 Interestingly, Elisabeth introduces her own nature as female as one bodily ‘condition’ that can impact reason. While Descartes concedes that a certain threshold of bodily health is necessary for the freedom that characterizes rational thought, he disregards Elisabeth’s appeal to the “weakness of my sex” (Shapiro 1999). Pellegrin (2021), in analyzing how the female body figures in the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth, argues that the very idea of a weak sex is antithetical to Cartesianism.