Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 415 - The Tenth Muse - Marie de Gournay.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department in King's College London and the University of London. Philosophers nowadays talk about epistemic injustice, which occurs when people are unfairly taken to lack authority as sources of knowledge. Miranda Fricker, who wrote the book that introduced the term, gives the example of women in corporate settings whose ideas and suggestions are taken as less credible simply because they are women. Fricker tells of one executive who, when she is at a meeting and wants to make a suggestion about policy, actually writes down the suggestion on a little piece of paper, surreptitiously passes it to a sympathetic male colleague, has him make the suggestion, watches it be well received, and then joins in the discussion from there. Women living before the age of the multinational corporation are already well aware of the phenomenon, even if they didn't have a name for it. One of the earliest clear statements of epistemic injustice I know is found in the work of Marie Léger de Gournay. She notes that even a woman with the wit of carnayotes, a leading skeptical philosopher of antiquity, will be ignored in conversation with a man. With merely a smile or some slight shaking of his head, his mute eloquence pronounces, it's a woman speaking. This passage actually occurs in two works by Gournay. It may be found in The Lady's Complaint, which along with her Equality of Men and Women and Apology for the Woman Writing, all published in the 1641 edition of her collected works, establishes Gournay as a pioneering feminist. But his appearance there is a bit of a recycling on her part, because the remark was first made in a lengthy preface to her 1595 edition of Montaigne's Essays. With the blessing of Montaigne's widow, Gournay included additional material beyond that found in earlier editions. Her expanded version was the standard one used until 1802, when scholars began to prefer the earlier 1588 edition augmented by Montaigne's handwritten notes. Arguably this downgrading of Gournay's edition was itself a case of epistemic injustice, since she knew Montaigne well, and might reasonably be taken to be an authoritative source of knowledge on his thought and on the text of the essays. This same aspect of Gournay's literary career makes her pioneering in another sense. She should certainly not be reduced to a mere follower and literary executor of Montaigne. Her collected works are more than a thousand pages long and range widely in terms of topic and genre. But she does give us our first example of a type that will become increasingly familiar as we move forward in history, the female philosopher, whose renown is secured primarily by being linked to a famous male philosopher. Later examples will include Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, best known to historians of philosophy for their correspondence with Descartes and Leibniz, respectively. This is something we haven't really seen before, unless you count family relations like Macrina the sister of Gregory of Nyssa. We did see how women humanists of the Italian Renaissance deliberately sought to associate themselves with prominent male humanists with mixed success. In one case, Isozzo Nogarola was upset when Guarino Guarini ignored a letter she sent him and when she complained had to put up with Guarini chastising her for taking the snub so badly instead of displaying a manly soul. Gournay was considerably more successful in getting people to think of her when they thought of Montaigne. Their friendship began after her reading of the essays in 1582 when she was not yet twenty years old. Looking back, she said that the book sent her into ecstasy. It affected her so deeply that her mother offered her a sedative. Determined to meet the author of this magnificent work, Gournay made contact with Montaigne and visited him in Paris, later hosting him for several months in Picardy. She became his adoptive daughter, something she underscores in the preface, constantly referring to him as her father. She is keen for the reader to understand that their closeness did indeed make her a unique authority on Montaigne. I alone, she proclaims, was perfectly acquainted with that great soul. Thus, she can, for example, settle the controversy as to his views on religion. Writing the preface after Montaigne's death, Gournay's admiration for him remains undimmed. She says, The language of the essays never wearies the reader except when it ceases, and everything about it is perfect but it's coming to an end. And she proudly quotes the praise lavished on the book by Lipsius, adding that, The essays were a match for him, he imparting, they deserving the greatest honor. Gournay herself had a more mixed reputation. Lipsius, with whom she exchanged correspondence, praised her too, using the already well-worn trope that her intelligence exceeded the normal bounds of womankind. Is it possible that so keen in understanding, and so solid a judgment, not to speak of such wisdom and knowledge, can be found in one of your sects, and in such times as these? She was called the 10th Muse, and after her death, eulogized as both daughter to Montaigne and sister to Lipsius. But she was also the target of satirical mockery, as in a 1610 work called simply the Anti-Gournay. At one point, pranksters tricked her into thinking that the King of England was soliciting an autobiography and portrait from her. Gournay, not the sort to take such treatment with good humor, sued them. In the end, though, it was the esteem of Montaigne that would have meant the most to her, and this she certainly had, to judge by a passage added to the original version of the essays. In it, Montaigne calls Gournay, my covenant daughter, whom I love indeed more than a daughter of my own, and cherish in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of my own being. She is the only person I still think about in this world. If youthful promise means