Jacqueline Broad

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679?-1749) was one of the earliest defenders of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). This paper examines her engagement with Stoic ideas in her moral writings: Remarks upon Some Writers in the Controversy concerning the Foundation of Moral Virtue (1743) and Remarks upon the Principles and Reasonings of Dr. Rutherforth’s Essay (1747). My analysis focuses on her principle of living in accordance with nature and her concept of virtue as conformity to the nature, relations, and fitness of things. I argue that a Stoic reading of Cockburn’s moral naturalism enables us to solve some puzzle and tensions in her thought and gain a richer understanding of Cockburn’s ideas concerning the foundations of morality.

This chapter examines three seventeenth-century feminist critiques of the misogynist pamphleteer John Sprint (fl. 1699–1700). It demonstrates that an ideal of freedom as rational self-governance—controlling one’s own will in conformity with the law of reason—plays a crucial role in the arguments of Sprint’s key critics, Eugenia, Mary Astell, and Mary Chudleigh. In their responses to Sprint, these Englishwomen highlight the moral dangers of the marital relationship, and especially the threat that such relationships pose to a woman’s capacity for rational self-governance. They argue that marriage thwarts this capacity if a wife is expected to ‘merge her will’ with that of her husband (as Sprint had suggested), such that she only ever thinks and desires what he himself thinks and desires. The chapter concludes by drawing parallels between these women’s views and those of recent feminist theorists of autonomy.

This volume is an edited collection of private letters and published epistles to and from English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650–1700). It includes the letters and epistles of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the correspondents of some of the best-known intellectuals of the period, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains the significance of the letters and epistles with respect to early modern scholarship and the study of women philosophers. It is argued that this selection of texts demonstrates the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in this period. To help situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume also includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known male contemporaries. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters and epistles. Among its critical apparatus, the volume also includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.

This volume is an edited collection of the philosophical correspondences of three English women of the eighteenth century: Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. The selected correspondence includes letters to and/or from John Norris, George Hickes, Mary Chudleigh, Richard Hemington, John Locke, Ann Hepburn Arbuthnot, and Edmund Law. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from questions about the love of God and other people to the causes of sensation in the mind, the metaphysical foundations of moral obligation, and the importance of independence of judgement in one’s moral choices and actions. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains some of the key themes and developments in the eighteenth-century letters, including an increased awareness of other women’s writings and of the concerns of women as a sociopolitical group. It is argued that if we look beyond printed treatises to the content of these letters, it is possible to gain a fuller appreciation of women’s involvement in philosophical debates of the 1690s and early 1700s. To situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondence relates either to her contemporaries’ ideas or to her own published views. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters. Among its critical apparatus, the volume includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.

From the inception of women’s response to male philosophical misogyny, women have focused on issues connected with virtue and educability. Two factors lie behind this tendency. The first is that arguments for women’s subjection in marriage, and for their exclusion from positions of power, have traditionally emphasized women’s moral incapacity, duplicitousness, and lack of prudence. So women seeking to defend themselves from such charges have interrogated the concept of moral virtue and sought to show how women are capable of being virtuous agents. Second, as traditional educators of the young, women have historically recognized the importance of early education in providing good habits of mind and the right decision-making capacities for later in life. In this paper, we examine the convergence of these two topics—virtue and education—in women’s texts of the pre-enlightenment and enlightenment eras. We narrow our focus to those works by women and about women, while acknowledging that many similar ideas and arguments might be found in male writings of the period. We choose to highlight women’s ideas because we think that they provide an interesting pre-history to the development of women’s feminist arguments for political equality from the late eighteenth century onwards. This is a pre-history that emphasizes women’s moral equality, or the idea that women are morally on a par with men in so far as they possess all the necessary psychological traits to be considered moral agents, as well as the necessary psychology to be considered morally educable.

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments.

In this article, I critically examine a number of recent editions of philosophical works by early modern women. I argue that the proliferation of such texts is likely to have positive implications for the study of early modern philosophy. By taking a historical-contextualist approach to women’s writings, these editions contribute to the goal of a thorough, unbiased, and impartial account of early modern thought. Their accessibility and teachability also draw attention to historical-philosophical ideas, methods, and genres that could have worth and relevance today. Above all, these texts are valuable for helping to correct a one-sided, male-biased understanding of the philosophical past.

In this chapter, the author interprets Mary Astell's critique of these principles as engagements with the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Scholars have examined Astell's writings in relation to the Hobbesian concept of the state of nature and Hobbes's theory of the social contract. While Astell explicitly vilifies Hobbes as a proponent of just cause theory, in the political pamphlets of 1704, she implicitly adopts salient aspects of his views concerning the maintenance of peace. Her writings are valuable for demonstrating how Hobbesian ideas concerning war and peace were embraced by a feminist pioneer of the early modern era. Astell's named references to Hobbes are reflective of a popular if somewhat distorted conception of Hobbesian politics in her time. Astell builds on Hobbes's views by suggesting that recognition of women's moral and intellectual competence can play a positive role in the maintenance of peace.

