1. Agrippa opens his declamation thus: “God most beneficent, Father and creator of all good things, who alone possesses the fecundity of the two sexes, created humans in his image, male and female created he them. Sexual distinction consists only in the different location of the parts of the body for which procreation required diversity. But he has attributed to both man and woman an identical soul, which sexual difference does not at all affect. Woman has been allotted the same intelligence, reason, and power of speech as man and tends to the same end he does, that is, [eternal] happiness, where there will be no restriction by sex.” Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, [1529] 1996), p. 43. On Billon’s ideas in his Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe féminin (1555), see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 200–204. See also Maria Equicola, De mulieribus (1501), quoted in Rabil’s introduction to Agrippa, Declamation, p. 24. See Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modem Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 59–60 for other European examples of the idea that “the soul, the mind and reason were not sexually differentiated.”
2. See in particular Isabelle Krier, “Souvenirs sceptiques de Marie de Gournay dans Égalité des hommes et des femmes” Clio, 29 (2009), 243–257, as well as Rebecca M. Wilkin’s analysis in Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 177–182. Wilkin suggests that Gournay draws specifically on Montaigne’s suspension of gender difference to frame her philosophical egalitarianism. For an opposing view re Gournay’s skepticism, see Ian Maclean, “Marie de Gournay et la préhistoire du discours féminin,” in Danielle Haase-Dubosc and Eliane Viennot, eds., Femmes et pouvoirs sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Rivages, 1991), pp. 120–134 (p. 125). For more general questions of the influence of Montaigne on Gournay, see the articles in Montaigne et Marie de Gournay, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion, 1997) and Montaigne and Maire de Gournay, special issue, Journal of Medieval and Reniassance Studies, 25.3 (1995).
3. All references are to Marie de Gournay, Œuvres complètes, eds. Jean-Claude Arnould et al. (Paris: Champion, 2002), 2 vols (hereafter referred to as OC). All English translations are from Desmond M. Clarke, trans. and ed., The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On this text, in addition to the works cited in n.2 and the introduction to the Clarke translation, see Elsa Dotlin, L’Évidence de l’égalité des sexes. Une philosophie oubliée du XVIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), Albistur and Armogathe, Dezon-Jones, and articles by Farrell, Frelick, Mathieu-Castellani, Michel, and Worcester in the bibliography.
4. See Venesoen, ed., L’Égalité des hommes et des femmes (Geneva: Droz, 1993), p. 35. So too is the criticism that even in her appeal to a dominant tradition, she quotes “many of her authorities out of context,” “distorting, even repressing their positions”; see Mary M. Rowan, “Seventeenth-Century French Feminism: Two Opposing Attitudes,” International Journal of Women’s Studies, 3.3 (1980), 273–291 (p. 276), and Michèle Farrell, “Theorizing on Equality: Marie de Gournay and Poullain de la Barre,” Cahiers du Dix-septième, 2.1 (1998), 67–79 (p. 69). It is imperative to recall that quoting “out of context” was a widespread and accepted practice; according to Jacques Truchet, it was accepted, even traditional, to draw from isolated Bible verses meanings, that they clearly did not have in their original context. See his Politique de Bossuet (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), p. 30.
5. For a broad overview of a tradition of feminist Bible criticism, see “One Thousand Years of Feminist Bible Criticism,” Ch. 7 in Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 138–166. See also Letty M. Russell, ed., Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1985); Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary (London: SPCK; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992). For the argument that her expressed aim to root her argument in divine patristic writings is an indication of her fideism, see Eileen O’Neill, “The Equality of Men and Women,” in Desmond Clarke and Catherine Wilson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 445–474 (pp. 450–453).