Table Of ContentAGAINST MARRIAGE
THE
OTHER VOICE
IN
EARLY MODERN
EUROPE
A Series Edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
HENRICUS CORNELIUS AGRIPPA LUCREZIA MARINELLA
Declamation on the Nobility and The Nobility and Excellence of Women,
Preeminence of the Female Sex and the Defects and Vices of Men
Edited and Translated by Albert Rabil Jr. Edited and translated by Anne Dunhill with
Letizia Panizza
LAURA CERETA
CollectedLettersofaRenaissanceFeminist FRANÇOIS POULLAIN DE LA BARRE
Edited and translated by Diana Robin Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises
Introduction and annotations by
TULLIA D’ARAGONA Marcelle Maistre Welch
Dialogue on the Infinity of Love Translation by Vivien Bosley
Edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell
and Bruce Merry ANTONIA PULCI
Florentine Drama for Convent
CASSANDRA FEDELE and Festival
Letters and Orations Edited and translated by James Wyatt Cook
Edited and translated by Diana Robin
SISTER BARTOLOMEA RICCOBONI
CECILIA FERRAZZI Life and Death in a Venetian Convent:
Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint The Chronicle and Necrology of
Edited and translated by Corpus Domini, 1395–1436
Anne Jacobson Schutte Edited and translated by Daniel Bornstein
MODERATA FONTE MARÍA DE SAN JOSÉ SALAZAR
The Worth of Women Book for the Hour of Recreation
Edited and translated by Virginia Cox Introduction and notes by Alison Weber
Translation by Amanda Powell
VERONICA FRANCO
Poems and Selected Letters ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN
Edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones Whether a Christian Woman Should
and Margaret F. Rosenthal Be Educated and Other Writings
from Her Intellectual Circle
MARIE LE JARS DE GOURNAY
Edited and translated by Joyce L. Irwin
“Apology for the Woman Writing”
and Other Works LUCREZIA TORNABUONI DE’ MEDICI
Edited and translated by Richard Hillman and Sacred Narratives
Colette Quesnel Edited and translated by Jane Tylus
JUAN LUIS VIVES
The Education of a Christian Woman:
A Sixteenth-Century Manual
Edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi
Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans
Duchesse de Montpensier
AG A I N S T M A R R I AG E
The Correspondence of
La Grande Mademoiselle
(cid:2)
Edited and Translated
by
Joan DeJean
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London
Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, 1627–1693
Joan DeJeanis Trustee Professor of French at the University of
Pennsylvania. Her previous books include Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937;
Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France; Ancients against
Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle;andThe Reinvention of
Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2002 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 1 2 3 4 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de, 1627–1693.
[Correspondence. English & French]
Against marriage : the correspondence of la Grande Mademoiselle / edited and
translated by Joan DeJean.
p. cm.—(The other voice in early modern Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Text in English and French.
ISBN 0-226-53490-1 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226-53492-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de, 1627–1693—
Correspondence. 2. Motteville, Françoise de, d. 1689—Correspondence.
3. Princesses—France—Correspondence. 4. Ladies-in-waiting—France—
Correspondence. 5. France—History—Louis XIV, 1643–1715. 6. France—
Court and courtiers—History—17th century. 7. Marriage. 8. Sex role.
I. Motteville, Françoise de, d. 1689. II. DeJean, Joan E. III. Title. IV. Series.
DC130.M8 A4 2002
944(cid:2).033(cid:2)0922—dc21
2002007082
(cid:2)(cid:3)The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Series vii
Acknowledgments xxix
Introduction: La Grande Mademoiselle 3
Montpensier-Motteville Correspondance 26
Montpensier-Motteville Correspondence 27
Volume Editor’s Bibliography 73
Series Editors’ Bibliography 75
Index 83
THE OTHER VOICE IN
EARLY MODERN EUROPE:
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.
THE OLD VOICE AND THE OTHER VOICE
In western Europe and the United States, women are nearing equality
in the professions, in business, and in politics. Most enjoy access to edu-
cation, reproductive rights, and autonomy in financial affairs. Issues vital
to women are on the public agenda: equal pay, childcare, domestic abuse,
breast cancer research, and curricular revision with an eye to the inclusion
of women.
These recent achievements have their origins in things women (and
some male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred years ago.
Theirs is the “other voice,” in contradistinction to the “first voice,” the voice
of the educated men who created Western culture. Coincident with a gen-
eral reshaping of European culture in the period 1300–1700 (called the Re-
naissance or early modern period), questions of female equality and oppor-
tunity were raised that still resound and are still unresolved.
The other voice emerged against the backdrop of a three-thousand-year
history of the derogation of women rooted in the civilizations related to
Western culture: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian. Negative attitudes
toward women inherited from these traditions pervaded the intellectual,
medical, legal, religious, and social systems that developed during the Euro-
pean Middle Ages.
