ABSTRACT
By the 1560s, it was clear that the authority of the ancient auctores was fading, and with it, the standard that had served to ascertain the truth about the natural world. The discovery of peoples unacknowledged in sacred history, the humanist recovery of competing philosophical traditions, and the restless impatience with ecclesiastical abuses that led to the Protestant Reformation-all disseminated through the recently invented printing press-had irreparably undermined the careful amalgam of Christian theology and Aristotelian natural philosophy composed by the medieval Schoolmen. Some Renaissance intellectuals strove to replace or buttress claims of truth derived from authority with positive (that is, rational or empirical) criteria. These authors emphasized women’s illiteracy with respect to the book of nature, just as scholastic natural philosophers had underscored women’s ignorance of Latin. In effect, even though epistemological experimentation led to widely divergent and sometimes contradictory representations of women, the idea of woman served a
consistent function.1 Through the exclusion of women, they articulated the limits of the search for truth and sought to ensure their privileged place within it.2 Others, however, magnified the void left by the dissolving scholastic system. Skepticism, a school of thought whose driving hypothesis was that nothing could be known for sure, flourished amid the intellectual upheaval of the late Renaissance.3 Skeptics underscored the presumption of human claims to knowledge. The subversion of gender hierarchies and/or notions of sex difference abound in their writing. What indeed could moderate man’s presumption more than to argue that women were just as worthy as men? And what could demonstrate the elusive nature of truth better than to reveal the speciousness of the supposedly obvious fact of sex difference? 4
Descartes thus inherited two opposing conceptions of the search for truth, each characterized by a divergent attitude towards women: a positive endeavor culminating in the attainment of truth, from which women were excluded; and a skeptical search in the pursuit of an indefinitely deferred destination that challenged all that could be taken for granted, including gender notions. Descartes’s original contribution to intellectual history was not his wholesale rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy, to which he merely delivered the coup de grâce, but rather his confrontation of positive and skeptical modes of seeking. Indeed, what was truly novel about his approach to an old dilemma was his claim to overcome the doubt that had undermined previous attempts to establish firm bases for knowledge. Descartes sought to out-doubt even the Skeptics to found a rational epistemology that would surpass skepticism once and for all. His claim that “even women” could read and profit from his method was not just the result of his hostility to scholasticism; it was part of his appropriation of skeptical arguments. Albeit conventional and
1 Because I focus on the epistemological function served by representations of women, my analysis differs significantly from Ian MacLean’s descriptive study, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
