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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy is an outstanding reference
source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe
from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in
these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon.
Comprising 46 chapters by a team of contributors from all over the globe, including early career
researchers, the Handbook is divided into the following sections:
I Context
II Themes
A Metaphysics and Epistemology
B Natural Philosophy
C Moral Philosophy
D Social-Political Philosophy
III Figures
IV State of the Field
The volume is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy who are interested in
expanding their understanding of the richness of our philosophical past, including in order to offer
expanded, more inclusive syllabi for their students. It is also a valuable resource for those in related
fields like gender and women’s studies; history; literature; sociology; history and philosophy of
science; and political science.
Karen Detlefsen is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of Philosophy and Education at
the University of Pennsylvania. She is editor of Descartes’ Meditations: A Critical Guide (2013) and
co-editor with Jacqueline Broad of Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays (2017).
Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts at McGill University. From 2002
to 2022, she was professor in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She is
translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (2007),
co-editor of Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (2013), editor of
Pleasure: A History (2018), and co-editor of Modern Philosophy: An Anthology (2022).
ROUTLEDGE H A N DBOOKS IN PHILOSOPH Y
Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and
important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems,
themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research.
All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in
the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable
reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting
topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks,
anthologies, and research-orientated publications.
Also available:
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INDIAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

Edited by William Edelglass, Pierre-Julien Harter and Sara McClintock
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BODILY AWARENESS

Edited by Adrian J.T. Alsmith and Matthew R. Longo
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF AUTONOMY

Edited by Ben Colburn
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY

OF FORGIVENESS
Edited by Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF IMPLICIT COGNITION

Edited by J. Robert Thompson
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND EARLY MODERN

EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP
THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF WOMEN
AND EARLY MODERN
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

Designed cover image: St Catherine Among the Philosophers, oil on canvas by
Ippolito Scarsella (1551–1620). Public domain, image kindly supplied by the
National Museum of Sweden.
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Taylor & Francis
The right of Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro to be identified as the author[/s]
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-138-21275-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-49676-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-45000-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
CONTENTS
List of Contributors x
1 Introduction 1
Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro
PART I
Context 11
2 Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe: Making Space for

Female Scholarship 13
Carol Pal
3 Canon, Gender, and Historiography 29

Lisa Shapiro
4 Method, Genre, and the Scope of Philosophy 41

Karen Detlefsen
PART II
Themes 57
Section A: Metaphysics and Epistemology 59
5 God, Freedom, and Perfection in Conway, Astell, and du Châtelet 61

Marcy P. Lascano
6 Vitalistic Causation: More, Conway, Cavendish 74

Tad M. Schmaltz
v
Contents
7 It’s All Alive! Cavendish and Conway against Dualism 87

Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons
8 Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Cockburn on Matter 112

Emily Thomas
9 Skepticism 127
Martina Reuter
10 Ways of Knowing 140

David Cunning
PART II
Section B: Natural Philosophy 155
11 Space and Time 157

Geoffrey Gorham
12 Method and Explanation 164

Anne-Lise Rey
13 Physics and Optics: Agnesi, Bassi, Du Châtelet 174

Bryce Gessell and Andrew Janiak
14 Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences 187

Gideon Manning
15 Theories of Perception 200

Louise Daoust
PART II
Section C: Moral Philosophy 213
16 Early Modern Women and the Metaphysics of Free Will 215

Deborah Boyle
17 Friendship as a Means to Freedom 228

Allauren Samantha Forbes
18 Managing Mockery: Reason, Passions and the Good Life among Early
Modern Women Philosophers 240
Amy M. Schmitter
vi
Contents
19 Virtue and Moral Obligation 254

Sandrine Bergès
20 Men, Women, Equality, and Difference 267

Marguerite Deslauriers
PART II
Section D: Social-Political Philosophy 281
21 Autonomy and Marriage 283

Kelin Emmett
22 Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth-Century Feminism: Arcangela

Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon 297
Hasana Sharp
23 Race and Gender in Early Modern Philosophy: How Amo and Astell
Wrote behind the Veil 311
Margaret Watkins
24 Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education: Van

Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell 324
Michaela Manson
25 Critical Perspectives on Religion 337

Charlotte Sabourin
26 Beauty, Gender, and Power from Marinelli to Wollstonecraft 350

Patrick Ball
27 Theories of the State 361

Alan M. S. J. Coffee
PART III
Figures 379
28 Italian Women Philosophers in the Sixteenth Century: From a

Critique of the Aristotelian Gender Paradigm to an Affirmation of the
Excellence of Women 381
Sandra Plastina
29 Teresa de Ávila on Self-Knowledge 396

Jorge Secada
vii
Contents
30 (Self-)Portraits between Two Gowns: Marie de Gournay 409

Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin
31 Madeleine de Scudéry: Moral Philosophy in a Gendered Key 422

John J. Conley, S.J.
32 The Unorthodox Margaret Cavendish 435

Tom Stoneham and Peter West
33 Anne Conway 450

Christia Mercer and Olivia Branscum
34 Gabrielle Suchon on Women’s Freedom 465

Julie Walsh
35 The Socratic Pedagogy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 479

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica
36 Mary Astell (1666–1731) 493

Jacqueline Broad
37 Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Agency, Virtue, and

Fitness in their Moral Philosophies 506
Patricia Sheridan
38 Du Châtelet and the Philosophy of Physics 519

Katherine Brading
39 The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of

Sexist Historiography 533
Sonja Ruud and Rebecca Wilkin
40 Catharine Macaulay’s Philosophy and Her Influence on Mary Wollstonecraft 546

Karen Green
41 Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy 558

Aaron Garrett
42 Mary Wollstonecraft 571

Lena Halldenius
43 Remorse and Moral Progress in Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy 584

Getty L. Lustila
viii
Contents
44 Mary Shepherd (1777–1847) 597

Antonia LoLordo
45 Women and Philosophy in the German Context 610

Corey W. Dyck
PART IV
State of the Field 621
46 What Difference? The Renaissance of Women Philosophers 623

Sarah Hutton
Index 631
ix
CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick Ball studied for his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a disserta-
tion on the relationship between individual freedom and social structures in the thought of early
modern women philosophers. He now teaches high school in Kyoto, Japan.
Sandrine Bergès is Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University in Ankara. Her publications

include Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (2019, with Eric Schliesser), The Wollstonecraf-
tian Mind (2019, with Eileen Hunt Botting and Alan Coffee), Women and Autonomy (2018, with
Alberto Siani), The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (2016, with Alan Coffee), A
Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics (2016), and The Routledge Companion to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindi-
cation of the Rights of Woman (2015).
Deborah Boyle is Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, USA.
She is author of Mary Shepherd: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Well-Ordered Uni-
verse: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Descartes on Innate
Ideas (Continuum, 2009); she edited Margaret Cavendish: Philosophical Letters, Abridged (Hackett
Publishing, 2021) and Lady Mary Shepherd: Selected Writings (Imprint Academic, 2018); and she has
published articles and book chapters on Cavendish, Shepherd, Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Con-
way, Mary Astell, Descartes, and Hume. Professor Boyle is also editor of the Journal of the History
of Philosophy.
Katherine Brading is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. She specializes in philosophy

of physics from the late sixteenth century to the present day. Her book Emilie Du Châtelet and the
Foundations of Physical Science was first published in 2019 by Routledge.
Olivia Branscum is Postdoctoral Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Olivia

specializes in the history of early modern philosophy and maintains particular interests in Marga-
ret Cavendish, Anne Conway, panpsychism in the early modern period, varieties of ontological
monism, and the philosophy of art.
Jacqueline Broad is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Philosophy in the School of Phil-
osophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is author
of Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (2002), A History of Women’s Political Thought in
Europe, 1400–1700 (with Karen Green, 2009), and The Philosophy of Mary Astell (2015).
x
Contributors
Adriana Clavel-Vázquez is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Tilburg University. Her main

research focuses on embodied imagination, the role imagination plays in our social interactions
and our engagement with art, and the interaction of ethical and aesthetic values.
Alan M. S. J. Coffee teaches Global Ethics and Human Values at King’s College London. He is
author of Mary Wollstonecraft (Polity, 2023) and co-editor of the Social and Political Philosophy of Mary
Wollstonecraft (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019).
Rev. John J. Conley, S.J. holds the Henry J. Knott Chair in Philosophy and Theology at Loyola
University Maryland in Baltimore. A specialist in women philosophers in early modern France,
he has previously published Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal (2009)
and The Other Pascals: The Philosophy of Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer
(2019).
David Cunning is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. His primary research is on
free will, the history of conceptions of mind and body, the nature of cognition, the rhetoric of
inquiry, and agency and authority. He is author of Cavendish (Routledge), Argument and Persuasion
in Descartes’ Meditations (Oxford), and Descartes (Routledge).
Louise Daoust is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Eckerd College. Her research focuses on
issues in the history and philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of perception.
Marguerite Deslauriers is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. She is author of Aris-

totle on Definition (Brill, 2007) and Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics (OUP,
2022), and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics (CUP, 2013). She is currently
working on a short monograph on Lucrezia Marinella, to appear in the Cambridge Elements
series Women in the History of Philosophy (ed. Jacqueline Broad), and a volume of translations of
pro-woman works from the Renaissance, Equality and Superiority: Texts from Renaissance and Early
Modern Europe.
Karen Detlefsen is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of Philosophy and Education at the
University of Pennsylvania. She publishes on a wide range of figures in the early modern period
across metaphysics, natural philosophy, and value theory. She is editor of Descartes’ Meditations:
A Critical Guide (2013) and co-editor with Jacqueline Broad of Women and Liberty, 1600–1800:
Philosophical Essays (2017).
Corey W. Dyck is Professor of Philosophy at Western University. He is author of Kant and

