ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the discourse of confidence in a range of French sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The discourse of confidentiality, like the discourse of friendship, often relies implicitly, if not explicitly, upon the assumption that the parties are male. The chapter also examines the treatment of confidentiality and its complex relationship to publicity in two early modern women authors: Marguerite de Navarre and Madeleine de Scudery. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptamron contains a number of stories that upend gender expectations regarding confidence. In the Histoire de Sapho, an episode from Artamne, Scudery develops the theme of female-male confidence in directions that have important implications for how we think about female publication during the period. The conception of confidence described by Saint-Evremond is closely related to the ideal of sinceritas that John Martin has identified as one of the Renaissances legacies to modern culture.
