FEMALE PHILOSOPHERS
BY TORSTEN SCHWANKE
Phemonoe (Libyan Sibyl)
Lived: 700 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field: Enlightenment philosophy / Pythia / Prophetess.
Phemonoe was the first priestess (oracle) in Delphi
The saying: "Know thyself" which can be interpreted as follows: "Realise that you are only human", from the oracle sanctuary in Delphi is attributed not only to Thales or Chilon, but also to Phemonoe.
The saying not only contains the call to self-reflection, but also implies the assumption that a subject can know itself.
Aristotle attributed this saying to the Pythia.
She composed oracular sayings in hexameters and is considered the inventor of this verse form.
„I am by birth half mortal, half divine;
An immortal nymph was my mother, my father an eater of grain;
On my mother's side of Idaean birth, but my fatherland was the red
Marpessus sacred to the mother, and the river Aidoneus.“
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Sappho
Lived: Around 615 to 570 B.C.
Nationality: Greek
Field: Poetry / Ethics
Sappho is considered the most important poet of classical antiquity. Philosophically, she advocates an ethic that calls for a royal free woman, even when the strongest emotions make thinking almost impossible.
She is an "I-thinker" even before Socrates,
She states her name and says "...but I say!" unlike Socrates, who is considered the first "I-thinker", but claimed that a voice of God spoke within him when he philosophised.
„How beautiful the apple,
So red and ripe at the top of the tree in the highest branches!
Has no one fetched it?
Forgotten by the pickers?
Oh no, oh no! Not forgotten!
Not could she reach it, the highest.“
„That which a noble man,
Whether man or woman,
Would find beautiful,
Is not so much the outward appearance,
But what she can love inwardly,
Is what she longs for.“
Sappho thus contradicts the emerging trend in her time, which later defined what was good and beautiful as the "objective doctrine of reason" in the Socratic tradition.
„The moon has gone down, to be sure,
And the Pleiades. Midnight already.
And by goes the hour.
But I sleep alone.“
„Sweet is the god,
But I am still in agony
And far from my strength.“
Sappho inspired poets, painters and philosophers with her poetry and ethics for centuries, right up to the Renassiance / Enlightenment and even today!
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Cleobuline of Rhodes
Lived: 570 B.C.
Nationality: Greek
Field of Expertise: Philosopher / Rhetorician
It is said that she mastered the art of riddles. She wrote riddle verses in hexameters.
„One is father and twelve are children to him;
But each child has twice thirty differently shaped children.
They are white in colour, but the others are black,
And immortal are they; but down they all go.“
What is special is not the relatively simple decoding of the riddle into years, months, days and nights, but the inclusion of the immortal being, which nevertheless disappears.
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Damo of Kroton
Lived: ca. 500 BC
Nationality: Greek
Area of expertise: Pythagorean
After Theanos' death, her and Phytagoras' daughter Damo continued the school of the Pythagoreans.
The neo-Platonist and neo-Pythagorean Iamblichos of Chalkis draws on the tradition, starting from the Letter of Lysis, that apparently among the Pythagoreans women played a relatively prominent role by the standards of the time and emerged as female philosophers; he offers a somewhat extended variant of the account.
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Myia
Lived: Ca. 550-450 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field of expertise: Pythagorean philosopher.
According to some traditions Myia was the daughter of Pythagoras and Theano and their pupil.
Porphyrios states, Myia wrote Pythagorean writings. These works are lost. All that has survived is a letter, certainly a forgery, which she supposedly addressed to a woman named Phyllis. In it, advice is given on how to deal with an infant and on the right choice of a wet nurse (a popular topic in Hellenistic and Imperial literature).
„Particular attention is to be paid to moderation in everything, and if the wet nurse respects the child's natural needs for food, sleep, etc., as this expresses, this contributes to the child's well-being. Especially the first time in the life of a child and the relationship with the wet nurse are important for the whole life.
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Melissa
Lived: Ca. 550-400 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field of expertise: Pythagorean philosopher
According to some traditions, Melissa was the daughter of Pythagoras and Theano and their pupil.
Melissa's name is derived from the Greek word for honey "Melli". However, it is not known whether her temperament was sweet or not.
She taught modesty of dress, and emphasised a woman's natural charms.
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Periktione
Lived: ca. 450 BC
Nationality: Greek
Area of expertise: Pythagorean
„Mankind came into being and exists to contemplate the principle of the Nature.“
„The function of Wisdom is not so much in the possession of things, but in the purpose to look at things as they are.“
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Arete of Cyrene (Aristripp)
Lived: 400 to 330 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field of Study: Cyreanic / Moral philosophy / Natural theory, philosophy.
Arete (Ἀρήτη) is primarily a figure from Greek mythology, the Queen of the Phaiaks. She was the daughter of Rhexenor (son of Nausithoos, who in turn was a son of Poseidon and Periboia, the daughter of the giant ruler Eurymedon) and later married his brother - her uncle - Alkinoos.
References to Arete can be found, for example, in the Saga of the Argonauts.
In Homer's Odyssey, the hero Ulyss finds himself in the land of the Phaeacians on his way home from Troy to Ithaca. There, his patron goddess Athena advises him to turn to the reigning and respected queen Arete for help; in the 7th canto - Ulysses arrival at Alkinoos - it says of her:
„But first look for the queen inside the hall.
Her name is Arete, and she was begotten by the same
Parents from whom the king Alkinoos descends.
Newly wed in the palace; the only daughter Arete
His brother's only daughter took Alcinous to wife:
Who honours her as no woman on earth is honoured,
None of all who now govern the house of men.
So Arete is honoured with heartfelt love
By Alkinoos himself, and her flourishing children,
And the people, who regard her as a Goddess...“
The name Arete originally denotes fitness, efficiency; later also in the sense of virtue, the name Arete thus connects with mythology in a figure in Greek mythology, as well as in philosophy in the figure of the Greek philosopher Arete of Cyrene:
Aristippos of Cyrene (Arete's father), who was a disciple and close follower of Socrates and founder of the Cyrenaic School (Hedonism), included in his aspirations to inspire and strictly influence Arete in philosophy.
She was also one of Plato's students.
She is said to have written a total of 40 books, none of which (not even fragments) have survived.
Furthermore, she is said to have taught philosophy at the academies and schools of Attica for 35 years.
Arete took over her father's philosophy school after his death.
This was reported by Diogenes Laertios in his work: The Life of Aristripp.
About 100 philosophers are said to have emerged from Arete's school.
When she died around 330 BC, she was so highly esteemed that an epitaph (inscription) on her tomb declares, „that she was the splendour of Greece and possessed the beauty of Helen, that she was the virtue of Thirma, the soul of Socrates, and the tongue of Homer.“
„Pleasurable and unpleasurable sensations form the certainty of life.“
„The aim is to attain pleasure through insight.“
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Axiothea of Philesia
Lived: ca. 350 BC
Nationality: Arcadian / Greek
Area of expertise: Platonist
Diogenes Laertius describes in his work: the life of Speussipos, that Axiothea of Phlius was a long-time student of Plato and then of Speussipos. Speussipos continued the Platonic school.
In any case, she was a courageous, intellectual woman who took it upon herself to attend the studies in men's clothing, because she was full of the Love of Wisdom, a true female philosopher, to leave her native land and travel to learn the foreign polis.
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Phintys of Sparta
Lived: ca. 300 BC
Nationality: Spartan / Greek
Area of expertise: Phytagorean
The virtues, as Phintys ascribes them to men by nature:
(a) the special virtues of man, which belong more to him, namely, bravery and prudence/insight,
(b) the special virtue of the woman, Sophrosyne
(c) the - both common – virtues, bravery, justice and prudence.
„Nothing in excess!“
„Know thyself!“
Stobaios transmits two longer fragments from a writing attributed to Phintys entitled "On the Prudence of Women" (Peri gynaikos sphrosynas) in Doric dialect.
The cultivation of virtue presupposes philosophical education.
Therefore, philosophising is not - as the Peripatetics thought - inappropriate for women, but belongs to their tasks.
Sophrosyne includes first and foremost marital fidelity.
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Hippe
Lived: Unknown
Nationality: Greek
Field: Natural philosophy / Prophetess / mysticism
Hippe was the daughter of Cheiron and the wife of Aiolos.
Historical and mythical can no longer be distinguished in Hippe's case. The oldest source is Euripides' drama Melanippe the Wise, which has survived only in fragments. Melanippe was the daughter of Hippe and Aiolos.
Menage: „The first contemplation of nature since the beginning of philosophy, which is why Hippe was thus included by him as the first in the history of women philosophers.“
Clemens Alexandrinus: „But Hippe taught him the contemplation of nature, the science of the Father.“
Euripedes: „She gave of the Divine foreknowledge first / In clear sayings from the stars beginning.“
She is said to have passed on her knowledge to her husband, Aiolos, which earned her a reputation as the first philosophers.
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Themistocleia
Lived: Around 600 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field: 1st mentioned philosopher / priestess / teacher
Themistoclea was a priestess of Delphi. She has the reputation of being the teacher of Pythagoras who is often called "the father of philosophy", as he is said to have coined the term "philosopher".
Diogenes Laertios made note of her in his work, The Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers.
In the section on The Life of Pythagoras, Diogenes Laertios states that she taught Pythagoras her moral doctrines. In itself, he has this information second-hand. He says: „Aristoxenus asserts, that Pythagoras derived most of his ethical teachings from Themistoclea, the priestess of Delphi.“
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Theano of Thurii (Crotone)
Lived: 546 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field of Expertise: Cosmology / Natural philosophy / Doctrine of virtue
Theano mainly wrote treatises on mathematics, physics, medicine and psychology of the child and writings on philosophical topics from the field of the doctrine of virtue. Since all the writings were published under the name Pythagoras, it is difficult to determine who was actually responsible for producing them.
Theano is also known for a collection of sayings; individual alleged sayings have survived in the collection of sayings, which has only been preserved in Syriac translation: Council of Theano, the original Greek version of which probably dates from the Roman imperial period.
While Theano was studying at the school of Pythagoras, they fell in love and lived together as a married couple. Porphyry described, among other things: „One of the women-students is famous above all, Theano by name.“
Pythagoras and Theano had three daughters, Damo, Myria and Arignote, and two sons.
After Pythagoras' death, Theano and her daughters continued the school of the Pythagoreans. Theano and her daughters acquired a reputation as excellent physicians during this period. According to the Pythagoreans, the human body is a miniature copy of the universe as a whole.
Theano taught mathematics in Samos and Kroton, and it is certain that she is the author (Fragments of Polyklet) of the „Treatise on the Golden Mean“, an important concept in mathematics.
The golden mean is found in nature and is used in both art and architecture.
Theano and Pythagoras thus together and the theorem of Pythagoras formed the mathematical basis for the "golden section", which was mathematically explained by Euclid with the special proportion, "the golden mean" with the number Phi (1.6180339887...).
Theano, in her writing "On Piety", which has not survived in its entirety, criticised the Pythagorean view that all things were created from numbers. She emphasised that living things that exist in the world, such as animals or plants, cannot come from things that are spiritual in nature.
She also demanded that women be given free access to the school of Pythagoras and thus to philosophical education.
Furthermore, she attached great importance to orienting the conduct of life to virtues such as Sophrosyne - Theano had already placed the moderate shaping of life through prudence at the centre of her thoughts before the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
For Theano, another virtue - which should be taught to children in particular - was patience:
„Only he who acts thoughtfully without haste and wantonness, will do the right thing in life.“
Her major works are:
"The Life of Pythagoras"
"Cosmology"
"Theorem of the Golden Mean"
"Theory of Numbers"
"Construction of the Universe"
"On Piety"
"On Virtue"
"Letters 1 to 7 of Theano"
For posterity, Theano became a legendary figure until the late Middle Ages, an embodiment of feminine Wisdom and Virtue.
„To be a wise woman is difficult.“
„What is love? - Passion of an Idle Soul...“
„What it is beautiful to talk about, it is ugly to be silent, and what it is ugly to talk about, it is better to be silent.“
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Arignote of Samos
Lived: Ca. 530-470 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field of expertise: Pythagorean philosopher
According to some traditions, Arignote was the daughter of Pythagoras and Theano and their pupil.
According to ancient tradition, she wrote a bacchica (verse) on the mysteries of Demeter, epigrams on sacred words, a writing on initiation into the mysteries of Dionysus, and other philosophical works.
„The eternal essence of number is the providential cause of all heaven, earth and the region between. Likewise it is the root of the continuance of the gods and daimones as well as that of the divine man.“
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Aspasia of Miletus
Lived: ca. 460/70 - 410 BC
Nationality: Greek
Field of expertise: Enlightenment philosophy/ rhetorician.
The most famous woman of ancient Athens was Aspasia, the companion of the great leader of democratic Athens, Pericles.
Aspasia, as a highly educated woman, maintained contact with the new philosophical currents of the time from Ionia; Socrates, Sophocles, Euripides, Phidias, and the elite of the time met in her house.
„Of me it would not be at all surprising that I should be able to deliver the speech of which I have a not at all bad teachers in the art of oratory, but who has also formed many other and excellent orators, but one who prefers it to all the Hellenes, Pericles.“ (Plato. Menexenos)
In this Plato-dialogue from the middle period, Socrates professes to be a student of Aspasia in the art of rhetoric. In it, Pericles, Aspasia's husband, and famous strategist of Athens, is described by Socrates as the most outstanding pupil of Aspasia.
On the other hand, Aspasia was portrayed and disparaged as a hetaera by ancient comedy writers, especially Aristophanes.
The evil talk was followed by the accusation that she was responsible for the outbreak of the Samian uprising (441 BC).
Jona Lendering points out that most of what we know of Aspasia is said to be based on mere hypothesis. Thucydides mentions that our only sources are the accounts and speculations of non-trustworthy men in literature and philosophy, recorded by them, in which it did not matter whether Aspasia was a historical figure at all.
Therefore, in the figure of Aspasia, we get a number of contradictory representations, she is either a good woman, like Theano, or a combination of courtesan and prostitute like Thargelia.
This is the reason that some modern scholars express their scepticism about the historicity of Aspasia's life.
The teaching activity of Aspasia is also mentioned in Plutarch (Pericles) and in Xenophon's Economy.
Some scholars assess Aspasia's teaching activity as an essential component of Athenian Enlightenment philosophy.
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Periktione
Lived: 440 - 365 BC
Nationality: Greek
Area of expertise: Pythagorean
In antiquity, two philosophical treatises were attributed to a Pythagorean named Periktione, of which only fragments have survived: On the Harmony of Women and On Wisdom. In research, it is usually assumed that the alleged name of the author is a pseudonym. Perhaps there is a connection with the name of Plato's mother, who may have been passed off as the author; she may have been considered a Pythagorean in the milieu in which the two writings were written.
„The woman should adhere to the standards of the natural in food, clothing, personal hygiene and jewellery and renounce all luxuries.“
„Conduct and duties towards parents according to divine law.“
Periktiones' marriage to Ariston produced four children: the sons Adeimantos, Glaukon and Platon, and the daughter Potone. Potone's son Speusippos succeeded Plato as scholarch (head) of the Platonic Academy.
Although the legend in its oldest surviving version does not explicitly state that Periktione was a virgin at the time of Plato's conception, but only that Apollo was his real father, the virginity of the mother is apparently assumed in the process.
The explicit statement that Plato was born of a virgin is only handed down by the late antique church father Jerome. Jerome reports that there were three authors (those already mentioned by Diogenes Laertios) according to whose view the "Prince of Wisdom" could only have been born of a virgin.(Jerome, Adversus Iovinianum)
„Striving of the soul for harmony through insight and self-control, modest living, virtue and observance of religious duties.“
„It is the task of Wisdom to see and compose the quality that belongs universally to all things.“
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Diotima of Mantinea
Is said to have lived ca. 400 BC
Nationality: Greek
Area of expertise: Eros / Love
Diotima appears as a literary figure (the only woman) in Plato's dialogue Symposion, she is described as a seeress from Mantineia, who acts as Socrates' teacher, who has been questioned by her in the same Maieutian way that he uses in his own conversations.
She appears as his instructor on the nature of Eros. And so, in all wisdom, she said to Socrates:
„Only believe it, Socrates, if you want to contemplate the ambition of men, you would only be astonished at their unreasonableness, if you had not in mind what I have said and considered how tremendously they are seized by the urge to become famous and to gain immortal fame for eternity, and for this they are ready to expose themselves to all dangers, to give even more than for their children and their property, and to endure every trouble and die for it.“
And Plato is also said to have taught by her the importance of Love. This is the case in Plato's Symposium (Συμπόσιον) which is a philosophical text by Plato from about 385 to 380 BC. It deals on a philosophical level with the origin, purpose and nature of love, and (in recent times interpreted) it is the origin of the concept of Platonic love.
In a sequence of speeches by men in a drinking party or better symposium, the philosophical definition of love is sought. Each man must deliver a eulogy, a speech in praise of love (Eros). Socrates claims in his speech, with reference to Diotima's speech, that the highest purpose of love is to become a philosopher or, literally, a lover of Wisdom.
Furthermore, Diotima is said to have initiated Socrates into the doctrine of ideas.
It is unknown whether the figure of Diotima is fictitious or has a historical model from the 5th century BC who may have actually borne this name.
Because of the strong after-effect of the dialogue up to the present day, the name Diotima has been taken up again and again in modern times and used as a pseudonym, as an honourific alternative name or to name a literary figure. It traditionally stands for a woman who is able to impart a philosophically underpinned knowledge in the erotic field.
She defines the concept of love as follows:
„A birth of the beautiful, both spiritual and physical.“
„The goal of love is the rebirth of one's own soul in the other through the idea of the beautiful.“
„Immortality is achieved through the ideas, virtues and the wisdom of one's partner.“
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Timycha
Lived: ca. 400 BC.
Nationality: Spartan / Italian
Area of expertise: Pythagorean
According to legends, Timycha was a Pythagorean woman from Sparta who lived in Lower Italy. Because of her steadfastness she was glorified as a heroine. She lived a typical Pythagorean life: the absolute secrecy of her followers, her unconditional reliability, the exclusivity of her covenant and the mysterious ban on beans, the reason for which was puzzled over.
The confrontation of philosophically living people with a ruler was popular material in antiquity, so a horror story developed around Myllias and Timycha.
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Lastheneia of Mantinea
Lived: ca. 350 BC
Nationality: Arcadian / Greek
Area of expertise: Platonist
Instead of looking for an Athenian male citizen as a friend and protector she dressed in menswear and attended Plato's academy openly.
We know that she studied there with Speusippos and became one of his disciples, presumably after Plato's death.
In the Symposium of Socrates there is a full description of her, given the progress of natural beauty on the handle of the essential eidos of beauty itself is attributed to her.
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Hipparchia of Maroneia
Lived: Ca. 340 BC
Nationality: Trakic
Area of expertise: Cynic
Hipparchia is best known for her philosophical discussions and her way of life, which was characterised by a lack of need and closeness to nature.
