De Gournay Research Articles

Bureaucracy: The Making of a Buzzword.

This article offers a revision of the history of Vincent de Gournay's neologism bureaucracy. The author shows that it was designed as a polemical tool against a tendency to multiply customs, tax-collecting and controlling bureaus, which "strangled commerce" in France. The origin of the term had more to do with the pre-physiocratic theory of liberal economy than with political philosophy. More than just a pun, it emerged in the wake of a long tradition of anti-office discourse and formed part of a new rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimizing the merchant estate, which suffered from a lack of prestige in France.

Prejudice as Viciousness: Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo

AbstractMarie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo, though thinking and writing in different social contexts, each offer an account of prejudice which bears a deep philosophical resonance to that of the other. This resonance is striking and mutually illuminating: Gournay and Amo develop a view of prejudice as a kind of epistemic and moral viciousness that damages both the prejudicial person and their socio‐epistemic neighbors. Their accounts highlight how agents are rightly held responsible for prejudice, as it is the agents' epistemic negligence and moral failure that allows prejudice to take hold. As such, their view offers a balance between a critical examination of individuals and an acknowledgement of the deep sociality that pervades the epistemic domain.

Noblesse commerçante contre noblesse militaire: une querelle des Lumières (1756–1759). Édition de Cheminade Christian

This is a welcome critical edition of the Abbé Coyer’s La Noblesse commerçante, the Chevalier d’Arcq’s La Noblesse militaire (both published in 1756), and Coyer’s last word, the Développement et défense du système de la noblesse commerçante (1757). Although the debate between Coyer and Arcq unleashed much commentary, historians have dismissed it as amusing but inconsequential. Most contemporary commentators sided with the traditionalist argument of Arcq, while Coyer’s reputation as a literary provocateur facilitated readings of the debate as a strange anomaly. Christian Cheminade’s contextualizing Introduction demonstrates the broad importance of the debate. He begins by showing the legal vicissitudes of the concept of dérogeance — the loss of noble status through commercial activity — since the thirteenth century. He shows that nobles, in both the medieval and modern periods, regularly sold the goods produced on their estates, and they sought to retain their tax exemptions despite profiting from trade. Only in the sixteenth century did the crown begin to discourage noble participation in commerce by threatening to remove those tax exemptions. It did so not because of bias against merchants or attachment to noble values. Kings instead protected merchants from unfair competition from tax-exempt nobles. Although Coyer later blamed ‘ces temps barbares du gouvernement féodal’ for having nurtured the nobility’s disdain for merchants (p. 11), the nobility’s insistence on cultural separation from the merchant class was in fact a late-seventeenth-century invention. It reflected the reactionary politics of influential figures such as Henri de Boulainvilliers and François de La Mothe-Fénelon, who sought to reassert noble pre-eminence after a time of alarming social mobility under Louis XIV. Meanwhile, because of imperial competition with the British, by the time Coyer had begun to write in 1755 the crown had reversed its policy of discouraging commercial activity among certain classes. Led by the Intendant de Commerce, Jacques Vincent de Gournay, many agents of the crown pushed for the liberalization of the French economy and urged the widest possible engagement in trade. Cheminade shows that Coyer belonged to Gournay’s circle and worked to advance his agenda. There are reasons to assume that Coyer’s strategy of attacking dérogeance served to disguise the real target of the Gournay group: the privileged corps et communautés that granted the right of commercial exchange in French cities only to their members. Coyer’s aggressive valorization of commercial activity, claiming as he did that commerce was honourable and that merchants were as patriotic as any noble, provided a robust rationale for a state policy encouraging all to engage in commerce. Cheminade reasonably connects Coyer’s trial balloon of commercial nobility with the efforts of reformers in the 1760s to create laissez-passer economic policies. Those efforts failed, in part because of the continued allure of the tripartite social order for which Montesquieu had provided an elegant theory, one that Arcq effectively redeployed. The Coyer–Arcq debate, embedded in Montesquieu’s typologies and reflecting the most advanced economic thinking of the age, was more than a blip on the cultural radar. Its relevance to the economic and fiscal troubles that finally prompted revolution reminds us that failed ideas, too, can reveal much about the promise and limitations that frame moments of cultural ferment.