Rational Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2014), translator and editor of Early Modern German
Philosophy: 1690–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), and editor of the collection Women and
Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has held visiting
positions at the University of Oxford, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and the
Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he was also recently an Alexander von
Humboldt research fellow.
Kelin Emmett is an Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at Langara College. She was
previously post-doctoral fellow with the SSHRC Partnership Development project ‘New Narra-
tives in the History of Philosophy.’ Her research and teaching interests are in ethics and social and
political philosophy, and she is especially interested in examining the social and material condi-
tions for autonomy and how these have been theorized historically.
xi
Contributors
Allauren Samantha Forbes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and faculty
in Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University in Canada. Her research focuses on the
feminist works of early modern women philosophers such as Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de
Scudéry, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philoso-

phy at John Jay College. He received his Ph. D. at the GC-CUNY and B.A. at the National Uni-
versity of Mexico (UNAM). His research and teaching interests cover Early Modern Philosophy
(focusing, in particular, on Novohispanic Philosophy), Contemporary Latin American Philoso-
phy, Philosophy of Science, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy of Race. His work has appeared
in Philosophy Compass, Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Hypatia, Transactions of
the Charles S. Peirce Society and Critical Philosophy of Race. He is currently working on a book man-
uscript on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s villancicos.
Aaron Garrett teaches at Boston University. He works on the history of modern philosophy, and
particularly the history of ethics. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy.
Bryce Gessell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Virginia University, where he

teaches philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the history of science. His research is
on the foundations of psychology and neuroscience and on Christian Wolff.
Geoffrey Gorham is Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College and Resident Fellow at the
University of Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. His articles on contemporary and early
modern science and metaphysics have appeared in journals such as Studies in the History and Philos-
ophy of Science, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the
History of Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science.
Karen Green is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is author of A
History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and
A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, with Jacqueline Broad (Cambridge
University Press, 2009). She recently edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford
University Press, 2019) and her most recent book is Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment
(Routledge, 2020).
Lena Halldenius is Professor of Human Rights Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She is a
political philosopher and author of Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (London, 2015)
and numerous essays on Wollstonecraft’s political writings.
Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. She has pub-
lished extensively on women in the history of philosophy. Her publications include Anne Con-
way: A Woman Philosopher, and Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Historical Context
(co-edited with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer) as well as articles on Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Masham,
Mary Astell, Catharine Macaulay, Émilie du Chatelet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Formerly direc-
tor of International Archives of the History of Ideas, she is currently President of the International
Society for Intellectual History.
Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University, where he co-leads
Project Vox with Dr. Liz Milewicz. He is author of Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge, 2008) and
Newton (Wiley, 2015), co-editor of Interpreting Newton (Cambridge, 2012), and editor of Space: A
xii
Contributors
History (Oxford, 2020). He is presently finishing a book on Émilie Du Châtelet and the formation
of the early modern European canon in the eighteenth century.
Marcy P. Lascano is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. She is co-editor with
Eileen O’Neil of Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical
Thought (2019), and author of The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism,
Vitalism, and Self-Motion (2023).
Antonia LoLordo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is co-founder and
co-editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy. Her publications include Mary Shepherd (Elements on
Women in the History of Philosophy; Cambridge, 2022), Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception
of an External Universe (Oxford, 2020), Locke’s Moral Man (Oxford, 2012), and Pierre Gassendi and
the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), in addition to papers on a variety of topics.
Getty L. Lustila is Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. His

research concerns eighteenth-century European moral philosophy. Getty also writes and teaches
Indigenous philosophy. He is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Gideon Manning is Associate Professor of History of Medicine and Humanities at the Cedars-
Sinai Medical Center, USA, where he is also Director, Program in the History of Medicine. His
research focuses on the history of medicine, science, and philosophy, especially in the early mod-
ern period. His most recent publications include “Circulation and the New Physiology” (2022)
and the volume Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar (2022), which he co-edited with Anna
Marie Roos.
Michaela Manson is an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash

University in Melbourne, Australia. She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto
(2023). Her research focuses on early modern philosophy of mind, moral psychology, education,
and friendship.
Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, edi-
tor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, and co-editor with Melvin Rogers of Oxford New Histories
of Philosophy. She created and directs Just Ideas, a program in Metropolitan Detention Center, a
maximum-security federal prison.
Carol Pal teaches history at Bennington College. She is author of Republic of Women: Rethinking
the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2012), which was awarded the 2013
Joan Kelly Memorial Prize by the American Historical Association. She is currently editing a
sourcebook on the history of medicine, and preparing a volume on Marie du Moulin for the series
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Her next monograph is an analysis of one of Samuel Har-
tlib’s manuscripts in the British Library.
Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin teaches at the Faculty of philosophy of Jean Moulin-Lyon III

University (France). Specialist in Descartes and Malebranche, she provided the first complete
annotated edition of the feminist Cartesian Poulain de la Barre (Vrin, 2011). She is currently
working on women philosophers (Elisabeth de Bohême, Marie de Gournay), editing with
D. Kolesnik-Antoine, Élisabeth de Bohème face à Descartes: deux philosophes? (Vrin, 2014). It leads her
research to the question of the corpus and the historiography of modern philosophy. Recently,
she directed a special issue of the journal Dix-septième siècle (Repenser la philosophie du XVIIe siècle.
xiii
Contributors
Canons et corpus, no. 3–2022). Her latest book is entitled Pensées du corps et différences des sexes à
l’époque moderne (ENS-Editions, 2020).
Sandra Plastina is Associate Professor of History of Philosophy in the Department of Edu-

cation, Culture and Society (DICES) of the University of Calabria. Her work focuses on the
history of early modern philosophy, broadly understood from the Renaissance to the Enlight-
enment. Her research interests include Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Gior-
dano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and women writers and philosophers, from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth century. Since June 2021 promoter of a European research partnership MUSAE
(Mulieris utopica sapientia europea) among Università della Calabria, Université de Tours, Uni-
versidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad Siviglia, Istituto del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo
(CNR-Roma).
Martina Reuter is Docent of Philosophy and Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Univer-
sity of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specializes in the Cartesian tradition with a focus on the feminist
philosophy of François Poulain de la Barre and in Enlightenment discourses on gender. Her
publications include Mary Wollstonecraft (Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy;
Cambridge, 2022).
Anne-Lise Rey is Full Professor in the Philosophy Department, Nanterre University, Paris,
France. She works on Leibniz, Newton, and Emilie du Châtelet. She has published numerous
articles on the natural philosophy of the classical age. She is also working on the historiographical
issues of natural philosophy in this period. She has edited Méthode et Histoire (Classiques Garnier,
2014), a French translation commented of the correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder: La
correspondance entre Leibniz et De Volder. L’ambivalence de l’action (Vrin, 2016), What Does It Mean to
Be an Empiricist? (Springer, Boston Studies, 2018), and soon will be published Philosophies: féminin
pluriel, (Classiques Garnier, 2023).
Marleen Rozemond’s research focuses on the material-immaterial divide in the early modern
period, and she is currently interested in the role of dualism in pro-woman arguments in the
period. She is author of Descartes’s Dualism (Harvard University Press, 1998) and various articles
on Suárez, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and the Clarke-Collins correspondence. She is Professor at
the University of Toronto.
Sonja Ruud holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute.
She began researching Louise Dupin’s “Work on Women” in 2011 through an undergraduate
research fellowship with Dr. Rebecca Wilkin (Pacific Lutheran University), and continued this
work for ten years in parallel to her graduate studies in Anthropology. Originally from Washing-
ton State, Sonja is currently based in Brussels.
Charlotte Sabourin is faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at

Douglas College. Her work engages with feminist interpretations of Kant and with seventeenth-
to eighteenth-century feminist philosophers.
Tad M. Schmaltz is Professor and James B. and Grace J. Nelson Fellow in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published articles and book chapters
on various topics in early modern philosophy, and is the author of Malebranche’s Theory of the
Soul (1996), Radical Cartesianism (2002), Descartes on Causation (2008), Early Modern Carte-
sianisms (2017), and The Metaphysics of the Material World: Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza (2020).
xiv
Contributors
Amy M. Schmitter is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. She is executive

editor and board secretary for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and recently stepped down from
the co-editorship of Hume Studies. She specializes in the history of early modern philosophy, with
particular interests in mind, metaphysics, passions and sentiments, and sense-perception, as well
as in the philosophy of art.
Jorge Secada is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is author of Cartesian

Metaphysics (Cambridge, 2000), Meditaciones sobre el Perú (Huacachina, 2023), and several articles
on early modern philosophy. He is also a regular contributor to public discussion in his native
country, Perú.
Hasana Sharp is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. She is author of Spinoza
and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago, 2011) as well as articles on Spinoza, political theory,
feminism, and environmental thought. She is currently completing a manuscript on Spinoza and
ideas of slavery.
Patricia Sheridan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Guelph,

