French Women and the Early Modern Canon: Recent Conferences, Editions, Monographs, and Translations

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2000 by Anne R. Larsen

In the second part of Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes, entitled "Regards d'hommes" (The Male Gaze), male perceptions of learned women combine both an admiring, but frequently ambivalent, gaze with contemptuous, often condemning judgement. J. Ceard examines these mixed signals in four Renaissance catalogues of mulieres doctae, those of Baptiste Fulgose, Coelius Rhodiginus, Barthelemy Chasseneuz, and Ravisius Textor: while these popularize the new notion of the learned woman, they show as well how difficult it was to separate her in both writers' and readers' minds from her normative roles as wife and mother. B. Hosington points out that in English humanist elogia, Protestant polemical portraits, and panegyrics by poets of learned women written between 1550 and 1558, the educated woman was admired "provided she was virtuous" and did not transgress normative social roles (106). Women on the fringes, however, "witches" (in N.-J. Chaquin's analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonology) and mystics (in S. Houdard's study), were viewed with suspicion since their knowledge put them in direct connection with the divine, enabling them to bypass male control. Still other learned women, on the other hand, became partners in conversation and in writing with male intellectuals: the extraordinary correspondence of twenty-five year old princess Elizabeth of Bohemia with the older Descartes is Ph.J. Salazar's subject of inquiry, and J.-Ch. Darmon examines La Fontaine's praise of Mme. de la Sabliere.

How did these women, the majority from the nobility and upper middle-classes, gain access to learning when formal educational opportunities were reserved solely for boys and men? What channels and sites of learning enabled them to involve themselves in programs of study? A considerable number of monographs and collections of essays have analysed the different sites open to women: salons and coteries, courts, convents, the printing industry, and the family (fathers, brothers, tutors, at times mothers) all facilitated the learning of daughters. In the first part of Femmes savantes, entitled "Realites/Savoirs" (Realities/Learning), the ways in which women gained access to knowledge are explored. In her analysis of seventeenth-century female novelists' "primary education," N. Grande notes that since women did not attend religious schools and were excluded from the colleges and universities, they were dependent on the salons where, as young women, they befriended learned male writers who became their tutors; these men corresponded with them, corrected their faulty spelling, lent them books, and directed them toward a modern rather than a classical, Latin-based curriculum. S. Juratic studies the family environment as the principal venue by which widows of Parisian booksellers learned their trade. According to P. Marechaux, convents, long reputed for teaching girls the art of musical composition, instrumentation, and song, produced musicians who were admired and highly respected.