Geertje Bol
geertje.bol@unifr.ch
+41 26 300 7945
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9402-430X
I am an SNSF Ambizione fellow. I am a historian of early modern political thought, especially interested in recovering women's political insights and bringing their perspectives to bear on present-day political concerns. My first book Partisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women's Political Thought was published with Oxford University Press in 2026.
At Fribourg, I am currently working on a second book project, which recovers an early modern tradition of "ambitious feminism" to intervene in contemporary debates about ambition and (in)equality. I am also very interested in the conservative origins of feminism, in particular recovering the neglected phenomenon of early modern Tory feminism.
Research Associate SNSF
Department of History
Research and publications
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Publications
15 publications
From Courtiers to Courtship: Tory Feminism and the Political Dangers of Flattery
Geertje Jeanne Bol, Mary Jo MacDonald, Perspectives on Politics (2026) | Journal articleCitations and Abbreviations
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterDedication
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterThe Virtue of Scripture Moderation
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterIntroduction
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterAstell’s Machiavellian Streak
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterMacaulay’s History
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterReflections on Revolutions
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapterPartisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Political Thought
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BookConclusion
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Book chapter -
Research projects
The Politics of Female Ambition: Gender and Agency in Seventeenth-Century England and France
Status: OngoingStart 01.09.2026 End 31.08.2030 Funding SNSF Open project sheet This project investigates the early modern origins of the enduring double standard that celebrates ambition in men but condemns it in women. It offers the first systematic and comparative study of ambition as a gendered political concept in seventeenth-century England and France, showing how ambition became both a marker of civic virtue and a moral boundary for exclusion. The project traces how ambition was used to justify women’s subordination—portraying their aspirations as unnatural, vain, or corrupt—and exclusion from politics, learning, and public life, while at the same time exploring how early feminist thinkers such as Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell subversively drew on it as a resource for emancipation. By integrating digital text analysis with close reading, The Politics of Female Ambition reconstructs how ambition functioned as a contested vocabulary of power—at once enforcing exclusion and offering tools for its critique. Using a bilingual corpus of seventeenth-century texts, it maps how ambition was defined, moralised, and gendered across languages, genres, and confessions. The project thus combines large-scale digital mapping with fine-grained interpretation to uncover how ambition circulated between France and England, and how women transformed a term of reproach into a claim for agency, dignity, and inclusion. By uncovering how early feminist thinkers recognised and resisted the moral double standard of ambition, the project illuminates the historical roots of tensions that continue to shape contemporary debates about women’s aspiration, leadership, and equality. Combining historical recovery with methodological innovation, the project reframes ambition as a moral and political concept with emancipatory potential. In doing so, it contributes to feminist theory, the history of political thought, and digital intellectual history, offering new insight into how ambition shapes debates on gender and equality, and how it might be reimagined as a more inclusive ideal.