Diogenes Laertius, who mentions Hipparchia as the only woman in his collection Lives and Opinions of Famous Philosophers, reports her quick-wittedness and an argument between her and the philosopher Theodoros in which she affirms her right to pursue the study of philosophy.
Diogenes Laertius further reports that she wrote some letters, jokes and philosophical refutations which are now lost.
Hipparchia wrote phicosophical hypotheses, logical conclusions and philosophical questions to Theodoros.
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Aesara of Lucania
Lived: ca. 400 to 300 BC
Nationality: Italian
Area of expertise: Pythagorean
Aesara the Lucania was a Pythagorean philosopher who wrote a work on human nature, a fragment of which was preserved by Stobaeus. Nothing is known about the life of Aesara. Her philosophical work "Human Nature" is preserved in a one-page fragment by Stobaeus.
Aesara of Lucania speaks of the microcosm of human nature and the city-state, the principle of natural law or the order of natural laws, the laws of action and the tripartite nature of the soul:
„According to rational divine plan, being (man) is threefold: it is organised in accordance with three functions: that which effects judgment and consideration (the mind); that which produces strength and ability (the spirit); and that which brings about love and friendship (the desire). They are all arranged in relation to each other so that the best part is in charge, the weakest is ruled, and the one that lies between the two retains a middle position; it rules and is ruled. An orderly harmonious interplay of the inner forces enables the same kind of life: through education and virtue man becomes lovable. The nature of man seems to me to have served as a model for law and justice and that in the individual house as well as in the city. If you follow the traces in yourself and really search, you will make a discovery: The law and justice are within us, for they are proper provisions of the soul.“
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Catherine of Alexandria
Lived: 287 - 307
Nationality: Greek
Area of expertise: Rhetorician
Catherine of Alexandria is one of the most famous Catholic saints.
She is one of the Holy 14 Helpers of Sorrows and is regarded as a helper in cases of ailments of the tongue and speech difficulties.
Catherine of Alexandria is the patron saint of schools, philosophical faculties, seamstresses and tailors.
In Christian tradition, Saint Catherine is a young, intelligent beauty who had promised herself to Christ as a consecrated virgin.
When Caesar Maximinus condemned Christians to martyrdom, Catherine confronted him and asked him why he did not convert to Christianity instead of demanding sacrifices to idols from Christians.
In a public discussion, to which the emperor had summoned his best 50 philosophers and scholars, Catherine presented such lucid and learned arguments in favour of Christianity that all fifty converted to Christianity. Because they had failed to dissuade Catherine from the Christian faith, the emperor sent them all to the stake.
Impressed by her quick wit and beauty, the emperor offered Catherine several times to rule by his side as a mighty and highly adorned queen. However, she refused, was scourged and imprisoned in a dark dungeon for twelve days without food. However, she received divine assistance through angels who anointed the wounds and a white dove that brought food. Christ himself also came to strengthen her faith and prepare her for martyrdom. The instrument of torture for her martyrdom was to be the wheel. However, at Catherine's prayer, an angel came and destroyed the instrument of torture with such force that 4000 pagans were killed at the same time. In the end, Catherine was beheaded.
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Sosipatra of Ephesus
Lived: 300-362
Nationality: Greek
Area of expertise: Neoplatonist
Sosipatra is known only from Eunapios of Sardis' biography of the philosophers and sophists; her name is not mentioned in any other source.
Eunapios, who describes some incidents from her life, gives an impression of the extraordinary reputation she enjoyed in the circles of the Neoplatonists of Asia Minor. His detailed narrative, in which he glorifies Sosipatra, is literarily embellished and has legendary features. He attributes to Sosipatra not only qualities that were expected of a philosopher personality in late antique Neoplatonism, but also superhuman abilities.
Thus, it was reported that Sosipatra had learned all the works of poets, philosophers and orators, and was able to explain the most difficult works with ease and clarity.
Thereupon her fame spread and students flocked to her.
Eunapios contrasted the ideal figure of the philosopher with the ideal of sanctity of the Christians, with whom the Neoplatonists rivalled, as an alternative.
In Pergamon, she taught philosophy and practised theurgy (contacting the world of the gods through special ritual acts). Thus she announced some prophecies, which are said to have been fulfilled, so that the Algerian bishop Augustine felt obliged to declare for later generations that he was fighting the allegedly known correctness of the pagan prophecies.
Whether she only taught orally or also wrote works is unknown.
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Makrina the Younger
Lived: 330-379
Nationality: Asia Minor
Area of expertise: Ascetic, Doctrine of the soul
According to Gregory of Nyssa's dialogue on the soul and resurrection, Makrina's education must have included philosophy and natural science. Makrina the younger received a good manual, scholastic and intellectual education. Her brothers Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, together with their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, achieved world fame as the Cappadocians. But, as we know today, behind them stood Makrina as spiritual mother, critical advisor and theological teacher. Gregory of Nyssa writes in his work "Dialogue with Makrina on the Soul and the Resurrection" that she answered the most complicated questions with excellent theological and philosophical knowledge.
As a beautiful girl from a respected and wealthy family, she had numerous suitors. Her father betrothed her at the age of fourteen to a young rhetor from the wider family. After the early death of her fiancé, Makrina decided to remain faithful to her fiancé and to be a support to her mother, not only in the household but also, after the early death of her father, in the management of the extensive family estates.
After her mother's death, Makrina became the leader of the ascetic community of consecrated virgins in Pontus, which is said to be the first women's monastery ever, where her brother visited her after Basil's death and found her on her deathbed.
Her life is described by her brother Gregory of Nyssa in Life of Macrina and Dialogue on the Soul and Resurrection, where he portrays her as his spiritual teacher.
"And so great was Makrina's order of life, and so such the height of her philosophy, and so sublime her walk by day and by night, that words cannot tell. "
(Gregory of Nyssa)
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Hypathia of Alexandrina
Lived: 355 - 415
Nationality: Greek
Field of Expertise: Neoplatonist / Syncretism / Mathematician / Astronomy
Hypatia was the daughter of the mathematician and astronomer Theon of Alexandria and the sister of the mathematician Epiphanius.
She was taught mathematics and astronomy by her father, who belonged to the Alexandrian Museion. She received her philosophical education in the Museion and probably in the Neoplatonic school of Alexandria, of which she was later the head. Who her philosophy teacher was is unknown. According to one research hypothesis, a son of the philosopher Sosipatra, Antoninos, comes into consideration.
After completing her education, she began teaching mathematics and philosophy herself. According to the Suda, she combined rhetorical talent with a prudent, thoughtful approach. Socrates of Constantinople reports that listeners came to her from everywhere.
Damaskios reports that she wore the philosopher's cloak (tríbōon) and travelled around the city teaching publicly and interpreting the teachings of Plato or Aristotle, or indeed any other philosopher, to anyone who would listen.
Étienne Évrard interprets the formulation of Damaskios in the sense that Hypatia taught in the open street, that she presented philosophical topics, which were usually discussed in a closed circle among the relevant educated, to a relatively broad public. Such an unusual procedure, especially for a woman at that time, caused a sensation.
Hypatia was known for not shying away from deliberately provocative behaviour. This is also an indication of a Cynic element in her philosophical stance; Cynics used to shock in a calculated way in order to bring about insights.
The news, handed down by Damaskios, that Hypatia interpreted both Plato's and Aristotle's writings and generally lectured on any philosopher, indicates that she represented the syncretism prevalent in her time. The basic tenets of all philosophical directions that were considered serious at the time were assumed to be uniform.
In the astronomical observations of the time, it was assumed that the planetary orbits were determined by the perfection of the circle. Hypathia recognised that due to the varying brightness of the sun, depending on the season, the earth and thus all the planets must revolve in an ellipse around the sun.
Through Hypatia's student Synesios of Cyrene, it became known that the philosopher developed the principle of tolerance and exemplified it as a value. She assumed that the basis of the coexistence of groups with different religious convictions is difference: someone is a Jew, a Christian or a Greek. Only by becoming aware of this difference can tolerance develop on two levels. The first stage is about recognising the difference: someone has a different religious conviction than I do. The second stage builds on this: it includes the equal rights of all different groups in a society: someone can live in Alexandria as a Jew, Christian or Greek without having to give up any rights.
That she was extraordinarily revered in Alexandria is also attested to by a report handed down in the Suda. Her murder therefore caused a great stir and was also condemned by some Christian historians.
Thus Socrates Scholasticus, a contemporary of Hypatia, in his Ecclesiastical History portrayed Hypatia as follows:
"In Alexandria there lived a woman named Hypatia. She had such an outstanding education that she outshone all the philosophers of her time. Her teaching brought her to the top of the Platonic school. To the authorities she appeared frankly and with the self-confidence that her education gave her. This woman was then the victim of certain machinations. The deed brought great shame to Cyril and also to the Church of Alexandria."
In the 14th century, the Byzantine historian Nikephoros Gregoras reported that the Empress Eudokia Makrembolitissa, who lived in the 11th century, was called "a second Theano and Hypatia". From his words we can see that Hypatia lived on in the medieval Byzantine Empire as a model of an exquisitely educated woman.
"What is a circle but a special ellipse whose focal points are so close together that they appear to be one?"
"I must question what I believe in."
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Athenais (after her baptism Aelia Eudokia)
Lived: 405 - 460
Nationality: Greek / Eastern Roman
Area of expertise: Miaphysitism / Orthodoxy
Athenaïs was born in Athens as the daughter of the pagan philosopher Leontios and was considered highly educated.
On 7 June 421 she married the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II and was Byzantine Empress until 443.
Although her father had been a pagan, her actions and utterances showed a much stronger Christian mindset.
Athenaïs Eudokia herself combines paganism with Christianity, passing from the latter to the latter, and from the still ancient-philosophical Athens to the orthodox-Christian Byzantium. If such spiritual contrasts did not already make her life strange, the wonderful scenes on which it moved would do so in any case; for these are the cities of Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem."
Aelia Eudocia was instrumental in the establishment of the Christian University of Constantinople, which was built up as the so-called Athenaeum in 424 based on Constantinian beginnings and produced the collection of the compilation of laws of the Codex Theodosianus as its first great intellectual achievement.
Aelia Eudokia herself composed spiritual poetry, some of which has been preserved. She sympathised with Miaphysitism, but turned to Orthodoxy at the end of her life. She is venerated as a saint in the Orthodox Church,
In Jerusalem, she had the city walls, which now enclosed Mount Zion as well as the old City of David, rebuilt and endowed hospitals, pilgrims' hostels, monasteries and churches. It also allowed the Jews greater freedom to visit the city on special religious feast days,
Although Eudocia's work has been ignored, especially by modern scholars, she left an exemplary legacy of how the Christian faith and Greek education became intertwined and the Byzantine Empire influenced the development of the Christian world.
The Homeric Centos, which Eudocia wrote, by some modern scholars is the most popular poem analysed, as Homer was a popular choice to write a Cento.
What is special about Eudocia's Cento is that it is the longest Homeric Cento at 2344 lines. This cento is a clear representation of who and what Eudocia was and what she believed. She wrote this epic combination of poems in hexameter to add the stories from the Book of Genesis and the New Testament story of the life of Jesus Christ to the Homeric philosophy from her classical Athenian educational background.
Eudocia needed the human ancient experience to provide a reference to the Bible in a new way. She used themes from the Iliad and Odyssey because they all contain content to clarify the gospel story.
Whenever and wherever possible, Eudocia needs or uses a Homeric line or adaptation to express greatness, pain, truthfulness, deceit, beauty, sorrow, grief, recognition, understanding, fear or wonder.
Eudocia's Homeric poetry is important in understanding how she, as a woman in the early Christian Byzantine Empire with an understanding of her role as empress, combines classical Greek literature with her Christian faith in her understanding of love.
The poem "Cyprianus and Justina" by the Empress Aelia Eudokia is practically unknown to us; and as far as I know, no German translation of it has ever been attempted. Its literary value, however, is no less than this, that it is the first poetical treatment of a subject, the most modern figure of which may be called the Faustian legend.
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Hrotsvit (Roswitha) of Gandersheim
Lived: 935 - 973
Nationality: German
Field of Expertise: History of religion and philosophy
considered the first German poetess
Hrotsvit was a canoness at Gandersheim Abbey and had a considerable education, which included knowledge of some of the ancient classics such as Terence, Horace and Ovid. She read Greek and Latin. Her works also testify to extensive knowledge of the history of religion and philosophy as well as politics. She was also familiar with Pythagorean doctrine. In her poems, she most frequently used the leonine hexameter.
Her works are attributed to the "Ottonian Renaissance".
The most important manuscript of her works, which contains all texts except the Primordia, is the Codex, a manuscript written by several hands in Gandersheim at the end of the 10th or beginning of the 11th century. It was discovered by the humanist Conrad Celtis in 1491/94 in the Regensburg monastery of St. Emmeram and used as the basis for the first edition of the Opera Hrotsvvitea or Gandeshemensis, illustrated by Albrecht Dürer and published in Nuremberg in 1501.
Hrotsvite herself divided her work into three books:
The "Legend Book",
The "Drama Book",
The third book comprises two historical writings in leonine hexameters:
the "Gesta Ottonis" (Gesta Oddonis),
and the "Primordia coenobii Gandeshemensis",
Hrotsvit does not see woman as inferior to man, but triumphs over him because she is morally superior to him; for Hrotsvit, woman is the redeemer and bearer of salvation.
Her work is characterised by a great openness, touching on all subjects that a canoness might not easily be expected to deal with. History, struggle and evil, not to mention vivid erotic motifs, of which Roswitha herself said: "Freely, I was often taken by shyness before my work, burning red poured over my face, for I had to design in my mind and hold on with my pen the loathsome folly of boys and their unedifying gossip, from which we otherwise cover our ears....".
It is not only interesting from a literary-historical point of view that in one of her writings - in the Legend of Pelagius - an alliance between the devil and a human being is described for the first time. Faust's Mephisto is thus hinted at here.
It seems like an anticipation of the history of Bad Gandersheim that Roswitha devotes herself in her dramas to strong-willed female personalities, such as will be found in this place until the 18th century. She also had an unusual will for a woman of her time, namely to share her experiences, stories, legends and epics. Roswitha wrote all her works in Latin, the language of education. Her two historical epics in particular are still an important source of German history of the Ottonian Romanesque period.
Roswitha is the first German writer and intellectual to have composed Latin texts in the Middle Ages. Thus, she acquires a very great cultural significance both as a poet and playwright and as a historian.
"The human feeling mixes her
With the recommendation of the sacred virtues
And makes her a unique example
For subsequent epochs."
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Murasaki Shikibu (Tosa Mitsuoki)
Lived: 973 -1016
Nationality: Japanese
Field of Expertise: Scholarly
The birth name of Japan's first female novelist, like much else of her life, is unknown. Instead, she took the name Murasaki Shikibu (literally, Purple of Ceremony).
Murasaki spent much time writing the Genji Monogatari, but also had to devote herself to her court duties.
In 1005, Murasaki entered the service of Empress Jotomonain, which was a great honour for her, and yet Murasaki left reluctantly, returning home after a short time. Life at court was not at all as she knew it from stories and had imagined it, they were critical of her. But even when she was offended, hated and belittled by the other courtiers, she remained in her service as a lady-in-waiting at the request of the empress herself. She also received the support of Emperor (Tenno) Ichijo, who considered her so intelligent that he said she had certainly read Nihongi, one of the two ancient historical works of Japanese history written in classical Chinese. The peculiarity of this was that in the Heian period women could neither read nor write Chinese, but used the so-called women's script (onna-de). Murasaki, however, did have the ability to read Chinese.
She had to learn how to play the koto, practise calligraphic writing and entertain the empress. She instructed the empress not only in the works recommended by ministers and the emperor, but also secretly in collections of poems in which Murasaki saw the possibility of making the empress into a woman of the highest moral standards, which her father Michinaga greatly welcomed.
In autumn 1008, she began the Murasaki Shikibu nikki, which described her life at court and the time before and after the birth of Crown Prince Atsuhira.
With her sensitive differentiation of the characters in her works, especially her main work: the Genji Monogatari, and their interconnection into a subtle system of thoughts and feelings, she thereby develops aesthetic, existential and religious dimensions that are also of philosophical significance.
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Anna Komnena of Byzantium
Lived: 1083 -1154
Nationality: Greek
Field of expertise: Christian Aristotelianism
Anna was very interested in the natural sciences and had studied medicine in addition to the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music). She also wrote a treatise on gout and ran a hospital in Constantinople. Anna also studied philosophy and was a follower of Christian Aristotelianism, which bore Neoplatonic traits.
Thus, a remarkable flowering of Aristotelianism emanated from a philosophical circle maintained by the emperor's daughter Anna Komnene, who was excluded from political life.
Around 1123, Anna, like her husband, devoted herself to writing history.
In her work of history, the Alexiade (or Alexias), written after 1137 and until at least 1148, the highly educated Anna describes the career of her father Alexios in 15 books, more precisely the years from 1069 to 1118. It is also a supplement to the work of her husband Nikephoros (Hyle Historias), who had described the period from Romanus IV Diogenes to Nikephoros Botaniates, but was unable to complete his work due to his wound and death.
Anna herself claims to have witnessed a number of events herself and to have relied on the accounts of warriors who had accompanied the emperor on his campaigns. She had access to archives as well as numerous eyewitnesses.
Anna drew portraits of the most important participants in the First Crusade, such as Bohemund I of Taranto and Count Raimund IV of Toulouse.
Anna lived in a time when women were expected above all to remain quiet in their quarters (called gyneceum) and to concentrate their participation in life exclusively on family matters. In public, they covered their faces with a veil and were not even allowed to take part in processions. However, in Anna Komnena's work, she also reveals herself as a woman who was given the remarkable licence to write what she thought.
Thus, Anna Komnena's historical work is entirely committed to her education, strongly based on ancient models, especially Thucydides and Polybios. However, her work also contains quotations from Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, John of Epiphaneia and many others.
In general, the source value of the work, which is also literarily sophisticated, is considered very high in modern research and is thus an important corrective to the Latin sources. However, it is not always objective towards the participants of the Crusade.
It represents the most comprehensive and, overall, also the most reliable source for Byzantine history at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries.
The written history of history forms a very strong bulwark against the tide of time, and to some extent it checks its irresistible tide and, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over, secures them and binds them, and does not allow them to fall into the abyss of oblivion.
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Heloisa dÀrgentuil
Lived: 1094 -1164
Nationality: French
Field of expertise: Eros / Love
Heloise was a brilliant scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew and had an excellent reputation for her intelligence and insight. Abaelard writes that she was nominatissima, "the most renowned" for her gift of reading and writing. She was famous throughout Western Europe for her erudition and was the wife of the philosopher and theologian Peter Abaelard and abbess of the women's convent Paraclete, founded on Cistercian and Fontevraldensian models and exegetically underpinned by Abaelard's writings.
