In this rich and detailed study of early modern women's thought, Jacqueline Broad explores the complexity of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual legacy in England and Europe. She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Locke. She also illuminates the continuities between early modern women's thought and the anti-dualism of more recent feminist thinkers. The result is a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought than has hitherto been available. Broad's clear and accessible exploration of this still-unfamiliar area will have a strong appeal to both students and scholars in the history of philosophy, women's studies and the history of ideas.

During the eighteenth century, elite women participated in the philosophical, scientific, and political controversies that resulted in the overthrow of monarchy, the reconceptualisation of marriage, and the emergence of modern, democratic institutions. In this comprehensive study, Karen Green outlines and discusses the ideas and arguments of these women, exploring the development of their distinctive and contrasting political positions, and their engagement with the works of political thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville and Rousseau. Her exploration ranges across Europe from England through France, Italy, Germany and Russia, and discusses thinkers including Mary Astell, Emilie Du Châtelet, Luise Kulmus-Gottsched and Elisabetta Caminer Turra. This study demonstrates the depth of women's contributions to eighteenth-century political debates, recovering their historical significance and deepening our understanding of this period in intellectual history. It will provide an essential resource for readers in political philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and women's studies.

In the late seventeenth century, a number of women actively embraced the new Cartesian philosophy in their published works. Some appealed both implicitly and explicitly to Descartes's views about the mind's natural ability to find truth; some highlighted the soul's essential nature as a non-bodily substance; and others wrote about the Cartesian method of overcoming the influence of the senses and the passions on the mind. 1 At first glance, it is understandable why Descartes' ideas were so attractive. As Mary Astell (1666-1731) remarked in 1697, 'All have not leisure to Learn Languages and pore on Books, nor Opportunity to Converse with the Learned'. 2 Yet with Cartesian philosophy -and other 'new philosophies' of the period, such as those of Locke and Hobbes -women did not require a formal 1 For details, see M.

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.

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. In a 1705 letter to the poet Elizabeth Thomas, Richard Gwinnett offers his considered opinion on 'a little Posthumous Treatise of Mr. Locke'. Gwinnett observes that the work is 'nothing inferiour to the more elaborate Works of that ingenious author, except in the 2 Stile, which is sometimes perplexed, and in many Places forced and stiff'. 1 Notwithstanding this criticism, Gwinnett remarks that 'what in my opinion deserves the highest Praise, is the principal Design of the Book, which is to recommend the Improvement of the Fair Sex, by a more ingenious and learned Education than is now customary, or even commendable among them'. 2 For Locke scholars, it will come as no surprise to hear that Locke never wrote a defence of women's education. Although the work in question was issued under Locke's name in 1747, the treatise is in fact Damaris Cudworth Masham's Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705). 3 Lady Masham (1659-1708) was one of Locke's closest friends in the later years of his life. The daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), Masham grew up among philosophers and theologians at Cambridge University, and later became a philosopher herself, and the correspondent of many leading intellectuals of the day. Masham and Locke probably first met in London in about 1681, when she was in her early twenties and he was already 'past the middle age of Man'. 4 Although the full details are obscure, their early attachment seems to have been a romantic one. When Locke went into exile in 1683, the couple exchanged letters on a range of topics, from general town gossip to philosophical discussions of Locke's early abridgment of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. In 1685, Masham married a member of Parliament, Sir Francis Masham, and left Cambridge for the Masham family estate of

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Our modern ideals about liberty were forged in the great political and philosophical debates of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we seldom hear about women's contributions to those debates. This paper examines the ideas of early modern English women – namely Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Mary Overton, ‘Eugenia’, Sarah Chapone and the civil war women petitioners – with respect to the classic political concepts of negative, positive and republican liberty. The author suggests that these writers' woman‐centred concerns provide a unique historical perspective on these much‐discussed ideals of freedom from external interference, freedom as self‐determination and freedom from domination.