EDULUM

Taking Marie Leprince de Beaumont as its starting point, the project entitled EDULUM (Female Educators and Enlightenment: the example of Marie Leprince de Beaumont) aims to reflect on the role of women as authors and educators in the European movement of the Enlightenment. At once a novelist, a journalist, an educator, Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711-1780) is one of the best known authors in France and Europe in the 18th century. Numerous translations of her educational texts, in particular her Magasins bear witness to this. Despite the considerable influence she had during her lifetime (and beyond), through her writings, her life and work have been largely ignored by researchers. In all her books, one can read her faith in progress and the perfectibility of mankind, and she took part actively in a movement for the diffusion of knowledge which the Encyclopaedists also illustrate. She also defended the rights of women to knowledge and intellectual equality. She addressed questions like social hierarchy, equality and liberty. Marie Leprince de Beaumont is thus fully a participant in the different intellectual and religious debates of her century. To date, however, she has usually been associated with adversaries of the Enlightenment because of the connection of some of her work to apologetics and the promotion of Christianity. In reality, she invites us to question the traditional opposition between defenders and adversaries of the Enlightenment which has been the common approach in French historiography in particular. She thus offers an opportunity to analyse the role of women authors/educators (Félicité de Genlis would be another example) in Enlightenment thought and its diffusion in Europe. Thanks to the different scientific gatherings, the planned editions and research, the project will afford an opportunity to put an important 18th-century woman author back into the limelight. It will allow us to revise the literary canon by including a field currently neglected by research. One of the project’s specificities is to be aimed at once at specialists of the Enlightenment and of educational writings, and to a wider public, including that of schoolchildren and college students, thanks to planned collaborations with teachers and to the preparation of an online exhibition. There will also be occasions for M.A. students to take an active part in our research by their implication in tasks like establishing texts and participating in the preparation of the planned critical editions of Leprince de Beaumont’s texts. At the same time, our transcultural approach of the author will enable us, as researchers, to reflect on the respective conceptualisations of the Enlightenment in France and in Germany. Our Franco-German team will bring together two complementary scientific traditions which will be consolidated by our international collaborations.