Recherche et publications

• Publications
  15 publications

  2026 2025 2023 2022 2020

  From Courtiers to Courtship: Tory Feminism and the Political Dangers of Flattery
  Geertje Jeanne Bol, Mary Jo MacDonald, Perspectives on Politics (2026) | Article

  Citations and Abbreviations
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Dedication
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  The Virtue of Scripture Moderation
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Introduction
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Astell’s Machiavellian Streak
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Macaulay’s History
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Reflections on Revolutions
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Partisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Political Thought
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Livre

  Conclusion
  Geertje J Bol (2026) | Chapitre de livre

  Looking beyond women’s feminist thought in history
  Geertje J. Bol, History of European Ideas (2025) | Article

  ‘I Love you Whom the World calls Enemies’: Mary Astell Against Political Friendship
  Geertje Bol, History of Political Thought (2025) | Article

  Mary Astell on Moderation: The Case of Occasional Conformity
  Geertje Bol, The European Legacy (2023) | Article

  The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth‐Century Britain. By MaxSkjönsberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 373 p. £75 (hb). ISBN 9781108841634
  Geertje J. Bol, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2022) | Article

  Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment. By KarenGreen. New York: Routledge. 2020. 266 p. £96 (hb). ISBN 978‐0‐367‐35897‐6.
  Geertje J. Bol, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2020) | Article

• Projets de recherche

  The Politics of Female Ambition: Gender and Agency in Seventeenth-Century England and France
  Statut: En cours

  Début	01.09.2026
  Fin	31.08.2030
  Financement	FNS  Voir la fiche du projet
  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.