Around 1116/1117 Heloise met and fell in love with Peter Abaelard. Abaelard, a lecturer in dialectics in Paris, initially hired himself out as Heloise's tutor and the two entered into a passionate but concealed love affair. After some time, however, the affair was discovered. Abaelard had his mistress, who had meanwhile become pregnant by him, secretly taken to Le Pallet, where she gave birth to their son Astralabius.
Heloisa was married to her lover against her will, but in accordance with the requirements of canon law, thus retroactively legitimising the previous birth and initially avoiding a public scandal. However, in the same year, his revenge-seeking uncle Fulbert had Abaelard castrated. He survived the mutilation and retired as a monk to the monastery of Saint-Denis. He instructed Heloisa to retire to the convent of nuns in Argenteuil, thus making her remarriage impossible in the event of a subsequent divorce.
In 1129, contact between Heloisa and Abaelard was revived. The 32-year-old nun finally found a new home with a group of nuns in Abaelard's abandoned hermitage Paraklet near Nogent-sur-Seine. Heloisa built up a new convent of women there as prioress and later as abbess, which lived according to an attenuated Benedictine rule, partly according to Abaelard's suggestions. The convent grew rapidly under Heloisa's wise leadership and until her death resulted in 5 priories and 1 daughter monastery. Abaelard remained in contact with Heloisa and the monastery as an advisor until his death.
The couple's correspondence made them famous. In it, Heloisa proved to be not only a woman of extraordinary intellect and heart, but also a gifted writer in the subtlety and elegance of her formulations, as later confirmed by a contemporary (Hugo Metellus from Toulouse).
After a brief happiness together, separated for life and yet one heart and soul, even beyond bodily death. A couple of such intensity of thought and feeling that no second ever equalled it...
"Partners must respect each other
And treat each other
As if she and he were the best thing on earth."
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Hildegard of Bingen (Sybille of the Rhine)
Lived: 1098 -1179
Nationality: German
Field: Mystic / Scholar
Hildegard von Bingen is regarded as the first, but not typical, representative of German mysticism in the Middle Ages. Her works deal with religion, medicine, music, ethics and cosmology. An extensive correspondence, including harsh admonitions to even high-ranking contemporaries, and reports on extensive pastoral journeys, including public preaching, have been preserved. The fact that this was possible for a woman in medieval society can be explained by the fact that her prophetic self-image was shared by those around her. In the Roman Catholic Church she is venerated as a saint.
The naturopath and abbess Hildegard von Bingen was the most important German mystic. Her mystical-prophetic visions, her firm faith, her exemplary life and her charismatic appearance made the Trumpet of God a revered popular saint even during her lifetime. Her works open up a holistic view of man and creation, in which theological, cosmological, natural history and spiritual aspects are interwoven in a fascinating way.
Hildegard had numerous visions in the course of her life. In 1141 she experienced an apparition which she understood as a commission from God to record her experiences. About this experience - and uncertain about what it meant - she became ill. In her theological writing Liber Scivias (Know the Ways), which gathers her visions, Hildegard describes her inner struggle:
"But I, although I heard these things, refused for a long time to write them down - out of doubt and disbelief and because of the multiplicity of human words, not out of obstinacy, but because I followed humility and did so until the scourge of God felled me and I fell into a sick bed; then, moved at last by many kinds of sickness I gave my hand to writing. While I was doing it, I felt the deep meaning of the Holy Scriptures; and I thus raised myself from the illness by the strength I received and brought this work to its end - just so - in ten years. And I spoke and wrote these things not from the invention of my heart or of any other person, but by the secret mysteries of God, as I heard and received them from the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from heaven, and it said unto me, Lift up thy voice, and write thus."
A recognised scholar, she eventually founded the Rupertsberg monastery on the Rupertsberg on the left bank of the Nahe between 1147 and 1150. The preserved art objects, especially the gold-purple antependium, bear witness to Rupertsberg's former wealth.
In 1152, Archbishop Heinrich finally confirmed the transfer of the monastery estates, which had become very extensive due to Hildegard's reputation. This increasing wealth also affected the life of the monastery and provoked criticism. Several clergymen, but also leaders of other monasteries, for example Master Tengswich of Andernach, attacked Hildegard because her nuns allegedly lived luxuriously, contrary to the monastic commandment of poverty, and only women from noble families were accepted.
Since the number of nuns in the Rupertsberg monastery was constantly increasing, Hildegard acquired the Augustinian monastery in Eibingen in 1165 and founded a branch monastery there where non-nobles could enter. She appointed a prioress there and reserved the dignity of abbess for herself.
Because of her faith and her way of life, she became a guide for many people. Even during her lifetime, many called her a saint. Hildegard justified this view by repeatedly referring to visions for her theological and philosophical statements. In this way, she secured her teachings against the doctrine that women were not capable of theological knowledge on their own. She described herself as "uneducated".
Above all, it is the three theological works that established her fame at the time. Her main work:
Scivias ("Know the Ways") is a doctrine of faith in which the image of the world and the image of man are inseparably interwoven with the image of God. The overall philosophical-theological view, which corresponds in all essential points to the official church doctrine of the time, is presented in 26 visions.
The second visionary work: Liber Vitae Meritorum ("Book of the Merits of Life") could be described as a visionary ethic. In it, 35 vices and virtues are contrasted.
The third book: Liber Divinorum Operum (The Book of God's Work) is Hildegard's vision of the world and man. Here she describes the order of creation according to the medieval microcosm-macrocosm conception as something in which body and soul, world and church, nature and grace are placed in the responsibility of man. In this way, she also created an early form of homo signorum.
As abbess, she had to look after the nuns, not only as a superior, but also as a pastor. But Hildegard did not only have an open ear for her nuns. Crowds of people flocked to her for advice, especially for physical ailments.
In the records, Hildegard is mainly mentioned as a "healer". With her belief in viriditas and the prescription of natural remedies and the "sensible way of life", she also succeeded in actually curing the sick.
Between 1120 and 1160, Hildegard worked on her Encyclopaedia of Natural History: Liber Simplicis Medicinae secundum creationem, also called Healing Power of Nature, "Physica", the book on the inner essence of the various natures of creatures.
Schott published it in Strasbourg in 1533 and called it "Physica". It was her most scientific work and was used as a textbook at the Montpellier medical school. "Physica" and her later medical book: Causae et Curae (Origin and Treatment of Diseases or Book of Compound Remedies, on Signs and Cures of the Sick) was, like other medieval treatises on natural science topics, divided into books and chapters and written in a direct style. Hildegard described a total of 300 plant species. Among the animals, she treated birds, insects, mammals and also worms and the fish found in the Rhine and Nahe rivers.
Her image of God and man as well as her macrocosm in the form of the universe and her microcosm in the form of the human body are also philosophically relevant.
The collection of sacred songs by Hildegard von Bingen, which has come down to us under the name Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum ("Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Apparitions") contains 77 liturgical chants with melodies in diasthematic new notation as well as the liturgical drama Ordo virtutum, which has been preserved in text and musical notation, the range of chants includes antiphons, responsories, hymns, sequences, a curia, an alleluia and two symphoniae.
The so-called Giant Codex, formerly also called the "Codex with the Chain", is the central legacy of Hildegard of Bingen. Not only its enormous size, which is very unusual for a medieval manuscript, have made it a veritable relic and icon of her spirit over the centuries. The reason for this is also the idea of an encyclopaedically ordered complete edition of Hildegard's writings, which was also unusual for the Middle Ages and which underlies the codex. Today it is kept in the Landesbibliothek in Wiesbaden.
„A wind blew from a high mountain and set in motion with its blowing a small feather, which of itself had no ability to fly, but only received it through the wind. Doubtless Almighty God caused this to happen, in order to show what He is able to work through a being which of itself would not have the least confidence."
Hildegard von Bingen will be canonised on 10 May 2012!
She was elevated to the rank of Doctor of the Church on 7 October 2012.
"Heavenly happiness when I look with open eyes,
What you, my God, have created
I already possess heaven here."
"Without woman, man could not be called man; without man, woman could not be called woman."
"The Lord does not want us to destroy our bodies."
"Man should first consider all his works in his heart before he performs them."
"It is our divine right
To decide for ourselves."
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Herrad of Landsberg (Hohenburg), also Herradis Landbergensis
Lived: 1125 -1195
Nationality: German
Field of expertise: Writer / Scholar
Herrad von Landsberg was abbess of the Hohenburg monastery on the Odilienberg from 1167 to 1195 and achieved great fame as author and illustrator of the Hortus Deliciarum, which summarised the spiritual and profane knowledge of the High Middle Ages for the nuns of the Hohenburg monastery in Latin and is the first encyclopaedia verifiably written by a woman.
Illustrated with 350 miniatures, the encyclopaedic work in Latin summarises the theological and profane knowledge of the time for the instruction of the convent women. Many of the miniatures are symbolic representations of theological, philosophical and literary themes, some are historical, some depict scenes from the artists' current experience and others are a collection of portraits of their sisters in the religious convent community.
Thus, the septem artes liberales (The Seven Liberal Arts) traditionally shows the education befitting a free man. The liberal arts were so designated in order to value them as superior to the practical arts (Artes mechanicae). Seneca writes in his 88th letter: Quare liberalia studia dicta sunt vides: quia homine libero digna sunt (You see why the liberal arts are so called: because they are worthy of a free man). A free man was one who did not have to work for a living. Thus, only those occupations that had no connection with gainful employment could be worthy. In the liberal arts, a distinction was made between the trivium (three-way) of the linguistic and logical-argumentative subjects, which form the prerequisite for any occupation with (Latin) science, and the more advanced quadrivium (four-way) of the mathematical subjects.
The original was burnt in 1870 during the siege of Strasbourg (where it had been deposited since 1723) during the Franco-Prussian War; only tracings (including a facsimile from 1818 that is now almost as valuable) have survived. Beginning with the nature and attributes of God, the creation of the angels and the fall of Lucifer, the depiction of the Zodiac and the passage of time follows, depicting man as a macrocosm in the midst of the four elements.
The seven-planet doctrine, represented in the nimbus of the just-created human being, shows the difference between medieval symbolic thinking and our present rational-logical, scientifically supported world view.
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Beatrijs of Nazareth (also Beatrix van der Aa; van Lie; van Bloemendaal)
Lived: 1200 - 29.08.1268
Nationality: Flemish
Area of expertise: Mystic
Beatrijs' life story is known from a medieval Latin vita, the "Vita Beatricis", written by an unknown clergyman who based it on Beatrijs' lost records, the Liber Vitae (Book of Life). It was Beatrice's diary, written between 1217 and 1235, in which she recorded her mystical experiences. Although Beatrice had enjoyed a good education and was certainly more than familiar with Latin, she wrote this Liber Vitae in her vernacular.
In 1236 she came to the convent of Nazareth. There she was elected prioress, a post she held until her death.
Beatrijs wrote a mystical work in the Flemish language: "Seven manieren van minne" (Seven ways of love), which deals with various aspects of spiritual experience. In this work, one can trace influences from the love mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, in which she places greater emphasis on the intellect and its use in the mystical ascent of the soul.
With this work, Beatrijs is the first to use the vernacular for a religio-literary work and thus stands at the beginning of Middle Dutch literature.
Of the seven types of holy disadvantages which contain the core of Beatrice of Nazareth's mystical teachings: she writes about the ascent into mystical love (God's love). Here she distinguishes seven types of experience: purifying love, serving love, the insatiable longing for full love, mystical joyful love, stormy love, victorious love and the transition into eternal love. It is a small tract of about five hundred prose verse lines that she probably wrote during her stay at the monastery of Nazareth. The work has its own mystical terminology. The original manuscript has been lost, but there are three copies which survive: the oldest dates from the mid-fourteenth century and the youngest from the mid-fifteenth century.
Beatrijs' philosophy is best explained by their image of man, which is most closely related to their views on God, the soul and the world. The human soul is originally an image of God.
Among the
Natural gifts of the soul
Include a
Perceptive reason and a noble pride,
So that the soul should keep away from evil
And direct itself towards the higher,
That is, towards God,
Who in the Neoplatonic manner,
Following the example of Augustine,
Is called the highest good. Also
Kindness, generosity and
The will to spare one's neighbour,
Should be among the natural gifts.
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Mechthild of Magdeburg (Helfta)
Lived: 1207 - 1282
Nationality: German
Area of expertise: Mystic
Mechthild of Magdeburg is one of the most important mystics of Central Europe.
Around the age of 20, she moved to Magdeburg, or more precisely the poor quarters of Magdeburg, where she took care of the outcasts and abandoned of society as a Beguine around 1230, where she lived as a Beguine according to the Rule of St. Dominic for over 30 years. Around 1250, at the encouragement of her confessor Heinrich von Halle, she began to write about the delights and torments of her mystical experiences with God. Heinrich von Halle compiled her notes, written in Middle Low German, into the first six of a total of seven books of the "Flowing Light of Divinity". The sensation she caused with this writing and her contemporary critique of real religious life, the Church and the world probably prompted her to spend the last years of her life in seclusion in the Cistercian monastery of Helfta. There she met, among others, the young Gertrud of Helfta. She lived in the monastery for another 12 years and added an eighth book to her records during this time.
In her work "Das fließende Licht der Gottheit" (The Flowing Light of Divinity), which comprises seven parts, Mechthild uses images from the Song of Songs and Minnesang to describe the mystical marriage of the soul with Christ. She is influenced by Bernard of Clairvaux, David of Augsburg, Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great, among others. Mechthild's writings are considered one of the most impressive examples of German women's mysticism and show the height of women's education in the Middle Ages.
Mechthild drew her spiritual strength from love, which she described in detail in her book "The Flowing Light of the Godhead". Mechthild is one of the first thinkers to give a differentiated philosophical account of different types of love and their significance for human beings.
Mechthild distinguishes 16 different types of love. She is primarily concerned with true love of divine wisdom, but she is also aware of sensual love. She understood love first and foremost as a gift from God that shapes people's lives and gives them the strength to survive turbulence. Those who love, believe in themselves and lose their inner alienation.
The Low German original of her text has not come down to us. What we do have is an Upper German transmission that was written between 1343 and 1345 in the circle of the Basel Friends of God around Heinrich von Nördlingen. This manuscript is now in the Einsiedeln Abbey Library. In addition, several other surviving excerpts or fragments attest to a certain, albeit not very broad, medieval reception of Mechthild's work. In addition, Mechthild's work was translated into Latin at an early date. An extensive manuscript of this version has also survived, which contains the first six books of the "Flowing Light", although the texts are arranged differently.
Mechthild's writings are the first testimonies of German mysticism written in Low German and are considered one of the most impressive examples of German women's mysticism and show the height of women's education in the Middle Ages.
"Whatever a man does,
If he is not truthful, do not trust him."
"Foolishness finds pleasure in itself,
Wisdom can never ask enough questions."
"I dance when Thou leadest me."
"Prayer makes a bitter heart sweet,
A sad heart glad, a poor heart rich,
A foolish heart wise,
A timid heart bold, a weak heart strong,
A blind heart seeing.
It draws the great God into a small heart.
It drives the hungry soul up
To the God of fullness."
"Wisdom is always with love,
Is mistress of all virgins.
She keeps whatever love grants,
Makes useful what man reads or teaches."
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Hadewijch of Antwerp
Lived: ca. 1210 - 1260
Nationality: Dutch
Area of expertise: Love and Minnemystic
Hadewijch of Antwerp was the first female poet in the history of Dutch literature and one of the most important authors in Middle Dutch. Hadewijch is also one of the first mystical authors in the Netherlands.
In a recent study, Daniel Devreese (2010) identifies with some historical arguments that Hadewijch was born as a certain Hadewid Greca before 1187. She lived in a group of nuns before moving to the Weyngaert Merksem crypt in 1212, which was supervised by the monastery of Villers. She lived there until about 1230.
There is no historical source about the real life span of Hadewijch.
She must have enjoyed a good education and been a very well-educated woman. She was familiar with Latin texts (mystical literature, Vulgate translation of the Bible) and well read with the most important theologians of the time (Augustine, Gregory, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint-Thierry and Richard of St. Victor). In addition, she was familiar with courtly manners and customs.
Hadewijch wrote in Latin or French, but in a variant of Middle Brabant, including the current provinces - Northern, Flemish and Walloon Brabant and Antwerp.
Recent research has shown that Hadewijch must have had a very musical talent. At first, her verses were recognised as poems, but these were mostly tunes, which made her famous. These tunes were often used by northern French minstrels in the thirteenth century. In her own creative way she used rhyme schemes and rhyming words.
From various sources it can be deduced that Hadewijch presided over and lived as the spiritual leader of a group of Beguine nuns.
Hadewijch's works have been preserved in their entirety in three manuscripts. Two old manuscripts come from the Rooklooster in Brussels (second half of the 14th century). They are kept in the Royal Library of Brussels. A third manuscript is said to come from the Bethlehem Herent monastery in Leuven (end of the 14th century). It is in the library of the University of Ghent. A fourth manuscript contains only part of her work (early 16th century). It is kept in the library of the Ruusbroec Fellowship in Antwerp.
These manuscripts contain: 14 visions, 45 songs of stanzaic poems, 31 letters and 16 letters of rhyme or Mengele poems.
Hadewijch's mystical visions are linked to Christian faith and symbolism, and in them one naturally finds strong similarities with the great mystics from other cultures and religions. Hadewijch, however, gives them a special colour with her Christian religious experience. She does this freely and proudly, without the feeling of being bound to church teachings and convictions. This is what makes Hadewijch so special.
These visions, like her other texts, help Hadewijch to fulfill her spiritual quest for the inner self.
Most scholars assume that the fourteen visions describe Hadewijch's development, which she experienced spiritually: the process of spiritual growth.
Hadewijch's ideas exerted little influence in her time until a later Dutch mystic, Jan van Ruusbroec adopted and popularised her doctrine of the Trinity and other core ideas (without mentioning her name). Ruusbroec himself was translated and read in many languages, which had a great influence on the wider Catholic traditions. Even though Hadewijch herself was little read until modern times, her ideas indirectly influenced many great thoughts to come.
Love mysticism has, besides a great emotionality, a strong ethical and also intellectual character.
Virtue and reason both play an important role. Ethics and reason are inseparable.
The path to the mystical union of the soul with God leads through following the human life of Jesus Christ.
This ethical path of virtue, which also implies suffering and tribulation, is equally the path of reason.
„The rational soul is created in the image
Of God and has 3 functions:
1. memory and consciousness
2. intelligence
3. the will."
"The soul has two eyes:
Love & Reason."
"In the deepest depths of the soul
The fiery wheel of God's love turns."
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Mechthild of Hackeborn
Lived: 1241 - 1299
Nationality: German
Area of expertise: Mystic
Mechthild kept her mystical experiences secret until she was 50 years old.
Her revelations were published by two fellow sisters on the instructions of the abbess Sophie von Querfurt in the "Liber specialis gratiae" (The Book of Special Grace) in the Latin language. The appendix of the five-part work reports on the last days of the lives of Mechthild and Gertrud of Hackeborn. Presumably Gertrud von Helfta was involved in the writing of the script, which was copied and revised by hand and published in 1877 in two volumes under the title "Revelationes Gertrudianae et Mechtildianae" (The Revelations of Gertrud and Mechtild) appeared in print.
