(ebook) the routledge handbook of women and early modern european philosophy by karen detlefsen, lis
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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy is an outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon. Comprising 46 chapters by a team of contributors from all over the globe, including early career researchers, the Handbook is divided into the following sections:
I Context
II Themes
A Metaphysics and Epistemology
B Natural Philosophy
C Moral Philosophy
D Social-Political Philosophy
III Figures
IV State of the Field
The volume is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy who are interested in expanding their understanding of the richness of our philosophical past, including in order to offer expanded, more inclusive syllabi for their students. It is also a valuable resource for those in related fields like gender and women’s studies; history; literature; sociology; history and philosophy of science; and political science.
Karen Detlefsen is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is editor of Descartes’ Meditations: A Critical Guide (2013) and co-editor with Jacqueline Broad of Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays (2017).
Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts at McGill University. From 2002 to 2022, she was professor in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She is translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (2007), co-editor of Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (2013), editor of Pleasure: A History (2018), and co-editor of Modern Philosophy: An Anthology (2022).
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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF IMPLICIT COGNITION
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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro
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Allauren Samantha Forbes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and faculty in Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University in Canada. Her research focuses on the feminist works of early modern women philosophers such as Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at John Jay College. He received his Ph. D. at the GC-CUNY and B.A. at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). His research and teaching interests cover Early Modern Philosophy (focusing, in particular, on Novohispanic Philosophy), Contemporary Latin American Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy of Race. His work has appeared in Philosophy Compass, Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Hypatia, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society and Critical Philosophy of Race. He is currently working on a book manuscript on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s villancicos
Aaron Garrett teaches at Boston University. He works on the history of modern philosophy, and particularly the history of ethics. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy
Bryce Gessell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Virginia University, where he teaches philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the history of science. His research is on the foundations of psychology and neuroscience and on Christian Wolff.
Geoffrey Gorham is Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College and Resident Fellow at the University of Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. His articles on contemporary and early modern science and metaphysics have appeared in journals such as Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science.
Karen Green is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is author of A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, with Jacqueline Broad (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She recently edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford University Press, 2019) and her most recent book is Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (Routledge, 2020).
Lena Halldenius is Professor of Human Rights Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She is a political philosopher and author of Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (London, 2015) and numerous essays on Wollstonecraft’s political writings.
Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. She has published extensively on women in the history of philosophy. Her publications include Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, and Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Historical Context (co-edited with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer) as well as articles on Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Macaulay, Émilie du Chatelet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Formerly director of International Archives of the History of Ideas, she is currently President of the International Society for Intellectual History.
Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University, where he co-leads Project Vox with Dr. Liz Milewicz. He is author of Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge, 2008) and Newton (Wiley, 2015), co-editor of Interpreting Newton (Cambridge, 2012), and editor of Space: A
History (Oxford, 2020). He is presently finishing a book on Émilie Du Châtelet and the formation of the early modern European canon in the eighteenth century.
Marcy P. Lascano is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. She is co-editor with Eileen O’Neil of Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought (2019), and author of The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and Self-Motion (2023).
Antonia LoLordo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy. Her publications include Mary Shepherd (Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy; Cambridge, 2022), Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (Oxford, 2020), Locke’s Moral Man (Oxford, 2012), and Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), in addition to papers on a variety of topics.
Getty L. Lustila is Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. His research concerns eighteenth-century European moral philosophy. Getty also writes and teaches Indigenous philosophy. He is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Gideon Manning is Associate Professor of History of Medicine and Humanities at the CedarsSinai Medical Center, USA, where he is also Director, Program in the History of Medicine. His research focuses on the history of medicine, science, and philosophy, especially in the early modern period. His most recent publications include “Circulation and the New Physiology” (2022) and the volume Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar (2022), which he co-edited with Anna Marie Roos.
Michaela Manson is an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto (2023). Her research focuses on early modern philosophy of mind, moral psychology, education, and friendship.
Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, and co-editor with Melvin Rogers of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy. She created and directs Just Ideas, a program in Metropolitan Detention Center, a maximum-security federal prison.
