Volume 40, Number 20 · December 2, 1993
The Lost Art
By Benedetta Craveri, Translated from the Italian by Noga Arikha, Patrick Creagh
Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime
by Erica Harth
Cornell University Press, 267 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France
by Mary Vidal
Yale University Press, 238 pp., $50.00
In his Discours de la méthode (1637) Descartes said that he chose to write in French rather than in Latin in order to reach 'those who employ nothing but their pure natural reason.' We are justified in supposing that among such readers the philosopher included women, since they were not taught Latin.[1] And although women did not have a right to the same education as men, it was common knowledge that their opinions were influential within aristocratic society, and their praise or criticism often determined a book's success or failure.
Review, 5321 words
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