The Liber specialis gratiae, (Book of Special Grace) contains her visions of bridal mysticism, the Unio mystica as summa experientia, supreme experience, in addition to that of the wounds of love, the veneration of the Heart of Jesus, (via ευχαριστειν Eucharist - to give thanks, brings to mind the salvific dying of Jesus Christ.) It is rich in allegories such as that of the Fountain of Virtue or the Garden of the Heart, as well as numerical symbolism.
As a feat of asceticism, to commemorate the Passion of Christ, she placed broken pieces in her bed and rolled in them until she was dripping with blood, thus averting the wrath of God.
She was often questioned about the fate of the deceased. Miraculous healings are also reported, for example, she helped a blind sister to see again.
After initially attracting a great deal of attention in the 16th century, her own work "The Book of Streaming Praise" disappears completely behind the above-mentioned Gertrude Book, which became popular.
In it, she nourishes God not through abstraction from the senses, but through the use of all the senses towards God, in ever greater conformity with the senses of the God-man. Not spiritualisation away from the world, but communion of the created with the uncreated will through perfect virginal yes is the way.
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Angela of Foligno
Lived: 1248 - 1309
Nationality: Italian
Area of expertise: Mystic
She belonged to the Third Order of Franciscans and is considered an important mystic of the order.
Angeela's penitential practices and austerities were rewarded with revelations, visions and gifts of grace such as had not been seen for centuries. In 1291 she became a Franciscan tertiary and remained so even after the death of all her relatives. She sold her possessions and now lived in poverty and penance.
She now gathered her many disciples and followers in the Cenacolo, Communion Hall, in the Franciscan monastery not far from her home, which she founded after 1285, where men and women, clergy and laity gathered to pursue paths of progressive religious life and social engagement.
More and more mystical experiences and proofs of grace now came to Angela. Her visions were recorded by Fra Arnaldo in the Liber de vera fidelium experientia, the book of the true experience of faith, and verified and confirmed by the Church. Angela describes mystical experience, drawing ever closer to Christ until the soul unites with Him in love and pain, enabling the experience of God as Ognibene, the highest perfection.
Angela, who was influenced early on by Franciscan theology, is considered one of the most important mystics in this context. The theme of God's encounter with the human soul is a leitmotif of her writings.
"One must know,
That God comes into the soul at times,
Without being asked
Or even wished for."
*
Marguerite Porete
Lived: 1255 - 1310
Nationality: French
Area of expertise: Mystic
Little is known about Margaret's life. It can be deduced from her educational background that she came from the upper classes.
At an unknown time, she had joined the Beguine movement, an emancipatory religious form of life that had arisen almost simultaneously in various places in Europe in the second half of the 12th century.
On 11 April 1310, she was condemned as a heretic by 21 theologians in the church of Saint-Mathurin in Paris. A total of fifteen sentences of her writing, taken out of context and sounding heretical, had formed the basis for the condemnation of Margaret, who herself refused to comment or recant.
On 1 June 1310, Whit Monday, after being handed over to the secular authorities as a relapsed heretic (relapsa) on 30 May, she was burned at the stake in the Place de Gèrve in Paris.
Marguerite's famous work Mirouer des simples Ames (Mirror of the Simple Soul) was written before 1296.
The Mirror of Simple Souls Who Persist Only in Desiring and Longing for Love (Mirouer des simples Ames aneanties et qui seulement demourent en Desir et Vouloir d'Amour) was written in Old French. It was widely read after Margaret's death, was translated into Latin and later into four other languages.
The writing is a textbook of love mysticism, structured in the form of a dialogue, which describes the path of the soul through seven stages to perfection. Under the guidance of divine love, the soul, as a disciple of the Godhead, progresses from the valley of humility through the level of truth to the mountain of minne to perfect union with God in love, which means perfect freedom.
This idea of freedom in particular was interpreted as immoral by the representatives of the Church, condemned and burned at the stake in Paris.
Margareta's thinking revolves around the ascent of the soul to God. She sees the ascent as a return to an original state in which the soul originally found itself before it separated from God.
What is striking is the close proximity of Margaret's theological positions to those of Meister Eckhart, who was her contemporary. For example, in Margaret's view, the soul exists eternally because of its consubstantiality with God, and is therefore not created in time; this corresponds to Eckhart's doctrine of the eternity of the soul's ground.
In the "Mirror of Simple Souls", reason is mentioned on almost every page. Porete is harsh in his criticism of it:
"Reason understands only the gross and leaves aside the subtle; those who obey it live in slavery".
"Reason is unfree and self-absorbed. Even a donkey would not know what to do with what its followers teach".
"No one arrives at a deep foundation nor even at a high building, unless he arrives at it with the acuteness of the powerful natural sense and by the subtlety of the light of spiritual insight."
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Gertrude of Helfta, the Great
Lived: 06.01.1256 - 1301/2
Nationality: German
Field: Mystic
At the age of 5 Gertrud entered the convent school of Helfta near Eisleben in the province of Saxony.
The very gifted and creative child learned the liberal arts with zeal, almost impetuosity, and with great success. Among them, Latin and music were particularly important for nuns. The abundance and fluency that Gertrudis gained in Latin, as evidenced by her "Spiritual Exercises" written in Latin, aroused a fair amount of astonishment and reminded one of a famous Benedictine predecessor: Hrotsuita of Gandersheim.
At the age of 26, on 27 January 1282, she had her key religious experience, a first vision in which she saw herself called by Christ into his special discipleship.
Hereupon Gertrudis turned from the liberal arts to purely spiritual studies; she exchanged grammar and secular literature, in which she had lost herself too much, according to her own views, for theology.
Gertrud's love for Jesus was great, but her love for people was just as strong. For hours she was a listener, counsellor and comforter to the people around her. At the same time, she was a highly educated and artistically gifted woman.
As an important mystic, theologian and linguistic artist, she is one of the outstanding women of the Middle Ages; she is the only German female saint to bear the epithet "the Great".
Through her, her teacher Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207-1284/92) and her fellow sister Mechthild of Hackeborn) (1241-1298) became mystics too.
Helfta is considered the "crown of German nunneries."
Gertrude's mystical life was always characterised by a pleasant simplicity, calmness, evenness, strength of soul and mildness. Her power of thought and will are always pushing towards perfection. The feeling of inadequacy faithfully accompanies the striving soul, and likewise an ever-awake eagerness to be a buster, which in its fire melts out impatience and vanity, for example. Humility, open-heartedness, patience and all-embracing love shine out in Gertrud.
She thirsts for spiritual perfection; she never rests in self-satisfied enjoyment of the graces; indeed, these do not even deprive her of the conviction that she is not worthy to be carried by the earth. She does not regard her pardon at all as a personal distinction or even as a reward; she only believes that she has the task of an example from which one may learn how graciously God's human kindness condescends even to the most unworthy creature, the task of a herald of the God-Man‘s heart of the all-merciful Saviour.
From such faith flows her respect and pure, strong love for her fellow human beings, deep tenderness without cloying softness. She is full of compassion, even for suffering animals, which she does not forget in addition to her sublime contemplation. The synopsis of the individual traits of Gertrud's inner life, which the "Messenger" describes or hints at in the first book, allows us to perceive her life in the full light of the Holy Gospel.
The spiritual, lively, strong-willed saint corresponds so well to what her Rule in the 72nd chapter demands of good zeal.
As she looks into this mirror, so she also looks out of it.
Further mystical experiences deepened her relationship with Christ in the following years. Gertrud now developed, as the centre of the Helfta circle of theologians, a lively literary activity:
she translated parts of the Bible into German, wrote numerous prayers, as well as her two major works, the Exercitia spiritualia (Spiritual Exercises) and - with the support of fellow sisters – the Legatus divinae pietatis (Messenger of Divine Love).
Later, together with a fellow sister whose name is unknown, she wrote in the Liber specialis gratiae (Book of special grace) the revelations of Mechthild von Hackeborn.
In her literary work, Gertrud developed a theology of her own with great linguistic skill, writing a mystical "summa" of the theology and religious speculation of her time. At the centre is the comprehensive message of "God-love" that reaches into cosmic dimensions.
Rarely in the history of Christianity has God been seen so exclusively as Love as in Gertrude.
The incomparable dignity of every human being is derived from the longing of the loving God for human beings, especially from the incarnation of God.
Prayer has great power,
Which a person performs
To the best of his ability.
It makes a bitter heart sweet,
A sad heart glad,
A poor one rich,
A foolish one wise,
A despondent bold,
A weak one strong,
A blind seeing,
A cold one burning.
It draws the great God
Into a small heart.
It lifts the hungry soul
Up to God, the living source,
And brings together two lovers:
God and the soul.
"Too much closeness sometimes prevents
From seeing each other clearly."
"The Lord much prefers to take the good will of a sincere heart
Than great works without a sincere intention."
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Birgitta (Birgersdotter) of Sweden
Lived: 1302 - 1373
Nationality: Swedish
Area of expertise: Mystic
It was Birgitta's wish to enter a monastery from an early age. Even as a child, Birgitta is said to have experienced several visions: When she was seven years old, the Virgin Mary appeared to her and placed a golden crown on her head. At the age of eight, the crucified Christ appeared to her for the first time.
At the age of thirteen, however, Birgitta was married to the 18-year-old Ademar Ulf Gudmarsson.
In 1339, Birgitta and her husband Ulf went on their first pilgrimage to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway. Two years later they made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. On the journey home, Ulf fell ill and died in Alvastra in 1344. There Birgitta experienced new revelations and felt called to be a "bride of Christ and His mouthpiece". She founded a new religious community and establish a monastery in Vadstena on Lake Vättern in Sweden. So in 1349 she founded the Order of the Redeemer there, today usually called Birgitten. In the same year she left Sweden and moved to Rome.
In 1370, Pope Urban V gave his permission to found the Order of the Redeemer. Two years later, Birgitta went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem at the age of 69. On 23 July 1373 she died in her residence at the Piazza Farnese in Rome.
On 7 October 1391, Birgitta was canonised by Pope Boniface IX. Pope John Paul II elevated her to Patroness of Europe on 1 October 1999, together with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein.
Her visions had a great influence on piety and the way biblical scenes are depicted in the visual arts.
Albrecht Dürer depicted the infant Jesus lying on the naked ground, not in the manger, but as in Birgitta's vision. In the works of the painter and Dürer-contemporary Matthias Grünewald, there are also several references to her visions. This applies just as much to the Isenheim Altarpiece as to the Stuppach Madonna created afterwards. Birgitta of Sweden's visions can also be traced back to the type of nativity scene depicting the Mother of God adoring the Child.
Three of her works have been published: Opera minora, Revelaciones extravagantes and Regula Sancti Salvatoris.
In 1502 her „Puch der himmlischen offenbarungen der heiligen wittiben von dem kunigreich Sweden“ was published in German in Nuremberg. The state of the Church around that year gave her records an unheard-of topicality. This was further intensified by the Immaculata controversy prevailing around this time.
She emphasised the unity of the eternal triune God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) the three persons were consubstantial and each person was present in every other person, one will, one wisdom, one power, one virtue, one love and one joy.
In 1391, Pope Boniface IX canonised the mystic. On 1 October 1999, St. John Paul II proclaimed Birgitta co-patroness of Europe.
„What is God but life and loveliness, shining light, everlasting goodness, judging justice and healing mercy?"
"There can be nothing more lovely than to rejoice in one's neighbour's happiness and to wish for him what one wishes for oneself."
"He is truly wise who knows only one word: Love."
*
Juliana of Norwich
Lived: 1342 - 1413
Nationality: English
Area of expertise: Mystic
Juliana of Norwich was probably a reclusant at the church of St Julian in Norwich and experienced 16 mystical openings about the life of Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity during a serious illness in 1373.
Twenty years later she reported on them in her book Revelations of Divine Love.
The most important source about her origins and circumstances are the details given in the Revelations of Divine Love. Her writings suggest a sound biblical and also theological knowledge. Her revelations have been written down in two versions: A shorter transcript is commonly dated earlier and still contains many biographical details and particulars, while the later, second transcript, has been worked through theologically. In this second writing, everything is directed towards God's will of salvation towards all people.
Her desire to share in suffering springs from a sense of solidarity, both with the suffering Jesus and with those who mourn for him. Moreover, her consciousness of suffering is active because it does not lead to self-sacrifice but turns into a feeling of joy.
She said, that the fundamental life cycles of creation, rebirth, redemption and providence also correspond with the cycles of natural and supernatural life.
Since God has maternal aspects, and the human soul is a part of God, all human beings can be ascribed these maternal aspects.
"All things will be good and all things will be well, and all kinds of things will be good."
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Catherine of Siena
Lived: 1347 - 1380
Nationality: Italian
Area of expertise: Mystic
Catherine had her first vision as a seven-year-old child: She saw Jesus Christ and the apostles Peter, Paul and John above the roof of the Dominican church.
At the age of twelve, she was to be married, but refused because she had vowed virginal celibacy for the sake of Christ. At sixteen she entered the Third Order of the Dominicans against the will of her parents. She devoted herself intensively to prayer, the care of the sick and the welfare of the poor.
It was only through a renewed vision of Christ that she stepped out of her secluded life. In addition to ecclesiastical questions, she also spoke out on political and social issues - extremely unusual and sensational for a woman at that time.
Out of her religious understanding, she also developed a political effectiveness. She gave public speeches and - when she felt it necessary because of her connection to the church - also sharply criticised those in positions of responsibility in the church and in politics. Soon her reputation spread throughout Europe and people from all countries asked her for advice - including even the Pope, whom she did not spare but prophetically rebuked. However, rebellion against papal authority was alien to her.
On 1 April 1375, she was stigmatised in front of a cross in Pisa: the stigmata of Jesus are said to have miraculously appeared on her body, although they could only be seen by Catherine herself.
In 1376, Catherine travelled to Avignon. She convinced Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome. A year later, the Great Schism began, with Catherine supporting Pope Urban VI. At his request, she moved to Rome. From there she fought for the unity of the Church and for a peace settlement in crisis-ridden Italy.
In 1461 Catherine was canonised and in 1939 she was named patron saint of Italy. In 1970, Pope Paul VI elevated her to the rank of Doctor of the Church; in 1999, she was elevated to the rank of Patroness of Europe by John Paul II, together with Edith Stein and Birgitta of Sweden.
St. Caterina of Siena's texts are filled with deep faith, enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God and devoted love for Christ's Church. She does not shy away from taking up conflictual themes and prophetically addresses people from different walks of life, including popes, bishops and princes. The reading of her writings can also be of help to people today who are striving for spiritual deepening.
The goal, closeness to God, is symbolised by three lights:
The general light that people already possess, which lives in the general love for their fellow human beings and for God. The other two lights can only be acquired by those who strive for perfection, both are rooted in the light of reason.
One, the second, is the special light given to those people who chastise their bodies and thus prevent their sensuality from ruling their reason.
The third light is the most perfect; at this level man participates in the divine truth and has reason to rejoice in everything.
St Catherine of Siena says "to those who take offence at what happens to them and rebel against it":
"Everything proceeds from love, everything is ordered towards the salvation of man. God does nothing except with this end in view."
"May God grant that we may not be deprived of the light which makes us know the truth."
"Through dialogue man experiences the connection between truth and love, and the path to his true destiny, love, is shown."
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Dorothea Bucca
Lived: 1360 - 1436
Nationality: Italy
Field of Expertise: Moral Philosophy
Bucca proclaimed her laureata (doctorate) in 1390 and was appointed professor at the University of Bologna, occupying a chair of internal medicine and moral philosophy for almost 40 years.
In those days medicine was still very unscientific overloaded with magic and superstition. There was no exact science in the modern sense. The anatomy of the human body was unclear.
The art of healing, so closely associated with charm and enchantment, was widely perceived as a magical art.
The woman "healer", as Mrs Bucca was called, was to many nothing more than a sorceress, for she supposedly treated with the powers of darkness and thus knew how to exercise control over her life, happiness and health by means of communing with these powers.
She was feared and respected by all.
In the 15th century, whole crowds of young men made pilgrimages to Bologna to hear the moral philosophies of Dorothea Bucca.
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Christine de Pizan
Lived: 1365 - 1430
Nationality: French
Field: Poet / Utopian
After the death of her father in 1387 and that of her husband, who succumbed to an epidemic in 1390, she had to deal with protracted inheritance proceedings and the resulting financial problems. In addition to her own children, she also had to provide for her mother and two teenage brothers. Since a remarriage with such an entourage and no fortune was hardly conceivable, she turned to her poetic talent and began to write ballads, lais and rondeaus, taking Eustache Deschamps as her model. For her children, she first wrote the educational book "Book of Wisdom", which she dedicated to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, in return for the usual payment,
After this, she quickly won other wealthy patrons to whom she dedicated and presented her works, among them the French Queen Isabeau de Bavière and the Dukes John of Berry, Louis of Orleans and John Without Fear of Burgundy, the successor of Philip the Bold, who also belonged to the royal family.
As a lyric poet, Christine initially focused on love, lamenting the loss of her husband in a very personal manner (Ballades du veuvage, Cent ballades d'amant et de dame).
Later, she wrote more doctrinal-philosophical works, not only in verse but also in prose, e.g. the princely mirror L'Épître d'Othéa (1400) or the reflections on Fortuna's work in history and in her own life in La Mutation de Fortune (1403).
In addition, she reacted to the civil wars in France in politically motivated works.
In 1399 she criticised the misogyny of the men in her social circle, and in particular that of Jean de Meung in The Novel of the Rose, thus unleashing the so-called Querelle du Roman de la rose, the first Parisian literary dispute in the history of French literature, in which she herself intervened with her Épître au dieu d'amours (also 1399). In 1401 she wrote Le Dit de la rose, which describes the fictitious founding of an "Order of Roses" protecting women.
A treatise on the proper education of girls, Le Livre des trois vertus, dates from 1404.
In 1405, she completed her most interesting work from today's perspective:
Le Livre de la Cité des dames.
In it, she uses the example of significant female figures from biblical and profane history to point out the unrecognised abilities of women and develops the image of a utopian society in which women are granted equal rights.
"Everywhere, in all kinds of treatises, philosophers, poets, all orators (listing them would take up too much space) seem to speak as if from a single mouth and all come to the same conclusion, namely, that women tend to all kinds of vice in their behaviour and way of life."
"Those who have slandered women out of ill-will are small minds who have encountered numerous women superior to them in cleverness and gentility. They reacted to this with pain and displeasure, and so their great envy has led them to accuse all women of evil.“
From 1418, the beginning of one of the worst phases of the Hundred Years' War, she lived in seclusion with her daughter Marie in the convent of the Dominican nuns of Saint-Louis de Poissy. There, in 1429, she witnessed the military achievements of Joan of Arc, the "Maid of Orleans", and in 1430, after a long silence, dedicated a eulogy to her as heroine and "Honour for the female sex", the Dictié en l'honneur de la Pucelle (Poem in honour of the Virgin).