Carol Pal teaches history at Bennington College. She is author of Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize by the American Historical Association. She is currently editing a sourcebook on the history of medicine, and preparing a volume on Marie du Moulin for the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Her next monograph is an analysis of one of Samuel Hartlib’s manuscripts in the British Library.
Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin teaches at the Faculty of philosophy of Jean Moulin-Lyon III University (France). Specialist in Descartes and Malebranche, she provided the first complete annotated edition of the feminist Cartesian Poulain de la Barre (Vrin, 2011). She is currently working on women philosophers (Elisabeth de Bohême, Marie de Gournay), editing with D. Kolesnik-Antoine, Élisabeth de Bohème face à Descartes: deux philosophes? (Vrin, 2014). It leads her research to the question of the corpus and the historiography of modern philosophy. Recently, she directed a special issue of the journal Dix-septième siècle (Repenser la philosophie du XVIIe siècle.
Margaret Watkins is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Providence College. She specializes in early modern ethics and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. She is President of the International Hume Society and author of the Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She has published articles on Hume’s ethics, philosophical psychology, and aesthetics in journals such as Hume Studies, Inquiry, and History of Philosophy Quarterly as well as articles on Montaigne and on the resources of Jane Austen’s novels for ethical theory and pedagogy.
Rebecca Wilkin is Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University where she teaches in the French & Francophone Studies and the International Honors Programs. She has published on Descartes, Cartesianism, and early modern women philosophers (Elisabeth of Bohemia, Gabrielle Suchon) and is currently interested in how early modern feminist philosophy (François Poulain de la Barre, Louise Dupin) influenced the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. With Angela Hunter (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), she has produced the first English translation of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women (1745–1750), which they reconstructed from manuscripts (published by OUP).
Peter West is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in London. His work focuses on early modern theories of mind and cognition, in figures like Cavendish, Shepherd, Amo, and Berkeley. His research also covers the history of analytic philosophy, especially the work of Susan Stebbing.
1 INTRODUCTION
Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro
This handbook participates in a broad-based project of expanding our understanding of our philosophical past by recovering the works of hitherto neglected philosophers. Historians of philosophy have become increasingly invested in this Recovery Project. Our focus here is on one piece of this larger project: the philosophical work of European women of the early modern period. Our primary goal is to introduce advanced undergraduate majors in philosophy, graduate students, and scholars in the discipline (both those working in the early modern period, and more broadly) to the extraordinary richness of the philosophy produced by women working in Europe from about 1560–1780 (more on this period below). But in the process of realizing this introduction, we have another goal, namely, to expose the breadth of philosophical themes tackled by the women in this era – many of which have been unfairly sidelined in our discipline’s history – as well as the range of genres and methods employed by women philosophers as they investigated these philosophical themes.
This volume approaches these goals through its organization. It opens with three chapters (Chapters 2–4) that grapple with historical context (Carol Pal), canon and historiography (Lisa Shapiro), and method and genre (Karen Detlefsen) in order to make clear the range of obstacles women of this period faced in their production of philosophy, how they grappled with those obstacles, and thus, the ways in which the contemporary philosophers ought to approach their work to appreciate fully their philosophical contributions.
The next section deals with Themes, and this section is further subdivided into four subsections – Metaphysics and Epistemology (Chapters 5–10), Natural Philosophy (Chapters 11–15), Moral Philosophy (Chapters 16–20), and Social and Political Philosophy (Chapters 21–27). Each chapter in the Themes Section deals with a small number of philosophers writing on the topic at hand. One overall goal of the chapters is to show how women philosophers engaged both with philosophical themes we have tended to associate with the early modern period (e.g. causation, physics, freedom, and the like) and with philosophical themes we have tended to forget or treat less seriously in our history of philosophy (e.g. marriage, beauty and embodiment, friendship, and the like). A second goal of this section is to expand our list of women philosophers to include not only those represented in the next section of this volume but also many others.