This paper provides an overview of women's engagement with Stoic ethics in early modern England (c. 1600–1700). It builds on recent literature in the field by demonstrating that there is a positive gender‐inclusive narrative to be told about Stoic philosophy in this time—one that incorporates women's specific concerns and responds to women's lived experiences. To support this claim, we take an interdisciplinary approach and examine several different genres of women's writing in the period, including letters, poems, plays, educational texts, and moral essays. In these writings, we argue, a distinctive conception of Stoic therapy emerges. Women embrace well‐known aspects of the Stoic philosophy—such as living in agreement with nature, the importance of self‐government, and the ideal of freedom from the passions—but they also allow room for the cultivation of eupatheiai or life‐affirmative feelings, such as feelings of respect, affection, and good will toward other people.

Several recent studies devote themselves to Mary Astell's feminist theory of virtue—her ‘serious proposal to the ladies’ to help women obtain wisdom, equality, and happiness, despite the prejudices of seventeenth-century custom. But there has been little scholarship on Astell's conception of heroic virtues, those exceptional character traits that raise their bearers above the ordinary course of nature. Astell's appropriation of heroic virtue poses a number of philosophical difficulties for her feminist ethics—heroic virtues are characteristically masculine, exceptional, and individualistic, ill-suited to a community-oriented feminism aimed at ordinary women. In this paper, we seek to investigate—and then dispel—these key difficulties. Our intention is to generate a new understanding of Astell's theory of virtue as a unique and sophisticated theory that equalizes and naturalizes heroic virtue for women.

This article examines two early modern feminist works, Woman Not Inferior to Man and Woman's Superior Excellence Over Man, written by “Sophia, A Person of Quality.” Scholars once dismissed these texts as plagiarisms or semi-translations of François Poulain de la Barre's De l’égalité des deux sexes. More recently, however, Guyonne Leduc has drawn attention to the original aspects of these treatises by highlighting Sophia's significant variations on Poulain's vocabulary. In this article, I take Leduc's analysis a step further by demonstrating that Sophia's variations amount to unique and distinctive arguments for the restoration of women's rights, based on both the natural equality and the moral superiority of women compared to men. I argue that Sophia goes beyond Poulain's Cartesian insights to mount a critique of male tyranny characterized as a lack of generosity toward women. My contention is that Sophia's texts represent a culmination in a line of reasoning that extends from the querelle des femmes of the Renaissance to Poulain's Cartesian feminism of the seventeenth century, through to arguments for women's rights in the eighteenth century. Her works thus warrant greater recognition as significant turning points in the history of feminist thought.

In her Remarks Upon Some Writers (1743), Catharine Trotter Cockburn takes a seemingly radical stance by asserting that it is possible for atheists to be virtuous. In this paper, I examine whether or not Cockburn’s views concerning atheism commit her to a naturalistic ethics and a so-called radical enlightenment position on the independence of morality and religion. First, I examine her response to William Warburton’s critique of Pierre Bayle’s arguments concerning the possibility of a society of virtuous atheists. I argue that this response shows Cockburn vacillating between a moral naturalism, on the one hand, and a theistic morality, on the other. Second, I draw on Cockburn’s letters to her niece Ann Arbuthnot, and her opinions concerning mystical ideas about “the will of God” in north-east Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century. I maintain that these letters give us a fuller appreciation of Cockburn’s naturalistic position. My conclusion is that Cockburn’s ideas concerning atheism prompt us to consider the close interplay between secular and religious principles in so-called radical ideas of the period.

In his correspondence, John Locke described his close friend Damaris Masham as ‘a determined foe to ecclesiastical tyranny’ and someone who had ‘the greatest aversion to all persecution on account of religious matters.’ In her short biography of Locke, Masham returned the compliment by commending Locke for convincing others that ‘Liberty of Conscience is the unquestionable Right of Mankind.’ These comments attest to Masham’s personal commitment to the cause of religious liberty. Thus far, however, there has been no scholarly discussion of the tolerationist ethic underlying Masham’s 1705 publication, Occasional Thoughts. In this chapter, I argue that Masham’s work appeals to three common tolerationist principles of her time: the idea that the authorities should not use coercion and penalties as ways of imposing religious beliefs on others; the view that God requires human beings to attain salvation through their own efforts, and not by blindly following the dictates of the state-established religion; and the idea that the granting of liberty of conscience helps to ensure the peace and stability of political society. I show that Masham goes further than her tolerationist contemporaries by arguing that together these principles imply that a woman’s intellectual education—or the conscious cultivation of a woman’s ability to reflect critically on her religious beliefs—is vital for the good of the commonwealth.

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments.

Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway’s thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises “those doctors” who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is “intimate present” in the body. In this paper, I argue that here she targets Walter Charleton, a well-known defender of Epicurean atomism in mid-seventeenth-century England. My intention is to highlight the sophistication of Conway’s theory of soul-body relations vis-a-vis that of Charleton.