Ontario. She works on early modern philosophy, with a specialization in women philosophers
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her work centers mainly around moral philosophy
in the period. She has published articles on Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy and
on the moral philosophy of John Locke.
Lisa Shapiro is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Philosophy at McGill
University and was until October 2022 Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Her
research focuses on accounts of human nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She
is author of numerous articles on early modern philosophy, and has edited multiple volumes
including with Marcy Lascano the teaching anthology Modern Philosophy (2022), Pleasure: A His-
tory (2018), Emotions and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (2013) with Martin
Pickavé, and she is translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth and René Descartes
(2007). She is PI on an SSHRC Partnership Grant Extending New Narratives in the History of
Philosophy (2020–2027).
Alison Simmons is the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

She works on early modern theories of mind and body, including in the philosophical works of
women. She is also Co-founder of Embedded EthiCS@Harvard.
Tom Stoneham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and President of the Inter-
national Berkeley Society. Recent articles include ‘Berkeley and Collier’ in the Oxford Handbook
of Berkeley (OUP, 2022) and ‘Locke on Cognitive Bias’ (with Elisabeth Thorson) in The Lockean
Mind (Routledge, 2022). He also writes on perception, dreaming, and consciousness.
Emily Thomas is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. She is author of Abso-
lute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (2018, Oxford University Press), The Meaning
of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Victoria Welby (Cambridge
University Press, 2023).
Julie Walsh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on
theories of human and divine freedom in the early modern period. She has a special interest in
what women in that era were writing about the conditions for women’s freedom.
xv
Contributors
Margaret Watkins is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at
Providence College. She specializes in early modern ethics and aesthetics, with a particular focus
on the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. She is President of the
International Hume Society and author of the Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (Cambridge
University Press, 2019). She has published articles on Hume’s ethics, philosophical psychology,
and aesthetics in journals such as Hume Studies, Inquiry, and History of Philosophy Quarterly as well
as articles on Montaigne and on the resources of Jane Austen’s novels for ethical theory and
pedagogy.
Rebecca Wilkin is Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University where she teaches in the
French & Francophone Studies and the International Honors Programs. She has published on
Descartes, Cartesianism, and early modern women philosophers (Elisabeth of Bohemia, Gabrielle
Suchon) and is currently interested in how early modern feminist philosophy (François Poulain de
la Barre, Louise Dupin) influenced the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. With Angela
Hunter (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), she has produced the first English translation of
Louise Dupin’s Work on Women (1745–1750), which they reconstructed from manuscripts (pub-
lished by OUP).
Peter West is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in
London. His work focuses on early modern theories of mind and cognition, in figures like Cav-
endish, Shepherd, Amo, and Berkeley. His research also covers the history of analytic philosophy,
especially the work of Susan Stebbing.
xvi
1
INTRODUCTION
This handbook participates in a broad-based project of expanding our understanding of our philo-
sophical past by recovering the works of hitherto neglected philosophers. Historians of philosophy
have become increasingly invested in this Recovery Project. Our focus here is on one piece of
this larger project: the philosophical work of European women of the early modern period. Our
primary goal is to introduce advanced undergraduate majors in philosophy, graduate students, and
scholars in the discipline (both those working in the early modern period, and more broadly) to
the extraordinary richness of the philosophy produced by women working in Europe from about
1560–1780 (more on this period below). But in the process of realizing this introduction, we have
another goal, namely, to expose the breadth of philosophical themes tackled by the women in this
era – many of which have been unfairly sidelined in our discipline’s history – as well as the range
of genres and methods employed by women philosophers as they investigated these philosophical
themes.
This volume approaches these goals through its organization. It opens with three chapters
(Chapters 2–4) that grapple with historical context (Carol Pal), canon and historiography (Lisa
Shapiro), and method and genre (Karen Detlefsen) in order to make clear the range of obstacles
women of this period faced in their production of philosophy, how they grappled with those
obstacles, and thus, the ways in which the contemporary philosophers ought to approach their
work to appreciate fully their philosophical contributions.
The next section deals with Themes, and this section is further subdivided into four
subsections – Metaphysics and Epistemology (Chapters 5–10), Natural Philosophy (Chapters
11–15), Moral Philosophy (Chapters 16–20), and Social and Political Philosophy (Chapters 21–27).
Each chapter in the Themes Section deals with a small number of philosophers writing on the
topic at hand. One overall goal of the chapters is to show how women philosophers engaged
both with philosophical themes we have tended to associate with the early modern period (e.g.
causation, physics, freedom, and the like) and with philosophical themes we have tended to forget
or treat less seriously in our history of philosophy (e.g. marriage, beauty and embodiment, friend-
ship, and the like). A second goal of this section is to expand our list of women philosophers to
include not only those represented in the next section of this volume but also many others.
This next section (Chapters 28–45) includes chapters that focus on specific figures of the
period, and these figures were chosen for their current status as philosophers who have enjoyed
relatively significant prominence in scholarly activity of the past few decades. Some – Cavendish,
Du Châtelet, Wollstonecraft, for example – can fairly be thought of as already canonized. Others
DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-1 1
are well on their way. Two of the chapters discuss several women practicing philosophy in Italy
(Chapter 28) and Germany (Chapter 45) in this period. We should note that the choices made for
figures to be included in this section were anything but easy, and our expectation and hope is that
a volume similar to this one published in a decade or so would have an exponentially more expan-
sive list of names in such a section. That said, one can also hope that recognizing and appreciating
the role of women in the history of philosophy of early modern Europe might make a volume
such as this one redundant in a decade or so, were such philosophers to be thoroughly integrated
into our history of philosophy.
Our volume closes with an eye to the future, how the current focus on women philosophers
in early modern Europe can be seen as a modern-day Renaissance, and where we might go from
here. This is “What Difference: The Renaissance of Women Philosophers” (Chapter 46) written
by a scholar – Sarah Hutton – who was among the first visionaries who broke open the field of
study that centered the study of women philosophers in early modern Europe.
To understand much of the thinking behind this handbook, and the expansion project of which
it is a part, there is no better place to start than its title. There are four key concepts in play in
that title: the early modern period; the geographical center of Europe; the place of women in the
philosophy of that time and place; and the very idea of philosophy. In this Introduction, we discuss
each of these key concepts.
1.1 ‘Early Modern’ and Issues of Periodization

Historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers alike are accustomed to referring to the
“Early Modern Period.” Philosophy curricula often have courses in Early Modern Philosophy.
The temporal boundaries of the period are thought to be roughly 1560–1780. The start date
allows us to include such thinkers as Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais, and in particular, his
Apology for Raymond Sebond, are often identified as reintroducing skepticism and thereby influ-
encing shifts in epistemology. And the end date marks Kant as the culmination of an intellectual
historical movement.
These dates also partly overlap with an event of a sort: the Scientific Revolution, which became
an organizing idea that was especially powerful near the middle of the twentieth century, during
the development of the professional discipline of the History of Science. According to the general
account developed around this idea, the early modern period was key – perhaps singularly so – in
the history of science, a history which stretches for much of the duration of human history itself.
This period was deemed so important because it marked an era of revolution, of rapid and whole-
sale change, in which science as we now know it emerged from science in its Medieval Scholastic
form. The high points of this transformative change, according to the narrative of the Scientific
Revolution, are as follows. Copernicus was the starting point and affected a revolution in astron-
omy which was incompatible with the then-reigning Aristotelian physics. Galileo attempted to
address the ensuing crisis with his work in mechanics and with his attempt to develop a new
physics to supplant Aristotle’s, and which could account for the Copernican proposal of a moving
earth. Newton synthesized the advances of these early revolutionaries (while also assimilating
Kepler’s laws of planetary motion), and the result was modern science – observationally-based,
grounded in mathematically-expressed laws, and completing the “mechanization of the world
picture” (Dijksterhuis 1950). These four figures along with a handful of others – typically Tycho,
Bacon, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Leibniz, and Boyle – form the standard cast of characters in
the Scientific Revolution narrative. Of course, as we now understand it, this history is really one
of natural philosophy, and this narrative has come under significant fire in recent centuries for a
range of reasons; nonetheless, that it was such a powerful historiographical theme for some decades
2
Introduction
helps to explain why the “early modern period” in Europe, and scientific revolution that tracked
that period, is anchored so firmly in our philosophical history.
There are, however, reasons to take pause when thinking about the notion of the “early mod-
ern” period. First, scholars of European Literature and History mark the period differently, having
the early modern period start with the Protestant Reformation, say, and end in the early eigh-
teenth century before the new literary form of the novel is perfected and a more secular culture of
the Enlightenment takes hold. Second, the scope of the philosophical historical period, in high-
lighting the real scientific achievements of Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle, and Newton and
their philosophical impact, discounts the philosophical impact of critical transformative social and
political events in Europe that include the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Fronde,
the American Revolution, and the French Revolution.
Many essays in this volume do respect the standard scope of the philosophical early modern
period. However, some essays, such as Gideon Manning’s “Women, Medicine, and the Life Sci-
ences,” Marguerite Deslauriers’ “Men, Women, Equality and Difference,” and Sandra Plastina’s
“Italian Women Philosophers in the Sixteenth Century: from a critique of the Aristotelian gender
paradigm to an affirmation of the excellence of women,” consider philosophical work earlier in
the sixteenth century. Other essays consider figures writing after 1780, including Karen Green’s
“Catharine Macaulay’s philosophy and her influence on Mary Wollstonecraft,” Lena Halldenius’
“Mary Wollstonecraft,” Aaron Garrett’s “Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Phi-
losophy,” Getty L. Lustila’s “Remorse and Moral Progress in Sophie de Grouchy,” Corey W.
Dyck’s “Women and Philosophy in the German Context,” and Antonia LoLordo’s “Mary Shep-
herd.” Sandrine Bergès, in her “Virtue and Moral Obligation,” extends beyond the typical scope
of the period at both ends, discussing Christine de Pizan at the early end and Wollstonecraft at
the later one.
What defines the Early Modern Period as it is articulated in this volume? We have left the peri-
odization itself untheorized. However, one way to think about the early modern period is in terms
of the development in Europe of new institutions and modes for engaging in intellectual activity.
Carol Pal details some of these changes in her “Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe.”
Michaela Manson’s chapter “Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education:
van Schurman, Pascal, Maintenon and Astell” touches on changes in educational institutions, and
Charlotte Sabourin’s chapter “Critical Perspectives on Religion” touches on religious institutions.
Some chapters on individual women also detail how the women on whom they focus fit into these
changing institutions. These include the chapters on Margaret Cavendish by Tom Stoneham and
Peter West, on Louise Dupin, by Rebecca Wilkin and Sonja Ruud, and on Phillis Wheatley, by
Aaron Garrett.
Another way to think about this period is in terms of the shape of the answers to philosophical
questions that come to be central in the period. Some of these are the topics in metaphysics and
epistemology that frame the canonical narrative of the period. Several thematic chapters demon-
strate how women thinkers engage with these familiar topics even while they intervene in these
discussions in original and as yet underexplored ways. See for instance these chapters: “God, Free-
dom, and Perfection in Conway, Astell, and Du Châtelet” by Marcy P. Lascano, “It’s all Alive!
Cavendish and Conway against Dualism” by Marleen Rozemond and Alison Simmons (on the
metaphysics of the human being), “Causation” by Tad M. Schmaltz, “Cavendish, Conway, and
Cockburn on Matter” by Emily Thomas, “Skepticism” by Martina Reuter, “Ways of Knowing”
by David Cunning, “Theories of Perception” by Louise Daoust, and “Early Modern Women and
the Metaphysics of Free Will” by Deborah Boyle. Additional discussion of these canonical topics
can be found in the chapters dedicated to several individual women philosophers, including Jorge
Secada’s “Teresa de Ávila on Self-Knowledge,” Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando
3
Gallegos-Ordorica’s “The Socratic Pedagogy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” “The Unorthodox
Margaret Cavendish” by Tom Stoneham and Peter West, “Anne Conway” by Christia Mercer and
Olivia Branscum, and “Mary Shepherd” by Antonia LoLordo.
In the late twentieth century, this period also has been characterized by the particular attention
it gave to natural philosophy and the emergence of more specialized sciences. A set of thematic
chapters show women’s contributions to debates around the nature of space and time, scientific
method and explanation, as well as to emerging theories of biological life and health, and to phys-
ics and the emerging science of optics. See these chapters: “Space and Time” by Geoffrey Gor-
ham, “Method and Explanation” by Anne-Lise Rey, “Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences”
by Gideon Manning, and “Physics and Optics: Agnesi, Bassi, Du Châtelet” by Andrew Janiak
and Bryce Gessell. Additional discussion can be found in the chapter on Émilie Du Châtelet by
Katherine Brading.
Philosophers of the period also discuss topics in moral philosophy. More often than not the
moral philosophy of the period is a virtue ethics. And women are no exception here. Sandrine
Bergès’ chapter, and Amy M. Schmitter’s “Managing Mockery: Reason, Passions and the Good
Life among Early Modern Women Philosophers” address overarching issues in women’s the-
orizing about virtue ethics. However, just as with the topics in metaphysics and epistemology
mentioned above, women’s contributions are distinctive, as is evident in the title of Amy M.
Schmitter’s contribution. Jacqueline Broad’s “Mary Astell,” Patricia Sheridan’s “Agency, Virtue,
and Fitness in the Moral Philosophies of Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn,”
John J. Conley S.J.’s “Madeleine de Scudéry: Moral Philosophy in a Gendered Key,” and Getty L.
Lustila’s paper on Sophie de Grouchy each show how individual women philosophers bring new
insight to fundamental topics in moral philosophy.
In reading about women thinkers of the period, and men thinking about the status of women,
we discover a central concern with equality and difference as Marguerite Deslauriers details in
her chapter. Sandra Plastina’s paper on Italian women enriches the context of these discussions.
This topic not only is at the center of discussions of the metaphysics of sexual difference, but it
also informs discussions of both moral and personal autonomy as it is realized in the social insti-
tutions that define women as of lesser status. The discussions of Kelin Emmett in “Autonomy and
Marriage” make evident the link between women’s critical discussions of marriage and the devel-
opment of the concept of autonomy. Michaela Manson’s chapter on the philosophy of education
shows how educational institutions are sites both for asserting women’s fundamental metaphysical
equality with men and for addressing conditions of inequality through the cultivation of reason.
Allauren Samantha Forbes’ “Friendship as a Means to Freedom” demonstrates how discussions
of friendship forge new ways of understanding individual power. Patrick Bell’s “Beauty, Gender,
and Power from Marinelli to Wollstonecraft” argues how the feminized institutions of beauty are
used to leverage power. These themes are also reflected in the discussions of particular women, for
instance, in Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin’s “(Self-) portraits between two gowns: Marie de Gour-
nay,” which thematizes the gap between a woman’s self-understanding as intrinsically powerful
and the way the social world positions her; and in Julie Walsh’s “Gabrielle Suchon on Women’s
Freedom.” Many women of the period frame their discussions of women’s condition in terms of
slavery and servitude, without directly referencing the clearly more violent enslavement of African
peoples. Hasana Sharp discusses the intellectual context of the use of those terms in “Slavery and
Servitude in 17th Century Feminism: Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon.”
These discussions of equality and difference intersect with the social upheavals of the period,
and so lead naturally to discussions of political philosophy. Alan M.S.J. Coffee’s “Theories of the
State” surveys women’s contributions to how to think about political community. These ideas,
and their intersection with moral philosophy are explored further in Karen Green’s chapter on
Catharine Macaulay and Lena Halldenius’ chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft.
4
Introduction
1.2 ‘European’ and Marking the Geographical Focus

