SOURCE: “The World of Prose and Female Self-Inscription: Scudéry's Les Femmes illustres,” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 1983, pp. 37-44.

In the following essay, Greenberg proposes that the literary culture of late seventeenth-century France was characterized by a kind of free play with social systems that enabled an active feminine authority. Focusing on Les Femmes illustres, the critic finds that Scudéry took this opportunity to write her own place in history.

The use of language by educated groups such as libertines or precious writers during the baroque period reveals the uncertainty of changing codes and shifting referential contexts. The “art of conversation” was created and developed during what Michel Foucault has called the transition between the Renaissance's “Prose of the World” and classical, scientific discourse.¹ The very notion that conversation became an art, that is, that it became an aesthetic rather than a communicative act...