Hi, I'm

Heard

and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought

to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Take Your Medicine, Oliva Sabuco and Camilla Eculiani.

Historians who want to uncover the achievements of women intellectuals in earlier times

are often faced with problems of authorship. For all we know, some surviving pre-modern works

are in fact by women, but not labeled as such. And when works and ideas are

ascribed to women, there's often some doubt about authenticity. There's no consensus whether

diatima, who delivers the culminating speech of Plato's symposium, is based on a real person.

Philosophical letters, ascribed to even earlier women of the Pythagorean school, are certainly

not by them,

as shown by the fact that the Greek language used in them dates from a later period,

but maybe the authors were female nonetheless.

Things are usually a bit clearer for medieval women authors,

but even here it has sometimes been suspected that male colleagues had a significant role

in shaping the text ascribed to figures

like Hildegarde of Bingen. And just recently, when covering Elizabethan England, we saw a debate

about the sonnets ascribed to Anne Locke, whom we may or may not choose to believe when she denies

her own authorship. In the bad old days, historians used to make the sexist assumption that more sophisticated texts were surely not written by women, even if they were transmitted under the names of female authors.

Nowadays, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, since there is a healthy appetite to discover and study texts by pre-modern and early modern women thinkers.

...