Women Moralists in Early Modern France

Julie Candler Hayes explores the contributions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French women philosophers and intellectuals to moralist writing, a genre focusing on dispassionate observations on the human condition and traditionally viewed through its best-known male writers. This study, the first of its kind, includes both famous thinkers--such as Émilie Du Châtelet and Germaine de Staël--and nearly two dozen of their contemporaries. Hayes demonstrates how, through their critique of institutions and practices, their valorization of introspection and self-expression, and their engagement with philosophical issues, women moralists carved out an important space for the public exercise of their reason.

• | Author: Julie Candler Hayes
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Jan 17, 2024
• | Number of Pages: 305 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0197688608
• | ISBN-13: 9780197688601