Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The Conclusion draws together the contributions of this study which has examined the ways in which the struggle to define the female intellectual in seventeenth-century France mapped onto a broader struggle for a definition of literature and literary knowledge in a context of significant cultural change. It has reframed early modern classical reception through the prisms of literary ideologies and authorial strategy. In addition to instances of reception and translation, the study has also looked at the (related) roles played by the reception of ancient Greek and Roman culture in shaping professional identities (biographical and rhetorical) and in the development of genre; and has considered tensions in contemporary and historiographical ideas of collective categories. The Conclusion then analyses the afterlives of the figure of the ‘femme savante’, from Bluestocking, le Bas bleu, and the Girton Girl to contemporary definitions, to show the enduring influence of Scudéry’s satire.