[In the following excerpt, Wilson and Warnke discuss the surge of literary activity by women during the seventeenth century in the context of the rise of feminist thought, the inaccessibility of education for women, the influence of the Baroque sensibility, and the significance of religion and religious controversy during this time.]

The seventeenth century witnessed a great surge of literary activity by women. It has been estimated that four hundred wrote between 1640 and 1700 in England alone and that their writings constituted approximately one percent of the texts published. A large portion of the works penned by women in the Early Modern era, as in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were devotional or religio-political in nature; but the ratio of religious to secular texts became a great deal more balanced as time progressed. Analogously, women scholars, while still considered oddities, did increase in number in the 1600s; the mid- and late seventeenth century therefore witnessed an unprecedented number of women who decided to write polemically and with a collective awareness of their gender in order to address the subject of women's condition and potential, thus partaking in the philosophic/theological debate concerning the spiritual equality of the sexes. Men, too, participated in the debate on both sides of the issue, and the numerous catalogs of good (or famous) women and essays in defense of (or attacking) the female sex proliferated during the period and bear witness to the fervor of the controversy. As Moira Ferguson remarks, "Fostered by the influence of Cartesian, Lockean, and spiritual egalitarian views of the world, … several sturdy defenses of women … launched forthright feminist essays on a surprised public." "The human animal is," Marie de Gournay wrote in 1622, "neither male nor female…. And if I am allowed to jest a little in passing, I have a joke that is not altogether irrelevant: nothing resembles a male cat on a windowsill more than a female cat." And Rachel Speght argued similarly, though less wittily, in a 1621 poem:

Both man and woman of three parts consist,
Which Paul doth bodie, soule, and spirit call:
And from the soule three faculties arise,
The mind, the will, the power; then wherefore shall
A woman have her intellect in vaine,
Or not endeavour Knowledge to attaine.

Some women scholars of the period advanced the idea that the education of women is for the benefit of men as well. Bathsua Makin, for instance, suggests that women's education will act as an incentive to men to keep up their studies. Keeping women ignorant, she asserts, is simply a tool of domination: "Let women be fools, and then you may easily make them slaves."

The equation of learning with at least limited power made it politically wise, even essential, that Early Modern women scholars circumscribe the field of application as well as the extent and availability of education for women. Almost invariably they limited their advocacy of learning to women "of estate"; they pled for private (as opposed to public) instruction; they often reassured their audience that they did not wish to hinder "good housewifery"; and they usually linked the support of education to moral probity.

In the realm of belles lettres, the seventeenth century also saw a great flowering of women's art, giving us several women who—either by necessity or by choice—lived by their pen. Whether conforming to Baroque sensibilities or deliberately avoiding them, seventeenth-century women writers left us both with a legacy of feminist aesthetics (marginal in some cases, but surprisingly pronounced in others) and with a complex picture of female experience in the wide range of intellectual perspectives that they chose to provide. Perhaps the most important aspect of this legacy was the growing collective awareness of gender not only as a determining factor of individual identity but also as the parameter of most tenets of social, political, and intellectual endeavor. While during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as Merry E. Wiesner observes, women by and large succeeded in intellectual pursuits when they simultaneously rejected the world of women, several Early Modern women writers gave public expression to the recognition "that women as a group suffered discrimination and should be given rights and privileges because of, not despite, their femaleness." The rights and privileges which Early Modern women sought involved remedying the long tradition of patriarchal suppression; their goal was a degree of sexual egalitarianism. One should judge a person by his or her accomplishments, early feminists argued, not by gender. Leonora Christina, the Danish princess imprisoned for her husband's alleged crimes, remarks, for example: "The mind pays no heed to sex and is not changed through external form or figure…. often women acquit themselves heroically. How often does one not see effeminate hearts in men's bodies and, on the contrary, virile strength in weak vessels. It is unfair to measure the deed by the person and not to esteem the person by the deed." Her courageous conduct in and out of prison, one should add, bears ample testimony to the "virility" of her mind.

