SOURCE: “‘As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak’: Madeleine de Scudéry's Rhetoric of Conversation,” in Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, University of South Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 305-19.

In the following essay, Donaworth focuses on Scudéry's art of conversation, arguing that her rhetorical skill granted her more social freedom than was usual for a woman of her time, and that it created a model for other women.

Madeleine de Scudéry, the most popular novelist of seventeenth-century Europe, was also, I shall argue, a rhetorical theorist. She was the first of a series of women in the seventeenth century to appropriate the Renaissance and adapt rhetoric to women's circumstances.¹ Scudéry devised a new rhetorical theory for women: she revisioned the tradition of masculine “public” discourse for mixed gender “private” discourse in salon society, emphasizing conversation and...