I waver between thinking that each period I read about it the absolutely most fascinating one with regard to gender and sexuality, and thinking that the period immediately before the one I'm reading about is. But every time I read articles about the 17th century (especially England or France, but let's be honest: that's where the publications skew) I come back to the idea that it was a fascinatingly queer era. In contrast (and, in many ways, in opposition) to the artificially glittering world of Versailles there was the woman-centered world of the French salons, and their export of precieuse culture to England. Beside the libertine activities of the court and family politics that ensured that love and marriage were largely separate experiences, there was the chaotic gender-transgressing culture of the common people, meticulously documented by disapproving preachers who considered the dissolution of clear gender signifiers to presage the apocalypse.
This is the context in which Madeleine de Scudéry ventured to write about the ideals of friendship and to dream about a different way for men and women to relate. One shouldn't take this as an actual blueprint for behavior, but more of a critique of the status quo. But underlying it is the firm principle of 17th century social politics that women's best and most lasting relationships were not with men, but with their female friends. (Even if social conventions required them to end up with men in the end.)
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