Marie de Gournay et son interprétation d’imago Dei – à la recherche du nouveau sens de la notion biblique

In The Equality of Men and Women, Marie de Gournay opens up new perspectives, while also elaborating on biblical and theological interpretations. It is interesting to study her commentary on the biblical passage on the creation of man and woman as well as her scriptural analyzes. How do they fit into the tradition of theological controversy? Are her explanations based on other texts that were the benchmark for women’s champions and detractors? Are Gournay’s interpretations within the framework of the deconstruction of traditional formulas or, to the contrary, a new explanation based on female religious sensibility?

No Apologies: Jenny Diski’s Apology for the Woman Writing as Fictional Memoir

This essay argues that Jenny Diski’s final novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, adds to the understanding of Diski’s view on literature and the arts, thus complementing her nonfiction writing. Drawing on notions of survival and the Freudian uncanny, the essay shows how the relationships between Michel de Montaigne and Marie de Gournay and between De Gournay and her servant Jamyn are built around notions of affective engagement, where the intellectual labor of writing conjoins physical experiences of excitement. Such a view of literature as affect is then directly connected to the force of a text to survive.

Marie de Gournay’s “Advis à quelques gens d’Église” and the Early Modern Rigorist Debate

Abstract This article examines one of Marie de Gournay’s forays into religious controversy in her short text “Advis à quelques gens d’Église.” First published in L’Ombre de la damoiselle de Gournay (1626), the text is an indictment of the abuse of the sacrament of confession by both penitents and confessors, and points to a rigorist stance on the part of the author nearly twenty years before it became the dominant position of the church once again. Tackling a range of thorny questions such as the aim of confession, deferred absolution, and the nature of sin, Gournay examines confession as a societal institution, outlining how it fails utterly to reduce the daily experience of petty injustices and wrongdoing. Placing that failure squarely at the feet of the clergy, Gournay includes advice for the confessors, making of the text a secular “manuel des confesseurs”—an extraordinary undertaking for a laywoman at the time.

De réflexions de Marie de Gournay sur les techniques de la traduction (d’après le traité Lettre à Monseigneur de Gelas)

The paper highlights Marie de Gournayʼs considerations, the author of the Renaissance, on the methods of translation, which she set out in her treatise A Letter to Monsignor de Gelas. It is stated that translation, as an intellectual activity, the main purpose of which is to enrich the national culture and improve the native language, has always been a privileged topic of reflection for this creative woman. Notes on this can be found in several treatises, which she collected in her work Les advis ou Les présens de la demoiselle de Gournay (1641). It is in these texts that she best describes her theory of translation. The concept of “theory” should be understood not from the standpoint of modern interpretation, but in the meaning of the original Greek word “theory”, i.e. a coherent presentation of explanations, concepts, ideas, proposals, laws and hypotheses. Thus, it is a question of foregrounding this “theory” in the context of an in-depth analysis of the authorʼs letter to Monsignor de Gelas. The author claims that Marie de Gournауʼs views deserve attention in contemporary discussions on translation and that her ideas about the art of translation still remain constructive and relevant, despite being put forward nearly five centuries ago.

“My friendship with her is by no means an ordinary one”: the friendship alliances of Christian Hebraist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678)

ABSTRACT This study explores the friendship alliances of Anna Maria van Schurman in her archived correspondence with three women scholars – Marie du Moulin, Marie de Gournay, and Dorothy Moore – and two women artists – the portraitist Madame Coutel, and the singer Utricia Ogle. It will argue two main points: firstly, that Van Schurman’s study and valuing of Hebrew were determining factors either in bringing her closer to or in distancing her from a friendship alliance; and, secondly, that each of the women mentioned performed a distinct role in Van Schurman’s strategic search for the most influential male mentors and supporters in the Republic of Letters.

Against Uniformity: Gournay’s Philosophy of Language and Literature

Marie de Gournay’s defense of figurative language and her attack on the purified language championed by the neoclassical Parisian establishment is a political as well as aesthetic polemic. The neoclassical ideal of clear, concise speech not only impoverishes language through its animus toward the use of metaphor; it assaults human subjectivity by suppressing the expression of rare emotional states through idiosyncratic symbols. The effort to impose a uniform, chastened national language is condemned as a species of cultural hegemony, in which individual and regional variations on the vernacular are suppressed.

The Gospel According to Eve: A History of Women’s Interpretation

The Gospel According to Eve: A History of Women’s Interpretation

Los amores de Montaigne Tercera escala: los viajes

En escritos anteriores nos referimos a los amores de Montaigne: a Marie de Gournay (Ambrosini, 2018 1, 2019) y a Etiénne de la Boétie (Ambrosini, 2018 2) en este último nos referimos a sus viajes y a su amor por viajar.

