Coin Portraits and Women's Ethos in Scudéry's Les femmes illustres

Abstract:Madeleine de Scudéry's Les Femmes illustres (1642) comprises fictional speeches by famous women of antiquity and includes coin portraits reproduced from Guillaume Rouillé's Promptuaire des medalles (1553). The portrait illustrations invoke connections between Scudéry's text and the genre of Rouillé's text—the coin image anthology. Comprised of coin portraits accompanied by biographies, anthologies of coin images draw from ancient visual traditions and grant prestige to women's images. As backgrounds for Les femmes illustres, these texts enhance the ethos of Scudéry's heroines because the coin portraits encourage readers to see the women as people worthy of public commemoration. Scudéry's prefatory epistle echoes the visual arguments and guides readers into ways of seeing women speakers as competent rhetors deserving of respect.