Re-Gendering Intellectual Life: Gilles Ménage and his Histoire des femmes philosophes

Abstract

Abstract The late work of Gilles Ménage (1613–1692), Historia mulierum philosopharum (1690), is a compilation of all the information that he could gather concerning women philosophers from earliest antiquity to the fourteenth century. It made little impact when first published, but is currently the subject of renewed interest in the context of women's studies, with recent translations into English, French, Italian, and Spanish. However the work's true importance is much greater than has been realised. Ménage included it, as he had always intended, in his monumental and definitive edition of Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers (1692), the greatest known source of information about the (male) philosophers of antiquity. Ménage's Historia thus became a supplement, and corrective, to Diogenes Laertius, and was included with subsequent editions and translations of the irreplaceable Greek text. In this way, the reality of women's capacity for the highest intellectual achievement was incontrovertibly established, and women were integrated into the mainstream of the history of philosophy. An analysis of the frontispieces to the three volumes of Chauffepié's translation of Diogenes (1758) demonstrates how, thanks explicitly to Ménage's work, the role of women was now seen as crucial to modern intellectual life.