Engendering the republic of letters: Reconnecting public and private spheres in eighteenth-century Europe

This thesis shows that the public/private frameworks currently employed by Anglo-American and Italian scholars studying eighteenth-century elite women in France and Italy are not a useful tool for understanding these women's political and intellectual experiences. By undertaking a close reading of the correspondence of four French and Venetian salon women, I have shown how their participation in the republic of letters necessarily mixed personal and professional considerations. In their letters, salon women propagated the values of civility and sociability: beauty, wit, spontaneity, transparency and sometimes charity and humanity were all cultivated and enriched through the practices of polite exchange (based on modesty and discipline). The ethic of exchange as the means of improving both aesthetics and society at large was particularly important and the gens de lettres worked hard to establish the conditions for its existence. The salon women I have studied not only systematically circulated the documents, criticism and compliments that made intellectual exchange possible, but they also ran errands, did favours, defended political and literary causes and made recommendations in order to show their commitment to other members of the republic and thus to the cohesion of the community. In other words, friendship and personal loyalty underwrote political and intellectual relations by mapping a social obligation onto a professional one to ensure that exchange would continue. In light of this evidence, it is impossible to speak of a division between public and private spheres in eighteenth-century elite society.