School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemWomen, Early Modern: Society and Sociability(Springer International Publishing, 2020)Definition/Introduction: Beginning in the fifteenth century, European women began to question misogynist literature that attempted to justify their relegation to a subordinate position within society, generating the querelle des femmes. In time they developed new models of ideal social relationships between the sexes, along with concepts of society and sociability that elevated women’s social role. While the earliest defenses of women accepted women’s subjection within marriage as analogous to the legitimate subjection of citizens to their monarch, as Protestants and republicans questioned the legitimacy of arbitrary monarchical power, the justice of a husband’s rule over his wife also came into question. The concept of modernity embraced new developments in vernacular literature, hospitable to female participation, and the novel became a powerful vehicle for the articulation of egalitarian models of love and friendship between the sexes. The level of civilization of society came to be measured in relation to the social role and participation of women, and the possibility of equal friendship between the sexes outside marriage, slowly transformed into the ideal of marriage as an affective and more or less egalitarian companionship.
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ItemReason and Experience in women’s responses to Descartes and Locke(Springer, 2020-02-13)Definition/Introduction: From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, commentators characteristically divided the epistemological trends of the seventeenth century into two streams, the rationalists and empiricists. Cartesian rationalism, in particular, was associated with a distinctive form of metaphysical dualism and a sharp mind/body divide. Reason was not only claimed to be a more reliable source of knowledge than sensory experience, it provided access to an immaterial realm of immutable truths. Having been educated in this tradition, a significant group of late twentieth century feminist interpreters of early modern epistemology and metaphysics argued, from a number of perspectives, that Cartesian dualism, with its associated high evaluation of pure reason, was entangled with metaphorical and psychological tendencies that debased the bodily, sensual, emotional, and natural features of existence. The latter were marked feminine, while reason and the mind were elevated and conceptualized as masculine. These feminists argued that, at least metaphorically, rationalism excluded women. In response to such claims, other scholars pointed out that Cartesian rationalism had been attractive to many early modern women interested in philosophy, and that the idea of an immaterial mind or soul, which has no sex, fostered claims for the intellectual equality of the sexes. More recent detailed scholarship into the philosophical writings of early modern women reveals that many were, in fact, suspicious of philosophies that imposed a sharp opposition between reason and experience, or mind and body. Reading the works of these women demonstrates that even when influenced by Descartes, women philosophers questioned Cartesian forms of dualism, developing their own theories of the relationship between reason, sense perception, and knowledge. The complexity and variety of the positions they developed highlights the crudity of the historiographic tendencies to read historical texts through simple dichotomies such as rationalism and empiricism.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMacaulay, Catharine(Springer Netherlands, 2021)