The many Voices of Female Authorship. Strategic Multilingualism in Life Writing and the Shaping of Female Authorship and Authority in the Age of Enlightenment.'

This project seeks, for the first time, to give fundamental insight in how multilingualism, as a rhetorical tool, informed early modern women’s processes of authorial identity formation.

As an early modern woman, taking ownership over a text was far from self-evident. In fact, women writers had to carefully craft and renegotiate their authorial identities in their writing. Their life writing in particular was essential to both their authorial practice and self- fashioning. This project investigates the hypothesis that especially Enlightenment women writers, who lived in the transition period from crossing to defending linguistic, cultural and national borders, used multilingualism in their life writing as a strategy for authorial self- fashioning. The project therefore innovatively charts and compares the forms and functions of multilingualism in the letters and (travel) journals of Enlightenment women writers who lived, worked and travelled between the internationally renowned centres of the Republic of Letters.

In doing so, the project will, first and foremost, shed new light on how Enlightenment women writers actively (re)shaped their authorial identity and authority. It will thereby challenge previous visions on the forms and functions of multilingualism in Enlightenment Europe and provide the empirical stepping stone towards a new methodological framework for the study of early modern multilingualism.