This new awareness that women can succeed qua women contrasts most clearly with the perception of medieval writers. Patristic theology and Church tradition predicated the notion of the baptismal equality of the sexes, an equality to which women could rise by embracing virginity and becoming, in St. Jerome's words, "like men." The female ideal as a male clone thus pervaded the consciousness of many medieval women writers. Not surprisingly, therefore, the large majority were single women either confessed in vows (like men) or widowed or abandoned by their husbands. Women writers of the Early Modern era, on the other hand, most typically were married and did not necessarily aspire to the male ideal in their creative efforts. Consequently, seventeenth-century women writers often succeeded in creating female heroes (not heroines who were appendages to men) in an effort to valorize the female experience and women's contributions to society.

The sense of gender-collectivity is also reflected in the modes and models of discourse women writers chose for expression. With some frequency, Early Modern women writers modeled their texts on their female predecessors: the Spaniard Marìa de Zayas y Sotomayor used Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron as a source for her novelas; Polish author Elzbieta Druzbacka patterned her fantastic tale of a young prince's life in fairyland, the Fabula o Ksiazeciv Adolfie, dziedzicu Roksolanii, after Mme d'Aulnoy's L'Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Duglas; and Mme d'Aulnoy used Mme de LaFayette as her model for the Histoire, to mention a few examples. The works of women scholars of the Early Modern era also bear eloquent testimony to their awareness of shared, gender-specific experience and ideas. Many corresponded with one another, and most were aware of and built upon the works of their female contemporaries. Bathsua Makin and Marie de Gournay both corresponded with Anna Maria van Schurman; Makin incorporated some of Schurman's ideas into her own pedagogical manifesto; Mme de LaFayette's first published work was a literary portrait of her friend Mme de Sévigné; and Ana Caro composed a eulogy for the preface of Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor's Novelas. Moreover, in many of the seventeenth-century women's texts, the same sense of collectivity is felt in the almost inevitable catalogs of famous virtuous/heroic women of the past and the present, whose examples are presented to support the view that women's suppression and supposed inferiority are by no means historic, philosophic, or ethical absolutes.

Yet this female self-consciousness among seventeenth-century authors is complex and at best ambiguous. Some of the women writers are outright misogynists when discussing public positions sought by women or public protests for reform voiced by women. Some deliberately embrace a class-rather than a gender-consciousness when faced with controversial issues. Even the passionately vocal defenders of women's right to education often hasten to provide assurances that female education is to be limited to the nonpublic, nonprofessional spheres and is only to be pursued if servants can discharge household duties.

The new self-consciousness about gender is most clearly pronounced in the writings of the polemicists (such as Makin, de Gournay, and Schurman) and in works of women not members of the aristocracy. Aristocratic women appear to view themselves as aristocrats first and women second; some, like the Duchess of Newcastle, deliberately distance themselves from their lower-class and militantly reformist sisters. The self-consciousness also appears to be more pronounced with successful writers: Aphra Behn, Marìa de Zayas y Sotomayor, and Ana Caro, for instance, repeatedly emphasize this awareness of a gender-bond, whereas Camilla Faà Gonzaga, who wrote furtively and produced only one work, does not.

Confessional allegiance does not seem to have been much of a conditioning factor in the literary creativity of seventeenth-century women. Catholic Spain and Poland produced their share of literary women, but so did Lutheran Denmark and Sweden. The most staunchly Calvinistic centers—Geneva or, early in the century, the Palatinate—may have stifled female artistic activity with more than customary vigor, but then one must consider predominantly Calvinistic Holland, where Maria Tesselschade and others flourished. Dutch Calvinism, however, was less hostile than the Genevan variety to belles lettres as a whole, because of the firm links between the burghers and the local aristocracy, the relative openness of a maritime commercial culture, and the degree of religious tolerance granted, albeit grudgingly. An atmosphere in which one is reminded of the existence of options may have played a role in fostering female artistic activity. England and Holland were relatively tolerant; Austria and Hungary, at least early in the century, had not forgotten religious diversity in the face of the Habsburg insistence on orthodoxy; and even in the repressively Catholic society of Louis XIV's France, some court intellectuals had not altogether forgotten the heritage of Henri IV or of Montaigne….

