Philobiblon

p. 8 The resistance to certain feminine nouns (a resistance that was only officially overcome in 2019 when the Academie francaise gave approval to the use of feminine terms for most metiers and functions) is to be placed in the linguistic context of the 17th-century – a period credited not only with being a transitional moment because of the standardisation and codification of the French language, but also with ushering in the masculinisation of French, evident from the shift towards the preferred use of the universal masculine pronoun and agreement. As Eliane Viennot and others remind us, grammar is never a neutral or objective phenomenon, and there were exclusionary strategies at play in its development… the term ‘autrice’. This is a term Marie de Gournay used liberally in her oeuvre, both as a scholar of Latin (it has its roots in the Latin feminine noun auctrix, meaning a female creator or originator)… and as a (proto-)feminist intellectual, trying to find a name, and thus a place, for herself.”

p. 10 author’s approach “resists the tug of collectivity that can sometimes shape scholarship on ‘women’s writing’, including the work of historians in the 1990s. Instead, I … wary of the category of ‘woman writer’, either because this appears, if left unpacked, to have essentialising connotations, and/or because it assumes a common orientation towards feminised genres or women’s causes… sees gender as one category alongside others, such as class, education and faith; and allows s to avoid essentialising notions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”

p. 14 “significant work by Jane Stevenson and Laurie Churchill has focused on women Latinist; and the important and chronologically wide-ranging Women Classical Scholars, which examines women’s classical reception from the Renaissance to the 20th century, defines a female classicist as a ‘philologist’, foregrounding linguistic knowledge. This would (and does) include Anne Dacier, but exclude Madeleine de Scudery. … early modern genres have been a site of implicit or explicit judgement according to their degree of learning, with traditional forms of reception (translation, imitation, commentary) in the hands of ‘savantes’, valued more highly than new genres that took the ancient world as their subjects (historical novels or romances, imagined lives, incidental verse, epistolary novels) and were products of a female-orientated salon culture, by so-called salonnieres.

p. 15 “Particularly important is the tension between the professionalisation of the writer, and the related necessity to earn a living by one’s pen, and what Viala calls “le tropisme nobilitaire”, that is the aristocratic vaunting of amateurism over money-making. Most of the authors in my corpus shared the need to navigate this tension because of financial difficulties… Scudery, as[piring to aristocracy, and dependent on favours and patronage, played down the professionalism of her literary activity and the labour of her learning (and thus her Latinity) even though she did also (and did need to) profit from it financially. Cournay, on the other hand, needed to prove her worth, though her knowledge of classical culture, in order to court her own patrons, whereas Villedieu, with her publisher, Claude Barbin, developed her own lucrative and influential conception of ancient historical fiction that was geared to public and commercial success.”
p. 16 “Underlying some of these different positions was the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and its debates about ideologies of learning, classical reception, especially vulgarisation and adaptation and literary value. … Classical languages and culture, particularly Latin, were (still) the epitome of what constituted learning within the literary field in 17th-century France, and whereas men had the cultural privilege to deny the importance of Latinity and Greco-Roman culture (the Modernist position), the path to legitimacy for women was more complicated.”
p. 244 “We witness across this corpus some clear examples of solidarity between women intellectuals and writers. … whereby French literature is linked to a feminine troubadour history, the cours d’amour, and to a line of significant women from Lizan to Scudery, whose alter-ego Damophile is a figure of ridicule. Funning through the work analysed are anxieties about the social space of the salon (we see this in Gournay’s reprimands of contemporary readers, in Scudery’s Sapho, hounded by persistent hangers-on, in Antoinette Deshouliere’s representation of flatterers who are a nuisance), even as we also encounter a celebration of these spaces, whether fictional or historical, physical, or, in the case of Mare-Jeanne L’Hertier’ periodical, virtual. “

p. 245 “For the immediate successor of the figure of the “femme savante” we need to look to mid-18th century England at the ‘Bluestocking Circle ‘ of Elizabeth Montagu…p. 246 “also fed back into French culture in the late 18th and into the 19th century by way of its calque “Les Bas=Blues,”… connotes all that was pejorative about the 17th-century femme savante, particularly unwomanliness”… That connotation of manliness is evident in the well=known series of 40 plates “Les Bas-Blues” by Honore Daumier printed in August 1844 in Le Charivari magazine, in which women are ridiculed for neglecting their wifely or motherly duties while studying or are presented as haggard or unattractive in their pursuit of knowledge”.
p. 249 Next in line of negative or contested figures for the female intellectual might be the late 19th-century/early 20th century phenomenon of the ‘Girton Girl’… literally to women who studied at Girton College in Cambridge, the first college for women founded by Emily Davies in 1869, but the term came to stand more broadly for a certain type of female intellectual… could have positive or negative force, but its charged meaning derived essentially from a distrust of learned women.”