“The Rhetoric of Equality: Marie de Gournay, Linguist and Philosopher”

Marie de Gournay’s works are mostly well known today. This French writer, editor, translator, philosopher and literary critic played a key role in Renaissance Europe taking part to the major cultural debates of her time. The originality of her thought as well as the audacity of her choices have been much argued and progressively appreciated. In a particular way, her later feminist treatises – The Equality of Men and Women (1622) and The Ladies’ Complaint (1626) – have been widely studied over the time, although against the background of the « Querelle des femmes ». Despite this kind of developments, these texts deserve a new and greater attention. Hence, moving beyond the terms of the ‘Woman Controversy’, this contribution will mainly focus on the linguistic and rhetorical strategies applied by the author in order to pursue the refutation of male claims to rational superiority. Using the examples of illustrious women and dealing with various sources – historical, philosophical, biblical – Marie de Gournay shows the importance of providing both men and women with the same intellectual opportunities since the main attribute of human beings is the rational soul. Through a disarticulation of the scholastic theory, the author proves that neither the natural nor the political or the religious laws admit any differences between men and women. In this context, she conceptualises her own idea of « the unity of the sexes » exploiting linguistic, philosophical and social issues and thus contributing to an aware construction of gender equality in Early Modern France.