No matter which events or topics we take as most defining, the Early Modern period is rooted in
historical events that are associated with the European continent. That is, the periodization that
is typically used in academic philosophy, and that is at the core of this volume, makes sense most
obviously (and perhaps even exclusively) in a European context. This may seem obvious, but all
too often it goes without saying. If we take “European” to be a term strictly about geography,
focusing on thinkers from Europe might seem unproblematic, and in some senses it is unprob-
lematic. The figures covered in this volume lived and worked in Europe for most, if not all, of
their lives. Nonetheless, we think it is important to make that geographical focus explicit. If we
recognize, as we should, that philosophy is practiced globally, including in the years represented
by this volume, then were we to center traditions other than the European tradition, the histori-
cal events central to those traditions might well give rise to radically different periodizations. As
such, it is critical that we acknowledge that the significance of years 1560–1780 has been defined
in reference to one geographical place, namely Europe.
Furthermore, there are at least two ways in which this volume, as a volume focused on Europe,
is unusual. First, traditional histories of early modern philosophy do not even focus on all of
Europe, but rather on intellectuals in a handful of countries: France, the Netherlands, England,
Germany, and Scotland. There is little mention of the philosophical work going on in Italy and
Spain, let alone the Nordic countries. A truly European philosophy would embrace the whole of
intellectual work across the whole continent. We start this work here, with discussions of Italian
women, German women, and a Spanish and a Novohispanic woman. Chapters discussing Italian
women include: Gideon Manning’s, Marguerite Deslauriers’, Hasana Sharp’s, and Sandra Plasti-
na’s chapters; Corey W. Dyck’s paper introduces German women; Jorge Secada discusses a Spanish
philosopher, and Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica discuss a phi-
losopher who lived and wrote in New Spain, what is now Mexico.
However, even this broadening of geographical perspective is too simple, for the years repre-
sented by the “early modern” of the title were ones of significant global travel and exploration,
including travel and exploration by Europeans. These global movements included the chapters of
European colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, both with racism at their core. Events in
Europe thus impacted other global regions. This interaction, including the connections between
colonialism, slavery, and racism, is reflected in Margaret Watkins’ “Race and Gender in Early
Modern Philosophy: How Amo and Astell Wrote behind the Veil” and Aaron Garrett’s “Phillis
Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy.” Both Anton Amo and Phillis Wheatley
were displaced African philosophers. They may have lived many years in Europe, and may have
produced much intellectual work while living and thinking in Europe, but their identities are
more complex than being simply construed as “European.” And Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the
focus of the chapter by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica, had
significant ties to Europe, even while being based in a colony and part Nahuatl. These figures
immediately problematize the often-unspoken assumption that the history of philosophy is a his-
tory of European philosophy.
These considerations intimate that there is not necessarily a unified European philosophy, and
this point has been undertheorized (though for one example of extended discussion on a closely
related theme, see Appiah 2016).
1.3 “Women”
As noted at the beginning of this Introduction, with its focus on early modern European women,
this volume contributes to the Recovery Project, a project that aims to recover, write about, and
5
disseminate the ideas of women with an eye to gaining a fuller understanding of our philosophical
history. Though this Recovery Project is now several decades old, it is in many respects in early
stages.
First, while several women philosophers of the past have received significant scholarly
attention – for instance, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish,
Mary Astell, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd—there are many, many more with whom
scholars are only starting to engage and still others to be re-discovered. Many chapters in this vol-
ume include some of the first (or very few) scholarly philosophical engagements in English with
the following figures: Maria Gondola, Camilla Greghetta Erculiani, Margherita Sarrocchi, Louise
Dupin, Frances Reynolds, Marguerite Buffet, and Olivia Sabuco.
Second, the Recovery Project began to get a grip in the history of philosophy by noting the
connection between newly rediscovered women and canonical or well-known male philosophers:
Elisabeth corresponded with Descartes, Conway was connected to Cambridge Platonists and
Henry More in particular, Masham corresponded with Leibniz, Du Châtelet translated Newton
into French, and Shepherd targeted Hume and Berkeley. However, scholarship has moved from
treating these women as ancillary to canonical male figures to recognizing them as philosophers in
their own right, with their own agendas and views. Occasionally in this volume, an author draws
on the philosophy of a male thinker to highlight a point made in their chapter. However, where
men are included, they are so in order to illuminate something about the women’s philosophies.
One exception here is Watkins’ comparison of Mary Astell and Anton Amo to make a point about
double-consciousness. The vast majority of the papers in this volume focus exclusively on the
work of women thinkers.
Third, as we detailed above, in focusing on the work of women philosophers, we can discover
innovative philosophical perspectives on familiar themes from early modern European philoso-
phy. It is also often the case that women philosophers have chosen to focus on different philo-
sophical questions, ones which have fallen out of fashion in part because of the dominance of the
canonical history of philosophy.
Often, as several papers in this volume make clear, the philosophical interests of many of these
women are intimately connected to their lived experience as women, a connection that inflects
their philosophical writing in a variety of important ways. This has hopefully come out in the
sketches of the topics covered by the chapters in this volume. It is perhaps worth highlighting one
theme that emerges again and again – women aim to articulate and to theorize their position as
authors, with associated authority, even while they are deprived of authority in their social situa-
tions. That is, these authors are not only aware of their complicated positions of epistemic author-
ity, but they also make a point of inserting their position into their writing. Margaret Watkins’
paper on Amo and Astell, and Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin’s chapter on Marie le Jars de Gournay
are explicit about this point. But it is also addressed in Michaela Manson’s chapter, John J. Conley
S.J.’s paper on Madeleine de Scudéry, Jacqueline Broad’s paper on Mary Astell, Rebecca Wilkin’s
and Sonja Ruud’s “The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of
Sexist Historiography,” and Lena Halldenius’ chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft. Karen Detlefsen’s
“Method, Genre and the Scope of Philosophy” argues that figures such as Cavendish and Du
Châtelet play with the genre of the preface to navigate this complex issue.
1.4 “Philosophy”
The ways in which women of the early modern European period think and write about philoso-
phy leads us to think anew about the philosophical enterprise in early modern Europe, and how
the recovery project expands and deepens our understanding of the very nature of philosophy
itself. We can begin with the points we just noted regarding women’s philosophical interests.
6
Introduction
Many women were interested in many of the standard topics in metaphysics and epistemology
that the standard history of early modern philosophy puts front and center, and contributed their
own insights into these topics. From this perspective, the nature of philosophy looks very familiar,
yet in being confronted with the unfamiliar positions on familiar topics taken up by these women,
we are reminded that doing philosophy well requires an openness to the full range of logical pos-
sibilities and attentiveness to work through the details.
Yet it is also the case that many women of the period focused their attention on topics that have
not been centered within our histories of philosophy, even if they were topics of intensive phil-
osophical interest at the time. We are thus reminded that philosophy is not defined by a narrow
set of topics or questions, but rather almost any topic can be approached philosophically. Some
topics rise to the fore at certain historical moments. Interestingly, many of the topics in which
early modern women engaged and were set aside by history are emerging again as central topics
in contemporary philosophy. Currently, there is a renewed interest in equality, in the emotions,
and in the nature and value of education, to name just a few. Yet because our history of philosophy
has omitted these topics, contemporary philosophers not only do not recognize that their topics of
interests have a history, but they also do not benefit from the insights that a historical perspective
can provide.
We noted that many early modern women’s philosophical contributions are informed by their
lived experiences as women. The recovery of these women thinkers thus reveals a history of fem-
inist philosophical thought, one that begins long before the so-called First Wave of feminism and
the struggle for women’s suffrage of the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth
century. However, the centrality of lived experience to their philosophy also highlights a feature
of philosophy that is obscured from view by canonical histories of philosophy.
Canonical histories of philosophy present us with philosophical views that are abstracted from
any particular context. They highlight the idea that philosophical positions strive to capture time-
less truths. But, as Lisa Shapiro notes in her paper, “Canon, Gender, and Historicity,” while the
truths of philosophy may well be timeless, the search for those truths is anchored in very human
efforts to understand them. These efforts are undertaken in a particular context in which the phil-
osophical questions that motivate them arise. Canonical histories of philosophy mask that context:
they make it seem as if philosophical questions are asked from nowhere.
The philosophical works of early modern women highlight that philosophical inquiry, even
if it strives for an understanding of timeless truths, emerges from somewhere. A philosopher
becomes interested in the philosophical questions they do because they matter to them in some
way or another. This is easily seen in the cases of philosophical questions about human relation-
ships, like friendship and marriage, and about autonomy and self-determination. But it is also
true of philosophical questions in metaphysics and epistemology. Early modern women’s work
in metaphysics, perhaps because it is more unfamiliar, makes it clear that getting the metaphysics
right matters. It is not a mere logical exercise, nor is it simply a matter of understanding nature
correctly. How we understand nature impacts how we live, not simply in our day-to-day practical
decision-making but most centrally in how human beings are distinguished from one another and
from other parts of nature.
Many of the women philosophers discussed in this handbook often deploy genres of writing
other than the treatise, the genre that has been held up as a philosophical standard for some time.
This may well be because these women were excluded from the intellectual elite, and so did not
have either the training or the resources to write in that vein. It is worth noting that many canon-
ical figures of the period also did not write treatises: Montaigne is thought to have invented a
new genre of writing, the essay, to capture what he had to say; Descartes expressed his philosophy
in stylized meditations, an equally stylized discourse, and a textbook; Spinoza appropriated the
geometrical method to put forward an ethics; Leibniz wrote prolifically in many different forms,
7
including short essays and a long dialogic response to Locke; Locke appropriated the empirical
methods of Bacon and Boyle to transform the essay genre; Berkeley used the dialogue to great
effect; and Hume was self-conscious about the challenges of writing philosophy in a way that
moved his readers. And indeed Margaret Cavendish and Gabrielle Suchon stand out as having
written treatises to express their views. As Karen Detlefsen notes in her paper, the ‘alternative’
genres of expression of these women thinkers might well not have been borne of constraint but
rather a positive choice they made to best express themselves. Perhaps they recognized the com-
plexity of, at one and the same time, engaging in the abstraction of philosophy and represent-
ing the salience of their own lived experience to their philosophy and appropriated genres from
poetry to plays to polemics to the emerging genre of the novel, as well as prefaces to their works
to capture this complexity.
1.5 Putting It All Together