"After your death will come a prince of character and wisdom, who, from his familiarity with your works, will wish he had lived in your time and beheld you with his own eyes" (Christine on Joan of Arc).
Christine de Pizan's importance is not exhausted in her femininity, nor in her advocacy of women's causes. The political author and the philosopher Christine remain to be discovered, as well as whether the first approaches to a historicising view of human behaviour have a forward-looking character.
Christine de Pizan writes de la rose: "Nature has endowed women with as many physical and spiritual gifts as the wisest and most experienced men."
"But if women had written these books - of this I am sure - everything would be very different, for they know well that they are falsely accused."
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Battista Malatesta (di Montefeltro)
Lived: 1384 - 1448
Nationality: Italian
Field of expertise: Humanist
Battista Malatesta was a learned woman of the nobility as well as a poet and orator who was educated in philosophy and languages. She corresponded with other scholars of her time such as Leonardo Bruni. Bruni`s letter to Baptista Malatesta of Montefeltro, entitled De studiis et litteris, was written in the early 15th century. In it Bruni describes a course of study suitable for women who share the conviction, held early on by humanists, that classical studies are "worthy of being pursued by men and women alike."
De studiis et litteris (from now on just De studiis) is a letter addressed to Battista Malatesta (1384-1448), daughter of the Count of Urbino, Antonio di Montefeltro (†1404). It was written between 1422-1429, but most likely in 1424.
Bruni's praise of her erudition at the beginning of the letter, though a common mode of introduction in humanist letters, seems to be based on her actual interest in classical literature. With her father-in-law, the Lord of Pesaro, who was also interested in ancient literature and was known as Il Malatesta degli Sonetti, she exchanged sonnets and Latin letters, many of which are still preserved in manuscript. In 1433, when King Sigismund travelled through Urbino, he was greeted by Battista with a Latin poem.
Bruni's thoughts in De studiis can be easily summarised: formation must for him consist of two elements, namely literary ability and factual knowledge or erudition.
Bruni ends the writing with the thought that his aim is to spur Battista on, as one who is excited by her excellence, in the same way that the crowd of spectators in a racing race spurs on the runner in search of glory.
With Bruni's support, Battista Malatesta then wrote and left behind an Opusculum studiis et de litteris.
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Isotta Nogarola
Lived: 1418 - 1466
Nationality: Italian
Field of expertise: Humanist
Isotta and her sister Ginevra studied together under Martino Rizzoni, a pupil of Guarino da Verona. Between 1434 and 1440 the sisters corresponded with the most important humanists of the Renaissance. Perhaps deterred by the example of her sister Ginevra, who abandoned her studies after her marriage, Isotta took a self-proclaimed vow of chastity. Thereupon, withdrawn from the rest of the family, she spent her life alone in the library at her mother's house. In 1441 she began to study theology.
Isotta's most famous work "de Pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato" (Of the equal or unequal sin of Adam and Eve) arose from a lively correspondence with the humanist Ludovico Foscarini. It was triggered by Saint Augustine's statement that Eve was more guilty of original sin than Adam. In the dialogue, about the equal or unequal sin of Eve and Adam, Isotta therefore discusses the question of whether woman is inferior to man.
With a Latin diologue and several letters, she is considered the first Renaissance woman to contribute to humanist culture.
Isotta's surviving texts were not published until 1885 in Vienna!
"The inconstancy of Eve, which was condemned, was not an inconstancy of nature, but of habit. For those qualities which are in us by nature, we are neither praised by guilt, according to the judgment of the wisest philosophers."
"Eve being intellectually as well as morally weaker, less blame for original sin can be attributed to her. Adam, on the other hand, was made in the image of God, he was brought into the world by God as the perfect man. Therefore, he also possessed more knowledge and thus more responsibility than Eve, who, as an incompetent, was supposed to be subject to the man, but was unable to see through the serpent's cunning. Ludovicio regarded Adam as a passive victim. Eve had deliberately deceived him, because she wanted to become more like God. But a deliberate act would not only presuppose intelligence and free will, the premise of the woman's inferiority would also be reduced to absurdity. If the woman really acted out of ignorance, she can be exonerated from guilt. If, however, her actions were based on an unreasonable thirst for knowledge and arrogance, her guilt cannot be derived from her inferiority, and the essential inequality of man and woman would be abolished."
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Cassandra Fedele
Lived: 1465 - 1558
Nationality: Italian
Field of expertise: Humanist
In 1487 Cassandra was asked by the University of Padua to deliver a speech in praise of science at a graduation ceremony. Her "Oratio" was soon circulated in print and carried the news of this miracle of female scholarship as far as Germany.
In an ever-increasing correspondence with scholars and high ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries, Cassandra praised the sciences, virtues, capable achievements and, last but not least, the high addressees themselves in a humanistic manner. They did not fail to respond to her in an appropriate manner.
On ceremonial occasions, Cassandra appeared as a speaker on behalf of the Venetian Senate, thus documenting the Serenissima's claim to claim a leading position alongside Florence and Rome in the field of humanistic studies as well.
When Queen Isabella of Castile sought to attract Cassandra to her court, the Doge himself forbade the young scholar to leave her home.
Nevertheless, Cassandra was soon allowed to live in oppressive poverty. As a woman, she was denied a university degree and an adequate professional position. Around 1500, she married a doctor with whom she spent several years on Crete. On the return journey, the couple lost all their belongings in a shipwreck. When Cassandra's husband died in 1521, he left his wife in poverty.
A petition from the widow to Pope Leo X remained unanswered. It was not until 1547 that the aged scholar, who despite all adversities had prepared a work "De scientiarum ordine" for printing - it is lost due to the publisher's carelessness - was given a livelihood-securing position as director of an orphanage for girls.
The ninety-year-old made her last appearance when she gave a speech to welcome the Polish Queen Mother Bona Sforza.
"I can make myself immortal and happy in this life."
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Beatriz Galindo
Lived: 1465/75 - 23.11.1534
Nationality: Spanish
Field of expertise: Humanist / Scholar
Beatriz Galindo was one of the most educated women of her time.
Her parents decided to have her taught in a grammar class at the University of Salamanca. She showed great talent for Latin, not only in translating and reading classical texts, but at fifteen she was also able to speak in Latin and make great corrections.
Her fame spread first from Salamanca and then throughout the Empire and she became known as "La Latina".
She translated Aristotle in particular into Spanish.
In 1486, when she was preparing to become a nun at the Isabella of the Catholic Monastery, Queen Isabella of Castile summoned her to her court, where the Queen and her children took Latin lessons from Galindo.
Her presence at the court was not limited to being a governess to the Queen, their relationship is said to have been very friendly, but also to her collaboration with Lucio Marineo Siculo (1460 - 1533).
Beatriz Galindo was held in very high esteem by the queen for her friendly advice, which also went beyond philological matters.
She became a professor at the University of Salamanca, where she taught rhetoric, philosophy and medicine.
Galindo is said to have written a series of treatises on classical authors and philosophers for the Queen's better understanding, the existence of which is disputed.
"Posside sapientiam, Melior est quia auro"
"The possession of wisdom is better
than the possession of gold"
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Laura Cereta
Lived: 1469 - 1499
Nationality: Italian
Field of expertise: Humanist
As a pupil, assistant and secretary to her father, Laura Cerete acquired knowledge from a wide variety of fields. Her studies, to which she sacrificed many night hours, ranged from Italian literature and humanistic education to natural science, philosophy and theology.
Besides learning Latin and Greek from her father, she also showed great interest in mathematics, astrology, agriculture and her favourite subject: moral philosophy.
She produced her literary work, a corpus of 78 letters of mixed content and a paradoxical encomium ("Dialogue on the Death of an Ass"), before the age of 20.
In 1486 she is said to have begun a seven-year career of teaching moral philosophy at the University of Prada, but no public record of this is said to exist.
In 1488 she produced a fair copy of her texts, copies of which soon circulated.
Unlike most women of her time, Cereta was able to participate in letter-writing because of her social contacts. The topics Cereta discusses in her humanist-style letters in loose succession are topics of education and science, moral and religious issues, political and warlike events, but also her personal circumstances and, time and again, the discrimination and degradation of women, especially in the field of studies. she defended women's right to education and fought against the oppression of married women.
In contrast to the slightly older Cassandra Fedele, whose writings testify to complete conformity to the leading social and educational classes and "feminine reserve" in terms of subject matter and diction, Cereta astonishes us with the wide radius of her themes, the daring of her assertions and the non-conformism of her style.
Her appearance can be seen as a contradiction of the universally accepted image of the virgo docta, as embodied by Cassandra Fedele at the time, in a sense as a provocation of a metropolitan cult figure by an uncouth young woman from the provinces.
Cereta's style is considered complex, her Latin overstylised. Stylistically, she was initially inspired by Francesco Petrarch, later by Augustine and Jerome. In terms of content, Cereta was particularly an advocate of women's rights.
Her letters laid the foundation for the feminism of the Enlightenment.
Her letter to Bibolo Semproni contains one of the few medieval references to the 1st century BC poet Cornificia.
Cereta's letter to Lucilia Vernacula: Violence against women, denigrating learned women, asserts "that uneducated women are stronger than the adversaries of feminist ideals, the men who disregard the notion of women as human beings possessing scientific potential." Vernacula addresses all ignorant women who do not know Therefore, Cereta's letter to Lucilia Vernacula is in fact addressed directly to all uneducated women, rather than to any particular person who shows an interest in learning.
"All human beings, which include women, are born with the right to education"
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Vittoria Colonna
Lived: 1492 - 1547
Nationality: Italian
Field: Poet / humanist / new-platonic thought
Vittoria Colonna was/is described as the female genius of the Italian Renaissance.
With her irresistible urge, she corrected, competed, spurred, enriched, complemented contemporary poets, philosophers, theologians, and all the male literary, philosophical, theological doctrines of her time that caught her attention, challenging male abstracting thought from the perspective of a woman committed to the fullness of life.
Her mother Agnese of Montefeltro came from the lineage of the Dukes of Urbino. Urbino was an important centre of humanist culture. Since Agnese was known for her love of literature and fine arts, and Fabrizio had cultural and scientific interests, it can be assumed that Vittoria grew up in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere.
Among her contemporaries, Vittoria found an extraordinary degree of admiration and adoration, which related to her character as well as to her education and beauty. Already in her married years, a circle of literary figures formed around her, by whom she was glorified in poems (among them Girolamo Britonio, Pietro Gravina, Scipione Capece, Marcantonio Minturno and Galeazzo di Tarsia).
The most prominent among the poets who befriended her even then were Jacopo Sannazaro and Francesco Berni. Giovanni Berardino Fuscano praised her in his Stanze sopra le bellezze di Napoli as the most beautiful of beauties.
She was also on friendly terms with Baldassare Castiglione, who gave her the manuscript of his Cortegiano to judge in 1524. A close friend of Vittoria was the papal secretary Gian Matteo Giberti.
After the death of her husband, other literary figures entered Vittoria's circle and became enthusiastic about her, among them Claudio Tolomei, Bernardino Rota, Angelo di Costanzo, Bernardo Tasso, Bernardino Martirano, Gian Giorgio Trissino and Marcantonio Epicuro. Titian painted a Maria Magdalena at Vittoria's instigation in 1531. Other prominent friends of Vittoria were Ludovico Ariosto, who praised her poetry as unique in his epic Orlando furioso, Marcantonio Flaminio, who glorified her in Latin poems, and Cardinal Pietro Bembo, who spoke enthusiastically of her sonnets.
While humanist-minded poets continued to pay homage to her in the style of cheerful, gallant worship, as a widow she began to devote herself with growing passion to religious concerns. Neoplatonic impulses played a significant role in the spirituality she now developed.
She joined a religious current in Catholicism whose aims partly coincided with those of the incipient Reformation. The initiator of these efforts was the humanist Juan de Valdäs, who deeply impressed Vittoria and significantly influenced her new orientation. The concern of these circles was a deepened inwardness of religious life; this was often associated with a distancing from conventional customs and the externalised practice of ritual customs. Adherence to formalities was contrasted with the need for a personal relationship with God.
A core idea here was that grace as a free gift was decisive for man's salvation; merits that he believed he could acquire through his actions were insignificant. Good works and even the desire to perform them were not merits of man, but owed to grace itself, i.e. their consequence and not their cause. This emphasis on grace led Vittoria's friends and herself to formulations that showed a more or less pronounced closeness to Martin Luther's concept of sola gratia. Through her sympathy for such ideas and for prominent theologians who advocated them more or less clearly, Vittoria found herself caught between the fronts in the incipient struggle between Catholicism and the Reformation, even though there was no doubt that she considered herself a Catholic until the end of her life. This potential for conflict came to the fore particularly sharply in the Reformation.
This potential for conflict came to the fore particularly sharply in the controversy surrounding her friend Bernardino Ochino, of whom she was an enthusiastic follower. Ochino was a religious general of the Capuchins and a famous but controversial preacher who was suspected of heresy by his opponents. Vittoria spoke up for him forcefully in urgent letters. He later fled Italy, broke with the Catholic Church and openly espoused a Reformed theology, compromising Vittoria. Another friend of Vittoria, Pietro Carnesecchi, was also suspected of heresy; later, long after her death, he was handed over to the Inquisition and executed. But she also had friends in the College of Cardinals who were sympathetic to her spiritual concerns, including in particular Gasparo Contarini, Jacopo Sadoleto and Reginald Pole. She found a like-minded friend and comrade-in-arms in the Queen of Navarre Margaret of Angoulume.
Vittoria's friendship with Michelangelo, which began in 1538, was very intense, and he glorified her in several poems in the style of her gallant humanist admirers, praising her beauty in particular effusively.
The last years of Vittoria's life were darkened by increasing religious intolerance. The Roman Inquisition, set up by Pope Paul III in 1542 to prevent the advance of Protestantism in Italy, turned against a central part of her religious thought, the doctrine of grace. From then on, she was no longer allowed to represent the ideas that were now definitely considered heretical.
Vittoria's poetic activity began in 1512 at the latest; her oldest surviving poem dates from this year. Of her poems, a considerable part of over 100 sonnets and canzonas is dedicated to the memory of her husband, whose personality she idealises.
Petrarch's influence is strongly noticeable in Vittoria's poetic work, both in form and content (Petrarchism). A fundamental difference to Petrarch's attitude, however, is that Vittoria never regrets earthly love as such or regards it as a mistake. Rather, she values what she has experienced in marriage as fundamentally positive, for she sees in it, in a Neoplatonic sense, the prerequisite and starting point for what she hopes to attain through the deification of love. She only sees as a mistake her continued clinging to grief over the loss of the ephemeral after the death of the beloved husband has put an end to this way of experiencing love.
On the other hand, Vittoria also knows and masters the Petrarchist discourse on love, which depicts and problematises the contradictory emotions (contrari affetti) in erotic experience. This is evident, among other things, in her Cento poetry, in which she takes passages from various Petrarch poems and combines them into a new unity.
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Tullia d Àragona
Lived: 1510 - 1556
Nationality: Italian
Field of expertise: Poet / Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thought.
Tullia d'Aragona was born in Rome. She came from a noble house. Her father was probably Pietro Tagliavia of Aragon, archbishop and cardinal, the lover of her mother Giulia Ferrarese, who was married to Constanzo Palmieri.
Tullia d'Aragona was considered one of the most famous and educated cortigiana onesta, an intellectual courtesan of the Renaissance; as well as an admired poet and philosopher in sixteenth-century Italy and the men who belonged to her, were powerful of their time and powerless in her famous arms; taken with the intellect of the cortigiana onesta, and had it not been for her will to rise to the top. Not, however, through coitus or the gutter of reporting, but as a literary woman. Through her father, she received an extensive education in literature, philosophy and spoke several languages. In her salon in Ferrara, Florence and Venice, the most respected men of the Roman clergy, poets, scientists and politicians frequented.
Well-known and famous poets and scientists belonged to her circle of friends (Guilio Camillo, Francesco Maria Molza, Cardinal Hypolitos de Medici, Ercole Bentivolglio, Filippo Strozzi, Lattanzio Benucci, Benedetto Varchi, Girolamo Muzio, Pietro Manelli), so that one should not have made too much noise about her.
In Siena, they wanted to put Tullia d'Aragona on trial as a courtesan, and in Rome she was published on the tax list as a prostitute. But she addressed the Duke of Florence with an excellent dialogue on the relationship between physical and spiritual love, and was given permission to continue running her salon thereafter as a highly respected writer. She spent most of her life in Ferrara and Rome, where she resided until the death of her husband.
The French traveller Villamont, who came to Rome in 1588, wrote the following about the courtesans:
„What I admire most is that the distinguished gentlemen of Rome, when they pass the windows of Madame the Courtesan, greet her with such submissiveness, kiss her hands and pay their respects as if they were a princess or some great lady...“
As a widow, she went under the protection of the Duchess Eleonora of Toledo, with whose support she published a book of verses and poems. As well as yours:
Dialogues on the Infinity of Love, which appeared in Florence in 1547 and was dedicated to Casimo I de Medici.
Benedetto Varchi, Tullia d'Aragona's most important interlocutor in the dialogue, had reviewed the dialogue. Another interlocutor is Muzio Lattanzio Benucci.
Tullia d'Aragona ascribes to herself the role of the student who asks questions that are then answered by Varchi. However, this role is not rigidly maintained.
In terms of content, the dialogue refers to Plato's Symposium and the Phaedrus, as well as to the contemporary authors Marsillio Ficino, Sperone and Pietro Bembo.
The dialogue discusses, among other things, questions about the relationship between rhetoric and logic, the connection between Platonic and Aristotelian thought, the concepts of infinity and immortality, and Petrarch's ideal of love.
The starting point is the question of whether love has to be infinite or whether it is possible to love with measure and limit.
Varchi proves that love knows no end by reflecting on the difference between the noun love and the verb to love. On the basis of grammatical-logical considerations, the philosopher comes to the conclusion that love as a noun has a higher status than the verb to love. She thus agrees with Varchi on the Aristotelian theory of the superiority of the noun over the accidental (verb).
Tullia d'Aragona concedes the higher value to the beloved and proves this with the example of God, who is both lover and beloved.
"Do not let this be your concern, but set your mind on continuing in your proof. And if it is possible for you, bring things into a system; connect them with each other and pay no attention to what I know or do not know. For to confess the truth, it seems to me that I know nothing at all, except just that I know nothing."
"Thus he deserves nobility and punishment to a far greater degree who, without discipline and moderation, surrenders himself to sensual passion and thus makes reason, which should always be the ruler, the slave of the senses."
