L’usage des sens dans deux diptyques de la querelle des femmes en Angleterre (1540-1589)

Abstract

This paper intends to demonstrate that the senses are part of the debate about the equality / inequality of the sexes known as the “Querelle des femmes”. It is based on two diptychs of the early modern period, each composed of an attack and a defence of the female sex. The first set was published in the early 1540s by the same author, Edward Gosynhill (The Schoolhouse of Women, The Prayse of All Women). The second has been recomposed on the basis that Jane Anger’s Protection for Women could be an answer to the “Cooling Card for Philautus”, which is part of John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. The five senses are omnipresent in the four texts and this paper aims at clarifying how the gender hierarchy each of them supports puts to use the hierarchy of the senses as it was conceived in the Tudor period. It first looks at the way both attacks and defences deal with the early modern assumption that the senses were feminine and opposed to reason considered as a male attribute, but also that the lower senses were typed as feminine while the higher senses of sight and hearing were typed as masculine. Both debates challenge these beliefs and envisage gender relations in different ways that the senses help comprehend.

Keywords

• controversy about women
• Jane Anger
• Edward Gosynhill
• gender hierarchy
• hierarchy of the senses
• reason