Let’s now return to the whole title ‘Women and Early Modern European Philosophy.’ This hand-
book starts from the basic fact that the history of European philosophy as it has been told since at
least the middle of the nineteenth century has effectively made the philosophical contributions
of women disappear. The number of women discussed in the handbook and the breadth of the
philosophical topics on which they write demonstrates just how massive the loss has been, and this
handbook only begins the process of recovering the philosophical work of women in this period,
as Sarah Hutton exposes in her chapter.
Now that the process of recovering the philosophical work of women is underway, there is an
imperative to reflect on how we write the histories of philosophy to ensure that we do not fall
prey to the exclusionary impulse that has characterized the history of philosophy we inherited.
In this introduction, we have strived to demonstrate that reflective spirit. Following a point made
by historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his Silencing the Past, we need to recognize that histo-
ries of philosophy, just as histories of events, are told by people with perspectives and interests,
which inevitably lead to some exclusions. We need to be attuned to and make explicit our own
assumptions and subject them to criticism. The tellers of the tales of the history of philosophy are
us, historians of philosophy and philosophers, human beings with interests, attempting to better
understand the world we inhabit. In order to truly change the history of philosophy, we need to
find ways of writing the history of philosophy that acknowledges both its and our own partiality,
and to be open to the partiality of others. We need to find ways of writing histories of philosophy
that acknowledge that even the timeless questions that we take to be at the core of philosophy
are raised from a particular perspective and that answers to these questions are all the richer with
the full array of different perspectives as part of the conversation. We can perhaps learn from the
experimentation with genre we find with many of the authors discussed in this volume.
This handbook includes 51 authors (or co-authors), but there are many others who are also
currently involved in recovering the philosophical work of early modern European women. In
addition, we are all part of a much larger project to rethink the history of philosophy more gen-
erally and with it what counts as philosophy itself in a contemporary context. Not only are others
working to recover the philosophical work of women in other periods (in particular the Medieval
period and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) in the European context, but there are
also robust projects that are aiming to look at the history of philosophy in a global context. This
includes work to position European philosophy as one of many rich philosophical traditions. These
might be cast as part of religious traditions – for instance, Islamic philosophy, Jewish philosophy,
Buddhist philosophy, Hindu philosophy – or they might be cast geographically – for instance,
Persian philosophy, African and Africana philosophy, Indian philosophy, South American phi-
losophy, Chinese philosophy, and so on. It includes work writing Black intellectual history; and
8
Introduction
it includes work to articulate an Indigenous philosophy that is rooted in oral traditions. And it
also includes work to recover women philosophers in non-European traditions, and in particular
Indian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy, that have their own canons that have obscured
if not erased the women philosophers of those traditions. While these efforts have been and rightly
are in many ways independent of one another, together we are all working to transform the ways
in which the history of philosophy is currently practiced, to build a new community of practice,
and in so doing change the nature of philosophy.
Acknowledgments
This Handbook has benefited from the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are indebted to the
Research Assistants who assisted us in assembling the final manuscript: Zach Agoff, Talia Ferreira,
Luis Eduardo Melo de Andrade Lima, Lauren Perry, Mary Purcell, Sara Purinton, and Maja Sid-
zińska. We knew that this volume would take a fair amount of time to come together, because of
the labor involved in coordinating a large number of authors. The disruption of the COVID pan-
demic in 2020, and the lockdown that occurred just a week before our scheduled NEH-supported
conference to bring the authors together, further extended the timeline. We thank the authors
for their perseverance and their patience as the volume came together. We are especially grateful
to our editors at Routledge, Andrew Beck and Marc Stratton for their patience and continuing
support of the volume.
References
Appiah, K. (2016) “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation,” The Guardian. Available at: https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture.
Dijksterhuis, Eduard Jan. (1950) The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
9
PART I
Context
2
WOMEN AND INSTITUTIONS IN
EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Making Space for Female Scholarship
Carol Pal
Placing early modern women philosophers in their historical context has proven to be a compli-
cated task. They are an awkward fit, since they were, by definition, exceptional. Yet male philos-
ophers of the same period must also be considered exceptional, and new research is uncovering
evidence of far more early modern female scholars than we could have expected. We are faced,
then, with a quandary: given the formidable array of barriers they faced, how did so many women
manage to flourish intellectually within a system designed to prevent this from happening?
That system was composed of two powerful, ubiquitous, and enduring institutions that worked
together in a deeply interlocked fashion to shape the lives of everyone living in early modern
Europe: the family and the Church.1 Despite their ostensibly disparate purviews, these two
institutions – which were in turn bolstered by interlocking systems of law, custom, and
education – operated to reinforce and uphold the same underlying concept: a universally ordered,
hierarchical, and interdependent structure that laid out specific roles for everyone and everything.
From angels to earthworms, from the cosmos to the family hearth, each entity and element had
its place, and systems large and small were molded on the same overall pattern. Macrocosm and
microcosm worked seamlessly together within a structure often referred to as the Great Chain
of Being.2 And in every one of these interlocking structures, the female element was of necessity
below the male. The concept of equality was no less destabilizing than the concept of inversion,
and there was no arguing why or whether this had to be. Whether spiritually, intellectually, or
instinctively, early modern people would have been to some degree aware that no single part
of the system could be challenged without threatening the entire structure. Both directly and
indirectly, that structure had governed Europe for two millennia; a vision of life without that
structure was a vision of chaos.
For female scholars, this picture would seem pretty grim indeed. Yet a growing body of schol-
arship is showing us that despite this universal agreement regarding the necessity of women’s infe-
riority, a great number of women managed to construct intellectual lives of excellence, erudition,
and power. Moreover, their achievements were not necessarily hidden, or without support from
men who were also prominent proponents of these self-same institutional structures. Clearly, then,
a simple verdict of widespread oppression peppered with individual miracles of resistance does not
make sense. So how might we take this burgeoning knowledge, and use it to more accurately and
usefully parse the relationship between women and institutions in early modern Europe?
We will not find the answers by investigating institutions and early modern female scholars
as enemy combatants. In this chapter, I argue instead that the key to understanding this complex
relationship is to see it as an ongoing negotiation for space. The stakes were high on both sides.
DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-3 13
Carol Pal
For the two interlocking institutions of family and Church, the stakes were of course bound up
in issues of power and control; and the platform upon which they both stood was fundamental –
the maintenance of a bulwark between order and chaos. For intellectual women, what was at
stake was their scholarly souls. They needed safe spaces wherein they could thrive and continue
being the scholars and thinkers they already were, without simultaneously destroying the less
controversial parts of their lives. Intellectual women knew the rules. And for the most part, they
accepted that – in general – institutional hierarchies and limitations were necessary.3 The ques-
tion was whether there might be room within that general case to accommodate the specific and
unusual case of female scholarship. In their written work, their correspondence, and in the lives
they lived, we can trace that ongoing negotiation for a space for learning. And, in their repeated
encounters with the eventual “that’s too much,” we can also see early modern institutions at work
to maintain the status quo.
We begin with the illustrative example of the Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman
(1607–1678). Her prominence in two important areas – learning and religion – demonstrates how
a push for the special case of a space for female scholarship co-existed with the eventual acknowl-
edgment that it was, in fact, a threat.4
In 1629, the poet and scholar Caspar Barlaeus began hearing about Anna Maria van Schurman,
a young woman of tremendous intellectual achievement.5 Impressed by her accomplishments, he
wrote about her in a letter to Constantijn Huygens, telling him about the maiden of 22 who could
converse in Latin “just like a Roman.”6 Barlaeus and Huygens, along with many other scholars in
early modern Europe, were becoming well aware of Van Schurman. She was a linguist, rhetori-
cian, poet, and classicist; she had an excellent command of mathematics, astronomy, theology, his-
tory, poetry, and music; she had mastered the learned languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and
she was proficient as well in Chaldaic, Arabic, Ethiopian, Flemish, German, French, and Italian.
As Van Schurman’s fame spread, she corresponded with some of the foremost scholars of the age:
René Descartes, Claude Saumaise, Daniel Heinsius, André Rivet, and Pierre Gassendi, to name
a few. She was “the Star of Utrecht,” and “the Tenth Muse.” It was even said that, “To have been
in Utrecht without having seen Mademoiselle de Schurman was like having been to Paris without
seeing the king.” (Yvon 1715: 1264–65).
Yet Van Schurman was also deeply modest, deferential, and devout. She was so devout, in
fact, that she had consecrated herself to a life of celibacy while still in her teens, and kept true
to that vow until her death in the religious community she co-founded with Jean de Labadie.7
Thus her modesty demanded that she pursue certain studies in secret – in particular, her Hebrew
studies with Voetius.8 That secrecy went away with the opening of the new University of Utrecht
in 1636, when Voetius invited Anna Maria van Schurman to write an inaugural ode for the
opening ceremonies. This extremely public ode, wherein “Anna Maria van Schurman congrat-
ulates the Glorious and Ancient City of Utrecht on having recently been bestowed with a New
Academy,” gave high praise to both the city and its new school. However, it also rather pointedly
criticized the university for allowing everyone except women to enter and imbibe the Nectar of
Knowledge.
But what (perchance you ask) are those concerns that trouble your heart?
These sacred precincts cannot be penetrated by the virgin chorus.9
It was a thinly-veiled critique. Yet either despite or because of this poem, the directors of the uni-
versity responded by allowing Voetius to smuggle his most famous pupil into his lectures.
A small cubicle with a latticed opening was created for Van Schurman at the rear of Voetius’
classroom. There, able to see without being seen, she could benefit from lectures without endan-
gering her modesty. Van Schurman thereby became the first woman to “attend” university in the
14
Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe
Netherlands.10 This stealthy scholarship was in fact an open secret in the Republic of Letters, and
while Van Schurman’s achievement was admired, jokes proliferated almost immediately.
But was the situation really funny? Van Schurman had very publicly criticized the new univer-
sity for being impenetrable to women, and had then gone on to engineer that penetration herself.
Apart from the obvious juvenile teasing, then, what might this woman’s unprecedented presence
in the lecture hall actually portend for the relationship between women and institutions?
Only one month later, Barlaeus wrote to Huygens on this very subject. The tone was playful,
as he pointed out how much more sensible life would be if only the famously modest and celibate
Van Schurman were a man. Among the reasons he enumerates is the fact that she would no longer
have to hide behind the lattice at the back of Voetius’ classroom:
[T]here are many reasons why I would wish to make her into a man. The first is because she
writes poetry, which will bring dishonor upon men. Second, because then there will not be
the danger that a good man might become inflamed with love for her…Third, so that access
to her might be accomplished more freely and easily…Fourth, if she were a man, she could
attend the lectures of professors in safety, and sit among their learned sex. Now, shamefaced,
she listens to the professor teaching through an aperture, or little window, so that she cannot
be seen by impudent youths. Fifth, if she were a man, she could give public orations, either
of her poetry, in which she is strong, or Hebrew writing, which she reads with no trouble.11
There is a progression here in Barlaeus’ list of reasons why Van Schurman should really be a man.
He begins with the most trivial. Van Schurman’s poetry is putting male poets to shame; men are
falling in love with her, to no avail; it’s far too difficult to find a way to talk to her; the cubicle
at the back of Voetius’ classroom is ridiculous; and the public is being unnecessarily deprived of
further public displays of her marvelous erudition. But as the list goes on, things get more serious:
Sixth, if she were a man, she could be moved up to the helm of the Republic, and teach by
her example, and besides, the Republic would do better to be ruled by a woman from time
to time, rather than always being ruled by men.
(Huygens 1911: II, 164)
Here, Barlaeus has backed himself into a corner. His point is that Van Schurman has all the skills
and moral authority necessary to become a leader in public life – the only thing preventing this
from happening is her gender. But then he had gone even further, musing on the possibility
that women might, in fact, be good leaders for the Dutch Republic, where leadership was not
hereditary.
And at this point, Barlaeus realized that he was treading on treacherous – perhaps heretical –
ground. So he stopped himself there, and begged Huygens to tell no one what he had just said:
But truly, Huygens my friend, let these jests be buried between the two of us. For it would
not be to the honor of that most respectable and dignified virgin to know a great deal about
how much we use her name in a familiar way in order to revere it.
(Huygens 1911: II, 164)
By this point, however, he has gone too far, and we realize that his “just kidding” has a hollow
ring.
Because it contains so many veiled references to Van Schurman’s seemingly impenetrable vir-
ginity, this letter has sometimes been seen as an extended obscene joke, while in feminist analyses,
it has been described as misogynistic and cruel.12 I would suggest a third approach. The jokes are
15
Carol Pal
certainly there, but they are not at the expense of Van Schurman – they are rather aimed at the
situation. The reasons why Barlaeus contends that Van Schurman would do better to become a
man are all solidly grounded in the discrepancies between her abilities and her opportunities, all
of which arise from social and cultural limitations imposed on her gender. Barlaeus, in fact, makes
clear his belief that without these artificial limitations, she would be unstoppable. However, since
Van Schurman was so modest, there was also no doubt that she would have been offended by the
discussion; thus keeping her from seeing it would have been a very good idea. This letter, there-
fore, is neither misogynistic nor obscene – it is merely accurate.
In the event, of course, Van Schurman did not become a man. Nor, as a woman, was she installed
at the helm of the Dutch Republic. In fact, even her lattice-veiled presence in the lecture hall
must have been discontinued within months, since by May 1640 Descartes was already referring
to Van Schurman’s cubicle in the past tense.13 The most likely explanation is that a woman’s pres-
ence in the lecture hall – even a hidden one – had proved to be too much of a presence after all.
In this example, we see the institutional structures that governed early modern European life
operating to do what they normally did. They preserved order, and preserving order meant that
women could not occupy male-only institutional spaces. So Van Schurman would no longer
attend university lectures, or give public orations – and leading the Republic (a role that she would
certainly have found appalling) was out of the question, even as a joke.14 And yet…she certainly
had attended the lectures, and she had given a public oration, and both events were well known
at high levels. And despite an educational system that denied higher learning to women, she had
excelled in a spectacular way. This episode thus provides us with a useful introduction to the ways
in which early modern women female scholars negotiated with institutions – the process of official
prohibition, followed by case-specific accommodation, and then the closing of doors.
The following sections look in turn at these major institutions – family and the Church – in
order to understand how they shaped the lives of early modern women: their official mandates
and their ideal functions. We then turn to look at the ways in which female scholars created spaces
for their work within and alongside those prevailing structures. We begin with the most basic
institution of all: the family.
2.1 Women and the Family