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Teresa of Avila "the Great“
Lived: 28.03.1515 - 04.10.1582
Nationality: Spanish
Field: Mystic / Doctor of the Church
After the death of her mother and the marriage of her eldest sister, her father turned to a worldly life and brought Teresa at the age of sixteen to the convent of the Augustinian nuns in Ávila for further education, which she had to leave again after eighteen months for health reasons. For the next few years she stayed with her father and an uncle who introduced her to the teachings of the Church Father Jerome. Probably in 1536, without her father's knowledge, Teresa entered the Carmel of the Incarnation in Ávila, where 140 sisters lived at that time. Her father quickly accepted Teresa's decision, but for her this step was "as if she had to leave every bone behind".
The following year, Teresa became seriously ill. Her father took her to a quack in Becedas, whose attempts to heal her completely ruined her physically. For three years she was unable to move, and it is said that she was supposed to be buried, already presumed dead. During this time Teresa learned inner prayer, helped by the fact that on her way to becoming a "curandera" ("the healer") she came across a book by the Franciscan priest Francisco de Osuna, the Tercer Abecedario Espiritual ("Third Spiritual ABC"), which contained an introduction to this form of prayer.
After the partial recovery of her health, she again took part - supported by her prioress - in the lively intercourse with visitors to the convent in the consulting rooms, but suffered greatly because she felt she belonged neither to the secular life nor to that in God.
In 1554, Teresa saw a depiction of the suffering Christ and was so moved by it that she found her "final conversion". In radical self-sacrifice, she wanted to live only in Christ in the future, a wish that was not taken entirely seriously in her community. In 1560, Teresa experienced visions of hell, which intensified her desire for complete surrender.
Against much opposition, she finally received permission from Pope Pius IV and the local bishop to found her own convent in Ávila, that of the Discalced Carmelites, where the original rule of the order was to be followed again. At the same time, Teresa stipulated that no more than 21 sisters should live in a Carmel. The first one was followed by 16 more monastery foundations, in collaboration with John of the Cross a total of 32, as Teresa reports in her book of foundations.
Teresa developed ideas of living in passive contemplation.
Her two most important works are:
"Ways to Perfection" and "The Inner Castle".
In 1614 she was beatified, in 1617 she was named Patroness of Spain and in 1622 she was canonised. In 1944, Pope Pius XII declared her the patron saint of chess players. In 1970, Pope Paul VI elevated St Teresa to the rank of Doctor of the Church.
"Let our thoughts be ever directed to that which is eternal."
"Not a little misery and confusion come from not understanding ourselves through our own fault and not knowing who we are."
"But nothing is explained to us
that we cannot explain to ourselves."
"...never will anything else be able to replace self-knowledge, whether we want it to or not."
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Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665)
French | History of Intellectual Thought and Literature
Catherine de Vivonne was exceptionally well-educated and fluent in several languages. Plagued by delicate health and eager to avoid the rigid, demanding routines of the royal court in Paris, she established her own cultural sanctuary around 1620. This was held at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a city palace near the Louvre constructed largely to her own specifications.
Until roughly 1660, she hosted an open salon that brought high-ranking aristocrats—including Le Grand Condé and Cardinal Richelieu—into vibrant conversation with lesser nobility and bourgeois intellectuals. To ensure the space was not dominated by men, she invited noblewomen and young ladies, including her own daughter Julie, as well as Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (the future Madame de Sévigné) and Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne (the future Madame de La Fayette).
The exclusive circle surrounding the Marquise and the witty animator Vincent Voiture refined the arts of brilliant conversation and gallant occasional poetry. Together, they cultivated the inherently egalitarian ideal of the honnête homme—an ideal unconstrained by social class, roughly translating to the refined, honorable gentleman.
Their elevated literary style deeply influenced the era's literature and elevated the social standing of French writers. While widely imitated throughout Parisian society, their heightened speech was also occasionally mocked as over-refined or "precious."
The Hôtel de Rambouillet’s elevation of conversation into an art form established new standards of clarity, grace, and propriety. This linguistic influence directly shaped the extraordinary quality of 17th-century French letters and memoirs. Although Molière’s satire Les Précieuses ridicules target the exaggerated imitators of this movement rather than the Hôtel itself, the salon's glory days eventually drew to a close following Voiture’s death in 1648 and the political turmoil of the Fronde.
Legacy of the French Literary Salon: These salons created spaces for the free exchange of ideas across boundaries of class and gender, laying intellectual groundwork that fueled the Enlightenment and inspired thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot.
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Marie Dupré (c. 1650–Unknown)
French | Humanism
From an early age, Marie Dupré displayed an extraordinary capacity for learning. Delighted by her intellect, her uncle tutored her in Latin, Italian, Greek, rhetoric, poetry, and philosophy.
As a humanist, Dupré immersed herself in the philosophical system of René Descartes, with whom she shared a personal friendship. She defended Cartesian thought with such passionate conviction that she earned the nickname "La Cartésienne." She also maintained close friendships and intellectual exchanges with prominent women of letters, including Madeleine de Scudéry and Anne de La Vigne.
Dupré gained literary acclaim for her work Réponses d'Isis à Climène (Recueil de vers choisit). Although her recognition was primarily as a writer rather than a philosopher, this reflected a broader historical tendency to encourage women toward creative arts rather than formal philosophy—a sphere where patriarchal society viewed female intellect as less threatening.
Key Concept: Cartesianism—the philosophical system and methods derived from the works of René Descartes.
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Bathsua Reginald Makin (1600–1675)
English | Scholar and Women's Rights Advocate
Bathsua Makin brought the issue of women's societal status into the public eye during a period of emerging critique in 17th-century England. Accomplished in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Spanish, French, and Italian, she was widely celebrated as "England's Learned Lady."
Makin campaigned for equal educational opportunities for women and girls, arguing against cultural norms that treated women as intellectually inferior or the "weaker vessel." At age sixteen, she published Musa Virginea, a volume of Greek verse dedicated to King James I. Upon receiving it, the King dismissively remarked that she "could spin well enough," illustrating the deep hostility toward female erudition at the time.
Her landmark treatise, An Essay To Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues (1673), argued that learning was essential to a woman's moral and spiritual life. Written through a religious framework, Makin asserted that education polishes the soul, enabling women to better know God, nature, art, and language.
Makin maintained that educating women benefited the entire nation, not just individual souls. She proposed a comprehensive curriculum combining traditional skills (needlework, dancing, singing, and accounting) with rigorous academic disciplines, including English grammar, modern languages, Latin, geography, arithmetic, astronomy, natural philosophy, and classical languages.
Her educational model sought to help women become better wives, mothers, and daughters while simultaneously securing their place in public discourse. Even at age seventy-three, Makin remained dedicated to female empowerment, running a school for young women advertised in the postscript of her famous essay.
"A learned woman is like a comet: her mere appearance portends trouble."
"Learning perfectionates and adorns the soul."
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Anna Maria von Schürmann (1807–1678)
German-Dutch | Polymath / Late Humanism
From 1623 onward, Anna Maria von Schürmann (also known as van Schurman) lived unmarried in Utrecht. Exceptionally gifted from an early age—having read the Bible by age three—she eventually spoke and wrote ten languages: Dutch, French, German, English, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac/Aramaic, and Ethiopic.
Beyond her linguistic genius, Schürmann was a true polymath: an accomplished artist skilled in embroidery, stained glass, woodcarving, copperplate engraving, and portrait painting, as well as a musical virtuoso, poet, geographer, astronomer, theologian, educator, historian, and philosopher.
Starting around 1632, her network of correspondents and discussion partners expanded to include prominent figures such as René Descartes and Cardinal Richelieu. In her long-standing correspondence with the Old Testament scholar André Rivet, she boldly intervened in a burning, personally significant debate of her era: asserting that women possess the ability, the right, and the duty to engage in or formally study the humanities and natural sciences.
Her scholastically rigorous, impeccably structured arguments were published in 1641 in her sensational treatise Dissertatio.... Between 1648 and 1652, she published three volumes of her Opuscula, featuring poems and a selection of her correspondence conducted in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French.
Theologically influenced by Gisbert Voetius, she corresponded with numerous scholars, including Gerardus Johannes Vossius and Christiaan Huygens. Following her encounter with Jean de Labadie and reading her Pensées on the necessity of church reform (1669), she joined Labadie's newly founded, early-Christian style household community in Amsterdam. Her core belief reflected this spiritual commitment:
"In all people—which here means men and women alike—there is a divine spark that must be ignited in the spiritual experience of rebirth."
Schürmann traveled with the community from Middelburg to Amsterdam, and in 1670 onward to Herford in Westphalia. Following Labadie's death in 1674 in Altona (then Danish, near Hamburg), Schürmann became the leader of the persecuted group. She led them to Walta-State Castle in Wieuwerd, West Frisia, where they found refuge.
From Wieuwerd, she conducted an intensive correspondence with Eleonora von Merlau and Johann Jakob Schütz—the initiator of the Frankfurter Collegium pietatis and one of the most prominent early Lutheran Pietists, directly influencing the rise of German Pietism. In her later work, Eukleria, Schürmann defended her "choice of the better part" of life, arguing it was not a departure from her former goal of self-realization, but simply a different path toward it.
Anna Maria von Schürmann died in 1678, just a few days after completing her autobiography.
"Hence it comes to pass that in reading historiographical works across long spans of time, no more trace of women appears than the trace of a ship in the sea." (1638)
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Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701)
French | Philosophy of Love / Epistemology / Moral Psychology
Madeleine de Scudéry originally entered the literary world through her brother Georges as his junior writing partner. Together—though with a declining contribution from Georges, who focused primarily on playwriting—they authored the novel Ibrahim, ou l'Illustre Bassa (4 vols., 1641). Through her brother, she gained access to Parisian salon culture and its central figure, the Marquise de Rambouillet. She later joined the intellectual circle around Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances and great arts patron of the 1650s.
Scudéry achieved her literary breakthrough—still under her brother's name—with her pseudohistorical novels Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653) and Clélie, histoire romaine (1654–1660). Today, these works are considered the pinnacles of the Baroque heroic-gallant novel, establishing her as the quintessential author of Preciosity (Préciosité)—a highly cultivated, refined lifestyle and way of speaking practiced primarily by noble ladies, as well as bourgeois intellectuals and aristocrats.
Both monumental ten-volume novels feature loosely structured main plots filled with episodic interpolations centered on three core themes: heroic, virtuous love that triumphs over adversity; the heroic deeds of noble suitors; and witty, gallant conversations on the nature of love. Famous from Clélie is the Carte de Tendre, an allegorical map of the realm of love, where raw passion is tamed and transformed into a harmonious sympathy of souls.
After emerging from her brother's shadow—and following his banishment from Paris to Normandy after the Fronde (1652)—Mlle de Scudéry created her own salon, the Samedis ("Saturday Receptions"). U转向 as the "New Sappho" (her salon name), she hosted almost every major author of her time along with high society figures. In doing so, she stepped into the legacy of the Marquise de Rambouillet, continuing the mission to refine noblemen coarsened by a century of war into eloquent, discreetly flirtatious, and poetic gentlemen.
In line with shifting literary tastes, her later novels written under her own name were significantly shorter and more realistic, though they enjoyed less commercial success.
In her novels, Scudéry composed philosophical dialogues focusing on ethics, examining the virtues and vices of contemporary aristocratic society. Her work in moral psychology explored the interplay between temperament and free will. In epistemology, she analyzed certainty and self-knowledge, while in theology, she defended cosmological arguments for the existence of God.
Her aesthetic theory balanced the mimetic view of art as an imitation of nature with an appreciation for individual artistic perception. Throughout her philosophical explorations, Scudéry consistently analyzed the relationship between philosophical theory and the social condition of women.
Around 1670, she was briefly considered for a seat in the Académie française (which would have broken its status as an all-male club). While not admitted, she became the first recipient of the Academy's Prix d'éloquence (Prize for Eloquence) in 1671. She lived to the extraordinary age of 93 and later featured as the protagonist in E.T.A. Hoffmann's famous novella Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819/21).
Selected Aphorisms by Madeleine de Scudéry:
"Love is an I-know-not-what, coming from I-know-not-where, and ending I-know-not-why."
"Love is a passion that yields to nothing else, but to which everything else submits."
"When one does what one can, one does what one must."
"One causes more offense by refusing a request than by disobeying an order."
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Elisabeth of the Palatinate (1618–1680)
(also known as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Elisabeth of Herford / Elisabeth III)
German | Cartesianism
Elisabeth of the Palatinate was the eldest daughter of Elector Palatine Frederick V (the "Winter King" of Bohemia) and Elizabeth Stuart.
In her youth, she connected with Anna Maria von Schürmann and later with René Descartes, becoming his most dedicated student and engaging in a lively, profound philosophical correspondence with him until his death. This intellectual exchange directly inspired Descartes to write his famous treatise Les Passions de l'âme (The Passions of the Soul). In 1661, Elisabeth was elected Coadjutrix of the Imperial Abbey of Herford in Westphalia, becoming its Abbess in 1667.
Historian Gerd van den Heuvel highlights her historical importance as a scholar through the lens of "Elisabeth and the Philosophers," examining her correspondence and direct contact with Descartes, Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, Nicolas Malebranche, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Van den Heuvel presents a nuanced critique of certain modern readings, suggesting that Elisabeth approached Descartes not only as a pure philosopher but as a "therapist" whose intellectual framework helped provide emotional stability amid her tumultuous life.
Rather than placing her legacy solely in speculative philosophical innovation, historians emphasize her creation of spaces defined by a climate of religious tolerance and free intellectual exchange, unburdened by political calculation. As Princess-Abbess of Herford, she offered asylum to marginalized religious groups like the Labadists and Quakers. However, detailed historical records from her reign are scarce, as administrative documents were lost and Elisabeth personally ordered much of her private correspondence to be destroyed before her death.
Confronted with the concrete realities and personal crises of her life, Elisabeth consistently chose solutions guided by reason.
Key Terms: Cartesianism, Coadjutrix
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Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673)
English | Natural Philosophy
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (née Lucas), was a prolific poet, philosopher, essayist, and playwright. At a time when the vast majority of female writers published anonymously, Cavendish published boldly under her own name. Her published works spanned topics from gender roles, power dynamics, and etiquette to the heavily male-dominated realm of natural philosophy. Recognizing her unique position, contemporary reactions ranged from admiration to ridicule; Samuel Pepys famously dismissed her as "mad, conceited, and ridiculous."
As a natural philosopher, Cavendish used her major works—such as The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666) and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668)—to reject both the prevailing 17th-century mechanical philosophy and traditional Aristotelianism. She actively engaged with and critiqued the theories of leading figures in the Royal Society, as well as thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Robert Boyle.
In place of a rigid, mechanical concept of nature, Cavendish developed a utopian, critical counter-model:
Complex & Organic Nature: Nature is characterized by a depth and complexity that far exceeds human comprehension and cannot be reduced to deterministic mechanical laws.
Vitalist Materialism: She re-established the intrinsic dignity of nature through an anti-hierarchical concept of vitalism—the idea that all matter in the cosmos is inherently alive, self-moving, and perceptive.
Atomic Dance: Matter consists of indivisible units (atoms) moving through space, organizing themselves through contact into the objects of our perceptible world.
Ecological Ethics: Humanity is a material, integrated part of the cosmic whole. Any attempt to dominate or manipulate nature through aggressive technology or experimental destruction disrupts cosmic harmony, carrying existential consequences.
Cavendish's philosophical foundation served an explicit ethical purpose: forbidding the exploitation and destruction of nature.
Selected Quotations by Margaret Cavendish:
"The origin of the world as a single, definitive act of creation is dissolved into an eternal cosmic process, a cosmological dance whose duration guarantees the order of the world: movement is the music to which the atoms dance."
"Matter lives according to the organizational principle of a living organism."
"The ultimate goal is the prohibition of the exploitation and destruction of nature."
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Lady Anne Finch Conway (1631–1679)
English | Cambridge Platonist / Vitalist / Monist
Lady Anne Finch was born into wealth in London, which granted her access to extensive private study. Alongside traditional subjects, she taught herself Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Latin, French, Euclidean geometry, astronomy, and mathematics. She developed an early passion for philosophy, studying Plato, Plotinus, Philo Judaeus, mystical and theosophical texts, and the Kabbala Denudata.
Conway was one of the earliest and sharpest critics of Cartesian dualism. Rejecting René Descartes's division of the world into distinct spiritual (res cogitans) and physical (res extensa) substances, she proposed a vitalist monism:
Spiritual Monism: Mind and matter share the same fundamental essence and are inextricably linked. Body is condensed spirit, and spirit is fluid body.
Dynamic Hierarchy: All entities exist along a continuum. Lower physical forms can progress toward higher spiritual states, and physical matter can refine into living essence.
Harmonious Cosmos: Apparent oppositions in nature reflect temporary manifestations rather than absolute divisions; the underlying creation is inherently harmonious and dynamic.
Her most significant intellectual friendship was with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. Their nearly thirty-year correspondence covered scholasticism, theology, and critical readings of Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes. Influenced also by Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, Conway completed her masterpiece, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, prior to her conversion to Quakerism.
After her death, Van Helmont translated her treatise into Latin and published it anonymously, leading many to attribute her ideas to him. Her work directly influenced Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who adopted her concept of the "Monad"—a vitalist, elementary unit of life—to form his famous Monadology, explicitly citing the "Countess of Kennaway" as an inspiration.
Despite her vital contributions to early modern metaphysics and vitalism, her role was long marginalized in official histories of philosophy.
Selected Quotations by Lady Anne Conway:
"Everything is in flux, and change alone is eternal—a time-independent essence of things or living beings does not exist."
"I demonstrate here how a coarse body can be transformed into spirit..."
"The principle of all being is motion."
Key Terms: Monad, Vitalism, Monism, Pantheism (Critique)
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Anne de La Vigne (1634–1684)
French | Poet / Philosophy of Women
Raised in an intellectually rich environment, Anne de La Vigne showed an early genius for poetry and literature. Her relative, the academician Paul Pellisson, remarked that she seemed to have been "nursed by the Muses."
Known for her intellect, tact, and modesty, she earned the admiration of prominent literary figures, including Madeleine de Scudéry, who praised her refined spiritual elevation and poetic depth.
Rather than treating poetry as mere courtly entertainment, La Vigne approached her creative gift with disciplined study. She immersed herself in the works of leading philosophers, with René Descartes becoming her primary influence. She extracted rigorous concepts from his philosophy, using them to ground her verse and strip her writing of superficial affectation.
Her philosophical poetry attracted wide attention. Catherine Descartes, the philosopher's niece, expressed admiration for La Vigne's ability to master complex Cartesian thought, which La Vigne demonstrated in her poem L'Ombre de Descartes ("The Shadow of Descartes").
In recognition of her intellectual and literary achievements, she was inducted into the prestigious Accademia dei Ricovrati of Padua.
Key Terms: Cartesian Poetics, Accademia dei Ricovrati
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Louise-Anastasia Serment (1642–1692)
French | Natural Philosophy / Cartesianism
Although not a professional scientist in the modern sense, Louise-Anastasia Serment held a passionate intellectual interest in 17th-century natural philosophy, particularly the works of René Descartes.
