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Funded by: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Christina Queen of Sweden (1626–1689) has an established place in European cultural history, which appears to be built on her infamous deviations from whatwas expected of a female regent. In this chapter I want to assess some aspects ofthese deviations by rereading a selection of her 1,500 maxims collected by hersecretaries in the 1680s under the titlesL’Ouvrage de loisir[Work of leisure] andLes sentiments héroïques[Heroic sentiments] in order to understand what early modern freethinking could be for a woman.

I Fritänkandet – Kvinnliga libertiner och en annan humanism presenterar Carin Franzén sina studier av Margareta av Navarra, Drottning Kristina, Anne de Lenclos och Antoinette Deshoulières. De kallades libertiner för att de förde fram andra former av subjektivitet – friare former som idag ter sig mer aktuella än någonsin. Genom dessa kvinnors verk (noveller, maximer, brev och dikter) lyfter Franzén fram den fritänkande strömningen i den humanistiska traditionen och visar vad det kan inne­bära att tänka vid sidan om. Bortom det hävdvunna finns möjligheter att förändra våra sätt att vara och för­hålla oss till andra.

Bidragene til Anne Fastrups forsvar for dr.phil. graden

This article assesses the notion of ecological awareness through a re-reading of Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic Decameron, together with Sigmund Freud and Timothy Morton. The purpose is not primarily to trace antecedents to modern and late modern thought, but rather to follow a loop that in different ways is tangible in their works and links them together despite their temporal and thematic differences. If Freud and Morton possess heuristic value for a re-reading of Boccaccio, his way of articulating an earlier and freethinking vein in the humanist tradition may prompt us to see not only what an ecological thought may be, but also that it has always been there as an unconscious awareness. We suggest that such a loop can function as a liberating deviation from a linear idea of living at the end of times. In this article, we also follow this temporal and thematic loop as a tension between disruptiveness and interconnectedness that Freud metaphorically and mythologically describes as a battle between the two giants Thanatos and Eros. From Morton’s ecological perspective, everything’s interconnectedness (or Eros in Freud’s mythological description) is precisely what has been denied or repressed in the anthropocentric strive to master the world. What is interesting in this regard is that Boccaccio, by taking a specific disastrous event—the plague—as his starting point, also makes Thanatos and Eros the themes that interconnect his stories into a weird loop., Seed Box Program at Linköping University, https:// theseedbox.se

Är självet den givna och oföränderliga kärnan i vår identitet eller något som förändras övertid och genom olika språkliga former? Hur vi än väljer att besvara frågan är det förmodligenså att det krävs någon form av språklig framställning för att överhuvudtaget uppfatta ettsjälv. Det är hur som helst en grundtanke i antologin Selvet. Fra sjæleliv til skolestil. Europæisk litteratur 1500–1800. Genom att studera äldre självframställningar träder i studien enrad singulära själv fram som samtidigt ter sig historiskt, socialt och politiskt betingade.

The article discusses Antoinette Deshoulières’s poetry as a baroque disrupter of the French classical period at the second half of the seventeenth century. The focus is on her nature idylls and their critique of the period’s anthropocentric rationalism. In a first step and as a background, I discuss the conception of French Classicism as a break with baroque key topics, such as instability, metaphorical play, and imagination. From the perspective of French literary history, the Baroque is often conceived of as a disordered predecessor to the rational order of the Classical period associated with the “Age of Louis XIV” (1643–1715). In such a context, Deshoulières’s idylls, ”Les Moutons” (1677) and ”Le Ruisseau” (1685), both published in Le Mercure galant, could be read as baroque disruptors due to their place in a specific Epicurean vein within the French classical period that undermines its dominating rationalism. As a frame for my reading of the idylls, I provide a short description of the context of Deshoulières’s writing and its connexion to a wider libertine movement within literature and art, which can be traced back to the sixteenth century’s revival of Epicurus and natural philosophy. I conclude the article with a brief discussion of the actuality of Deshoulières’s poems in the light of a present ecological thinking.