This paper focuses on the English philosopher Mary Astell’s marginalia in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s personal copy of the 1704 edition of Pierre Bayle’s Pensées diverses sur le comète (first published in 1682). I argue that Astell’s annotations provide good reasons for thinking that Bayle is biased toward atheism in this work. Recent scholars maintain that Bayle can be interpreted as an Academic Sceptic: as someone who honestly and impartially follows a dialectical method of argument in order to obtain the goal of intellectual integrity. In her commentary, however, Astell suggests that: (i) if Bayle were honest and impartial in his inquiries, then he would not have pretended to attack popular superstition, only to undermine generally-held religious beliefs; and (ii) if Bayle valued intellectual integrity, then his argument for a society of virtuous atheists would not have relied upon a deceptive equivocation in terms. I conclude that the rediscovery of this marginalia is valuable for enhancing our appreciation of Astell as an astute reader of one of her most enigmatic contemporaries.

There have been many different historical-intellectual accounts of the shaping and development of concepts of liberty in pre-Enlightenment Europe. This volume is unique for addressing the subject of liberty principally as it is discussed in the writings of women philosophers, and as it is theorized with respect to women and their lives, during this period. The volume covers ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious notions of liberty, with some chapters discussing women's ideas about the metaphysics of free will, and others examining the topic of women's freedom in their moral and personal lives as well as in the public socio-political domain. In some cases, these topics are situated in relation to the emergence of the concept of autonomy in the late eighteenth century, and in others, with respect to recent feminist theorizing about relational autonomy and internalized oppression. Many of the chapters draw upon a wide range of genres, including polemical texts, poetry, plays, and other forms of fiction, as well as standard philosophical treatises. Taken as a whole, this volume shows how crucial it is to recover the too-long forgotten views of female and women-friendly male philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the process of recovering these voices, our understanding of philosophy in the early modern period is not only expanded, but also significantly enhanced, toward a more accurate and gender-inclusive history of our discipline.

Before her death in 1673, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, expressed a wish that her philosophical work would experience a ‘glorious resurrection’ in future ages. During her lifetime, and for almost three centuries afterwards, her writings were destined to ‘lye still in the soft and easie Bed of Oblivion’. But more recently, Cavendish has received a measure of the fame she so desired. She is celebrated by feminists, literary theorists, and historians. There are regular conferences organised by the International Margaret Cavendish Society, and there have been several biographies, as well as essay collections, journal issues, scholarly editions, and anthologies devoted to her work. In terms of studies in the history and philosophy of science, however, Cavendish has yet to achieve her resurrection in full. While there have been journal articles and book chapters, and a 2001 edition of her Observations, there have been (until now) no book-length studies of her philosophy, and there is currently no modern edition of her other major work, the Philosophical Letters. This essay-length review of Lisa Sarasohn’s The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish highlights why Cavendish should still hold interest for philosophers today.

This ground-breaking book surveys the history of women's political thought in Europe from the late medieval period to the early modern era. The authors examine women's ideas about topics such as the basis of political authority, the best form of political organisation, justifications of obedience and resistance, and concepts of liberty, toleration, sociability, equality, and self-preservation. Women's ideas concerning relations between the sexes are discussed in tandem with their broader political outlooks; and the authors demonstrate that the development of a distinctively sexual politics is reflected in women's critiques of marriage, the double standard, and women's exclusion from government. Women writers are also shown to be indebted to the ancient idea of political virtue, and to be acutely aware of being part of a long tradition of female political commentary. This work will be of tremendous interest to political philosophers, historians of ideas, and feminist scholars alike.

Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an influence on Locke’s revisions. I discuss the plausibility of this claim in light of the relevant historical and textual evidence.

On the strength of her 1666 pamphlet, Womens Speaking Justified, the Quaker writer Margaret Fell has been hailed as a feminist pioneer. In this short tract, Fell puts forward several arguments in favour of women's preaching. She asserts the spiritual equality of the sexes, she appeals to female exempla in the Bible, and she reinterprets key scriptural passages that appear to endorse women's subordination to men. Some scholars, however, have questioned Fell's status as a feminist thinker. They point to the fact that, according to Fell and her fellow Quakers, women are permitted to speak in church—but only in so far as they are vessels or mouthpieces for Christ. In every other respect, it is argued, the early Quakers continue to either ignore, denigrate, or efface the female sex. Other critics point out that the Quakers' gender egalitarian principles operate in a rather limited sphere of activity—that of religious worship alone—and do not extend to the socio-political domain. Notwithstanding such criticisms, Fell's defence of women's preaching was undoubtedly influential in her time and may have inspired women writers beyond her religious circle. Foxton (1994) claims that Quaker women's writings more generally set an important precedent for women's publishing activities in the seventeenth century, on both religious and non-religious topics. This entry covers Fell's life and works, and considers her ideas and arguments in the context of Quaker thought and practice, Quaker feminist thought, criticisms of Quaker defences of women, and Fell's place in the history of feminism.