Known as a devoted Cartesian (Cartésienne), she engaged deeply with the philosophical currents of her time and composed poetry in Latin and French. Portions of her literary output were published in Guyonnet de Vetron's anthology La Nouvelle Pandore.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684)
Italian | Aristotelian Logic / Theology
On June 25, 1678, at the age of thirty-two, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia made global academic history by becoming the first woman in the world to receive a doctorate in philosophy.
Born into one of the most prominent noble families of the Republic of Venice, she was managed as a child prodigy by her ambitious father, receiving instruction in classical and modern languages, music, and the liberal arts. An expert musician by age seventeen, she mastered the harpsichord, clavichord, harp, and violin, and composed her own musical works.
Disinterested in Venetian high-society luxury, she took the vows of a Benedictine oblate while continuing her intellectual pursuits at home. Supported by her tutors and family, she applied for a doctorate in theology from the University of Padua. When the theological faculty rejected the petition on the grounds that a doctorate included ecclesiastical authority to teach—and that "women must remain silent in the church"—a compromise was reached: she was permitted to defend a philosophical thesis on Aristotelian logic, which she completed with distinction.
Following her degree, she was appointed professor of mathematics at Padua and inducted into prestigious intellectual academies across Italy, including the Accademia dei Ricovrati. Shortly thereafter, however, she turned away from worldly academics to devote her remaining years to monastic devotion and charitable work among the poor. She died in 1684 at age thirty-seven.
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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695)
Mexican (New Spain) | Women's Rights Advocate / Poet & Scholar
Born Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez in New Spain (modern-day Mexico), Sor Juana was a self-taught polymath who learned to read by age three and avidly studied philosophy, astronomy, and medicine. Introduced to the viceregal court at sixteen, her brilliance and literary talent made her a favorite of the Vicereine.
Seeking intellectual independence rather than marriage or worldly societal obligations, she entered the Order of Saint Jerome. In her spacious convent suite, she assembled a large personal library, established scientific laboratoria, and composed celebrated plays, sacred works, and secular love poetry. Her masterpiece, the complex philosophical poem El Sueño ("The Dream"), was published in 1685.
When church authorities repeatedly admonished her to abandon secular scholarship, Sor Juana wrote passionate, rigorous defenses arguing for women's fundamental right to education and intellectual self-realization. In her famous responses—including letters to her confessor and the Bishop of Puebla—she asserted that the human soul and intellect are genderless.
Under increasing ecclesiastical pressure, she ultimately signed a confession of faith in 1694, surrendering her library and scientific instruments. The following year, she contracted the plague while nursing her fellow nuns and died at age forty-six.
Key Philosophical Principles:
The Genderless Intellect: Reason, freedom, and spiritual intellect belong equally to men and women; true distinction lies in wisdom versus ignorance, not gender.
Wisdom as Self-Realization: Human fulfillment requires an active, lifelong pursuit of knowledge, struggle, and intellectual growth.
Necessity of Female Education: Denying education to women deprives society of intellectual and moral flourishing.
Selected Verses by Sor Juana:
"To delight my mind with beauty's grace,
Rather than bestow my mind on face...
Not to stifle thought in vanity's store,
But to enrich my mind with wisdom's lore."
"The greatest favor God can grant to man is to grant him no unearned favors."
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Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1654–1720)
French | Classical Philology & Aesthetics
As the daughter of the humanist Tanneguy Le Fèvre, Anne Dacier learned Latin and Ancient Greek at an early age. Following the death of her father and her second marriage to the scholar André Dacier, she established herself in Paris as one of the most prominent philologists of the reign of Louis XIV. Her new translations of ancient authors—including Aristophanes, Terence, Sappho, and above all Homer's Iliad (1699) and Odyssey (1708)—set the standard for Neoclassical French prose.
In both the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns) and her own independent treatises, she developed an explicit philosophical aesthetic.
Core Positions of Her Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language:
Taste as an Indicator of Civilization: Dacier places the concept of taste (goût) at the center of aesthetics. The decline of taste, she argues, results from poor education, the ignorance of teachers, and the negligence of learners.
Primitivist Philosophy of History: She defends an Aristotelian understanding of art (the imitation of nature) and views ancient Greek and Hebrew culture as the ethical and artistic pinnacle from which modernity has in part fallen away.
The Value of Metaphor: Against Cartesian rationalism, which recognized only a strict one-to-one mapping of word to object, Dacier defends metaphor as an indispensable tool of cognition for spiritual and moral truths.
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Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659–1708)
English | Moral Philosophy & Epistemology
Damaris Masham was the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and a close confidante and intellectual companion of John Locke. She ranks among the first Englishwomen to publish independent philosophical treatises on ethical, theological, and epistemological questions, and she maintained an active correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Core Points of Her Thought:
Critique of the Moral Double Standard: Masham sharply opposed the societal devaluation of women and demanded equal access to science and philosophy.
Reason-Guided Virtue: Virtuous action stems from rational insight rather than mere submission to authority or the blind control of emotion.
Love for Creation as a Path to God: In A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, she argued against Nicolas Malebranche that the love of creatures and the physical world is not a distraction from God, but a necessary prerequisite for understanding God as the source of all goodness.
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Sophia Elisabeth Brenner (1659–1730)
Swedish | Moral Philosophy & Poetics
Sophia Elisabeth Brenner is considered the first major female writer and an early advocate for women's rights in the Swedish Baroque era. Thanks to her extraordinary command of languages, she composed occasional and didactic poetry in Swedish, Latin, German, French, Italian, English, and Dutch, earning her the honorary titles of the "Second Sappho" and the "Tenth Muse."
Core Points of Her Work:
Equality of the Mind: As early as 1693, she advocated for the intellectual equality of men and women in her work The Justified Defense of the Female Sex.
Ethical Egalitarianism: Brenner emphasized that vices and virtues are found equally in both sexes and that intellectual virtue is not bound to biological preconditions.
"Equally scandalous sins and equally noble virtues are to be seen from day to day among women as among men."
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Mary Astell (1666–1731)
English | Metaphysics, Epistemology & Women's Rights
Mary Astell is considered the first major English feminist. Autodidactically educated by her uncle, she moved to London following the early death of her parents. There, she established herself within a circle of educated women (including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and received patronage from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In her major work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Part I: 1694, Part II: 1697), she outlined the vision of a protected academy for women—a kind of secular educational monastery—where women could attain religious and secular education free from patriarchal pressure. In her Some Reflections Upon Marriage, she sharply questioned the social power structures of marriage.
Core Positions of Her Thought:
Cartesian Rationalism: Knowledge stems from innate ideas and the mind, which stands above the body. Human reason is a faint, yet divine ray.
Equality of Minds: Since the human soul has no sex, women possess the same capacity for reason and virtue as men.
Political Sociology: Astell denounced the hypocrisy within the political philosophy of her era:
"If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?"
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Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749)
English | Moral Philosophy, Epistemology & Drama
Catharine Trotter Cockburn achieved early success as a playwright and novelist. In 1702, at just 23 years old, she published a brilliant philosophical defense of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, earning Locke's personal admiration.
Following her marriage to the clergyman Patrick Cockburn, she paused her publishing activities for many years before writing further treatises on moral philosophy later in life. Thomas Birch posthumously edited her collected theological, moral, and poetic works.
Core Positions of Her Philosophy:
Epistemological Foundation of Morality: Cockburn defended Locke's empiricism while independently arguing for an objective grounding of ethics.
Reflection on Human Nature: Moral duties derive from reason and the conformity of an action with human and divine nature (fitness of actions):
"Men are capable of determining moral Right and Wrong by judging of the Fitness or Unfitness of certain Actions with Reference to these Natures."
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Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola (c. 1700 – c. 1740)
Italian | Natural Philosophy, Enlightenment & Cartesianism
Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola lived in Naples and engaged in intellectual exchange with the circles of the Accademia degli Arcadi. She translated René Descartes's Principia Philosophiae from Latin into Italian (1722), making a pioneering contribution to the dissemination of modern natural philosophy in Italy.
In her famous preface, The Translator's Letter to the Reader, she energetically opposed restricting women to needlework, singing, and fashion.
Core Points of Her Contribution:
Cause of Intellectual Differences: Women's intellectual weaknesses are not a matter of nature, but the result of deficient education.
Critique of Prohibitions: She urged the Catholic Church to evaluate Cartesian philosophy on its argumentative merits rather than banning or discrediting it outright.
Defense of Primary Texts: Barbapiccola spoke out against the Christianization of ancient philosophy, demanding a direct return to classical source texts:
"I study philosophy because its moral part civilizes us, because it illuminates metaphysics and physics, because it informs us about the beautiful and impressive architecture of the great building of the world..."
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Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749)
French | Philosophy of Happiness, Enlightenment, Metaphysics & Mathematics
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet-Laumont, grew up in a highly intellectual household in Paris. Thanks to her father, she received an education in classical languages, mathematics, and the humanities that was extraordinary for women of her era. Following her marriage to the Marquis du Châtelet and the birth of three children, she returned to Paris to dedicate herself more intensely to scientific study.
Beginning in 1734, she and Voltaire transformed the Château de Cirey in Champagne into a vibrant European center of the Enlightenment. Equipped with a natural sciences laboratory and an extensive library, they conducted physical experiments alongside historical and literary studies.
Scientific Achievements & Philosophy:
Newton Translation & Physics: Her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica remains a milestone in the history of French science to this day. In her Institutions de Physique (1740), she synthesized Newtonian mechanics with the monadology and metaphysics of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Discourse on Happiness (Discours sur le bonheur): Du Châtelet developed a pragmatic, Epicurean philosophy of happiness—what philosopher Ruth Hagengruber terms the "calculus of passions." She argued that happiness requires freedom from prejudice, the cultivation of good health, passionate inclinations, and a prudent balance between pleasure and reason.
Scholarship as a Sanctuary for Women: While men had access to career paths in politics, warfare, or diplomacy, she observed that study remained the primary reliable source for women to achieve personal happiness and intellectual independence.
Critique of Social Inequality: Throughout her writings, she consistently demanded women's full access to human rights, particularly within the education system.
"Reason must always hold the reins, for whoever says 'rational' means 'happy'—at least in my dictionary."
"One should start by telling and convincing oneself that we have nothing else to do in this world but to procure for ourselves agreeable feelings and sensations."
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Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Verati (1711–1778)
Italian | Experimental Physics & Natural Philosophy
In April 1732, Laura Bassi became the second woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Bologna, and in the same year, she was appointed the world's first female university professor of philosophy. She was distinguished by her deep training in advanced mathematics (algebra, geometry, and calculus), which granted her physical research an unusually high degree of mathematization compared to many of her contemporaries.
Pioneering Achievements & Academic Career:
Shattering the Myth of the Celibate Scholar: In 1738, she married the physician Giuseppe Verati, with whom she had eight children. By doing so, she dismantled the prevailing contemporary narrative that learned women could only exist as aloof, genderless "Minerva" figures.
Private Laboratory & Lectures: Because her public university teaching duties were heavily restricted due to her sex, she established a renowned private academy in her home. Starting in 1749, she held lectures on experimental physics there and conducted experiments in mechanics, pneumatics, hydromechanics, optics, and electricity.
Salaried Academy Position: In 1745, amid the academy reforms initiated by Pope Benedict XIV, she secured a position at the Accademia delle Scienze, becoming the first woman in Europe to receive a paid position as a professional scientist.
Chair of Experimental Physics: In 1776—shortly before her death and after decades of internationally recognized research—she was officially appointed Full Professor (Ordinaria) of Experimental Physics at the University of Bologna.
Network in the Age of Enlightenment:
Bassi maintained an active scientific correspondence with the leading scholars of her time, including Voltaire, Francesco Algarotti, Jérôme Lalande, Rugjer Bošković, François Jacquier, Jean-Antoine Nollet, Giovanni Battista Beccaria, Albrecht von Haller, and Lazzaro Spallanzani.
"I chose a person who walks the same path of science as I do, and who, as I knew from long experience, would not attempt to turn me away from it."
—Laura Bassi on her marriage to Giuseppe Verati (Letter, April 26, 1738)
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Louise-Henriette "Sophie" Volland (1716–1784)
French | Enlightenment & Intellectual Life
Louise-Henriette Volland—affectionately called "Sophie" by Denis Diderot—is regarded as one of the most influential intellectual confidantes of the French Enlightenment. Although no writings or portraits of her own survive, her decades-long correspondence with Diderot left a profound mark on the history of philosophy.
Intellectual Significance & Legacy:
Philosophical Sparring Partner: Between 1759 and 1774, Diderot addressed over 550 letters to her (187 of which survive). They formed a dynamic forum for discussing aesthetics, ethics, natural philosophy, and current affairs in Enlightenment culture.
Behind the Scenes of the Encyclopédie: To protect Diderot's life's work from being banned by censors, she supported pragmatic editorial compromises and smoothing behind the scenes.
Her Legacy: The only surviving document written by her hand is her last will and testament. In it, she bequeathed to Diderot a ring as well as a precious 11-volume edition of Michel de Montaigne's Essays bound in red morocco leather.
"My Sophie is a man and a woman whenever he pleases."
—Denis Diderot on Sophie Volland (May 10, 1759)
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799)
Italian | Mathematics, Linguistics & Philanthropy
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an extraordinary talent in both linguistics and mathematics. In 1748, she published her major work, Instituzioni analitiche (Analytical Institutions), one of the first systematic textbooks on analytical geometry and calculus.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Source: Bettmann Archive), KI-generiert
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Source: Bettmann Archive). Quelle: Bettmann / Bettmann Archive
Scientific Milestones & Life Path:
Precocious Talent & Salon Disputations: By the age of fifteen, she was already debating complex natural philosophy questions in Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish with European scholars at her father's salon in Milan.
University Appointment: In 1748, she was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna. However, she never actively taught there, despite multiple requests from her contemporary Laura Bassi.
The "Versiera" ("Witch of Agnesi"): Agnesi mathematically described a smooth, bell-shaped curve (the versiera, derived from the Latin versere, meaning "to turn"). Due to a translation error by English mathematician John Colson, the Italian word was mistranslated as l'aversiera ("she-devil" or "witch")—giving rise to the famous name Witch of Agnesi.
Later Life: Following the death of her father in 1752, Agnesi turned away from mathematics to focus on theology and charitable work. For nearly five decades, she directed a home for elderly women in Milan and devoted her entire fortune to caring for the poor and sick.
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Johanna Charlotte (Ziegler) Unzer (1725–1782)
German | Popular Philosophy of the Enlightenment & Aesthetics
With her 1751 publication Grundriss einer Weltweisheit für das Frauenzimmer (Outline of Philosophy for Women), Johanna Charlotte Unzer authored one of the first systematic presentations of philosophy in the German language specifically tailored for female readers. Influenced by Wolffian scholastic philosophy and encouraged by her uncle Johann Gottlob Krüger alongside the Halle philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier, she championed women's right to education and independent thought.
Core Ideas & Significance:
Equality of Intellectual Faculties: Unzer argued that the human soul possesses the same natural capacities regardless of sex. She pragmatically characterized perceived male intellectual superiority as "mere fashion," manufactured by societal patterns of upbringing.
Linguistic Germanization: To make philosophy accessible to a broader reading public, she systematically translated academic jargon into the vernacular (e.g., Grundwissenschaft for ontology, Seelenlehre for psychology).
Honors: In 1753, she was awarded the imperial privilege of Poet Laureate (Poeta Laureata) in recognition of her poetry. She was also made an honorary member of the German Societies in Helmstedt and Göttingen.
"Philosophizing is not difficult; one needs only sound natural reason and a little reflection."
—Johanna Charlotte Unzer
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Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham (1731–1791)
English | Republican Philosophy, History & Pedagogy
Catharine Macaulay was one of the most influential political thinkers and historians of the 18th century. Through her monumental, 8-volume History of England, she advanced a decidedly republican and anti-monarchist historiography that found significant resonance in the American colonies and among the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Political Legacy & Pedagogy:
Influence on the American Revolution: Macaulay sharply criticized the repressive policies of the British Crown. During her tour of the United States in 1785, she spent ten days as a celebrated guest of George Washington at Mount Vernon, maintaining ongoing correspondence with him on constitutional matters.
Pioneering Pedagogical Work (Letters on Education, 1790): She advocated for full co-education for boys and girls, as well as legal and intellectual equality between the sexes. She attributed disparities in intellectual performance entirely to unequal educational opportunities.
Trailblazer for Mary Wollstonecraft: Wollstonecraft enthusiastically reviewed Macaulay's educational treatises, drawing key inspiration from them for her own seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
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Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793)
French | Revolutionary of the Enlightenment, Playwright & Pioneer of Human Rights
Despite intense societal opposition, Olympe de Gouges carved out a prominent place in the intellectual life of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Paris. Having grown up in the Occitan-speaking region of southern France without a complete mastery of standard French, she typically dictated her works to secretaries. As a self-taught intellectual, she created a multifaceted body of work comprising plays, epistolary novels, utopian writings, and socio-political manifestos.
Social Critique, Literature & Journalism:
Fight Against Slavery: In her drama L'Esclavage des Nègres (The Slavery of the Blacks, 1784/1789), she denounced the suffering of enslaved people in the French colonies and vehemently demanded the abolition of slavery.
Critique of Paternity Laws & The Plight of Mothers: Her epistolary novel Mémoire de Madame de Valmont (1788) addressed the total lack of legal protection for unwed mothers and illegitimate children, as well as the widespread abandonment of infants in 18th-century Paris.
Utopian Political Novel: In Le Prince philosophique (1792), she developed radical thoughts on equality before the law, humane penal reform, and the duty of political rulers to serve universal virtue and the common good.
The "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen" (1791):
In response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which excluded women from political participation, de Gouges drafted her most famous political manifesto (Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne).
"Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum."
—Olympe de Gouges (Article X, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1791)
Political Resistance & Execution:
Nonviolence & Public Referendum: De Gouges decisively rejected Jacobin terror and mindless violence. In her pamphlet Les Trois Urnes (The Three Urns, 1793), she proposed a peaceful popular vote on France's future form of government (a unified republic, a federalist state, or a constitutional monarchy).
Condemnation & Execution: Her public defense of the deposed king on humanitarian grounds and her sharp critiques of Robespierre made her a target of the Revolutionary Tribunal. On November 3, 1793, she was executed by guillotine.
In June 1793, under the dark shadow of the gathering Jacobin Terror, Olympe de Gouges formulated her moving political testament (Testament politique). It reflects the unwavering humanism of a woman who paid for her convictions with her life.
"I leave my heart to my country, my honesty to men (they need it), my soul to women—that is no small gift—my creativity to playwrights, which may be of use to them... my selflessness I leave to the ambitious, my philosophy to the persecuted, my spirit to fanatics, my faith to unbelievers..."
—Olympe de Gouges (Political Testament, June 1793)
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Amalia Holst (1758–1829)
German | Pedagogy, Female Education & Enlightenment Natural Law
Amalia Holst (née von Justi) is regarded as the German counterpart to the English thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. She vehemently championed the universal human right to education and opposed the contemporary discrimination against women in both the school system and marriage. Together with her husband, she operated progressive educational institutes in Northern Germany.