This next section (Chapters 28–45) includes chapters that focus on specific figures of the period, and these figures were chosen for their current status as philosophers who have enjoyed relatively significant prominence in scholarly activity of the past few decades. Some – Cavendish, Du Châtelet, Wollstonecraft, for example – can fairly be thought of as already canonized. Others
are well on their way. Two of the chapters discuss several women practicing philosophy in Italy (Chapter 28) and Germany (Chapter 45) in this period. We should note that the choices made for figures to be included in this section were anything but easy, and our expectation and hope is that a volume similar to this one published in a decade or so would have an exponentially more expansive list of names in such a section. That said, one can also hope that recognizing and appreciating the role of women in the history of philosophy of early modern Europe might make a volume such as this one redundant in a decade or so, were such philosophers to be thoroughly integrated into our history of philosophy.
Our volume closes with an eye to the future, how the current focus on women philosophers in early modern Europe can be seen as a modern-day Renaissance, and where we might go from here. This is “What Difference: The Renaissance of Women Philosophers” (Chapter 46) written by a scholar – Sarah Hutton – who was among the first visionaries who broke open the field of study that centered the study of women philosophers in early modern Europe.
To understand much of the thinking behind this handbook, and the expansion project of which it is a part, there is no better place to start than its title. There are four key concepts in play in that title: the early modern period; the geographical center of Europe; the place of women in the philosophy of that time and place; and the very idea of philosophy. In this Introduction, we discuss each of these key concepts.
1.1 ‘Early Modern’ and Issues of Periodization
Historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers alike are accustomed to referring to the “Early Modern Period.” Philosophy curricula often have courses in Early Modern Philosophy. The temporal boundaries of the period are thought to be roughly 1560–1780. The start date allows us to include such thinkers as Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais, and in particular, his Apology for Raymond Sebond, are often identified as reintroducing skepticism and thereby influencing shifts in epistemology. And the end date marks Kant as the culmination of an intellectual historical movement.
These dates also partly overlap with an event of a sort: the Scientific Revolution, which became an organizing idea that was especially powerful near the middle of the twentieth century, during the development of the professional discipline of the History of Science. According to the general account developed around this idea, the early modern period was key – perhaps singularly so – in the history of science, a history which stretches for much of the duration of human history itself. This period was deemed so important because it marked an era of revolution, of rapid and wholesale change, in which science as we now know it emerged from science in its Medieval Scholastic form. The high points of this transformative change, according to the narrative of the Scientific Revolution, are as follows. Copernicus was the starting point and affected a revolution in astronomy which was incompatible with the then-reigning Aristotelian physics. Galileo attempted to address the ensuing crisis with his work in mechanics and with his attempt to develop a new physics to supplant Aristotle’s, and which could account for the Copernican proposal of a moving earth. Newton synthesized the advances of these early revolutionaries (while also assimilating Kepler’s laws of planetary motion), and the result was modern science – observationally-based, grounded in mathematically-expressed laws, and completing the “mechanization of the world picture” (Dijksterhuis 1950). These four figures along with a handful of others – typically Tycho, Bacon, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Leibniz, and Boyle – form the standard cast of characters in the Scientific Revolution narrative. Of course, as we now understand it, this history is really one of natural philosophy, and this narrative has come under significant fire in recent centuries for a range of reasons; nonetheless, that it was such a powerful historiographical theme for some decades
helps to explain why the “early modern period” in Europe, and scientific revolution that tracked that period, is anchored so firmly in our philosophical history.
There are, however, reasons to take pause when thinking about the notion of the “early modern” period. First, scholars of European Literature and History mark the period differently, having the early modern period start with the Protestant Reformation, say, and end in the early eighteenth century before the new literary form of the novel is perfected and a more secular culture of the Enlightenment takes hold. Second, the scope of the philosophical historical period, in highlighting the real scientific achievements of Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle, and Newton and their philosophical impact, discounts the philosophical impact of critical transformative social and political events in Europe that include the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Fronde, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution.
