Rhetorical Tropes and Realities—A Double Strategy Confronts a Double Standard: Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg Negotiates a Solution in the Seventeenth Century

At a time and in a place that for the most part barred women from writing, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633-1694) wrote and published by utilizing a number of strategies to circumvent those limitations. The devices she used seem fit exemplars of what Susanne Zantop called "complicated maneuvers, [and]...strategies of adaptation and defiance women had to develop in order to gain admittance to a realm dominated by male printers, publishers, critics, and peers" during the early modern period. This paper focuses on one such device, which I refer to as the double strategy, and on Greiffenberg's use of conventional rhetorical devices as part of that double strategy.