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This dissertation focuses on the emergence of self-awareness in women of the early 17th century as exemplified by Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638), a native of Greifswald in North Germany. It analyses the feminist components of her work. Her poetic production, preserved in the anthology Deutsche Poetische Gedichte (1650), consists of 105 poems, four prose introductions and three letters. It is the output of a writer whose short life of 17 years plays itself out against the backdrop of a century shattered by the Thirty Years' War, religious strife, the plague, oppression and social unrest. Topics such as friendship, love, female self-awareness, or the contrasting realities of women and men are the themes through which she explores an androcentric society and establishes herself as an advocate for the acceptance of women as full members of society. With her motto Du solst mich doch nicht unterdrucken ("You shall not suppress me") she insists on her equality as a woman and a writer. The defiance of her "natural" role as a woman expresses itself ambivalently, through observing social conventions while at the same time striving to undermine them. Sibylle Schwarz, unlike any other German bourgeois woman author between 1550 and 1650, has written poetry engaging in social criticism that corroborates and at the same time transcends the inferior status of women within a patriarchal structure. This unique nature of her writings makes them an important milestone in the emergence of female intellectual autonomy. The first two of six major sections state the goals of my research, a survey of the materials used and the methodology to be followed. Part III sets the context of a society in which women were limited to a narrow range of roles. In Part IV the conditions in which women lived, worked, and were brought up, from the institutionalised lack of educational opportunity to social, conventional and legal barriers to their full participation in society are being explored. Part V gives an extensive analysis of Sibylle Schwarz's work, relating it to her personal situation and to the themes already developed, with an accounting of her thoughts and ideas about her culture, her society and her gender. Part VI summarises the work and states its conclusions.

No description available.

This dissertation focuses on the emergence of self-awareness in women of the early 17th century as exemplified by Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638), a native of Greifswald in North Germany. It analyses the feminist components of her work. Her poetic production, preserved in the anthology Deutsche Poetische Gedichte (1650), consists of 105 poems, four prose introductions and three letters. It is the output of a writer whose short life of 17 years plays itself out against the backdrop of a century shattered by the Thirty Years' War, religious strife, the plague, oppression and social unrest. Topics such as friendship, love, female self-awareness, or the contrasting realities of women and men are the themes through which she explores an androcentric society and establishes herself as an advocate for the acceptance of women as full members of society. With her motto Du solst mich doch nicht unterdrucken ("You shall not suppress me") she insists on her equality as a woman and a writer. The defiance of her "natural" role as a woman expresses itself ambivalently, through observing social conventions while at the same time striving to undermine them. Sibylle Schwarz, unlike any other German bourgeois woman author between 1550 and 1650, has written poetry engaging in social criticism that corroborates and at the same time transcends the inferior status of women within a patriarchal structure. This unique nature of her writings makes them an important milestone in the emergence of female intellectual autonomy. The first two of six major sections state the goals of my research, a survey of the materials used and the methodology to be followed. Part III sets the context of a society in which women were limited to a narrow range of roles. In Part IV the conditions in which women lived, worked, and were brought up, from the institutionalised lack of educational opportunity to social, conventional and legal barriers to their full participation in society are being explored. Part V gives an extensive analysis of Sibylle Schwarz's work, relating it to her personal situation and to the themes already developed, with an accounting of her thoughts and ideas about her culture, her society and her gender. Part VI summarises the work and states its conclusions. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

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The dissertation examines the close but overlooked relationship between male poetry societies and the sharp rise of literary courtesans in the late Ming. I attempt to identify a particular group of men who devoted exclusive efforts to the promotion of courtesan culture, that is, urban dwellers of prosperous Jiangnan, who fashioned themselves as retired literati, devoting themselves to art, recreation, and self-invention, instead of government office. I also offer a new interpretation for the decline of courtesan culture after the Ming-Qing transition. / Chapter 1 provides an overview of the social-cultural context in which late Ming courtesans flourished. I emphasize office-holding as losing its appeal for late Ming nonconformists who sought other alternative means of self-realization. Chapter 2 examines the importance of poetry by courtesans in literati culture as demonstrated by their visible inclusion in late Ming and early Qing anthologies of women's writings. Chapter 3 examines the life and poetry of individual courtesans through three case studies. Together, these three chapters illustrate the strong identification between nonconformist literati and the courtesans they extolled at both collective and individual levels. / In Chapter 4, by focusing on the context and texts of the poetry collection of the courtesan Chen Susu and on writings about her, I illustrate the efforts by both male and female literati in the early Qing to reproduce the cultural glory of late Ming courtesans. However, despite their cooperative efforts, courtesans became inevitably marginalized in literati culture as talented women of the gentry flourished. / This dissertation as a whole explores how male literati and courtesans responded to the social and literary milieu of late Ming Jiangnan to shed light on aspects of the intersection of self and society in this floating world. This courtesan culture was a counterculture in that: (1) it was deep-rooted in male poetry societies, a cultural space that was formed in opposition to government office; (2) in valuing romantic relationship and friendship, the promoters of this culture deliberately deemphasized the most primary human relations as defined in the Confucian tradition; (3) this culture conditioned, motivated, and promoted serious relationships between literati and courtesans, which fundamentally undermined orthodox values.