Many essays in this volume do respect the standard scope of the philosophical early modern period. However, some essays, such as Gideon Manning’s “Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences,” Marguerite Deslauriers’ “Men, Women, Equality and Difference,” and Sandra Plastina’s “Italian Women Philosophers in the Sixteenth Century: from a critique of the Aristotelian gender paradigm to an affirmation of the excellence of women,” consider philosophical work earlier in the sixteenth century. Other essays consider figures writing after 1780, including Karen Green’s “Catharine Macaulay’s philosophy and her influence on Mary Wollstonecraft,” Lena Halldenius’ “Mary Wollstonecraft,” Aaron Garrett’s “Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy,” Getty L. Lustila’s “Remorse and Moral Progress in Sophie de Grouchy,” Corey W. Dyck’s “Women and Philosophy in the German Context,” and Antonia LoLordo’s “Mary Shepherd.” Sandrine Bergès, in her “Virtue and Moral Obligation,” extends beyond the typical scope of the period at both ends, discussing Christine de Pizan at the early end and Wollstonecraft at the later one.
What defines the Early Modern Period as it is articulated in this volume? We have left the periodization itself untheorized. However, one way to think about the early modern period is in terms of the development in Europe of new institutions and modes for engaging in intellectual activity. Carol Pal details some of these changes in her “Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe.” Michaela Manson’s chapter “Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education: van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell” touches on changes in educational institutions, and Charlotte Sabourin’s chapter “Critical Perspectives on Religion” touches on religious institutions. Some chapters on individual women also detail how the women on whom they focus fit into these changing institutions. These include the chapters on Margaret Cavendish by Tom Stoneham and Peter West, on Louise Dupin, by Rebecca Wilkin and Sonja Ruud, and on Phillis Wheatley, by Aaron Garrett.
Another way to think about this period is in terms of the shape of the answers to philosophical questions that come to be central in the period. Some of these are the topics in metaphysics and epistemology that frame the canonical narrative of the period. Several thematic chapters demonstrate how women thinkers engage with these familiar topics even while they intervene in these discussions in original and as yet underexplored ways. See for instance these chapters: “God, Freedom, and Perfection in Conway, Astell, and Du Châtelet” by Marcy P. Lascano, “It’s all Alive! Cavendish and Conway against Dualism” by Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons (on the metaphysics of the human being), “Causation” by Tad M. Schmaltz, “Cavendish, Conway, and Cockburn on Matter” by Emily Thomas, “Skepticism” by Martina Reuter, “Ways of Knowing” by David Cunning, “Theories of Perception” by Louise Daoust, and “Early Modern Women and the Metaphysics of Free Will” by Deborah Boyle. Additional discussion of these canonical topics can be found in the chapters dedicated to several individual women philosophers, including Jorge Secada’s “Teresa de Ávila on Self-Knowledge,” Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando
disseminate the ideas of women with an eye to gaining a fuller understanding of our philosophical history. Though this Recovery Project is now several decades old, it is in many respects in early stages.
First, while several women philosophers of the past have received significant scholarly attention – for instance, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd—there are many, many more with whom scholars are only starting to engage and still others to be re-discovered. Many chapters in this volume include some of the first (or very few) scholarly philosophical engagements in English with the following figures: Maria Gondola, Camilla Greghetta Erculiani, Margherita Sarrocchi, Louise Dupin, Frances Reynolds, Marguerite Buffet, and Olivia Sabuco.
Second, the Recovery Project began to get a grip in the history of philosophy by noting the connection between newly rediscovered women and canonical or well-known male philosophers: Elisabeth corresponded with Descartes, Conway was connected to Cambridge Platonists and Henry More in particular, Masham corresponded with Leibniz, Du Châtelet translated Newton into French, and Shepherd targeted Hume and Berkeley. However, scholarship has moved from treating these women as ancillary to canonical male figures to recognizing them as philosophers in their own right, with their own agendas and views. Occasionally in this volume, an author draws on the philosophy of a male thinker to highlight a point made in their chapter. However, where men are included, they are so in order to illuminate something about the women’s philosophies. One exception here is Watkins’ comparison of Mary Astell and Anton Amo to make a point about double-consciousness. The vast majority of the papers in this volume focus exclusively on the work of women thinkers.
