Scudéry’s portraits
Patriarchy, agency, and genre
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21597709 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Allauren Samantha Forbes (0000-0001-5627-6258, McMaster University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 492-514 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-04 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | British Journal for the History of Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0960-8788 • E-ISSN: 1469-3526 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09608788.2024.2423398 |
| OpenAlex | W4404481090 |
| Language | FR |
| References cited | 22 |
In the ongoing project of recovering and (re)integrating early modern European women philosophers, scholars have been re-examining not only who counts as a philosopher, but what kinds of works are properly understood as philosophical. Madeleine de Scudéry is best remembered as a novelist, but some scholars have argued that her dialogues are richly philosophical. Here, I examine an early and overlooked text from Scudéry – Illustrious Women – which is a collection of speeches of historical women who find themselves in dire circumstances. I argue that Illustrious Women offers a sophisticated critique of patriarchal power: Scudéry exposes the conflict between epistemic and practical agency under conditions of gendered oppression and illustrates specific manifestations of this harm concerning control, autonomy, and consent. In so doing, particularly through the genre of oratory, Scudéry’s Illustrious Women is both a work of seventeenth-century feminist resistance and a subversive educational tool
Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Patriarchy · Portrait · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Scientific Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History
Madeleine de Scudéry on conversation and its feminist ends
Oppressive Double Binds
Women's Writing and the Early Modern Genre Wars
Comic Epitaphs
Persuasive Ethopoeia in Dionysius’s Lysias
The King in Trinkets
Madeleine de Scudery
Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women
Women Writing Antiquity
Self-knowledge and varieties of human excellence in the French moralists
New Pleasure in Life Unfolding
"Female Friendship as the Foundation of Love in Madeleine de Scudéry's "Histoire de Sapho
| Highly cited | No |
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