Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 63~ mending Seneca as a philosopher for seventeenth-century Christians, Justus Lipsius could with some justification boast "I made philology into philosophy" (39). But ultimately such an attitude played into the hands of the moderns who wished to sweep aside antique learning in favor of genuinely relevant contemporary issues. Fatally, the expertise in classical philology of the likes of Richard Bentley unpicked the learned assumptions on which Cambridge Platonism based its synthesis of classical and modern philosophy. In place of the simple representation of the Renaissance recovery of ancient texts as the triumph of humanist philological expertise which swept away the errors of their predecessors, Grafton offers a counterhistory of fake and fudge, of the persistence of spurious texts in spite of the celebrated advances in historical philology--indeed of the knowing use of spurious works by scholars who should have known better and undoubtedly did (as in the case of Julius Scaliger and Berosus). Pride of place in the story of muddle and puzzle goes to Annius of Viterbo whose Commentarieson VariousAuthors DiscussingAntiquities (1498) enjoyed great prestige as a work of historical scholarship in its day, despite its being a confection of texts, real and imaginary, with archival documentation invented to order and entirely spurious histories of ancient nations supplied for attribution to ancient names mentioned in passing by "respectable" sources. Many scholarly shibboleths are overturned in this book: humanism is shown to be a far more varied and challenging intellectual movement than historians and philosophers would have us believe. Defenders of the Text is a judicious selection of case studies, rather than a comprehensive survey of the terrain. Presented as the fruit of a personal historical quest, the insights afforded here are the triumph of a synthesis (rare among philologists) which loses none of the particularity which each case requires. To have breathed such life into so dusty a subject as philology is a remarkable achievement. It exemplifies the fact that textual approaches to the past need not be sterile. On the contrary, historians of philosophy would do well to take up the challenge with which the book opens and reassess the learning of the Renaissance without the prejudices against it that have become part of the Western intellectual tradition. SARAH HUTTON UniversityofHertfordshire Erica Harth. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. Reading Women Writers Series. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, x992. Pp. xiii + 267. Cloth, $38.95 . Paper, $1~.95. Cartesian Women is a work in feminist cultural history. It is important to the history of philosophy because of Harth's readings of several seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury women philosophers. In particular, she details the relations between and the evolution of the academies open only to males and the salons presided over by women but open to both men and women. Descartes provides a foundational guideline for her study by contributing the theme that "the mind has no sex." This, with methodological doubt, allowed women to claim intellectual status equal to that of men. But divorcing 632 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:4 OCTOBER 1993 the mind from the body also precluded philosophizing from a feminist viewpoint that was necessarily linked with the female body. Consequently, any attempt to provide a "feminist alternative" to the purportedly disinterested-spectator version of objective rational science--deriving from Descartes and coopted by men as representing a male approach to nature--was strung out on the horns of a dilemma: either go with the sexneutral mind to attain equality and thereby accept the objective discourse of male scientists, or demand a right to a feminist discourse derived from the female body, thereby flaunting the difference that led many thinkers (both men and women) to argue that women are inferior to men. Harth's thesis is that "Cartesian women sought to preserve the union of fact and value which lies at the heart of late twentieth-century visions of a feminist science" (1e). She presents Princess Elizabeth as the foundational woman philosopher who argued directly with Descartes that his neostoical approach to the passions is impractical. Elizabeth did have strong influence on Descartes's study of the passions. But when Harth says that...