Women Moralists in Early Modern France

Julie Candler Hayes is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she served first as department chair and later as dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 2010 to 2020. Her research interests include early modern philosophy and literature, theories of language, literary theory, and translation studies. A Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques since 2010, she is past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

• PreambleAcknowledgementsA Note on NamesA Note on Texts I. Introduction: The Moralist World 1. Moralists and Moralizers 2. Unsystematic Philosophy 3. Philosophy and Literature in Early Modern France 4. Women Moralists and the Canon 5. Corpus and topics: Who is a Moralist? II. On Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of the Self 1. Scudéry: Conversation 2. Dupin: Sensation and Belief 3. Verzure: Comparison 4. Necker: Writing 5. Guizot: Doubts 6. Introspection and the Act of Writing III. On Friendship 1. Foundations of Friendship 2. Rituals of Friendship: Reciprocity, Exchange, Secrets 3. Sameness and Difference 4. The Politics of Reconnaissance IV. On Happiness and the Passions 1. From the Passsions to Passion 2. The Worlds of La Sablière and Dupin 3. Practical Guidance in Du Châtelet and Fourqueux 4. The Passions and Their Discontents in d'Arconville 5. Staël's Phenomenology of Passion V. On Marriage 1. The Philosophical and Legal Critique 2. The Implicit Moralist Critique: Lambert and Puisieux 3. The Explicit Moralist Critique: Verzure and d'Arconville 4. Suzanne Necker's Defense of Marriage 5. On Liberty VI. On Age and Experience 1. Experience, Knowledge, and the Seasons of Life 2. Codes of Conduct 3. Not her last word: d'Arconville on Old Age VII. On Women's Nature and Capabilities 1. Politeness and Embodiment 2. Portraits and Mirrors: Pringy's Differens caractères des femmes du siècle 3. Nature, Culture, and the désir de plaire 4. Comment peut-on être femme auteur? ConclusionBibliographyIndex

Women writers seldom appear in accounts of the early modern response to the intellectual, political, and cultural changes characterizing the period. Hayes offers a persuasive rethinking of these accounts through her insightful analysis of women moralists' writing. Hayes perceptively demonstrates how these writers' wide-ranging exploration of women's experience contributed to women's self-construction and sense of agency, as well as to the philosophical tradition and its understanding of the human condition. This book offers a valuable reference point for understanding the early modern.