Anne R. Larsen

Colette H. Winn

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From Marie de France to Elizabeth Vige-Le Brun

Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women

Colette H.. Winn

Renaissance Women Writers is the first book entirely dedicated to the study of French women writers of the early modern period. The twelve essays, reflecting current trends in Renaissance scholarship in the United States, analyze the formation of women's literary identity by exploring the works of eight of the most frequently read women writers of this period. The genres considered include sonnets (Louise Labe, Catherine des Roches); elegies (Louise Labe, Pernette du Guillet); memoirs (Marguerite de Valois); novellas (Marguerite de Navarre); translations, plays, and dialogues (Catherine des Roches, Marguerite de Navarre); dedicatory epistles (Louise Labe, Helisenne de Crenne, Jeanne Flore, Marie de Gournay); and novels (Marie de Gournay). Although the essays differ considerably in approach - spanning historical, textual and intertextual, political, and psychoanalytic, or drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist theories of narrative and reader reception - each views the text from a feminist perspective. The essays are grouped into three sections that reflect major characteristics of the works of French Renaissance women. Part One examines three revisionary practices in relation to dominant codes: women writers define a female reading community to empower the female speaker; demystify the illusion of mastery inscribed in male myths and encode these myths with the topos of female creative bonding; and privilege the "private" over the "public" in a genre such as the memoirs that was hitherto limited to narrating public events. Part Two focuses on the female body, an object mastered and seduced in male ideology. The essays discuss how women writers de-emphasize and ultimately transcend the female body. Finally, the essays in Part Three deal for the most part with the "politics of reception" by examining how women writers maneuver within the social restrictions of their time to negotiate their entry into the public world of print. A collective awareness of the determining role of gender marks the essays in this volume, providing fresh insights into the works of Renaissance women writers.

French Texts, American Contexts

Renaissance Women Writers

Diana Maury Robin

Carole Levin

Presents biographical and topical information on the contributions made by women during the Renaissance in such fields as medicine, religion, and art.

Italy, France, and England

Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance

Julie D. Campbell

Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.

Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters

Dutch Golden Age scholar Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded throughout the seventeenth century as the most learned woman of her age. She was 'The Star of Utrecht','The Dutch Minerva','The Tenth Muse', 'a miracle of her sex', 'the incomparable Virgin', and 'the oracle of Utrecht'. As the first woman ever to attend a university, she was also the first to advocate, boldly, that women should be admitted into universities. A brilliant linguist, she mastered some fifteen languages. She was the first Dutch woman to seek publication of her correspondence. Her letters in several languages Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French – to the intellectual men and women of her time reveal the breadth of her interests in theology, philosophy, medicine, literature, numismatics, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and instrumental music. This study addresses Van Schurman's transformative contribution to the seventeenth-century debate on women's education. It analyses, first, her educational philosophy; and, second, the transnational reception of her writings on women's education, particularly in France. Anne Larsen explores how, in advocating advanced learning for women, Van Schurman challenged the educational establishment of her day to allow women to study all the arts and the sciences. Her letters offer fascinating insights into the challenges that scholarly women faced in the early modern period when they sought to define themselves as intellectuals, writers, and thoughtful contributors to the social good.

Anne R. Larsen

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