Third, as we detailed above, in focusing on the work of women philosophers, we can discover innovative philosophical perspectives on familiar themes from early modern European philosophy. It is also often the case that women philosophers have chosen to focus on different philosophical questions, ones which have fallen out of fashion in part because of the dominance of the canonical history of philosophy.
Often, as several papers in this volume make clear, the philosophical interests of many of these women are intimately connected to their lived experience as women, a connection that inflects their philosophical writing in a variety of important ways. This has hopefully come out in the sketches of the topics covered by the chapters in this volume. It is perhaps worth highlighting one theme that emerges again and again – women aim to articulate and to theorize their position as authors, with associated authority, even while they are deprived of authority in their social situations. That is, these authors are not only aware of their complicated positions of epistemic authority, but they also make a point of inserting their position into their writing. Margaret Watkins’ paper on Amo and Astell, and Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin’s chapter on Marie le Jars de Gournay are explicit about this point. But it is also addressed in Michaela Manson’s chapter, John J. Conley S.J.’s paper on Madeleine de Scudéry, Jacqueline Broad’s paper on Mary Astell, Rebecca Wilkin’s and Sonja Ruud’s “The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of Sexist Historiography,” and Lena Halldenius’ chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft. Karen Detlefsen’s “Method, Genre and the Scope of Philosophy” argues that figures such as Cavendish and Du Châtelet play with the genre of the preface to navigate this complex issue.
1.4 “Philosophy”
The ways in which women of the early modern European period think and write about philosophy leads us to think anew about the philosophical enterprise in early modern Europe, and how the recovery project expands and deepens our understanding of the very nature of philosophy itself. We can begin with the points we just noted regarding women’s philosophical interests.
Many women were interested in many of the standard topics in metaphysics and epistemology that the standard history of early modern philosophy puts front and center, and contributed their own insights into these topics. From this perspective, the nature of philosophy looks very familiar, yet in being confronted with the unfamiliar positions on familiar topics taken up by these women, we are reminded that doing philosophy well requires an openness to the full range of logical possibilities and attentiveness to work through the details.
Yet it is also the case that many women of the period focused their attention on topics that have not been centered within our histories of philosophy, even if they were topics of intensive philosophical interest at the time. We are thus reminded that philosophy is not defined by a narrow set of topics or questions, but rather almost any topic can be approached philosophically. Some topics rise to the fore at certain historical moments. Interestingly, many of the topics in which early modern women engaged and were set aside by history are emerging again as central topics in contemporary philosophy. Currently, there is a renewed interest in equality, in the emotions, and in the nature and value of education, to name just a few. Yet because our history of philosophy has omitted these topics, contemporary philosophers not only do not recognize that their topics of interests have a history, but they also do not benefit from the insights that a historical perspective can provide.
We noted that many early modern women’s philosophical contributions are informed by their lived experiences as women. The recovery of these women thinkers thus reveals a history of feminist philosophical thought, one that begins long before the so-called First Wave of feminism and the struggle for women’s suffrage of the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. However, the centrality of lived experience to their philosophy also highlights a feature of philosophy that is obscured from view by canonical histories of philosophy.
Canonical histories of philosophy present us with philosophical views that are abstracted from any particular context. They highlight the idea that philosophical positions strive to capture timeless truths. But, as Lisa Shapiro notes in her paper, “Canon, Gender, and Historicity,” while the truths of philosophy may well be timeless, the search for those truths is anchored in very human efforts to understand them. These efforts are undertaken in a particular context in which the philosophical questions that motivate them arise. Canonical histories of philosophy mask that context: they make it seem as if philosophical questions are asked from nowhere.
The philosophical works of early modern women highlight that philosophical inquiry, even if it strives for an understanding of timeless truths, emerges from somewhere. A philosopher becomes interested in the philosophical questions they do because they matter to them in some way or another. This is easily seen in the cases of philosophical questions about human relationships, like friendship and marriage, and about autonomy and self-determination. But it is also true of philosophical questions in metaphysics and epistemology. Early modern women’s work in metaphysics, perhaps because it is more unfamiliar, makes it clear that getting the metaphysics right matters. It is not a mere logical exercise, nor is it simply a matter of understanding nature correctly. How we understand nature impacts how we live, not simply in our day-to-day practical decision-making but most centrally in how human beings are distinguished from one another and from other parts of nature.
