Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In this first book-length study of Louise de Keralio (1756–1822), Vicki Mistacco offers a reading of her entire body of writing and a new understanding of Keralio as an Enlightenment intellectual and a modern feminist thinker. Adopting a fresh approach—close textual analysis informed by feminist literary criticism and French feminist theory and by careful reconstruction of the historical and cultural context—Mistacco challenges the critical commonplace that Keralio is a puzzling “sexist republican.” She stresses instead the anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-exclusionary paradigm at the core of her thinking, a both/and rather than either/or paradigm, which Keralio envisages as a maternal one, reflected in the recurring motif of crossing boundaries. Mistacco analyses Keralio’s use of “double-voiced discourse” to uphold her feminist ideals while ostensibly endorsing gender norms. The book traces the evolution in Keralio’s thinking about the importance of including in cultural patrimony a matrimoine or maternal legacy: whether the contributions of French women writers to national identity and French genius, or those of Queen Elizabeth to the history of European sovereignty, or her own annotations to her translations, or in her late novels the testimony of women to arrive at historical truth. Mistacco shows how the idea of maternal legacy evolves into that of maternal enlightenment, arguing that Keralio elevates the maternal to the level of philosophy and theorizes a new social contract based on an ethics of care. Including unpublished and archival texts, this book offers an important contribution to the history of women intellectuals of the Enlightenment.</jats:p>