Meertaligheid als strategie voor zelfontplooiing in de briefwisselingen van Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni en Isabelle de Charrière

Abstract

In Enlightenment Europe multilingualism was an omnipresent fact. Even the correspondences of eighteenth-century writers gave clear evidence of – often strategically chosen – forms of multilingualism. Up until today, the question arises as to why early modern writers used (various forms of) multilingualism in their letters. This paper investigates, for the first time, the hypothesis that early modern writers used multilingualism in their letter writing as a strategy for intellectual and authorial self-fashioning. To that end, it explores the multilingual dimensions of two women writers’ correspondences. Studying the way in which Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1792) and Isabelle de Charrière (1740- 1805) actively (re)shaped their intellectual authority and authorial identity by means of multilingualism will prove to provide an excellent stepping stone towards more (comparative) research on the forms and functions of multilingualism in the (life) writing of eighteenth-century male and female writers.