anything, her soul will someday be capable of the finest things, among others a perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain. Note here the echo of Montaigne's attitude towards his brilliantly promising friend, La Boétie, a parallel Gournay herself draws explicitly in the preface. The insertion in the essays is under a cloud of suspicion, though. Scholars are unsure whether Gournay herself may have added it to burnish her own reputation. This would be consistent with what has been termed her readiness to convert his appreciation of her into a vehicle for self-promotion. And she did on occasion engage in literary subterfuge, as when she published a revised version of the works of the playa d' poet Pierre Ronsard, in which corrections of her own were presented as stemming from Ronsard himself. Perhaps Gournay saw herself as being so close to the mind of Montaigne that it didn't make much difference which of them wrote something. She said that, Many of his habits as a writer also become hers. Like the essays, the writings of Gournay indulge in self-conscious digressions, followed by announcements that she is getting back to the topic at hand. She defends Montaigne's focus on his own personality and his quest for virtue, saying of his critics, Her artful self-presentation as an author also recalls Montaigne. If anything, she's even more concerned about her reputation since, as she puts it, At a philosophical level, she adopts his use of skeptical strategies. She says, as he had, that Outlander's stories should not be rejected, only treated as unproven. Gournay even doubts her own worth, since integrity is often doubtful in other people. Only Montaigne's theme for her makes her confident that she must be deserving of that esteem. Gournay also deploys skeptical strategies in arguing for the equality of the sexes. Montaigne argued in his Apology for Raymond Sébon that there is no obvious hierarchy between different knowers. We find different perspectives being adopted by the same person at different times, by people of different cultures, and even by animals, as opposed to humans. Who are we to say which perspective is the best? You can see how this line of thought could be a bulwark against epistemic injustice, and Gournay used it exactly that way. The man who just smiles condescendingly at the views of a woman is, we might say, failing to realize that her perspective is on a par with his. Since Gournay was a feminist who claimed to carry on the legacy of Montaigne, it would have been welcome to her if Montaigne had seen the feminist implications of his own philosophy. She was convinced that he did, mostly on the strength of a passage in which Montaigne wrote that, male and female are cast in the same mold, save for education and custom, the difference between them is not great. As we'll see shortly, this idea is unfolded at length in Gournay's own writings on the equality of women. In the same passage, Montaigne even cites Plato as an upholder of gender equality, something also found in Gournay. Unfortunately for her, Montaigne's record on the question is more mixed than she would like to admit, though. He dedicated one of his essays to the topic of virtuous women, but all the examples that come to his mind are women who killed themselves for their husbands. Elsewhere, he states that women are weak in reasoning. They allow themselves to be led to where natural impressions act most alone, like animals. In a passage that would be a blow to Gournay's claims to have shared an intimacy with Montaigne on a par with the friendship he had with La Boitie, Montaigne says that whereas women have beauty, it is men who have reason, wisdom, and loving friendship. That is why they are in charge of the world affairs. So in adopting a thoroughly egalitarian view of the sexes, Gournay was going well beyond Montaigne, or perhaps saying what he would have said if he'd been more consistent in his epistemic egalitarianism. After all, if even non-human animals have a valid point of view on the world, then surely so do women. It's worth stressing that Gournay does indeed argue for the equality of the sexes, and not for the superiority of women. The more provocative move of claiming superiority was made by some women authors of this period, like Lucrezia Marinella, an almost exact contemporary of Gournay's. Marinella was born in 1571 and died in 1653, while Gournay lived from 1565 to 1645. But, Gournay says, again ringing bells that might have sounded in Montaigne's tower, I avoid all extremes and am content to make women equal to men. Her interest in gender and the relationship between the sexes is already evident in an early work, a narrative called the Promenade of Monceur de Montaigne. It was published the year before her edition of the essays, and claims to be a written version of a story she used to delight Montaigne when he was visiting with her. Again, Gournay is taking license for literary purposes here, in fact the story was likely written after his death, and is based on a story by another author named Claude de Talmont. With what I take to be ironically obvious disingenuousness, she says in her dedication of the work to Montaigne that she has taken the material from another book, but cannot quite remember the title or author of her source. The main thing is that her own tale is indeed original. I prefer, she says, to be empty rather than full of debts. Without going into the complex details of the story here, it may suffice to say that the heroine is pursued by two male lovers, and that Gournay uses this plot to show how women are seen as conquests by men, and unfairly treated, if not abused, by faithless and cynical suitors. As in her preface to the essays, she also digresses to defend the idea that women should be taken seriously as intellectuals. Philosophy will lead them to virtue, not wantonness, even if it may make them unconventional in their way of life. Presumably thinking of herself, she writes that, Great intellects always stray from the beaten path, then more so because