Authorship, Authority, and Agonism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between knowledge of Latin and Greek culture, authority, and polemic in the work of Marie de Gournay. It first analyses her figuration of the female intellectual in her autobiographical writings. Mingling the individual and the collective, negotiating the tension between the recognition conferred by erudite classical knowledge and her marginalised access, and grounded in an urgent need to solicit favour, she offers herself as a test case for what she identifies as the aporia represented by the female intellectual. Then the chapter turns to her translations, first of prose (Tacitus, Sallust, Cicero), examining her appropriation of the polemical voice, her reflections on good governance and merit, and her (contested) theories of language and poetics, which are, it is then shown, defended in her translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, and her poetry. Finally, the chapter explores her reception to query the periodisation implicit in her frequent relegation from the seventeenth century.