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The early years of the Fronde produced a flowering of polemical writings: “il n'est pas mesme jusque des femmes qui ne s'en meslent” [even women are getting involved], Cardinal Mazarin's librarian, Gabriel Naudé, noted with disdain. Among these female lampoonists was Suzanne de Nervèze, whose Le Rieur de la cour [The Court Jester] was published in 1649. In this brief work, the author adopts a number of textual strategies to legitimize her public and critical expression of opinion. Wearing the mask of the Jester, this “new Democritus,” she goes on to denounce all the expressions of court hypocrisy. Beyond this lesson in ethics, however, what she ultimately seeks to preserve is the status quo of a social and political order in crisis.
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Clément Marot was the first French translator of Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. His translation, entitled Six sonnetz de Petrarque sur la mort de sa dame Laure, was intended as a celebration of the langue françoyse, in keeping with the ideals of Francis I’s court and the creation of a “royal Italianism” considered the founding element of the translatio studii et imperii. The refinement of this edition, together with a style derived in part from the tradition of the rhétoriqueurs, is reminiscent of courtly translation, which aimed at poetic ornamentation. A closer look also reveals Marot’s deep evangelical inspiration, as well as his innovative way of translating at a time when the distinction between translation and imitation was not yet clear.
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130.More information
Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse defines sexual difference in one of the most enigmatic aphorisms of D'Alembert's Dream: “Man may only be the monster of the woman, or woman the monster of the man.” We will first consider Diderot's conception of the monster as the creative principle of an active matter still in transformation. Applied to the question of sexual difference, monstrosity would then imply a transformationalist view of sexual difference, underlining its precarious nature. The rhetorical use of chiasmus, a structural criss-crossing, establishes an egalitarian relationship between the two parts of the sentence, suggesting that the places occupied by man and woman are reversible and interchangeable. Bordeu, a celebrated doctor and philosopher of the Enlightment, later volonteers to give a scientific explanation of this chiasmus, based on the physiological aspect of sexual difference. He first reduces it to a topological question, that is the anatomical inversion of male and female organs, reinforcing the idea of interchangeability introduced by the rhetorical criss-crossing. Bordeu presents the somewhat enigmatic notion of an initial fetal hermaphrodism, evidenced by the fact that the rudimentary organs of each sex contain a sugestion of the other. As we will see, hermaphrodism in Diderot has the possibility of being reactivated, and thus defines sexual difference through its physical attributes as transformable and interchangeable topological states, rather than as a fixed assignment of gender.