and how they were received, or acknowledged, what made these Romanian women turn into revolutionaries, political activists, underground resistant fighters, or political prisoners of concentration camps or take to the road of exile. The social range from which these women come is very broad, from aristocrats to peasant farmers, from philosophers to scientists, from artists to lawyers, poets or academics. The different political or religious persuasions and ethnic extractions are also represented, offering a panoply of famous and infamous alike, some of a world repute, but more often than not names limited to a national circulation, which would deserve a wider audience, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. This dictionary-cum-anthology assembles for the first time the large Romanian Diaspora (France, Germany, Italy, US, Canada, Argentina) side by side with the home-grown names, which stayed native, to brave the ire of the Communist regime over the past 50 years, or indeed to collaborate with it. The 114 biographical essays are accompanied by some 300 quotations and over one thousand references (in English, French, German, Romanian). There is an introductory overview and Preface by a specialist Academic of International repute with a particular interest in Romania and in feminist studies. The book has 65,000 words (ca 450,000 characters with spaces) and contains approximately 60 portraits (Photographs, cartoons, book covers, posters - optional). The Market No other title of this kind had been published before. The book should be used as a tool for further research by a variety of academics world-wide (America, Canada, Europe) especially in inter-disciplinary studies (literature, history, social history, politics), who should find here sufficient raw material to generate further studies. At the same time the author had taken particular care to purge the narrative of much specialist jargon, in order to make the text more accessible to the general public with interest in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, or the Romance Culture, or indeed the very large Romanian Diaspora of several million people.