Review: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 474 pp, $120.00, (hardback); £22.99/$34.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781107166035 Christopher Kelly Christopher Kelly Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2018) 2 (2): 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2018.2.2.242 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher Kelly; Review: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 May 2018; 2 (2): 242–249. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2018.2.2.242 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search From the very beginning, bureaucracy was a dirty word. The eighteenth-century economist, merchant, and official, Jacques-Claude Marie Vincent, Marquis de Gournay (also credited with coining the term laissez faire), complained that free trade in grain was being impeded by over-regulation. This “illness” of French government, he was later reported to have wittily remarked, was a kind of bureaumanie—the inevitable result of bureaucratie.1 Despite the efforts of sociologists and historians, “bureaucracy” as an analytical—or even descriptive—term has never quite escaped its polemical origins. (Late antique scholars might think here of “paganism” or “barbarians.”) A feeling of unease—and a sense that bureaucracy needs defending both as a useful category and as a positive institution—frames the best contributions to the excellent new collection, Empires and Bureaucracy in World History, edited and thoughtfully introduced by Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons. The immediate interest for readers of Studies in Late... You do not currently have access to this content.

Woman’s voice in the history of the french philology

The aim of the research is to highlight the philological views of one of the most erudite and consistent opponents of the purist renewal of the French language of the era of classicism, Mademoiselle Marie Le Jarre de Gournay, which she set out in the four treatises reviewed in the article. To achieve this goal, the article uses a number of general scientific methods, the choice of which is based on the polyparadigmal methodological approach, according to which the object of research is a reflection of the author's worldview, which was formed under the influence of certain historical and cultural processes and defined the conceptual basis of the author's thinking. This approach determined the choice of relevant methods and techniques. Fundamental among them is the method of linguistic observation, which is used to obtain primary information about the subject of research, descriptive and analytical, which helped to conduct a qualitative analysis of the subject of research and the method and ntretratsionno-text, which was involved in depth analysis of the contents of author's intentions. Methodical methods with systematization, generalizations, descriptions and comparisons have also been applied. The scientific novelty of intelligence lies in the fact that for the first time Russian Romanistics is acquainted with the philological works of Marie de Gournay, an outstanding French philologist of the late 16th - early 16th centuries, who opposed many linguistic innovations rigidly imposed on the French by reformers headed by Mahlerb. Conclusions. Treatises by Marie de Gournay shed light on a wide range of issues of the functioning of the French language at the end of the 16th - early 17th centuries, so a thorough study of these works is of outstanding importance, not only for a better understanding of the history of the French language development, but also for a better understanding of how the foundations of poetic creativity were created future writers and poets of France.

Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean. Edited by Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams

This is an impressive collection of essays by Ian Maclean’s colleagues and students, a future landmark study like Ian Maclean and I. D. McFarlane’s earlier edited book, Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). The book grew out of a series of meetings of contributors, and this has produced an exceptionally well conceived and coherent collection. It focuses on the creation and consumption of the Essais through two pairs of critical concepts — genesis and production, and diffusion and reception — which the contributors explore and question, offering a subtle and complicated view of book and reception history and rethinking the ordinary limits of intertextuality in the process. Chapters examine how the Essais move forwards and backwards in time, how they anticipate and rewrite themes and commonplaces, and how they continue to speak to readers today. The book’s theme, defined by the editors in their Introduction as ‘the “transit” of [Montaigne’s] work through time, space, language, discipline, and genre’ (p. 2), builds on important work on movement in the Essais, while allowing time and space for innovative and varied methodologies and techniques of reading, from Terence Cave’s cognitive criticism (deployed to explore how Montaigne’s embodied thought is enacted on the page) to Warren Boutcher’s division of ‘Des cannibales’ into rhetorical periods, showing the shape of Montaigne’s Ciceronian training more clearly to unversed modern readers. Intertextuality is persuasively re-imagined as influence, buried or explicit, in many of the chapters: Rowan Tomlinson on Angelo Poliziano’s eclectic humanism and its overlooked undertow; Kathy Eden on Erasmus’s rhetoric of the face; and Emma Herdman on the provocations and pleasures of Juvenal for women readers. Other chapters explore the effects and mutations of the Essais over time: Kate Tunstall on the power of the will and of the imagination in Diderot, Montaigne, and Augustine; and Timothy Chesters on Flaubert’s reading of the Journal de voyage. A real strength of the collection is its geographical reach, covering responses to the Essais in Germany and Britain: Valerie Worth-Stylianou on the treatment of Montaigne’s Latin quotations by his English translator, John Florio, and his French editor, Marie de Gournay; John O’Brien on Christoph Besold’s reading of the Essais as part of a shared intellectual and legal tradition; Ingrid De Smet on Isaac D’Israeli’s reading of Montaigne, refracted through translations, collections of ana, and compilations; Kathryn Murphy on Montaigne and Robert Burton’s shared interest in the particular; and Colin Barrow on Montaignian moments of reflection and the performance of thought in Shakespeare. Others offer a thematic focus, exploring the flexibility of a theme and how it is turned over and inside out in the Essais’s meandering progress: Chimène Bateman on how marriage is questioned and problematized; and Frank Lestringant on the shifts and mingling of vanity, travel, and writing. As Ian Maclean points out in his Afterword, many of these contributions feature the ‘triangulation’ of the Essais with a reader and a shared antecedent (p. 259), fracturing the familiar story of sources and intertexts. This rich and rigorous collection is a proud tribute to the different directions and approaches inspired by Ian Maclean’s work, and a valuable addition to Montaigne and early modern studies.

Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon: Etude et textes ed. by Constant Venesoen

Reviewed by: Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon: Etude et textes ed. by Constant Venesoen Cathleen M. Bauschatz Venesoen, Constant, ed. Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon: Etude et textes. Classiques Garnier, 2011. Pp. 395. ISBN 978-2-8124-0246-3. 35€ (Paper). For twenty-five years, Constant Venesoen has been a pioneer in the study of seventeenth-century French women writers, beginning with his Etudes sur la Littérature Féminine du XVIIe Siècle (Summa, 1990). He went on to publish editions of the works of Marie de Gournay (1993 Marie de Gournay (1998); of Madame de Pringy (2000); Anne-Marie de Schurman (2004); Madame de Brégy (2006); and finally Madame de Maintenon (2011) of whom he has also published a biography (2012). This review concerns Venesoen’s edition of Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon (Garnier 2011). Despite the fact that this edition was published six years ago, it still merits attention, in part for the contrast it presents to the edition of the Proverbes Dramatiques (Garnier 2014), reviewed in WIF Studies, Vol. 24, 2016 (pp. 150–53). Readers may refer to those two reviews for background information on Madame de Maintenon herself, generally better known for her adventurous life as the grand-daughter of poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, wife of satirist Paul Scarron, and finally as second and morganatic wife of Louis XIV. Her voluminous works are less well known, although they were frequently edited in [End Page 204] the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aside from the letters, most of her works concern the school she founded in Paris for impoverished noble and bourgeois girls, Saint Cyr. It is difficult to date these works precisely, since many were written down by the author’s assistant, Mlle d’Aumale, but then printed later under a variety of titles, and in various different selections, depending on the interests of each editor or publisher. A good introduction to Madame de Maintenon’s work for anglophones is John Conley’s Madame de Maintenon: Dialogues and Addresses, from the Other Voice Series (Chicago, 2004). The title, Les Loisirs, seems to repeat that of the first 1757 edition, but the collection has also been published under the titles Conversations, Entretiens, Conseils et Instructions. The book represents a collection of thirty-six conversations on a variety of moral and philosophical topics, followed by an additional fifteen conversations which were left out of the 1757 edition. These conversations are similar in some ways to the previously reviewed Proverbes Dramatiques. Both books represent a group of girls discussing a topic which has been suggested to them. The Proverbes are really dramatic scenes, and each ends with a proverb as the “lesson” to be derived from the discussion. The Proverbes may have been written earlier (1680’s), and for younger girls, than is the case with the Loisirs. The Loisirs, on the other hand, may have been written later (1690’s and early 1700’s), and seem to be directed to older girls, probably those in the last group, aged 17 to 20. These conversations are more abstract than those in the earlier book, and focus on defining a variety of concepts, which appear as the titles for each one. Some examples are: “Sur la Société,” “Sur la Raison,” “Sur la Contrainte,” “Sur l’Amour Propre,” and “Sur le Bon Esprit.” Several of the distinctions made by the young ladies are quite subtle and lucid, worthy of “moralistes” like La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyère. Generally, there is a conclusion which suggests a conventional morality for women, of the “chaste, silent and obedient” variety. The book is not “feminist” in any modern sense. But frequently the most interesting comments are made by rebellious girls who question the dominant ideology of the book, for example the strange bias against intellectual women (reminiscent of Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes). Issues of social class are frequently raised, and the girls are taught to understand and to accept the hierarchy of seventeenth-century society. The dialogic structure, however, does leave the reader the option of selecting the opinions with which he or she agrees. This tension is one of the most interesting facets of the book, as...