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Le XVIIe siècle français connaît un engouement pour la mystique, qui se pense alors comme une « Science des Saints » et développe ses pratiques, ses discours et son propre champ disciplinaire. Cette science mystique prône une approche anti-intellectuelle de la connaissance, une abnégation de la pensée et une indéfinition du savoir, dont le sens, difficilement accessible, doit demeurer caché. Les mystiques, et particulièrement les femmes, présentent ainsi un rapport paradoxal à la connaissance. Parce qu’elles sont reconnues pour entretenir un lien direct avec Dieu et pour leur cheminement religieux marqué par l’extraordinaire, les femmes de ce courant spirituel apparaissent favorisées. Leur ignorance, caractère déjà rattaché à la spiritualité mystique, mais plus accentué chez elles en raison de la nature de leur sexe, les élève au rang de sujet spirituel privilégié. François de Sales a notamment pensé ce renversement de valeurs, en insistant sur la « savante ignorance » de ces saintes. À partir de ce paradoxe, ce mémoire s’attache à dégager une figure de la savante ignorante dans deux autobiographies spirituelles du XVIIe siècle, la Relation de 1654 de Marie Guyart, dite de l’Incarnation et la Vie par elle-même de Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte, dite Madame Guyon. Il propose d’étudier la façon dont ces deux autrices font leur et transforment, chacune à sa façon, cette figure. Bien plus qu’une simple désignation, le double caractère « savant » et « ignorant » de la femme mystique pose une tension entre des manières d’être, des approches du monde, des attitudes et des compétences opposées. Le paradoxe établi par François de Sales mérite en ce sens d’être déplié et approfondi. Nous nous y appliquerons, en suggérant qu’il traverse tout le sujet, influençant sa construction et sa représentation et qu’il implique l’ensemble de l’œuvre : la figure de la savante ignorante se trouve à même les formes de discours, les procédés d’énonciation et les tours stylistiques, elle s’incarne dans la narration et la structure du récit et appelle à différentes stratégies de légitimation. / The French 17th century nourishes a keen interest for mysticism, conceived as a “Science of the Saints”, with its own disciplinary field, practices and discourses. This mystic science advocates an anti-intellectual approach to knowledge, a denial of thought as theory and differentiation, a process difficult to fathom and better kept hidden. The mystics, and women in particular, have a paradoxical relation to knowledge. Believed to have a direct connection do God and a religious path marked by the extraordinary, the women of this spiritual movement appear privileged. Their ignorance, a trait already attached to the mystic way, but more accentuated in their case due to the nature of their gender, raises them to the rank of a privileged subject. François de Sales reflected this value reversal by insisting on the “savante ignorance” when speaking of these holy women. On the basis of this paradox, this thesis seeks to present the figure of a “savante ignorante” in two spiritual autobiographies of the 17th century: the Relation of 1654 by Marie Guyart, also known as Marie de l’Incarnation, and Life by herself by Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte, also known as Madame Guyon. It proposes to study the way these two authors address this figure and transform it in their own way. More than a simple designation, the double nature of the mystic woman as “savante” and “ignorante” creates a tension between opposite ways of being and of approaching the world, and within attitudes and skills. In this sense, the paradox established by François de Sales deserves to be developed and deepened. We will apply ourselves to do so by proposing that this paradox cuts through every aspects of the subject, influencing the construct and the representation of the self, and ultimately influencing the entire work of the author: the figure of the “savante ignorante” can be found throughout the forms of the discourse, the processes of enunciation and the stylistic choices; it is embedded in the narrative structure and calls for different strategies of legitimation.

Dans le corpus, "le corps dans tous ses états" évoque d’emblée l’Incarnation. Mais celle-ci présuppose le corps vivant du fidèle. C’est lui qui donne corps aux semblables sensibles et intelligibles par amour. En retour, ceux-ci le poussent à faire corps avec eux en s’y assimilant. Tel est le Christ, l’Homme-Dieu qui épouse la condition terrestre et donne corps à la métaphore. Son corps est ainsi le milieu qui conjugue les dissemblables du monde en semblables mystiques. Comme les époux qui se fondent en un corps autre, son corps est donc d’un genre troisième et mystérieux. Tout cela prend corps grâce au lecteur, que le corpus suscite car il en partage la langue qui fait corps avec la voix intérieure. Telle est la chair du corpus où s’incarnent le Verbe divin et les métaphores. / John Donne is a Christian. Therefore all his works center around the Incarnation. However, the divine assuming a human body out of love requires first that a living believer should give rise to couples of persons and beings alike though different. Then the believer strives to assimilate himself to the other couple member, as is the rule in a good metaphor. Such is Christ, who is both God and Man as well as a living metaphor. He is a third type of being, made visible in marriage. This is achieved through bodies sharing in the same innate interior words, which starts with the mere act of reading John Donne’s corpus. Finally, the body means Verbum embodied in language.