The baroque is the dominant style of the literature and art of the seventeenth century. To most authorities, that great style—or complex of styles—manifested itself first in Italy and France in the 1580s, and later extended to termini in the various national cultures. It shaded into Neoclassicism in France and England during the 1660s; continued rather later in Spain, Latin America, and the German-speaking world; and lasted well into the eighteenth century in Russia and Eastern Europe. Some historians posit a period of Mannerism that intervened between the Renaissance and the Baroque and included such figures as Montaigne, Cervantes, and Donne. From the comparatist's point of view, however, it is perhaps wise to think of Mannerism as one of the many currents within the Baroque rather than as a separate period.

What then is the Baroque? In technique it is distinguished by devices of extravagance, ingenuity, playfulness, and exaggeration. Sometimes relying heavily on sensuous effect, Baroque authors often go to the opposite extreme and favor forms of expression so intellectualized as to approach the abstract. When Baroque art is sensuous, however, it aims not at the careful mimesis typical of Renaissance art but rather at a kind of frankly artificial phantasmagoria. Whether sensuous or stern, Baroque literature characteristically derives its features from a strenuously active intellect—an intellect aware of the contradictions of experience (above all, the problem of appearance versus reality). Hence Baroque authors extensively use the figures of contradiction: irony, paradox, ambiguity, antithesis. Over their work hovers always the faculty of wit (Italian ingegno, Spanish ingenio, French esprit), which the seventeenth century defined as the ability to discern the similarities among apparently dissimilar phenomena.

Struck by the contradictions of life, Baroque authors thirst for the divine and transcendent unity that they believe must lie beyond those contradictions. Sometimes they seek it in sexual love, sometimes in religious devotion—themes often to be found in the work of the same author. The Baroque is one of the great ages of Western mysticism; at the same time, it is the age in which the scientific world view of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton definitively ousted the traditional world view—symbolic, poetic, ordered, and hierarchical—that had prevailed since classical antiquity. In an era of such intellectual ferment, it is not surprising that literature itself was keenly intellectual.

The Baroque literary imagination achieved its greatest triumphs in lyric poetry and drama, although one must not forget that it also produced Don Quijote and Paradise Lost. In both the lyric and the drama, one encounters notable contributions by women writers: Catharina von Greiffenberg, the Austrian mystic and religious poet who achieved remarkable heights of intellectual exaltation; Kata Szidónia Petr czi, the Hungarian lyric poet and translator of German pietistic writings whose passionately personal poems were not discovered until the nineteenth century; Sibylle Schwarz, the sensitive German lyric poet and dramatist who enjoyed great contemporary popularity; Ludamilia Elisabeth von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, whose devotional poems contributed to the formation of the religious vernacular in Germany; the Dutch poet Maria Tesselschade, learned, witty, and much respected by her contemporaries; Ana Caro, one of Golden Age Spain's outstanding playwrights; and Aphra Behn, lyric poet, productive and distinguished dramatist, and one of the founders of the English novel. Even though prose fiction is not one of the dominant genres of the Baroque, the seventeenth century did have its share of glorious novelistic triumphs; the century opened with the Quijote and closed with La Princesse de Clèves by Mme de LaFayette, perhaps the first true novel in French and certainly one of the greatest.

In whatever genre they chose to write, Baroque authors seem to have been obsessed by two venerable topoi—the

world as theater, and life as a dream. The relevance to the general preoccupation with appearance versus reality is obvious, and that preoccupation itself may to some extent explain the great efflorescence of dramatic literature in the seventeenth century. In the novelistic genre, on the other hand, the appearance/reality question is frequently bonded with a strong didactic concern, as evidenced by the many "exemplary novels" popular in the seventeenth century. The masterful collections of Marìa de Zayas y Sotomayor and Mariana de Carvajal employ the form to convey their essentially feminist aesthetics, clothed in the conventional topos of the dichotomy between illusion (delusion) and reality, a dichotomy that is frequently presented in a gender-specific manner. The fables of Mme d'Aulnoy, didactic and escapist at the same time, also formulate new and surprisingly feminist perspectives by assigning nontraditional roles to males and female—for example, the nurturing, passive role to man and the guarding, fighting, active role to woman.

