Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, the 10th news, Marie-Din Gornet.

Philosophers nowadays talk about epistemic injustice, which occurs when people are unfairly taken to lack authority as sources of knowledge.

Miranda Fricker, who wrote the book that introduced the term, gives the example of women in corporate settings whose ideas and suggestions are taken as less credible, simply because they are women.

Fricker tells of one executive who, when she is at a meeting and wants to make a suggestion about policy, actually writes down the suggestion on a little piece of paper, sort of ticiously passes it to a sympathetic male colleague, has him make the suggestion, watches it be well received, and then joins in the discussion from there.

Women living before the age of the multinational corporation, are already well aware of the phenomenon, even if they didn't have a name for it.

One of the earliest clear statements of epistemic injustice I know is found in the work of Marie-Din Gornet.

She notes that even a woman with the wit of carnities, a leading skeptical philosopher or eventiquity, will be ignored in conversation with a man.

With merely a smile or some slight shaking of his head, his mute eloquence pronounces, it's a woman speaking.

This passage actually occurs in two works by Gornet.

It may be found in the lady's complaint, which along with her equality of men and women, and apology for the woman writing, all published in the 1641 edition of her collected works, establishes Gornet as a pioneering feminist.

But his appearance there is a bit of a recycling on her part, because the remark was first made in a lengthy preface to her 1595 edition of Montaigne's essays.

With the blessing of Montaigne's widow, Gornet included additional material beyond that found in earlier editions.

Her expanded version was the standard one used until 1802, when scholars began to prefer the earlier 1588 edition augmented by Montaigne's handwritten notes.

Arguably this downgrading of Gornet's edition was itself a case of epistemic injustice since she knew Montaigne well, and might reasonably be taken to be an authoritative source of knowledge on his thought and on the text of the essays.

This same aspect of Gornet's literary career makes her pioneering in another sense.

She should certainly not be reduced to a mere follower and literary executor of Montaigne.

Her collected works are more than 1,000 pages long and range widely in terms of topic and genre.

But she does give us our first example of a type that will become increasingly familiar as we move forward in history, the female philosopher whose renown is secured primarily by being linked to a famous male philosopher.

Later examples will include Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Sophie Charlotte of Hannover, best known to historians of philosophy for their correspondence with Descartes and Leivnitz respectively.

This is something we haven't really seen before, unless you count family relations like Makrina the sister of Gregory of Nissa.

We did see how women humanists of the Italian Renaissance deliberately sought to associate themselves with prominent male humanists with mixed success.

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