Pedagogical Philosophy & Social Critique:
Critique of Rote Education: In her Remarks on the Errors of Our Modern Education (Bemerkungen über die Fehler unserer modernen Erziehung, 1791), she rejected both mechanical rote learning and overly permissive, purely play-based instruction. She demanded the targeted cultivation of a child's individual interests and intellectual agency.
Equivalence of the Laws of Thought: Holst exposed the male denial of women's education as an interest of power ("Afteraufklärung" / pseudo-Enlightenment). She emphasized that the female intellect follows the exact same logical principles as the male intellect.
Critique of Rousseau & Fichte: She decisively rejected Johann Gottlieb Fichte's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's postulate of female subordination in marriage. For Holst, a lasting marriage could exist only as a contract between two free, equal partners grounded in love and mutual respect.
"We throw away the invisible threads with which we have hitherto directed the machinery of the world's great spectacle from behind the scenes, because it is beneath our dignity as human beings to disguise ourselves any longer, in order to reach our goals through cunning and intrigue."
—Amalia Holst (On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education, 1802)
Major Works:
Remarks on the Errors of Our Modern Education (Bemerkungen über die Fehler unserer modernen Erziehung, 1791)
Letters to Elisa (Briefe an Elisa, 1799/1800)—a polemic reply to traditional virtue ethics
On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education (Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höheren Geistesbildung, 1802)—her principal work on educational theory
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Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and passionate advocate for women's rights during the Enlightenment.
Early Life and Independence
Wollstonecraft grew up in an impoverished family of eight, dominated by a violent father and a submissive mother. Rather than breaking her spirit, her father's outbursts stirred a lifelong resentment against tyranny and arbitrary authority. Her husband, philosopher William Godwin, noted in his 1798 memoir that even in youth, she felt her superiority and showed open disdain for domestic abuse.
Mostly self-taught, Wollstonecraft expanded her mind through reading, travel, and dialogue with intellectual circles. She formed a deep bond with Fanny Blood, who taught her professional writing. Together with Fanny, she opened a school in 1784. Following Fanny's premature death, Wollstonecraft turned to writing to earn a living, publishing Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and translating works from French, German, Dutch, and Italian.
Philosophical Impact and Major Works
Political Breakthrough: In response to Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), instantly gaining European fame.
The Feminist Masterpiece: Her magnum opus, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear so only because they lack access to education.
Critique of Rousseau: She forcefully opposed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's view that a woman's primary duty is to please men, writing: "Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison."
Legacy
Wollstonecraft died of childbed fever shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein). Posthumously, Godwin published her unfinished novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. Her call for co-education and rational independence deeply shaped later nineteenth-century women's rights leaders like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Fuller.
Mary Wollstonecraft stands as a pioneering champion of rational independence, whose philosophical radicalism laid the groundwork for modern feminist thought. In her seminal 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she issued an uncompromising critique of a social structure that intentionally cultivated docility and helplessness in women, only to condemn them for the very superficiality it engineered.
"Teach them to think!"
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
The Architecture of Dependence
Wollstonecraft identified early childhood education as the primary instrument of female subjugation. Girls were denied autonomy from their earliest years, socialized into a state of perpetual childhood, and conditioned to view their physical appearance and charm as their sole currency in society.
Systemic Infantilization: "The child, especially the girl, is not left for a moment to her own guidance, and thus becomes dependent—and this dependence is then naturally called 'natural.'"
Marital Subjugation: She condemned domestic hierarchy as a form of moral degradation, writing, "The marital tyranny of the heart and behavior is to me an injustice committed against women that humbles the soul."
Intellectual Emancipation: Against Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s assertion that women should be educated solely to please men, Wollstonecraft demanded rigorous intellectual cultivation: "Teach them to think!"
Historical Vision and Legacy
Wollstonecraft recognized that dismantling centuries of structural oppression would not occur overnight. She viewed the liberation of women not merely as an individual benefit, but as a prerequisite for moral and civic progress across human society.
Transgenerational Transformation: "Who can say how many generations will be necessary to give vigor to the virtue and talents of a liberated offspring of wretched female slaves?"
Civic Virtue: She argued that as long as mothers were kept in ignorance, they could never raise rational, virtuous citizens, making female education a matter of national importance.
Through her insistence that reason knows no sex, Wollstonecraft transformed the discourse of Enlightenment liberty into a universal mandate for human dignity.
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Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) stood as one of the most formidable intellectual forces of early nineteenth-century Europe, seamlessly bridging Enlightenment rationalism and emerging Romantic sentiment. As an author, political theorist, and famous salonnière, her fierce commitment to personal liberty made her one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s most persistent and formidable opponents.
"The passions, that impulsive force which sweeps man along independently of his will, are the true obstacle to all individual and political happiness."
— Madame de Staël, De l'influence des passions (1796)
Intellectual Life and Political Exile
The daughter of Swiss-born French finance minister Jacques Necker, Madame de Staël was raised amidst the intellectual elite of pre-revolutionary Paris. After fleeing the Reign of Terror, she transformed her estate at Coppet into a haven for exiled intellectuals, turning it into what contemporaries dubbed "the headquarters of opposition to Napoleon."
Literary Sociology: In De la littérature (1800), she established one of the earliest theories connecting creative work directly to prevailing political, social, and climatic conditions, advocating for French literature to draw inspiration from northern, Germanic traditions.
The Cultural Bridge to Germany: Her celebrated work De l'Allemagne (1813)—famously banned and ordered destroyed by Napoleon—introduced German Romantic philosophy and literature (including Goethe, Schiller, and Kant) to the French-speaking world, shaping Europe's view of Germany for generations.
Romantic Fiction and Autonomy: Her novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807) explored the tragic tension between exceptional, intellectually gifted women and the rigid societal conventions that sought to constrain them.
Sovereignty of Mind and Passion
Throughout her exile, de Staël refused to compromise her political or intellectual principles. Her encounters with figures like Goethe and Schiller during her 1803–1804 journey through Weimar cemented her reputation as an unyielding conversationalist who demanded discourse on equal footing.
Critique of Tyranny: She viewed Napoleon not merely as a military adversary, but as a pragmatic suppressor of ideals and human liberty.
Emotional Realism: Her philosophical essays analyzed human ambition and romantic passion as paradoxical forces—essential to vital experience, yet inherently disruptive to lasting stability.
Through her writings and personal courage, Madame de Staël redefined the role of the modern European intellectual, proving that ideas could challenge the authority of empires.
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Bettina Brentano von Arnim
Bettine (1785-1859) was an iconoclast, a political reformer, and a salonnière whose publications in the 1830s and 1840s rekindled philosophical Romanticism. Brentano von Arnim questioned philosophy's tendency toward abstraction and attempted to make philosophy more expansive in its concerns. This is evident in their claim that a proper understanding of human beings requires that we take into account our intellectual abilities as well as our sensory and emotional lives. In her opinion, humans are fundamentally creative - just as nature itself is creative. In order to become fully human, realize one's abilities and experience human life to the maximum, it is necessary to live poetically.
It is also evident in their conception of philosophy as a dialogic enterprise that can only be carried out through the activity of “sym-philosophy”. In the case of Brentano von Arnim, the “Sym philosophy” was a realized achievement, as evidenced by her publication Günderode (1840). Günderode is a semi-fictional correspondence based on letters to her friend Karoline von Günderrode, illustrating the romantic ideal of sociability – staging a dialogue in which participants develop their viewpoints and reach a higher level of understanding. Brentano von Arnim also dealt with important social issues such as poverty and education.
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Karoline von Günderrode
Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) was a playwright, philosopher and poet who made crucial contributions to German Romanticism and German idealism. Günderrode's writings come in various forms, such as philosophical fragments and notes, essays, dramas and poems. In addition, her writings draw on content from philosophy, world religions and mythologies, ancient languages and the natural sciences.
The diversity of form and content is typical of Günderrode's criticism of bourgeois society, which offered no space for intellectual women and their aspirations. It is also indicative of Günderrode's syncretism, which wanted to make philosophy more poetic and poetry more philosophical.
Günderrode's novel approach dealt with fundamental philosophical questions in her writings, including the question of the "vocation of man" and the associated questions of (female) self-determination, autonomy and intercultural understanding. She argued that the human vocation should not be understood in purely human terms, but must also take into account the larger community to which humans belong: the earth and all its inhabitants. For Günderrode, human morality serves not only to achieve human goals, but also to realize the earth's goals.
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Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) was a writer, literary critic, feminist and psychoanalyst whose contributions included the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of life, the philosophy of art and literature, and psychology. Salomé's diverse interests led to famous friendships with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud. This, in part, brought widespread attention to her autobiography, Looking Back: Memoirs (1951), and her letters. Salomé's works in literature, criticism, and philosophy include Ibsen's Heroines (1892), Friedrich Nietzsche (1894), Rainer Maria Rilke (1928), The Freud Journal (1958), and many essays on Russian art and culture.
Salomé's contributions to psychoanalytic literature include essays on bisexuality and narcissism (which she sees as potentially productive and not just regressive or destructive), as well as groundbreaking observations on women's sexuality. Salomé's 1910 work The Erotic argues that eroticism represents a central point of connection between mind and body, self and other, the individual human being and the totality of nature. In this sense, eroticism is the key to our understanding of humanity. With her interdisciplinary orientation, Salomé represents a clear philosophical movement of the long 19th century.
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Simone Weil (1909–1943)
The French philosopher Simone Weil is a confronting and disturbing figure in modern philosophy. This is not only because she was so many things at once – ascetic and mystic, teacher and factory worker, labor activist and political activist, social thinker and penetrating moral psychologist, critical Marxist and heterodox Christian theologian – but also because of the striking “untimeliness” of her thought . For unlike philosophers in the analytic tradition, she insisted that life and philosophical reflection were interconnected at the deepest ethical level; and, unlike those in the postmodern tradition, she felt free to resort to terms such as “truth,” “reality,” “the sacred,” “justice,” “soul,” and “God.”
Weil was, of course, neither an analytical philosopher nor a proto-postmodernist. She came to philosophy in the interwar years in a philosophical milieu of political radicalism, phenomenology and emerging existentialism. Like most of her contemporaries, she viewed philosophy as the essence and challenges of human existence, although she differed from the existentialists in what this meant.
While Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir saw things in terms of the radical freedom of the individual to choose their values in a godless world, Weil took a different path. For her, it was not about perfecting herself as a substitute for God and creating values out of a supposed absolute freedom, but rather about facing the real existence of other people and taking care of them. While Sartre's existentialism saw him faced with the challenge of showing how morality was even possible, Weil took the possibility of morality as a given - as an essential and fundamental modality of human life and experience, however incomplete and flawed its manifestations like - and looked for it to show what it means to take morality seriously.
Seen in this way, the moral life rested on our ability to care for others, which meant caring for them as they were, rather than as a means or hindrance to our own end, including that of our moral perfection or virtue. To reject this attention would be to read the world in such a way that nothing and no one is sacred, not even oneself. This reading gave us the world of power and with it the sovereignty of violence, and it was the ultimate logic of violence, “that it “turned everyone who was subjected to it into a thing.”
Such a reading of the world denied the ethical, but it was precisely this denial that the ethical wanted to overcome. For Weil, here lay a fundamental contradiction at the heart of ethical life. It was not a contradiction that meant the impossibility of this life, but rather it showed us that the ethical was ultimately and fundamentally something supernatural.
This article considers Weil as a moral philosopher in a tradition stretching from Plato to Kant: someone who took morality with a seriousness and a total commitment that was alien to those philosophers driven by skepticism or, in response, by the desire to have been seduced into finding something rational on which an otherwise threatened building can rest safely.
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Edith Stein
Stein (1891–1942) was a phenomenologist who studied with Edmund Husserl. Her early work is consistent with phenomenological studies of the affective and emotional dimensions of consciousness. This is illustrated in On the Problem of Empathy (1917), in which Stein attempted to trace the basis of intersubjectivity to the lived body and the empathy we have with other people. Most of Stein's works remained unpublished during her lifetime.
She was not allowed to progress from the dissertation to the habilitation, which is required for academic positions in Germany. Her Jewish background also made it increasingly difficult for her to publish. Stein's collected works include Essays on Women: a series of shorter texts from the 1920s and early 1930s that examine questions of gender, education, and related topics from a phenomenological perspective.
Another significant contribution is her work on the philosophy of psychology and the humanities (originally intended as a habilitation). In addition, her philosophy includes discussions of psychologism, willpower, the relationship between the sentient and mental aspects of man, political philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Stein was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Her work deserves further attention because of its original systematic position and undoubted influence within phenomenology.
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Hannah Arendt 1906-1975
Political theorist
Arendt grew up in Königsberg, received her doctorate in Heidelberg in 1928 and continued her scientific work in Berlin. Endangered as a critic of National Socialism and a Jew, she fled to Paris in 1933, where she joined the World Zionist Organization. Interned in France after the start of the war, she managed to emigrate to New York in 1941. She writes for the German-Jewish exile newspaper "Aufbau", works for the Conference on Jewish Relations and writes her major work "Elements and Origins of Total Domination". In 1951 she became a US citizen and taught at various universities. In 1961 she took part as a reporter in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and in 1963 published the controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil".
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Alice von Hildebrand
Alice von Hildebrand, née Alice Jourdain (born March 11, 1923 in Brussels, Belgium; † January 14, 2022 in New Rochelle, New York) was a Catholic philosopher and theologian.
Alice Jourdain came to New York City in 1940 as a war refugee. She met the philosopher and theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand at the Jesuit college Fordham University in New York and studied philosophy at Fordham University. She later became Dietrich von Hildebrand's assistant, and wife from 1959, and worked with him in writing some of his books.[1]
From 1947 she taught at Hunter College in New York City and was a professor of philosophy for 37 years until 1984. She then went on to speak in South America, Canada, thirty-five U.S. states, and many European countries. In addition to her many years at Hunter College, she also taught at several other institutions, including the Catechetical Institute in Dunwoody, NY, the Franciscan University of Steubenville (where she was a member of the Board of Trustees for many years), and Thomas More College in Rome , at Ave Maria College in Michigan and at the Notre Dame Institute in Arlington, VA (now Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College).[1]
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Ruth Lapide
The religious scholar and her husband Pinchas Lapide were among the most important mediators in the Jewish-Christian dialogue in Germany
According to a report in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, the Jewish religious scholar and historian Ruth Lapide died on Tuesday at the age of 93 in her adopted home of Frankfurt am Main. She and her husband Pinchas Lapide, who died in 1997, were among the most important mediators in Jewish-Christian dialogue in Germany.
Ruth Lapide, née Rosenblatt, was born in 1929 in Burghaslach near Bamberg, Franconia. Her Jewish family had lived in Germany since the 12th century. She and her family fled Nazism to Palestine, where she studied linguistics, history and Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In the 1970s she returned to Germany with her husband Pinchas Lapide. There the couple was particularly committed to the exchange between Christians and Jews and wrote several books. When her husband died in 1997, Ruth Lapide continued this work with her son Yuval. He repeatedly advocated for the most accurate possible interpretation of the Bible and emphasized the Jewish roots of Christianity.
Ruth Lapide was received in private audiences by several popes and also regularly advised the Catholic Bishops' Conference.
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Christa Meves (née Mittelstaedt; born March 4, 1925 in Neumünster) is a German child and adolescent psychotherapist and writer.
After studying geography, German and philosophy at the universities of Breslau and Kiel, she completed her state examination in Hamburg, where she also studied psychology. In 1962 she completed her additional training as a child and adolescent psychotherapist (psychagogue) at the psychotherapeutic institute in Göttingen. In 1992 she received state recognition. She is a member of the Lower Saxony Chamber of Psychotherapists.
Christa Meves works in Uelzen. She has authored more than 100 books that have been translated into up to 13 languages. From 1978 to 2006 she was co-editor of the weekly newspaper Rheinischer Merkur. Meves is also an author for the Catholic newspaper Die Tagespost.
She had been married to the ophthalmologist Harald Meves († 2003) since 1946. From 1973 she was an appointed member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany, from which she left at her own request in 1984. In 1987 she converted to the Roman Catholic Church.
Christa Meves developed her own concept based on the neoanalytic drive theory and the instinct theory of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, developmental psychology and findings from her practical experience in child psychotherapy. This was later supported by results from brain and hormone research, which she then wrote down in the book Secret Brain. Meves developed a theory of personality types, which she differentiated into display, orderly, hermit, and devotional types.
On the question of psychotherapeutic treatment in prison, Meves warned against “carelessly overestimating the reversibility of criminal behavioral disorders.” Repeat offenders are often not in a position to assess their actions according to the situation at the time of committing the crime, so that the crime is often not intentional Therefore, a criminal accusation cannot be made.
In her book Manipulated Excessiveness, the books The Enlightened Eros (1964) by Alex Comfort and Sex Education (1970) by Helmut Kentler were subjected to sharp criticism. With Kentler's book one gets the “very clear impression” that “real demagoguery is being practiced here. The aim here is to incite political incitement and at the same time promote anarchy. Mr. Kentler's instructions on gender education are comparable to diabolical "strategies for corrupting people." In her essay The Verkopfite Mensch, she blamed the philosophy of the Enlightenment and especially Kant for an overvaluation of thinking and a devaluation of feelings. Here religion assigns it one-sidedly to the realm of feeling.
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Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (born November 23, 1945 in Oberwappenöst, Upper Palatinate) is a German religious philosopher.
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz studied philosophy, German and political science in Munich and Heidelberg and received her doctorate in 1970 from Ernesto Grassi. phil. doctorate. In 1979 she completed her habilitation on Italian Renaissance philosophy. In 1995 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vallendar University of Philosophy and Theology. She was married to Hans-Bernhard Wuermeling until his death in 2019.
She was head of studies at Rothenfels Castle and taught as a private lecturer at the universities in Munich, Bayreuth, Tübingen and Eichstätt. She received a professorship in philosophy at the Weingarten University of Education. Since 1993 she has held the chair for philosophy of religion and comparative religious studies at the Technical University of Dresden. In 2007 she took on a visiting professorship at the University of Trento/Italy, Cattedra Antonio Rosmini.
When she retired on April 1, 2011, her chair was also closed. Since 2011 she has headed the newly founded EUPHRAT Institute (“European Institute for Philosophy and Religion”) at the Benedict XVI University of Philosophy and Theology. in Heiligenkreuz near Vienna.
Her research focuses on the philosophy of religion in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Edith Stein and Romano Guardini. The focus of the research is the anthropology of gender, the theological foundations of modern times, Cusanus, and phenomenology. She is co-editor of the 28-volume complete edition of the works of Edith Stein and the 29-volume complete Italian edition of the works of Romano Guardini (Opera omnia, Morcelliana, Brescia). An important topic in research and teaching is the phenomenology of grace, to which she also dedicated her own monograph (“Forgive the Unforgivable?”).