This interdisciplinary volume of eleven essays examines the idea and the reality of equality between the sexes in early modern France. It aims to contribute towards the development of the history of equality as an intellectual category within the history of political thought.

Derval Conroy is Associate Professor of French at University College Dublin. Her research interests include women writers, the history of women in political thought, the history of feminisms and the history of equality, areas on which she has widely published. She is author of Ruling Women. Vol 1. Government, Virtue and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France; Vol 2. Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama (2016).

Introduction: thinking equality in the early modern period 1. "Poulain de la Barre, a logician of equality: prejudice time and the sex of the mind" 2. "Equality, neutrality, differentialism: Descartes, Malebranche, and Poulain de la Barre" 3. "Gender equality in community: Descartes, Poulain de la Barre, Fontenelle" 4. "The rhetoric of equality: Marie de Gournay, linguist and philosopher" 5. "Virtue as a language of equality: gender, moral androgyny and the representation of archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia in seventeenth-century France" 6. "Reading, Acting and Writing Into Being: Ursulines as Jesuitesses in the French Atlantic World" 7. "The paradoxes of early modern nuns and gender equality: the case of Port-Royal in early modern France" 8. "Fashioning Equality and Friendship: Saint-Evremond, Hortense Mancini and Ninon de Lenclos" 9. "Gender Equality and the Role of Women Theatre Professionals in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century France" 10. "Equality in the printed book: the case of book privileges in France in the seventeenth century" 11. "The destabilization of gender in the European Enlightenment and Qing China"