The seventeenth century was also a great age of epistolary writings. Mme de Sévigné, perhaps the most prolific epistolière of the age (there are over fifteen hundred extant letters penned by her) gives us a lively account of the glorious reign of Louis XIV and provides us with her intimate personal views on subjects as diverse as religion, children, gambling, travel, syphilis, medicine, literature, court intrigues, and wars.

If the conflict between the traditional symbolic and the emerging scientific world views is one of the factors conditioning the Baroque mentality, another of equal significance is surely the religious controversy between Catholic and Protestant, Anglican and Puritan, and Lutheran and Calvinist that left so heavy and tragic a mark on the age. Catharina von Greiffenberg, an Austrian Protestant noblewoman reared a generation before the Habsburgs had effectively imposed Catholicism on all their realms, was obliged to flee her estate for the sanctuary of Lutheran Nuremberg (where she was warmly welcomed by her fellow poets). She planned a trip to Vienna to convert the emperor to Lutheranism but, fortunately for her, was dissuaded. On the other hand, in what must have been one of the best-publicized events of the century, Queen Christina of Lutheran Sweden renounced her crown, converted to Catholicism, and played a significant role in the Counter-Reformation. In Hungary the Lutheran noblewoman Kata Szidonia Petr czi heroically resisted the Catholicizing tendencies of the Habsburgs; Mary Ward fled England to escape the religious persecution of Catholics, only to occasion vituperative criticism by the Catholic clergy who attempted to suppress the schools for girls she founded throughout Europe; and the staunchly Calvinistic Anna Maria van Schurman, disillusioned by the doctrinal rigidities of the church, abandoned her intellectual and literary aspirations to join a persecuted pietistic sect.

Baroque society was not hospitable to the artistic and intellectual endeavors of women, its authoritarianism and increased centralization having tightened the grip of traditional conservative attitudes. Mary Ward faced constant criticism and persecution by the clergy; Anne Bradstreet was regarded as an oddity; and Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, was widely viewed as mad. (In relatively tolerant Holland, Tesselschade had better fortune.) Neither Protestantism, with its hectic and neurotic concern for doctrinal purity, nor Counter-Reformation Catholicism, with its paranoid fear of heresy, could provide an ambience like that of the High Renaissance. In its sophistication and relative openness to the arts, the Renaissance permitted—and in some cases even fostered—the work of such women as Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, and Marguerite de Navarre, and it made possible the protests of the very same literate women whom it sought to oppress. Joan Kelly remarks: "Feminist theorizing arose in the fifteenth century, in intimate association with and in reaction to the new secular culture of the modern European state. It emerged as the voice of literate women who felt themselves maligned and newly oppressed by that culture, but who were empowered by it at the same time to speak out in their defense." Despite the hostile atmosphere, and in some instances in dialectical opposition to misogyny, seventeenth-century women wrote their works, displaying a marked flair for the great and difficult Baroque styles.

Not all seventeenth-century writers, male or female, can justly be classified as Baroque; an adversarial stance toward patriarchal authority induced in some an avoidance of what was, in effect, the style of the establishment. The Baroque was a current in the art of the period, albeit the most important one. One might argue that Aphra Behn flourished after the English sensibility had become Neoclassical rather than Baroque. La Princesse de Clèves is justly regarded as a masterpiece of Neoclassicism, although some scholars would contend that Mme de LaFayette, like her contemporary Jean Racine, epitomizes a baroque dompté (the term is Helmut Hatzfeld's) in which classical bienséance cannot conceal the turbulence of Baroque passion. The Danish countess Leonora Christina and the Italian Camilla Faà Gonzaga practice, in their gripping memoirs, a style that does not even attempt the fashionable devices of the Baroque; they write straightforward, highly personal prose guided by no principles apart from their own genius and firm convictions. Camilla Faà, in deed, sees the process of writing as the only path left to (re)establish her identity—to recollect, rectify, and justly preserve the story of her life which her husband, Duke Ferdinand, had misrepresented. Finally, the memoirs of Queen Christina of Sweden, while rhetorical and occasionally ebullient, preserve in an essentially personal prose a fascinating individual's struggle to achieve her ambitions.

