Download Free The Forerunners Of Feminism In French Literature Of The Renaissance Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Forerunners Of Feminism In French Literature Of The Renaissance and write the review.

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France provides the first comprehensive comparison of the printed debates in the 1500s over the superiority or inferiority of woman - the Querelle des femmes - and the dignity and misery of man. Analysing these writings side by side, Lyndan Warner reveals the extent to which Renaissance authors borrowed commonplaces from both traditions as they praised or blamed man or woman and habitually considered opposite and contrary points of view. In the law courts reflections on the virtues and vices of man and woman had a practical application-to win cases-and as Warner demonstrates, Parisian lawyers employed this developing rhetoric in family disputes over inheritance and marriage, and amplified it in the published versions of their pleadings. Tracing these ideas and modes of thinking from the writer's quill to the workshops and boutiques of printers and booksellers, Warner uses probate inventories to follow the books to the households of their potential male and female readers. Warner reveals the shifts in printed discussions of human nature from the 1500s to the early 1600s and shows how booksellers adapted the ways they marketed and sold new genres such as essays and lawyers' pleadings.
The dawn of humanism in the Renaissance presented privileged women with great opportunities for personal and intellectual growth. Sexual and social roles still determined the extent to which a woman could pursue education and intellectual accomplishment, but it was possible through the composition of poetry or prose to temporarily offset hierarchies of gender, to become equal to men in the act of creation. Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, this anthology introduces the works of twenty-five women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them Marie Dentière, a Swiss evangelical reformer whose writings were so successful they were banned during her lifetime; Gaspara Stampa, a cultivated courtesan of Venetian aristocratic circles who wrote lyric poetry that has earned her comparisons to Michelangelo and Tasso; Hélisenne de Crenne, a French aristocrat who embodied the true spirit of the Renaissance feminist, writing both as novelist and as champion of her sex; Helene Kottanner, Austrian chambermaid to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary whose memoirs recall her daring theft of the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen for her esteemed mistress; and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, the first Englishwoman known to write a full-length work of fiction and compose a significant body of secular poetry. Offering a seldom seen counterpoint to literature written by men, Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation presents prose and poetry that have never before appeared in English, as well as writings that have rarely been available to the nonspecialist. The women whose writings are included here are united by a keen awareness of the social limitations placed upon their creative potential, of the strained relationship between their gender and their work. This concern invests their writings with a distinctive voice--one that carries the echoes of a male aesthetic while boldly declaring battle against it.
Considering a wide range of Renaissance works of nonfiction, Jordan asserts that feminism as a mode of thought emerged as early as the fifteenth century in Italy, and that the main arguments for the social equality of the sexes were common in the sixteenth century. Renaissance feminism, she maintains, was a feature of a broadly revisionist movement that regarded the medieval model of creation as static and hierarchical and favored a model that was dynamic and relational. Jordan examines pro-woman arguments found in dozens of pan-European texts in the light of present-day notions of authority and subordination, particularly resistance theory, in an attempt to link gender issues to larger contemporary theoretical and institutional questions. Drawing on sources as varied as treatises on marriage and on education, defenses and histories of women, popular satires, moral dialogues, and romances, Renaissance Feminism illustrates the broad scope of feminist argument in early modern Europe, recovering prowoman arguments that had disappeared from the record of gender debates and transforming the ways in which early modern gender ideology has been understood. Renaissance scholars and feminist critics and historians in general will welcome this book, and medievalists and intellectual historians will also find it valuable reading.
A comprehensive historical review of the debates surrounding women's contributions and roles in science, with emphasis on women's access to education, training, and professional careers. This remarkable work illuminates the debates surrounding women's involvement with science throughout history, covering a broad range of disciplines. Unlike a biographical compendium of great scientists, it examines the question posed throughout history: Are women capable of doing science? Whether people have the right to even ask the question is germane to the debate itself. The coverage discusses Hypatia, the first female scientist about whom we have information; examines the contradictory behavior of the church in the treatment of women during the medieval era; and covers the 17th century debates over women's education. It examines women physicians, discusses feminism and science, and delves into why there are so few women in science—even today. The debate that began during the time of Plato and Aristotle continues to this day.
Shakespeare and the Nature of Women was the first full-length feminist analysis of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ushering in a new era in research and criticism. Its arguments for the feminism both of the drama and the early modern period caused instant controversy, which still engrosses scholars. Dusinberre argues that Puritan teaching on sexuality and spiritual equality raises questions about women which feed into the drama, where the role of women in relation to authority structures is constantly renegotiated. Using a critical language which predates Foucault and other major theorists, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women argues that Renaissance drama highlights ways in which the feminine and the masculine are socially constructed. The presence of the boy actor on stage created an awareness of gender as performance, now crucial to contemporary feminist thought. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women claimed for women a right to speak about the literary text from their own place in history and culture. The author's Preface to the second edition traces contemporary developments in feminist scholarship, which still wrestles with the book's main thesis: Renaissance feminism, feminist Shakespeare.
While the study of the history of rhetoric has expanded to include an ever-growing range of rhetorical traditions, lesser-known figures, and under- and un-studied texts, it has continued to exist in the hermetically sealed binary of West and Rest. Rhetorical scholars have begun uncovering the many marginalized rhetorical traditions silenced by the homogenous nature of our histories themselves, reading and writing new histories of the rhetorical tradition through frames from gender to geography. Despite these substantial challenges to the traditionally received history of rhetoric, many voices are still silenced and many spaces are still excluded—voices speaking within the spaces of the less-than-monolithic West itself. This silencing and excluding continues, perhaps, because of assumptions that no texts exist from these marginalized voices or that substantial rhetorical activity was not conducted in these marginalized spaces—regardless of already extant evidence of rhetorical activity as diverse as rural civic ethos in Classical Greece and Etruscan influences on Roman rhetoric or long-standing passive knowledge of scholarly activity in Medieval Andalusia and Ireland. Rhetoric in the Rest of the West attempts to expand the conversation in those gaps in the history of rhetoric by examining the traditions that lost the cultural competition and have been shrouded in the shadow of the rhetorical tradition.
Helisenne de Crenne: At the Crossroads of Renaissance Humanism and Feminism examines the writings of this sixteenth-century French author in light of modern critical theory."--BOOK JACKET.
During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645) was celebrated as one of the "seventy most famous women of all time" in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Montaigne, as well as his editor, Gournay was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France. This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time—The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes Gournay's last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises, The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.