Dans les coulisses de l’atelier d’un maître verrier, ou Marie de Gournay et les séductions de la science

Calumny is the main criticism that has been attributed to Marie de Gournay throughout the centuries. Among the attacks addressed against this “woman of letters” there is the condemnation of her interest in alchemy. Mainly focusing on the Peincture de mœurs, Marie de Gournay’s lyric self-portrait, the present contribution seeks to reveal the uniqueness of the ideas of this author in the social and intellectual network of her time.

CANTILLON IN FRENCH AND ENGLISH. TWO EDITIONS BY RICHARD VAN DEN BERG AND ANTOIN E. MURPHY: NEW FACTS AND HYPOTHESES

The publication of a critical edition by Richard van den Berg (RvdB) of Richard Cantillon's famous 1755 Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, which provides a remarkably detailed comparison between this French text and various English counterparts by Malachy Postlethwayt and Philip Cantillon (and much more), has led to this article. Its publication almost coincided with the appearance of a new translation of the Essai in English, by Antoin E. Murphy (AEM). The first part of this article is a review of the new editions, which leads to new evidence and questions on Philip Cantillon's book. Its second part revisits the findings of Tsuda and Murphy to prove by methods borrowed from another field, the History of the Book, the long suspected involvement of Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759) in the publication of the Essai. Little known aspects of Cantillon's influence on other economists1—notably on members of the Gournay circle2—will be discussed . Additional details will also be provided on the interest in the Essai of the Societe de Bretagne, 3 and it will be suggested that the latter's reaction to Postlethwayt's Dictionary may have led to important works of Quesnay and Morellet.

Véron de Forbonnais and Plumard de Dangeul as Translators of Uztáriz and Ulloa

SummaryWhen analysing François Véron de Forbonnais's translation of Gerónimo de Uztáriz's Theórica y Práctica de comercio (1724) and Louis-Joseph Plumard de Dangeul's translation of Bernardo de Ulloa's Restablecimiento de las fábricas (1742), the first important point to consider is that the two cousins, who had decided to bring the works to a French public at the suggestion of Vincent de Gournay, were working with a language (Castilian) and within a political and cultural environment (the Spanish monarchy) which they had already experienced in person. A second important consideration concerns the linguistic challenge inherent in the fact that the Spanish did not yet have an economic lexicon equal to that developed by French thinkers. The choices of terminology made by Forbonnais and Plumard bear witness to this different development and reveal the peculiarities of economic epistemology in the two countries. This essay will shed light on the translation strategies adopted by the French writers, focusing on a number of key concepts of the new science of commerce, such as consumption, exportation, importation, population, commerce, trade, money, and work.

Gournay’s Gift: A Special Presentation Copy of the 1595 Essais of Montaigne

A remarkable copy of the 1595 Essais of Montaigne at Maynooth offers a particularly full set of corrigenda in the hand of Marie de Gournay. Her many textual improvements are tabulated and their significance discussed. At the same time, this copy also carries an extensive manuscript emendation by Gournay to a crucial passage in Chapter II.17 of the Essais, as well as her handwritten inscription to a certain Beringhen. The dedicatee is identified as Henri de Beringhen and it is argued that Gournay’s corrections and inscriptions date from the early 1620s when she attended the salon of Beringhen’s aunt, Madame des Loges. The Maynooth copy as a whole provides a critical insight into the social and literary circles in which Gournay moved at the time as well as supplying further evidence of her continuing editorial work on the Essais in the framework of her own career.

The Equality of the sexes: three feminist texts of the seventeenth century

Acknowledgements Note on the Texts and Translations Introduction MARIE LE JARS DE GOURNAY The Equality of Men and Women The Ladies' Complaint ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN A Dissertation on the Natural Capacity of Women for Study and Learning Excerpts from other writings Correspondence Eukleria FRANCOIS POULAIN DE LA BARRE A Physical and Moral Discourse concerning the Equality of Both Sexes Excerpts from The Education of Ladies Further Reading Index