Can a Woman Deserve the Name of Enemy? Gender, War and Law in Katherine Philips's Corneille Translations

Abstract

ABSTRACTDespite the manifest presence of women in the wars of Katherine Philips's lifetime, the official legal languages of war almost entirely omit women. Philips's translations of Pierre Corneille's Pompey (1663) and Horace (1667) draw on the principles of formal equality articulated within international and military law, which except women; the practical details of lived wartime experience, governed by convention; and the dynamics of empire and ethnicity, as they influence wartime behaviour. Literature galvanizes the relations between these layers of theory and experience by enfolding them within stories that require interpretation, positing the presence of eloquent, defiant female characters in contexts in which they theoretically do not exist. Articulations of gender and ethnic difference present a challenge to principles of formal equality, calling into question the relation between generality and particularity. Horace and Pompey reveal the fault lines in military and international law: women, whom the legal languages neglect; revenge, which exists outside the laws and specifically applies to women; and barbarity, which delineates not only those outside the legal systems, but also the inhumane behaviour of those purportedly within them.