Browse results
Abstract
This introduction summarizes some of the main hypotheses that underly the contributions of this thematic issue of ARTES which is dedicated to the role of habit/custom and experience in the writing of some Early Modern women authors. One hypothesis is that references to habit and experience may have supported Early Modern women writers in their efforts to legitimize their arguments, knowledge and writing, the reason for this being that – due to various social restrictions and expectations – women were often denied access to other fields of knowledge, especially that of so-called book knowledge. Hence, the question arises to what extent the references to habit/custom and experience are connected to the question of female education and female strategies of (self-)empowerment. I will illustrate this using the prominent example of the medieval writer Christine de Pizan. Since the specific nature of female claims can only be assessed against the background of male writing practices, I will also make some introductory remarks on habit/custom and experience with reference to Early Modern male authors.
Abstract
This paper examines the role of habit and custom in educational writings from 16th- to 18th-century France. Authors like Michel de Montaigne, François de Fénelon, César Chesneau Du Marsais and Madame de Maintenon highly recognize the importance of habit and custom (habitude, coutume) for the education of children. Yet, their opinions diverge with regard to the consequences and the educational functions of habit and custom. In a first step (section 2), I will outline some major positions on the relationship between coutume/habitude and education in Montaigne’s Essais (1580/88), Fénelon’s Traité sur l’éducation des filles (1687) and Du Marsais’ article on „Éducation“ in the Encyclopédie (1755). Two further sections are devoted to Madame de Maintenon and her Conversations (or Loisirs, posth. 1757): in section 3, I will focus on the importance of habit and habituation in Madame de Maintenon’s practical education of girls in the Maison royale de Saint Louis in Saint-Cyr, a school that Maintenon founded for poor noble girls. In this context, special attention will be paid to the performative and theatrical aspects of her educational concept. In the last part (section 4), I examine the role attributed to habit and custom in the text of the Conversations. I will argue that this role, which is strongly linked to the idea of toughening up girls for a future life as a good mère de famille, may be explained by both the historical context of the French 17th century and Madame de Maintenon’s personal experiences.
Abstract
This article examines the Responces from Catherine des Roches’ Secondes Œuvres (1583) with regards to the role that habit plays in the literary creation of women writers. The Responces, a genre in which women traditionally ‘answer’ men, reveal insights into the author’s literary exchange with her contemporaries, among whom were also women poets. Catherine des Roches reinterprets this genre by addressing both men and women and, furthermore, by using the Responces addressed to other women writers to communicate exclusively with women. Moreover, Catherine des Roches stresses the habitualization of the writing practice in order to prove the virtuousness of women writers on the one hand, and to engage in female community-fashioning through networking and mutual praise on the other hand.
Abstract
The contribution focuses on the staging of experiential knowledge as a resource for the characterization of the warriors Rosmonda and Silveria in Margherita Sarrocchi’s „poema eroico“ La Scanderbeide (Roma: Andrea Fei 1623), with additional references to Lucrezia Marinella’s L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (Venezia: Ghirardo Imberti 1635). The analysis is based on the thesis that the value of experience for the „excellence“ of women, which is clearly stated in L’Enrico, is also already present in La Scanderbeide. Furthermore the article aims to show how Sarrocchi, in her letters to Galileo Galilei, enhances her position as an adept authoress of epic poetry by referring both to her practical experience as well as to her erudition.
Abstract
The autobiography of Margarethe Elisabeth Milow, a merchant’s daughter from Hamburg, is not only a precious source for the living conditions of protestant middle-class women in the 18th century, but it also illustrates that writing was practised as one habit among many others. The paper shows that the formally heterogeneous text owes its existence to strict routines, which Milow carried out conscientiously until her death. As she addresses her report to her children, it can also be read as an educational text: Fulfilling the demand of the admired theologian Julius Gustav Alberti for a progressive religious education centred on the life of the individual, Milow places herself as a narrator matured by female experience who finds instructive exempla in her own life story. Finally, the paper reveals a tension in Milow’s writing: On the one hand, she writes (family) history out of a strong sense of duty, on the other hand, she writes for the pleasure of exploring her talent to tell effectively constructed stories.
Abstract
Against the background of epistemic change in the early modern period, the article examines the literary staging of experience in the epic works of Moderata Fonte (Tredici canti del Floridoro, 1581), Margherita Sarrocchi (La Scanderbeide, 1623) and Lucrezia Marinella (L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato, 1635). With cross-references to Fonte’s and Marinella’s treatises on gender theory, the analysis of exemplary passages shows that the three women authors exploit the evidential quality of the agonistic scenes in their epic poems in order to rebalance the relationship between experience and habit in the context of gender issues. By doing so, they use evidentia (gr. enárgeia) in its entire spectrum as a rhetorical, epistemological, visual and also legally connoted dispositive.
Abstract
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero sueño is a text about the search for knowledge that does not come primarily from books, but from her own transcendental experience. The poem does not tell us a (knowledge) story in the true sense of the word, but unfolds a specific model of the thirst for knowledge. The poetry of Primero sueño symbolizes the free and passionate longing for knowledge and ambiguously rejects the act of knowing. The fact that the lyrical ego explicitly recognizes itself as a female in the very last verse can be interpreted in various ways, which are discussed in the article.
Abstract
The article discusses in which ways Catherine Bernard reflects in her tragedy Brutus the aporias of the Roman-Republican usus as well as its habitus by staging the famous episode of the roman history in which Brutus sacrifices his two sons – Titus and Tibérinus – for the sake of the Roman Republic. Bernard introduces in her play the character of Valérie, the sister of the consul Valérius, in order to present a moral counterpart to the masculine Roman ethics. By doing this, Bernard’s tragedy constitutes a turning part in the history of the French classicist theatre: her Brutus sets an end to a specific classicist poetics that focusses on state affairs and introduces at the same time a new poetical concept: a civil classicism.
Abstract
As an institution, marriage is an area of human life that has undoubtedly become an entrenched cultural habit over time. Throughout the early modern period, we usually encounter it not as a love marriage but as a forced marriage arranged by parents. And it is precisely from this position of marriage as institutionalized patriarchy from which numerous female characters in the novellas of the Spanish author María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–after 1647) suffer. This is especially true with regard to the protagonists who, through their suffering, are compelled to outwit their husbands by committing adultery, while others prefer a life as a nun in a convent to a life as a wife. In both cases, habit (here: the custom of marriage) is subverted and undermined by its opposite principle, namely creativity. The author’s two collections of novellas serve as the textual basis for this study: Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647).