Many of the women philosophers discussed in this handbook often deploy genres of writing other than the treatise, the genre that has been held up as a philosophical standard for some time. This may well be because these women were excluded from the intellectual elite, and so did not have either the training or the resources to write in that vein. It is worth noting that many canonical figures of the period also did not write treatises: Montaigne is thought to have invented a new genre of writing, the essay, to capture what he had to say; Descartes expressed his philosophy in stylized meditations, an equally stylized discourse, and a textbook; Spinoza appropriated the geometrical method to put forward an ethics; Leibniz wrote prolifically in many different forms,
PART I Context
Netherlands.10 This stealthy scholarship was in fact an open secret in the Republic of Letters, and while Van Schurman’s achievement was admired, jokes proliferated almost immediately.
But was the situation really funny? Van Schurman had very publicly criticized the new university for being impenetrable to women, and had then gone on to engineer that penetration herself. Apart from the obvious juvenile teasing, then, what might this woman’s unprecedented presence in the lecture hall actually portend for the relationship between women and institutions?
Only one month later, Barlaeus wrote to Huygens on this very subject. The tone was playful, as he pointed out how much more sensible life would be if only the famously modest and celibate Van Schurman were a man. Among the reasons he enumerates is the fact that she would no longer have to hide behind the lattice at the back of Voetius’ classroom:
[T]here are many reasons why I would wish to make her into a man. The first is because she writes poetry, which will bring dishonor upon men. Second, because then there will not be the danger that a good man might become inflamed with love for her…Third, so that access to her might be accomplished more freely and easily…Fourth, if she were a man, she could attend the lectures of professors in safety, and sit among their learned sex. Now, shamefaced, she listens to the professor teaching through an aperture, or little window, so that she cannot be seen by impudent youths. Fifth, if she were a man, she could give public orations, either of her poetry, in which she is strong, or Hebrew writing, which she reads with no trouble.11
There is a progression here in Barlaeus’ list of reasons why Van Schurman should really be a man. He begins with the most trivial. Van Schurman’s poetry is putting male poets to shame; men are falling in love with her, to no avail; it’s far too difficult to find a way to talk to her; the cubicle at the back of Voetius’ classroom is ridiculous; and the public is being unnecessarily deprived of further public displays of her marvelous erudition. But as the list goes on, things get more serious:
Sixth, if she were a man, she could be moved up to the helm of the Republic, and teach by her example, and besides, the Republic would do better to be ruled by a woman from time to time, rather than always being ruled by men.
(Huygens 1911: II, 164)
Here, Barlaeus has backed himself into a corner. His point is that Van Schurman has all the skills and moral authority necessary to become a leader in public life – the only thing preventing this from happening is her gender. But then he had gone even further, musing on the possibility that women might, in fact, be good leaders for the Dutch Republic, where leadership was not hereditary.
And at this point, Barlaeus realized that he was treading on treacherous – perhaps heretical –ground. So he stopped himself there, and begged Huygens to tell no one what he had just said:
But truly, Huygens my friend, let these jests be buried between the two of us. For it would not be to the honor of that most respectable and dignified virgin to know a great deal about how much we use her name in a familiar way in order to revere it.
(Huygens 1911: II, 164)
By this point, however, he has gone too far, and we realize that his “just kidding” has a hollow ring.
Because it contains so many veiled references to Van Schurman’s seemingly impenetrable virginity, this letter has sometimes been seen as an extended obscene joke, while in feminist analyses, it has been described as misogynistic and cruel.12 I would suggest a third approach. The jokes are
certainly there, but they are not at the expense of Van Schurman – they are rather aimed at the situation. The reasons why Barlaeus contends that Van Schurman would do better to become a man are all solidly grounded in the discrepancies between her abilities and her opportunities, all of which arise from social and cultural limitations imposed on her gender. Barlaeus, in fact, makes clear his belief that without these artificial limitations, she would be unstoppable. However, since Van Schurman was so modest, there was also no doubt that she would have been offended by the discussion; thus keeping her from seeing it would have been a very good idea. This letter, therefore, is neither misogynistic nor obscene – it is merely accurate.