Even when composing in the traditional genres and forms of Baroque letters, women writers were autodidacts by necessity and often stood outside the mainstream. Unable to attend universities and rarely permitted to join literary societies, they were forced to work in relative isolation—a phenomenon at least partially responsible for the noted independence and "modernity" of their thought, form, and style.

Scholarship and learning, as well as belles lettres, attracted many women during the seventeenth century. The learned lady, as Natalie Zemon Davis observes, "struggled to establish a role herself: the female schoolteacher became a familiar figure, whether as spinster or as an Ursuline." Frequently labeled "bluestockings," often distrusted or even ridiculed, women scholars voiced ardent concerns for the position, education, and educability of women; they advocated serious intellectual training and sustained study. "Not to find pleasure in serious reading," wrote Mme de Sévigné in 1689, "gives a pastel coloring to the mind," and her sentiments seem to have been shared by scores of seventeenth-century women.

While the fifteenth-century querelle des femmes never disappeared entirely from the literary scene (and was vigorously sustained by the women humanists of Renaissance Italy), it flared up again with renewed vigor after the publication of Jacques Olivier's Alphabet of the Imperfection and Malice of Women in 1615. Among the illustrious participants in the debate were Europe's leading women scholars: France's Marie de Gournay; Holland's Anna Maria van Schurman; Italy's Lucrezia Marinella; England's Bathsua Makin, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn; and Spain's Mara de Zayas y Sotomayor. More than their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century predecessors, these seventeenth-century women addressed many of the philosophical and theologial issues raised by misogyny: Is woman, indeed, an incomplete version of the male? Are men and women equally prone to sin? Are women capable of bettering their lot? Will women be resurrected in female form after the last day of judgment?

Early Modern women scholars advocate boldly and often uncompromisingly the spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes in their early works. Anna Maria van Schurman, perhaps the most famous (though certainly not the most militant) among them, formulates her views in a syllogistic manner:

1) Nature has given every human being the principles or the potential to grasp the principles of all arts and sciences. Women, too, have been given their principles; therefore, women are capable of grasping the arts and sciences.

2) Whoever has a desire for pursuing the arts and the sciences (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysica I:2), can do so. Women as members of the human species do have this desire; therefore, women are capable of pursuing the arts and sciences.

Schurman's defense of education for women is firmly anchored in ethical concerns; it rejects the prevalent view of the dangers posed by women's learning—namely, the tendency to heresy, pride, and sexual infidelity. Within the Renaissance tradition of More and Vives, who advocated women's education as a means to moral improvement, Schurman insists that education, the study of letters, leads to "the true greatness of soul." She differs from her Renaissance predecessors in her unwillingness to ascribe intrinsic value to household activities and her firmly optimistic view of the inevitable social and intellectual results of the education of women. In her devaluation of exclusively domestic, ornamental occupations for women, Schurman is joined by her English contemporary, Bathsua Makin. Makin argues in her introductory remarks to An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen:

Before I mention the Objections, I shall state the Propositions I have endeavoured to prove; That which I intend is this, That Persons of competent natural parts, indifferently inclin'd and disposed to Learning, whom God hath blessed with Estates, that are not cumbred in the World, but have liberty and opportunity in their Childhood; and afterwards, being competently instructed in all things now useful that concern them as Women, may and ought to be improved in more Polite Learning, in Religion, Arts, and the knowledge of things, in Tongues also as subservient to these, rather than to spend the over-plus time of their youth, in making Points for Bravery, in dressing and trimming themselves like Bartholomew-Babies, in Painting and Dancing, in making Flowers of Coloured Straw, and building Houses of stained Paper, and such like vanities.