In early modern Europe, the family was first and foremost an economic unit. This is not to say
that it was not also an affective unit, wherein love, care, and growth took place. However, these
emotional benefits were secondary to its purpose.15 The family was the basic building block in
the interlocked institutional system that enabled life in pre-industrial Europe, the entity that pro-
duced necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. From there, the production of individual families
was aggregated into the products of villages, communities, shires, duchies, and states. Within the
household – from the time they were no longer toddlers until the moment age rendered them
unable to help – women worked alongside men in fields and family workshops. They took care of
animals, sold goods in the markets, spun and wove and dyed.16
Apart from working alongside men throughout their productive lives, women also had their
gender-specific duties within the household. First, there was basic domesticity – the cooking,
cleaning, harvesting, brewing, child-rearing, and sewing that proceeded in a relentless dawn-to-
dusk cycle for rich and poor women alike.17 In addition, from the cottages of peasants to the man-
ors of nobles, women were the primary healers in the family. They grew and gathered medicinal
herbs, tended to the sick, collected, preserved, and adjusted medical recipes, and compounded the
salves and elixirs in their kitchens.18
Most crucially, however, the family was the entity that produced future generations – thus
for women, their primary role in the productive unit of the family was reproduction itself. This
16
meant that their intrinsic worth was inherently tied up with their bodies, and with their life stages;
and their reproductive lives, from the onset of menarche to the onset of menopause, were also
the focus of their productive lives. Women’s bodies were therefore a precious resource, requiring
protection and control. This was due in part to low life expectancy, and the difficulty of main-
taining a viable and stable population. Life expectancy hovered around 30 years throughout this
period (slightly higher for women), although it is important to unpack this number. Once a person
made it to adulthood, they could reasonably expect to live to a ripe old age; however, accidents,
disease, and malnutrition took their toll, and approximately half of the children born alive died
before adolescence.19 Thus given this high child mortality rate, and the ever-present possibility
of miscarriage, most fertile women would have to have been pregnant every two years or so – or
seven to ten times during their childbearing years – in order for the family to have a reasonable
chance of having two children live to adulthood, so that they might take over the family work.
Clearly, the institution of the family could not survive without making enormous demands on
women’s bodies and time – demands that were burdensome, pivotal, and unavoidable. Where, in
that scenario, was there room for female scholarship? The answer must be: nowhere. And although
it was possible for women to avoid this fate by choosing not to become wives and mothers, the
status of a single woman in early modern Europe was precarious indeed. Prior to the establishment
of social structures and institutions for people who were indigent, aged, or ill, it was crucial for
a woman to produce children who could later be relied on to support her if and when required.
Without this support, a woman could find herself needing to beg for food and shelter. Churches
might be able to provide limited assistance, but this was variable; thus without vast reserves of land
or money, a woman’s choice to live alone might strike us as ill-considered at best. Yet we now
know that between 15% and 25% of women in early modern Europe never married (Wiesner-
Hanks 2019: 64, 90–92; Bennett and Froide 1999). For some, this was a choice arising from sexual
preference or religious vocation.20 For others, it had not been a choice at all; they might have been
young women who had moved to cities to find domestic work, or older “spinsters” who had not
been able to marry for reasons ranging from lack of partners to lack of dowries. However, within
all these categories, we might consider the space created by women who had deliberately chosen
singleness in order to devote time to scholarship rather than domestic duties.
Some examples are useful here. We have already encountered Anna Maria van Schurman’s
early oath of lifelong celibacy, a choice that enabled her to pursue scholarship in her youth, and
religious pursuits in later years. Van Schurman was also associated in a loose but well-documented
network with six other female scholars; and despite the risks that accompanied singleness, four of
those seven scholars – Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), Marie du Moulin (c.1613–1699), Princess
Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680), and Van Schurman herself – remained single throughout their
lives.21 And if we look at earlier generations of female scholars, we can see a similar pattern.22 This
is not to say that the pursuit of scholarship was impossible for wives and mothers, but it was much
more difficult, even for women with supportive spouses; there simply was not enough room in
the day for both. Thus despite the fact that this choice could only work for very few women –
most particularly, those with ample resources of their own – single women are disproportionately
prominent among the population of early modern female scholars.
2.2 Women and the Church

