The Influence of Early Modern Epistemology on the Education of Girls in Eighteenth-Century France

Karen L. Taylor

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The Influence of Early Modern Epistemology on the Education of Girls in Eighteenth-Century France

In: Negotiating Childhoods

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Karen L. Taylor

Karen L. Taylor
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 65–77

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880467_008

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This paper explores the relationship between the curricular material (the cahiers de géographie) used at the Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr, a school for noble girls established by Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon in 1689, and the broader intellectual and cultural context from which it emerged. Saint-Cyr exposed its students not only to ‘agreeable and useful’ information, as geography was often termed at the time, but also to a manner of structuring knowledge that necessarily reflects aspects of empirical and epistemological thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The primacy of sense experience to the acquisition of knowledge permeates eighteenth-century thought. In his Essay Concerning Understanding (1690) Locke asserted that sense experience is the source of operations of the mind as well as our ideas. His influence in France is evident as Condillac, among others, built on Locke’s theory in his Traîté des sensations (1754). The very structure of the cahiers, with their combination of map, accompanying text and list of terms, echoes precisely this mental process whereby a visual image should ideally lead to the exercise of memory and, finally, comparison and judgment as the demoiselle reflected upon the material contained within multiple cahiers.

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Negotiating Childhoods

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880467

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 May 2010

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - General
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies
  - Youth & Adolescence

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The Influence of Early Modern Epistemology on the Education of Girls in Eighteenth-Century France

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Negotiating Childhoods

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