In the event, of course, Van Schurman did not become a man. Nor, as a woman, was she installed at the helm of the Dutch Republic. In fact, even her lattice-veiled presence in the lecture hall must have been discontinued within months, since by May 1640 Descartes was already referring to Van Schurman’s cubicle in the past tense.13 The most likely explanation is that a woman’s presence in the lecture hall – even a hidden one – had proved to be too much of a presence after all.
In this example, we see the institutional structures that governed early modern European life operating to do what they normally did. They preserved order, and preserving order meant that women could not occupy male-only institutional spaces. So Van Schurman would no longer attend university lectures, or give public orations – and leading the Republic (a role that she would certainly have found appalling) was out of the question, even as a joke.14 And yet…she certainly had attended the lectures, and she had given a public oration, and both events were well known at high levels. And despite an educational system that denied higher learning to women, she had excelled in a spectacular way. This episode thus provides us with a useful introduction to the ways in which early modern women female scholars negotiated with institutions – the process of official prohibition, followed by case-specific accommodation, and then the closing of doors.
The following sections look in turn at these major institutions – family and the Church – in order to understand how they shaped the lives of early modern women: their official mandates and their ideal functions. We then turn to look at the ways in which female scholars created spaces for their work within and alongside those prevailing structures. We begin with the most basic institution of all: the family.
2.1 Women and the Family
In early modern Europe, the family was first and foremost an economic unit. This is not to say that it was not also an affective unit, wherein love, care, and growth took place. However, these emotional benefits were secondary to its purpose.15 The family was the basic building block in the interlocked institutional system that enabled life in pre-industrial Europe, the entity that produced necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. From there, the production of individual families was aggregated into the products of villages, communities, shires, duchies, and states. Within the household – from the time they were no longer toddlers until the moment age rendered them unable to help – women worked alongside men in fields and family workshops. They took care of animals, sold goods in the markets, spun and wove and dyed.16
Apart from working alongside men throughout their productive lives, women also had their gender-specific duties within the household. First, there was basic domesticity – the cooking, cleaning, harvesting, brewing, child-rearing, and sewing that proceeded in a relentless dawn-todusk cycle for rich and poor women alike.17 In addition, from the cottages of peasants to the manors of nobles, women were the primary healers in the family. They grew and gathered medicinal herbs, tended to the sick, collected, preserved, and adjusted medical recipes, and compounded the salves and elixirs in their kitchens.18
Most crucially, however, the family was the entity that produced future generations – thus for women, their primary role in the productive unit of the family was reproduction itself. This
oneself immersed from birth in a bath of Christianity from which one did not emerge even at death.
(Febvre 1982: 336)
In this lucid and beautiful passage, Lucien Febvre alerts us to the fact that Christian ideas and norms – from morning until night, from birth until death – dictated the rhythms and patterns of early modern lives. Although Jews and Muslims shared the continent with Christians, and kept their own faiths and customs vital throughout these centuries, they were still inhabiting Christendom; and it was Christianity that would determine which spaces they could inhabit, and how much safety or freedom they might find within them. 23 For women all over Europe, from all walks of life, the surrounding culture of Christendom meant that their subservience to men had been ordained from the beginning of time by God himself. The Bible provided the evidence for this gendered hierarchy, and the umbrella institution of the Church – whether Catholic or Protestant – constructed theologies and doctrines to reinforce it. Drawing on a blended inheritance from the patriarchal structures of Judaism and the scientific reasoning of Aristotelianism, Christendom was built on a solid platform of man above woman. 24
Yet the Bible itself is not clear on this point at all. In fact, while the institution of the Church was completely consistent in mandating female subservience, the supporting scriptures are contradictory at best. The scriptural discrepancies begin immediately, with the account of Creation in Genesis. In Genesis 2, Eve is created from Adam’s rib in order for the first man to have a partner and helpmeet, and this story has been cited over the centuries as the absolute bedrock of woman’s secondary status. However, this was in fact the second version of the creation of Eve. In Genesis 1, man and woman were created in the image of God, at the same time, by the same act: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” 25 Thus there was no man first, woman second. However, the Church as an institution would consistently use the second version as its reference point with respect to women.
