Renée-Claude Breitenstein

Moving from manuscript to print created new audiences, beyond patronage. Books became increasingly available to a greater number of readers from a wider social background, beyond the restricted circles of aristocracy and learned readers. Amongst these new readers are women, who gained visibility and became an important component in the public arena shaped in the Renaissance. But far from forming a unified readership, these audiences are diverse, sometimes superposed, sometimes juxtaposed, always plural, often contradictory. The advent of printing seen as a conflicted process is particularly noticeable in texts dedicated to, about, or written by women. From the first printed translation into French of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris (1493) to the Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) by Marie de Gournay, collections in praise of women celebrate exceptional feminine figures for their virtues, or defend womankind through praise. Produced in the age of print, they are invaluable signs of the growing presence of women in the public sphere. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the influence of print culture on the construction of the public in collections in praise of women.

My program of research involves analyzing the many complex ways in which "publications" and "publics" interconnect in the French Renaissance from 1493 to 1622. I will explore the notion of "publications," understood as a book preparation process, in order to investigate various questions concerning the "makers" of the book (the author, the printer, the engraver, the publisher, the commissioner); the material, whether textual or iconographic, or both, that guaranteed access to the public sphere; and the stakes of the process: what and who was made public through the book. In terms of "publics," whereas authors of collections in praise of women printed in the first half of the sixteenth century were all men, female authors start writing in defence of their sex in the second half, thus becoming readers and creators of the encomiastic tradition. The presence of women in the public sphere reshapes the relationship between the author, the printer and the public; new forms of sociability are echoed in the textual and material aspects of books.

At the intersection of rhetoric, history and moral philosophy, collections in praise of women are precious testimonies: in their times, they offered a form of publicity to women; to modern readers, they provide complex representations of early modern female figures engaged in activities reaching beyond the domestic sphere. My program entertains a double goal: 1) to make this corpus better known as a literary genre by editing twelve texts, some unavailable in modern editions; and 2) to explore this corpus through an interdisciplinary approach using book history, sociology, and women studies, under the specific angle of publics and publications, in a book length study.