World Languages and Literatures

By the time the famous writer and courtesan Ninon de Lenclos declared in the late seventeenth century, "Mon Dieu, faites de moi un honnête homme, mais n'en faites jamais une honnête femme," the definitions of honnêteté for women and men had taken on distinctly gendered, and unequal, connotations (qtd. in Duchêne 119). At the end of the century, Antoine Furetière validates this gendered version of honnêteté in his Dictionnaire universel : "l'honnêteté des femmes, c'est la chasteté, la modestie, la pudeur, la retenuë, l'honnêteté des hommes est une manière d'agir juste, sincere, courtoise, obligeante, civile" (Furetière np). These dissimilarities, however, did not always exist. Noémi Hepp, for example, pinpoints the 1660s as the period in which moralists no longer portrayed women as equal to men in the masculine values of virtue, honor, and courage and began to regard women for their perceived difference from, and complementarity to, men (Hepp 110). Honnêteté reflects this split; the predominantly moral definition expressed in the 1630s and 40s highlighted women's similarities to men whereas the mondain ideal of sociability became portrayed as an exclusively masculine type. In contrast, the honnêtes women of salon society became ridiculed as "précieuse" for asserting their cultivation and worldliness. 1 Despite the different values placed on men and women for their honnêteté, the ideology of honnêteté in seventeenth-century French society

This edition offers a translation of two works by the seventeenth-century French Franciscan, Jacques Du Bosc: selected passages from L’Honneste femme (1632-36) and the entirety of Nouveau recueil des lettres de dames de ce temps (1635). Both of these texts articulate the theory and practice of the emerging ideal of honnêteté for women. To Du Bosc’s way of thinking, the honnête or “respectable” woman’s role in society is not only that of mother and wife; she is primarily a member of a social elite who embodies the art of pleasing through her politeness, urbanity, and conversation. Du Bosc’s work aims to justify this new role for women, even as he sets out the rules of moral conduct to guide them. In so doing, he refutes traditional misogynist attitudes while insisting that women follow a Christian moral code of conduct. Like his predecessor François de Sales, Du Bosc treats women as reasoning beings capable of guiding their own conscience. Moreover, Du Bosc promotes equality between the sexes, especially in relation to their moral behavior. In keeping with these beliefs, Du Bosc has women discuss, in the New Collection of Letters and Responses, a wide range of moral issues, rehearsing the pros and cons so that women readers may draw their own conclusions.

In the New Collection women correspondents exchange moral, ethical, and esthetic ideas: what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior, whether women should study, whether a man should marry an ugly woman. The most interesting letters are those which depict passionate friendships between women. The writers of these letters represent a close social network of women who love, respect, and support one another. In other words, while Du Bosc may be demonstrating appropriate kinds of social skills and attitudes of respectable women, he also appears to be advocating a new kind of relationship between women. In both of these texts from the first half of the seventeenth century Du Bosc made important contributions which helped shift public attitudes toward embracing women’s intellectual and moral equality.

Reclaiming the forgotten texts of women writers has been a major feminist undertaking of the last half-century. Indeed, believing in the importance of this sort of work, we have each spent much of our careers studying the women writers absent from our own graduate-school education. What follows, however, is a cautionary tale about discovery and reclamation: first, our discovery of what we thought was a hitherto-ne glected text by eminent seventeenth-century writer Madeleine de Scudéry-her Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641); second, our discovery that the text was not (even as indexed in Gerritsen Collection of Women's History microfilm collection) authored by Scudéry but was written instead by a Franciscan priest, Jacques Du Bosc. Clearly, our second discovery pointed out both our own rush to judgment as well as that of other literary scholars interested in the tenuous project of historical reclamation. In this essay, we seek to explore the implications of attribution and authorship for our cautionary tale. Does the fact that a work is not Scudéry's Lettres amoureuses but instead Du Bosc's Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635) diminish its importance to the history of women's letters?

In this article, I explore the passionate relationship between woman of letters Germaine de Staël and socialite Juliette Récamier in post-revolutionary France. To recontextualize this relationship from a minor friendship, as it has most often been viewed, to a major love relationship in both women's lives, I examine what Staël and Récamier themselves had to say about each other throughout their twenty-year friendship, and explore the significance of this passionate alliance. By examining scholars'; attitudes and assumptions surrounding this friendship, I raise important issues on how we read women's relationships today.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The correct reference for this volume is SVEC 2004:12 This series is available on annual subscription For further information about SVEC and other Voltaire Foundation publications see www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk This book is printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Baskerville by Alden Bookset Printed and bound by Polestar Scientifica Ltd