Chapter 1 - Discourses of misogyny

Summary

A substantial number of early modern French texts display a troubling preoccupation with questions relating to the proper place of women in literature and society. While this particular subject has been studied rather extensively in recent years, it has been most usually in conjunction with the development of contemporary feminism, and therefore within the parameters of an ideologically charged context. Consequently, the part that rhetoric and print culture have played in informing the language of misogyny in Renaissance French texts has not always been properly recognized nor sufficiently appreciated. In many instances, unfamiliarity with the right reading of early modern literary works has resulted in the conflation of the dynamics of persuasion with the prejudices of gender, making discrimination between them problematic as well as indispensable.

Historians have tended to lose themselves in the structural and semantic intricacies of early modern writing, confusing the rhetorical protocol of antifeminist discourse with social or personal reality. Women, of course, had long been the focus, both negative and positive, of masculine writing. Praised as noble and pure or reviled as evil and corrupt, their respective virtues or vices form the topoi of countless medieval works. This tendency to define female difference in contradictory terms was reinforced and readily propagated by the proliferation, through the recent invention of printing, of additional writings from classical Antiquity.