The following pages describe the traditional, overwhelmingly male
views of women’s nature inherited by early modern Europeans and the new
tradition that the other voice called into being to begin to challenge reign-
ing assumptions. This review should serve as a framework for the under-
standing of the texts published in the series The Other Voice in Early Mod-
ern Europe. Introductions specific to each text and author follow this essay
in all the volumes of the series. vii
viii Introduction to the Series
TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF WOMEN, 500 B.C.E.–1500 C.E.
Embedded in the philosophical and medical theories of the ancient Greeks
wereperceptionsofthefemaleasinferiortothemaleinbothmindandbody.
Similarly, the structure of civil legislation inherited from the ancient Romans
was biased against women, and the views on women developed by Christian
thinkers out of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were
negative and disabling. Literary works composed in the vernacular language
of ordinary people, and widely recited or read, conveyed these negative as-
sumptions. The social networks within which most women lived—those of
thefamilyandtheinstitutionsoftheRomanCatholicChurch—wereshaped
by this negative tradition and sharply limited the areas in which women
might act in and upon the world.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND FEMALE NATURE. Greek biology assumed
that women were inferior to men and defined them merely as childbearers
and housekeepers. This view was authoritatively expressed in the works of
the philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle thought in dualities. He considered action superior to in-
action, form (the inner design or structure of any object) superior to matter,
completion superior to incompletion, possession superior to deprivation. In
each of these dualities, he associated the male principle with the superior
quality and the female with the inferior. “The male principle in nature,” he
argued, “is associated with active, formative and perfected characteristics,
while the female is passive, material and deprived, desiring the male in or-
der to become complete.”1 Men are always identified with virile qualities,
such as judgment, courage, and stamina, and women with their opposites—
irrationality, cowardice, and weakness.
Even in the womb, the masculine principle was considered superior.
The man’s semen, Aristotle believed, created the form of a new human crea-
ture, while the female body contributed only matter. (The existence of the
ovum, and with it the other facts of human embryology, were not estab-
lished until the seventeenth century.) Although the later Greek physician
Galen believed that there was a female component in generation, contrib-
uted by “female semen,” the followers of both Aristotle and Galen saw the
male role in human generation as more active and more important.
1. Aristotle, Physics1.9.192a20–24, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,ed. Jonathan Barnes, rev.
Oxford trans., 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), 1:328.
Introduction to the Series ix
In the Aristotelian view, the male principle sought always to reproduce
itself.Thecreationofafemalewasalwaysamistake,therefore,resultingfrom
an imperfect act of generation. Every female born was considered a “defec-
tive” or “mutilated” male (as Aristotle’s terminology has variously been trans-
lated), a “monstrosity” of nature.2
For Greek theorists, the biology of males and females was the key to
their psychology. The female was softer and more docile, more apt to be de-
spondent, querulous, and deceitful. Being incomplete, moreover, she craved
sexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male. The male was intellectual, ac-
tive, and in control of his passions.
These psychological polarities derived from the theory that the uni-
verse consisted of four elements (earth, fire, air, and water), expressed in hu-
manbodiesasfour“humors”(blackbile,yellowbile,blood,andphlegm)con-
sidered respectively dry, hot, damp, and cold and corresponding to mental
states (“melancholic,” “choleric,” “sanguine,” “phlegmatic”). In this schemati-
zation, the male, sharing the principles of earth and fire, was dry and hot;
the female, sharing the principles of air and water, was cold and damp.
Female psychology was further affected by her dominant organ, the
uterus (womb), hysterain Greek. The passions generated by the womb made
women lustful, deceitful, talkative, irrational, indeed—when these affects
were in excess—“hysterical.”
Aristotle’s biology also had social and political consequences. If the
male principle was superior and the female inferior, then in the household,
as in the state, men should rule and women must be subordinate. That hier-
archy does not rule out the companionship of husband and wife, whose co-
operation was necessary for the welfare of children and the preservation of
property. Such mutuality supported male preeminence.
Aristotle’s teacher Plato suggested a different possibility: that men and
women might possess the same virtues. The setting for this proposal is the
imaginary and ideal Republic that Plato sketches in a dialogue of that name.
Here, for a privileged elite capable of leading wisely, all distinctions of class
and wealth dissolve, as do, consequently, those of gender. Without house-
holds or property, as Plato constructs his ideal society, there is no need for
thesubordinationofwomen.Womenmay,therefore,beeducatedtothesame
level as men to assume leadership responsibilities. Plato’s Republic remained
imaginary, however. In real societies, the subordination of women remained
the norm and the prescription.
2. Aristotle, Generation of Animals2.3.737a27–28, in The Complete Works,1:1144.
