The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period’s two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes – Epicurean and Stoic – towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period’s discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period’s dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires.

Carin Franzén and Johanna VernqvistIntroductionThis volume explores different subjective strategies used by early modern women–poets, philosophers or artists–who subverted conventional expressions of body,gender and senses. If the body and its sensations are most present, and sometimesviewed in contradictory ways–expressed, visualized or rejected–in early modernart and literature, women have most often served as the objects for these represen-tations (O’Rourke Boyle 1998; Hairston and Stephens 2010; Loh 2019). Furthermore,for male artists, philosophers and poets, they have incarnated the highest good aswell as the most sinful vices. Certainly, the troubles of being torn between desires ofthe flesh and the soul have roots in Christianity, Platonism and the aesthetic expres-sions of, for example, Petrarch and Dante (Falkeid 2015). Neoplatonists eagerlysought to split body and soul and disregarded what they classified as the lowersenses (touch, smell, taste) in favour of the intellectual senses (seeing and hearing).Let us take a famous example: while both the art and love poetry of Michelangeloare partly expressed through Neoplatonic ideals (Saslow 1986, 1991; Francese 2002),we find a strong focus on sensibility and a longing to touch or be touched, physicallyor emotionally, in his expression. The same tension can be found in Sperone Spero-ni’s philosophical dialogues, and as we will see in this volume, in Gaspara Stampa’spoetry, as well as in the art of Titian, Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi.Similar interest in corporeal experience and the role of the senses can be discernedthroughout early modern Europe, as shown recently in works such asAffective andEmotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe(Marculescu and Mor-and Métivier 2018) andGender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe:Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder(Broomhall 2018).

Christina Queen of Sweden (1626–1689) has an established place in European cultural history, which appears to be built on her infamous deviations from whatwas expected of a female regent. In this chapter I want to assess some aspects ofthese deviations by rereading a selection of her 1,500 maxims collected by hersecretaries in the 1680s under the titlesL’Ouvrage de loisir[Work of leisure] andLes sentiments héroïques[Heroic sentiments] in order to understand what early modern freethinking could be for a woman.

The article revisits Christine de Pizan’s famous reworking of medieval canon

in The Book of the City of Ladies from 1405, where anger can be said to appear as

a “thinking-­ feeling” with the capacity to dismantle misogynistic representations

(Massumi). In this sense Christine’s work is also an historical event that reverses

relationship of forces by “an appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who

had once used it” as Foucault described it in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”.

Thus, anger is an affect that engages Christine in a violent debate with her enemies

demonstrating that a hegemonic discursive order has no stable ground and there-

fore can be disturbed and changed.

I boken presenteras studier av Margareta av Navarra, Drottning Kristina, Anne de Lenclos och Antoinette Deshoulières. De kallades libertiner för att de förde fram andra former av subjektivitet – friare former som idag ter sig mer aktuella än någonsin.

Genom dessa kvinnors verk (noveller, maximer, brev och dikter) lyfter Franzén fram den fritänkande strömningen i den humanistiska traditionen och visar vad det kan inne­bära att tänka vid sidan om. Bortom det hävdvunna finns möjligheter att förändra våra sätt att vara och för­hålla oss till andra.

I Fritänkandet – Kvinnliga libertiner och en annan humanism presenterar Carin Franzén sina studier av Margareta av Navarra, Drottning Kristina, Anne de Lenclos och Antoinette Deshoulières. De kallades libertiner för att de förde fram andra former av subjektivitet – friare former som idag ter sig mer aktuella än någonsin.

Genom dessa kvinnors verk (noveller, maximer, brev och dikter) lyfter Franzén fram den fritänkande strömningen i den humanistiska traditionen och visar vad det kan inne­bära att tänka vid sidan om. Bortom det hävdvunna finns möjligheter att förändra våra sätt att vara och för­hålla oss till andra.