The contradictions continue – although not, interestingly enough, in the words and actions of Jesus. According to the gospels, Jesus rejected the patriarchal conventions of the Judaism in which he had been raised, and chose instead to raise up, welcome, and affirm the women who came to him. It was to Mary Magdalene that Jesus chose to reveal himself when he rose from the dead; he then told her to go to the brethren with the news, singling her out as an apostle to the apostles (John. 20:17, KJV). 26 After the crucifixion, however, the fledgling faith of Christianity became the creation of his followers – and, most importantly, that new faith was the creation of Saint Paul.
Paul was a Roman citizen from Tarsus, in Asia Minor, and never met Jesus while he was alive. Instead, Paul saw a vision of the resurrected Christ while on the road to Damascus. The risen Christ was arguably quite a different entity from the living Jesus, and the faith Paul established as a result of this vision was also quite different from the ideas that Jesus had explored while he was alive. Paul established an organization that was strongly influenced by his Greco-Roman heritage, and although most scholars now agree that Paul probably wrote only 7 of the 13 Pauline letters in the Bible, all those letters reflect a man tirelessly struggling to keep various scattered groups of Christians in order; he is constantly reminding them of how they should behave, of what is central to their new faith, and which old practices must now be discontinued (Barton and Muddiman 2001: 1078–83; MacCulloch 2009: 97–102).
From these letters, it also appears that Paul was very concerned about women. His primary goal was the establishment of order and organization in order to promote the survival and growth of the new faith. This entailed dealing with appropriate roles, and here is where things got complicated for women in Christianity. Paul’s letter to the Galatians presented a breathtakingly open vision of the equality of souls: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians. 3:28, KJV). However, that vision was quickly subsumed into the hierarchical requirements of a fledgling institution. And, as with the choice of the second, “rib” version of the creation of woman, the Pauline text constantly referenced with regard to women came not from Galatians, but from the first letter to the Corinthians:
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
(I Corinthians 14:34-35, KJV)
According to Paul, then, women must not speak, except to ask their husbands what, if anything, they need to know; and even then that asking must be done in the home. The reason given is one that is already familiar to us – a reference to the Great Chain of Being, and to human interactions as a microcosm of God’s macrocosm:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.
(Ephesians 5:22-23; I Corinthians 11:3, KJV)
The reasoning couldn’t be clearer; the family was a microcosm of God’s creation, thus men ruled over women just as God ruled over mankind.
Legal systems throughout early modern Europe also supported this hierarchical resonance of family and religion, since Church and state were deeply interlocked structures. Despite variances of time, place, and confessional affiliation, the need to maintain man over woman existed throughout. In English law, this was mandated through a doctrine known as “coverture,” under which a woman ceased to have legal existence once she got married. She was a feme covert, literally covered by her husband’s legal personhood, and could own no property – an umbrella condition which included her dowry, her children, and herself. 27 The reasoning supporting this legal status was the Bible, and Eve’s greater punishment after the Fall. Despite the fact that Adam had readily joined in, it was Eve who had been the first to eat the forbidden fruit; her extra punishments would be the pain of childbirth, and the sexual desire for her husband which would ensure the arrival of those pains. The icing on the cake was permanent subservience to her husband: “and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 4:16, KJV).
Thus when dealing with women, the task of the law in early modern Europe was to ensure that contemporary life reflected these biblical mandates. As the French jurist Jean Bodin wrote in 1576:
The power, authority, and command that a husband has over his wife is allowed by both divine and positive law to be honourable and right.
(Bodin 1955: 1)
Bodin’s argument for the interweaving of divine and earthly law was mirrored in English jurisprudence, as demonstrated by an anonymous pamphlet published in England in 1632. Although its intent was completely different – it was written for women, in order to help them understand their rights under the law – the information provided by the jurist was the same. Human law was