Unlike Lucretia Marinella and the more radical writers who advocated woman's superiority to man or delivered sweeping defenses of sexual egalitarianism, Schurman represents the more widespread view of seventeenth-century feminists writers: the potential equality of male and female, a potentiality which can be realized through equal education, social acceptance, and public opportunity.

While Schurman is deeply religious and cerebral in the logic of her defense of women, her French contemporary Marie de Gournay is polemical and delightfully irreverent. On the subject of the masculine identity of Christ (and therefore of priests), the Catholic de Gournay argues that Jesus' incarnation as a male is no special distinction bestowed upon the male sex, but simply a matter of historic convenience. "If men pride themselves," she says, "on the fact that Jesus Christ was born of their sex, the answer is that this was necessary for the sake of decency, for if he had been a woman, it would have been impossible for Jesus to go out at all hours of the day and the night and mingle with the crowds to convert them and to help and save mankind, without creating a scandal, especially in the face of the malice of the Jews." A correspondent and admirer of Schurman and a noted philological scholar herself, de Gournay presents her readers with a display of satiric pyrotechnics when faced with male scholars' disregard for female scholarship and art. Speaking of women collectively, de Gournay delivers a moving plea for equality. At the beginning of "The Ladies" Grievance," which she dedicated to the competent French regent Anne of Austria, de Gournay expresses her outrage at patriarchial prejudices by addressing the quintessential concern of women since time immemorial—freedom: "Happy are you, reader, if you do not belong to this sex to whom all good things are forbidden, since to us freedom is forbidden; and whom they [men] prevent from acquiring almost all virtues by keeping us away from power…. Happy are you, therefore, for whom it is no crime to be intelligent and learned, since the mere fact that you are a man allows you to think and do as you please and makes whatever you say right, and other people will believe you or at any rate listen to you."

Freedom, of course, is a protean term: ambiguous at best, constantly changing, and almost impossible to define in absolute as opposed to relative terms. Ever since Joan Kelly's pioneering work over a decade ago, scholars have believed that the freedom of Renaissance and Early Modern women declined in the context of an increasing disjunction between the public and private spheres of life through a restricting of female activity to the domestic sphere. More recently, Merry Wiesner has argued that, for Renaissance and seventeenth-century women, freedom specifically meant the ability to participate in public life. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, for example, wrote in 1656: "Thus by an Opinion, which I hope is but an Erroneous one in Men, we are shut out of all Power and Authority, by reason we are never Imployed either in Civil or Martial Affairs, our Counsels are Despised, and Laught at, the best of our actions are Trodden down with Scorn; by the Over-weening conceit Men have of Themselves, and through a Despisement of us." Demanding equal education for women, Margaret Cavendish defines freedom as access to the means and tools of power, the opportunity of full participation in public and intellectual life. Her French contemporary Marie de Gournay addresses the question of freedom in broader and more psychological terms, a definition that seems to hold true for most seventeenth-century women writers. Freedom, she asserts, is the phenomenon of being taken seriously, of having the opportunity for intellectual and artistic fulfillment and success—aspirations not very different from recent efforts by women scholars to establish a policy of anonymous submissions for publication. In her advocacy of equal opportunities for men and women, de Gournay goes one step further by suggesting that the victims of patriarchal chauvinism are ultimately men as well as women. Concluding her tract, she warns of the dangers presented by the ignorance of prejudice: "Men will find out, moreover, that in order to pay them back, women are seeking to acquire that same fine habit they have of wanting to belittle our sex without even listening to us or reading our writings, for we have listened to them and read their works. They should also remember a dangerous expression of excellent origin: only the less able can live content with their own wisdom, looking over their shoulder at that of others, and ignorance is the mother of presumption."