ABSTRACT
The chapter examines how skepticism influenced the thinking of three seventeenth-century women, Marie le Jars de Gournay, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, and Queen Christina of Sweden. It is argued that though none of them was a Skeptic to the exclusion of other intellectual interests, they all made innovative use of skeptical arguments in order to question different forms of dogmatism. Gournay questioned the customs and received opinions that degraded women; Elisabeth suspended her judgment concerning Descartes’ attempt to explain mind–body interaction and withheld a lifelong questioning of religious dogmatism; Christina also questioned religious dogmatism and wrote maxims, which questioned the possibility of self-knowledge.