they have persuaded themselves that what is straying, according to Custom, is submission to reason. The distance she takes here from Custom again recalls the skeptical attitudes she shares with Montaigne. What appears as a digression in the promenade takes center stage in Gournay's treatise, The Equality of Men and Women. Written for Anne of Austria, wife of the French king, Louis XIII, it first appeared in 1622 but was revised and expanded thereafter, just as Montaigne did with his essays and Gournay did with a number of her own works. She admits that women are often in practice inferior to men, but this, as Montaigne said in that one feminist passage, is due to the poor education they are offered. In fact, as she observes elsewhere, educated women, like herself, may have to hide their learning because society frowns on it. That's another observation that would fit right in with Fricker's discussion of epistemic injustice, as with the executive who had to disclaim authorship of her ideas to get them taken seriously. Gournay furthermore argues that women should be placed on a par with men in political and religious contexts. She criticizes the Salic law, which as we've seen prevented women from inheriting the throne, and she recommends that women should be allowed to perform the sacraments, as male priests do, advice the Catholic churches still declining to take today, about 400 years after she wrote. Not that Gournay was tempted by Protestantism. In this work, she responds to the claim that women cannot understand scripture by saying that men can't either, which of course would undercut the whole Lutheran and Calvinist program. Philosophically though, the heart of Gournay's case is that women and men share the same nature. As she puts it, Here, Gournay is relying on a truism of Aristotelian thought. Biologically speaking, both men and women belong to the same species, and sex is merely accidental to them as humans. When combined with the point familiar for Montaigne, that there is great variation within each type of creature, Gournay can infer that the potential capacities that come along with membership of the human species are realized to different degrees by different individuals. This undermines a widespread assumption of her day that she mentions in her preface to the essays that even the best of women will be only as great as the least of men. In the opinion of Leuxius, apparently of Montaigne, and most definitely of Gournay herself, Gournay did count among the best of women. But she was ready to recognize that she had equals. She belonged to the entourage of Marguerite of Valois, who is not to be confused with Marguerite of Navarre, whom we covered in episode 398. Though, you could be forgiven for being confused, because this Marguerite was also a queen of Navarre, and then queen of France, no less. She presided over a literary salon in the early 17th century, of which Gournay was a regular member. Gournay also engaged in learned correspondence of the type we discussed when looking at the later French humanists, Gallegue and Casaubon. In particular, we have an interesting exchange of letters between her and another prominent woman of the day, the much younger Anna Maria von Schurmann, who did not die until 1678. Schurmann was a Protestant who was in touch with many leading intellectuals. As an article devoted to her correspondence with Gournay points out, we have here an example of how women participated in the Republic of Letters, characteristic of early modern Europe. Not content with being Montaigne's symbolic daughter and Leuxius's symbolic sister, Gournay offers when writing to Schurmann to serve as mother to her. By this logic, Schurmann would, I suppose, be Montaigne's intellectual granddaughter. Gournay is not shy in lavishing praise upon her, and compares her to the comet or new star seen in the night sky by Tycho Brahe. Schurmann returned the favor, writing a poem about the elder woman of letters in which she praised her as a strong defender of the cause of our sex. But they did not quite see eye to eye on what it meant to be a woman of letters. Gournay gently criticized Schurmann for spending too much time on learning ancient languages. Be wary of spending too much effort on Latin and Greek, she advised, and don't worry about Hebrew at all. Languages take an inordinate and too long a time for a mind as capable of matters and of the best as yours. She would later give even more radical advice to the future king, Louis XIII, saying he should not even bother with Greek and Latin, since everything worth reading was now available in French. These passages may indicate a receding of humanist ambitions from the high point of the 15th and 16th centuries. As French vernacular literatures advanced and more translations were made, mastery of classical languages became less vital. Perhaps, though, there is also a subtle anti-Protestant agenda in discouraging Schurmann from the study of Hebrew. As we saw her saying already, scripture is not something individual believers should be confident of understanding. As we can see from these developments and the dates of her publications, Marie de Gournay has brought us well into the 17th century. It obviously made sense to discuss her here, following on from Montaigne, but equally obviously, we are not done with the age of Reformation. We've dealt with Central Europe and the Low Countries, and this look at Gournay has rounded off our tour of Renaissance France. But there is another region that still needs our attention if we are going to understand the full impact of the Reformation, the full riches of philosophy during the Renaissance. It's a place whose most famous son, at least from this period, and maybe from any period, called a Septured Isle. The phrase comes from a passage in Shakespeare's Richard II, which also calls the inhabitants of this island a happy breed. But not as happy as you, since unlike the denizens of Britain in the Elizabethan age, you get to keep listening to The History of Philosophy without any doubts.