ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ways in which questions of virtue and sexual differentiation are negotiated in the configuration of sovereignty and government in seventeenth-century France, in a powerful discourse which contributes to the construction of a nascent paradigm of equality. It examines how the framing of certain moral and intellectual virtues, such as prudence, as being key to government, allows a way in for the ideologists of women’s authority, for whom prudence transcends sexual differentiation, and casts women as equally capable of good government as their male counterparts.
As a case study, the chapter will focus on the representation of Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633), Infanta of Spain, who is widely treated in early modern France and yet whose reception at the time has been almost entirely overlooked. Co-sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands with her husband Albert from 1598 to 1621, sole governor until her death in 1633, granddaughter of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis, Isabella is frequently evoked as a female exemplar of government in seventeenth-century France, and is key to the pro-gynecocracy arguments of Anne of Austria’s regency. As the ethical code of princely virtues is demonstrated to accord space to women, by its own terms, government emerges as the ultimate site of androgyny, in a powerful legitimation of equal access to power for both sexes, which remains far from accepted today.
