Talk 1: Johanna Dorothea Lindenaer: Memoirist, Translator, and Religious Polemicist. Talk 2: Rhetoric, Method, and Genre in Gabrielle Suchon’s Treatise on Ethics and Politics

Floris Verhaart, Margaret Matthews (Assumption University), Marguerite El Asmar Bou Aoun (Saint Joseph University of Beirut, Lebanese American University), Jil Muller (Paderborn University), Daniel Fischer, Katia Raya Rami

https://indico.uni-paderborn.de/event/156/

28.04.2026, 4.30-6pm (Paris time)

Floris Verhaart - Johanna Dorothea Lindenaer: Memoirist, Translator, and Religious Polemicist

After being accused of treason and conspiracy, a young widow was imprisoned by the Dutch army in Maastricht. With the help of an army officer and two of his soldiers, she managed to escape and fled to Paris in 1704, where she converted to Catholicism and became a writer and translator. The name of this widow was Johanna Dorothea Lindenaer (nom de plume: Mme Zoutelande). Among her original publications are a notoriously unreliable memoir (1710) and a renunciation of her former Protestant beliefs, La Babylone démasquée (1727).  Her translations – translated from Dutch into French – include a selection of letters written by Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-78) on the relationship between medicine and divine providence (Lettres de la très fameuse demoiselle Anne-Marie Schurmans, 1730) and a treatise on political theory with a distinctly republican flavour by Pieter de la Court (1618-85), the Memoires de Jean de Wit, grand pensionnaire de Hollande (1709). 

Although this written output may seem like a mishmash of topics, I will demonstrate how Lindenaer’s writings and translations across a range of genres and themes convey a coherent religious agenda aimed at defending Catholicism from Protestant polemicists and at commenting on contemporary tensions between Jansenists and their opponents within the Catholic church. Both in her translations and in her original writings, Lindenaer makes clever use of the arguments and formulations of others to get her own points of view across to the reader. This helps her retain the intellectual modesty expected of women in the early modern period. After all, she could claim she merely reported and conveyed other people’s ideas. I will therefore argue that Lindenaer was not just a religious author and translator who happened to be a woman; her gender is key to understanding her writings from a religious perspective. 

About the Speaker: Floris Verhaart is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter. He is affiliated with the ERC/UKRI project Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe and has published on a wide range of aspects of early modern religious and intellectual culture, such as ideas on religion and violence, sexuality and gender, university culture, and the impact of the classical tradition. He is the author and (co)editor of five books, including Protestant Politics Beyond Calvin: Reformed Theologians on War in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Ian Campbell) and Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750: Beyond the Ancients and the Moderns (OUP, 2020). 

Margaret Matthews - Rhetoric, Method, and Genre in Gabrielle Suchon’s Treatise on Ethics and Politics

In this talk, I discuss the genre, methodology, and mode of communication used by early modern philosopher Gabrielle Suchon in her Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693), and describe its relation to her feminism. I examine how Suchon adapts aspects of the theological genre and methods of Scholasticism, redirecting them toward new ends, namely, an extended argument for the moral, intellectual, and spiritual equality of men and women. I show further how Suchon’s appropriation of Scholasticism renders her feminist project distinctive within her seventeenth-century context, contrasting it with that of feminist writers in the querelle des femmes tradition (e.g., Marie de Gournay and Marguerite Buffet) and Cartesian feminists (e.g., François Poulain de la Barre and Mary Astell). When considering the rhetorical features of Suchon’s work, scholars have often emphasized her efforts to communicate with a female audience and to cultivate generosity and solidarity in her female readers. Much less scholarly attention has been given to Suchon’s mode of communication with male audiences and her use of traditionally male-dominated genres, such as Scholasticism, to advance her feminist project. I show how Suchon draws on Scholastic methods and genres, such as dialectic and the disputed question format, as well as concepts within Thomistic natural law theory, to reach a specific type of male reader, namely one steeped in the Scholastic tradition. On one level, her goal is to persuade this type of reader that concern with the elevation of women’s status is not only consistent with, but also demanded by the Thomistic theoretical framework that he accepts. On another level, by appropriating a traditionally male-dominated genre, Suchon’s goal is to reclaim a position of epistemic authority that has been denied to her as a woman writer, and to perform (through her own example) the very equality she seeks to prove.

About the Speaker: Margaret Matthews is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Assumption University. Her research specialization is in Renaissance and Early Modern philosophy with an emphasis on the intersection of epistemology and social and political philosophy. She has published on topics such as Gabrielle Suchon’s epistemology and Marie de Gournay’s skepticism, and she is currently working on a book project on the philosophy of Gabrielle Suchon.