Gallant Women Students, Professors, and Historians: Learning, Sex, and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of German Literature

The decades around 1700 provided a setting relatively congenial to das gelehrte Frauenzimmer, or “the lady of learning.” Yet this gallant cultural landscape and the literary women who occupied it remain submerged under layers of anachronism and neglect. This article begins with a heuristic account of the origins of literature and of the work of gender in the invention of aesthetics. Propelled by innovative work by scholars of French and English literature, the argument develops with a consideration of literature’s gallant, French beginnings. Gallant readers reinvented the fusty res publica litteraria, making rooms hospitable to women, too. Next, I turn to marginally known texts by men and devoted to women’s literary and intellectual endeavors. Both circle around the Frauenzimmer in her private Cabinett: Talander’s romance-novel, Neu=eröffnetes Liebes=Cabinett des galanten Frauenzimmers (The Gallant Lady’s Cabinet of Love Newly Revealed, 1694), and Johann Caspar Eberti’s catalogue of learned women, Das eröffnete Cabinett des gelehrten Frauenzimmers (The Learned Lady’s Cabinet Revealed, 1706). At the origins of modern literature, some readers and critics feared these and other gallant texts promoted libertinism; indeed, they urged women to take up the pen: to learn, to teach, and to write.