Ruling Women: Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-century French Drama

"This book, the first of two volumes, is the first study of its kind devoted to an analysis of the debate concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a wide range of political and feminist texts, it sets out to demonstrate that the dominant discourse which upholds patriarchy at the time is frequently in conflict with alternative discourses which frame gynaecocracy as a feasible, and laudable reality, and which reconfigure (wittingly or unwittingly) the normative paradigm of male authority. Central to the argument is an analysis of how the discourse which constructs government as a male prerogative quite simply implodes when juxtaposed with the traditional political discourse of virtue ethics. The study draws on the existing work concerning queenship but innovates in its focus on the literary, feminist, and philosophical representations of female governance in France"--