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This volume challenges the view that women have not contributed to the historical development of political ideas, and highlights the depth and complexity of women's political thought in the centuries prior to the French Revolution.
From the late medieval period to the enlightenment, a significant number of European women wrote works dealing with themes of political significance. The essays in this collection examine their writings with particular reference to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and toleration. The figures discussed include Christine de Pizan, Catherine d'Amboise, Isabella d'Este, Elizabeth I, Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Elizabeth Carter, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Cornélie Wouters. These women actively contributed to the political practice and discourse of their times. Some of the women question their exclusion from political power and argue in favour of women's virtue, prudence, and capacity to govern. Others aim to demonstrate women's spiritual equality with men, to defend liberty of conscience, and to highlight the importance of education as a means to moral development. And some women explore the notion of female citizenship or attempt to come to terms with issues of religious freedom and religious toleration.
Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration serves as an introduction to a rich and as yet under-explored period in the history of women's ideas.
List of contents
Political Thought as Improvisation: Female Regency and Mariology in Late Medieval French Thought.- Phronesis Feminised: Prudence from Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I.- Catherine d'Amboise's Livre des Prudents et Imprudents: Negotiating Space for Female Voices in Political Discourse.- "Machiavelli in Skirts." Isabella d'Este and Politics.- Liberty and the Right of Resistance:Women's Political Writings of the English Civil War Era.- Margaret Cavendish and the False Universal.- The Social and Political Thought of Damaris Cudworth Masham.- "Our Religion and Liberties": Mary Astell's Christian Political Polemics.- Virtue, God, and Stoicism in the Thought of Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay.- Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on the Will.- Keeping Ahead of the English? A Defence of Jews by Cornélie Wouters, Baroness of Vasse (1790).
Summary
This volume serves as an introduction to a rich and as yet under-explored period in the history of women’s ideas. The volume provides a partial insight into the richness and complexity of women’s political ideas in the centuries prior to the French Revolution. The essays in this collection examine women’s political writings with particular reference to the themes of virtue (especially the virtue of phronesis or prudence), liberty, and toleration.