Writing in 1942, Lucien Febvre argued for the ubiquity of Christianity, identifying it as the defin-
ing mentalité of the early modern world:
Christianity was the very air one breathed in what we call Europe and what was then Chris-
tendom…Whether one wanted to or not, whether one clearly understood or not, one found
17
Carol Pal
oneself immersed from birth in a bath of Christianity from which one did not emerge even
at death.
(Febvre 1982: 336)
In this lucid and beautiful passage, Lucien Febvre alerts us to the fact that Christian ideas and
norms – from morning until night, from birth until death – dictated the rhythms and patterns
of early modern lives. Although Jews and Muslims shared the continent with Christians, and
kept their own faiths and customs vital throughout these centuries, they were still inhabiting
Christendom; and it was Christianity that would determine which spaces they could inhabit, and
how much safety or freedom they might find within them.23 For women all over Europe, from
all walks of life, the surrounding culture of Christendom meant that their subservience to men
had been ordained from the beginning of time by God himself. The Bible provided the evidence
for this gendered hierarchy, and the umbrella institution of the Church – whether Catholic or
Protestant – constructed theologies and doctrines to reinforce it. Drawing on a blended inheri-
tance from the patriarchal structures of Judaism and the scientific reasoning of Aristotelianism,
Christendom was built on a solid platform of man above woman.24
Yet the Bible itself is not clear on this point at all. In fact, while the institution of the Church
was completely consistent in mandating female subservience, the supporting scriptures are contra-
dictory at best. The scriptural discrepancies begin immediately, with the account of Creation in
Genesis. In Genesis 2, Eve is created from Adam’s rib in order for the first man to have a partner
and helpmeet, and this story has been cited over the centuries as the absolute bedrock of woman’s
secondary status. However, this was in fact the second version of the creation of Eve. In Genesis 1,
man and woman were created in the image of God, at the same time, by the same act: “God cre-
ated man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”25
Thus there was no man first, woman second. However, the Church as an institution would con-
sistently use the second version as its reference point with respect to women.
The contradictions continue – although not, interestingly enough, in the words and actions
of Jesus. According to the gospels, Jesus rejected the patriarchal conventions of the Judaism in
which he had been raised, and chose instead to raise up, welcome, and affirm the women who
came to him. It was to Mary Magdalene that Jesus chose to reveal himself when he rose from the
dead; he then told her to go to the brethren with the news, singling her out as an apostle to the
apostles ( John. 20:17, KJV).26 After the crucifixion, however, the fledgling faith of Christianity
became the creation of his followers – and, most importantly, that new faith was the creation of
Saint Paul.
Paul was a Roman citizen from Tarsus, in Asia Minor, and never met Jesus while he was alive.
Instead, Paul saw a vision of the resurrected Christ while on the road to Damascus. The risen
Christ was arguably quite a different entity from the living Jesus, and the faith Paul established as
a result of this vision was also quite different from the ideas that Jesus had explored while he was
alive. Paul established an organization that was strongly influenced by his Greco-Roman heritage,
and although most scholars now agree that Paul probably wrote only 7 of the 13 Pauline letters
in the Bible, all those letters reflect a man tirelessly struggling to keep various scattered groups of
Christians in order; he is constantly reminding them of how they should behave, of what is central
to their new faith, and which old practices must now be discontinued (Barton and Muddiman
2001: 1078–83; MacCulloch 2009: 97–102).
From these letters, it also appears that Paul was very concerned about women. His primary
goal was the establishment of order and organization in order to promote the survival and growth
of the new faith. This entailed dealing with appropriate roles, and here is where things got com-
plicated for women in Christianity. Paul’s letter to the Galatians presented a breathtakingly open
vision of the equality of souls: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
18
there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians. 3:28, KJV). How-
ever, that vision was quickly subsumed into the hierarchical requirements of a fledgling institu-
tion. And, as with the choice of the second, “rib” version of the creation of woman, the Pauline
text constantly referenced with regard to women came not from Galatians, but from the first letter
to the Corinthians:
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but
they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for
women to speak in the church.
(I Corinthians 14:34-35, KJV)
According to Paul, then, women must not speak, except to ask their husbands what, if anything,
they need to know; and even then that asking must be done in the home. The reason given is one
that is already familiar to us – a reference to the Great Chain of Being, and to human interactions
as a microcosm of God’s macrocosm:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is
the saviour of the body.
But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the
woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.
(Ephesians 5:22-23; I Corinthians 11:3, KJV)
The reasoning couldn’t be clearer; the family was a microcosm of God’s creation, thus men ruled
over women just as God ruled over mankind.
Legal systems throughout early modern Europe also supported this hierarchical resonance
of family and religion, since Church and state were deeply interlocked structures. Despite vari-
ances of time, place, and confessional affiliation, the need to maintain man over woman existed
throughout. In English law, this was mandated through a doctrine known as “coverture,” under
which a woman ceased to have legal existence once she got married. She was a feme covert, literally
covered by her husband’s legal personhood, and could own no property – an umbrella condition
which included her dowry, her children, and herself.27 The reasoning supporting this legal status
was the Bible, and Eve’s greater punishment after the Fall. Despite the fact that Adam had read-
ily joined in, it was Eve who had been the first to eat the forbidden fruit; her extra punishments
would be the pain of childbirth, and the sexual desire for her husband which would ensure the
arrival of those pains. The icing on the cake was permanent subservience to her husband: “and he
shall rule over thee” (Genesis 4:16, KJV).
Thus when dealing with women, the task of the law in early modern Europe was to ensure that
contemporary life reflected these biblical mandates. As the French jurist Jean Bodin wrote in 1576:
The power, authority, and command that a husband has over his wife is allowed by both
divine and positive law to be honourable and right.
(Bodin 1955: 1)
Bodin’s argument for the interweaving of divine and earthly law was mirrored in English juris-
prudence, as demonstrated by an anonymous pamphlet published in England in 1632. Although
its intent was completely different – it was written for women, in order to help them understand
their rights under the law – the information provided by the jurist was the same. Human law was
19
Carol Pal
based on divine law, which followed upon God’s decision that women’s bodies would forever be
the ones to bear the brunt of punishment for Adam and Eve’s shared transgression:
See here the reason of that which I touched before, that Women have no voyse in Parliament,
They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood
either married or to bee married and their desires or subject to their husband…. The common
Law here shaketh hand with Divinitie.
(The lawes resolutions of womens rights 1632: 9)
The point was inescapable – the Church and the law were mandating how families worked, and
Church, family, and law all worked together to ensure a woman’s subservient status.
This set of agreements also worked at the very highest levels, with rulers of the realm. In the
early modern era, the unpredictable workings of reproductive biology – exacerbated by dynastic
strategies of inbreeding – resulted in what had previously been considered unthinkable: a string
of female rulers, leading the most powerful realms in Europe. Between the Renaissance and the
French Revolution, an estimated two dozen women ruled European states – not as the wives of
kings, but as sovereigns in their own right.28 This was precisely the sort of situation that laws and
customs had been designed to prevent; rule by a female sovereign upended biblical directives,
created intolerable vulnerabilities through their future marriages to foreign kings, and opened the
door to every kind of chaos. It was a slippery slope.
The Scottish theologian John Knox (c.1514–1572), writing in 1557, was one of those who felt
the draft as this door was opened to potential doom. Mary Tudor ruled in England, and Mary of
Guise ruled in Scotland as regent for her daughter, the future Mary Queen of Scots, so Knox felt
the need to alert the world to this danger in a pamphlet entitled The first blast of the trumpet against
the monstruous regiment of women:
To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation,
or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will
and approved ordinance, and finalie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice.
(Knox 1558: 9)
Nature, nation, God, order, justice, equity – all could and would be undone should women be
allowed to rule. Then in 1558, as soon as his pamphlet was published, Knox’s worst fears were
apparently borne out; Mary Tudor died childless, and the English throne passed to the only other
surviving legitimate child of Henry VIII – Mary’s sister, now Queen Elizabeth I.
Yet somehow, the early modern world survived this onslaught of female kings, just as the
University of Leiden had survived Anna Maria van Schurman’s invasion of the lecture hall. And
despite Barlaeus’ anxiety, the fury of John Knox, and the admonitions of Saint Paul, perhaps the
early modern world was less surprised by this than we might have thought – because despite
the constant reiteration of the interlocked values of Church and family, the actual operation of
these processes had always included accommodation of the special case. Female scholars were one
of those special cases, and their negotiations had already been going on for centuries. We turn
now to examine how this worked.
2.3 Making Space for Female Scholars

As we have seen, the institutional structures governing life in early modern Europe simply
could not give female scholars the time and space their work required, because there was no
20
way – economically, socially, doctrinally, or legally – that this pursuit could be construed as either
necessary or useful. So in order to explain the successful scholarly lives achieved by so many
early modern women, we need to observe how they managed to do it: and that was by creating
alternative scenarios and spaces within these already-existing structures. The details and contexts
differed; however, whether we are talking about families, royal courts, the Church, or the law,
the essential element driving each of these space-making alternatives was consistent across the
institutional spectrum – and that essential element was education.
Education is always a form of preparation for life; and in early modern Europe, this meant
that the form and extent of one’s education were determined by the life one was born to lead. It
was not an open-ended endeavor aimed at personal growth and self-improvement; instead, it was
entirely practical, a “preparation for carrying on societal roles” (Whitehead 1999: xii). Where
those societal roles differed, the education differed, too. Thus although gender was certainly an
important constitutive element in the intellectual lives of early modern female scholars, it was only
one of many factors. In fact, if one were to choose the most salient factor determining the shape
and scope of women’s learning, it would have been their social rank. The demands of survival
on one end of that scale, and of political and social obligations on the other, were usually quite
effective in precluding the pursuit of learning. This held true for men as well as for women, and
to think of education otherwise was a political act – because, as formulated by the educational
reformer Jan Amos Comenius, universal education would have entailed educating all children,
regardless of sex or social rank: “Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all
alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and
hamlets, should be sent to school” (Comenius 1923: 66–68).29 For women, however, this was also
complicated by the need to epitomize the Christian virtue of modestia.30 Thus in addition to deal-
ing with the same hurdle faced by non-elite men – that of nonutility – women pursuing higher
learning needed to avoid any perceived transgressions of feminine modesty.
This was a complex negotiation; however, early modern women did not tackle it on their
own. And for many female scholars, the alternative space necessary for that education was first
given to them at home by attentive and encouraging fathers. 31 For instance, when he deemed
the French school in Utrecht to be too worldly, Frederik van Schurman had decided to include
his daughter Anna Maria in the education he was providing for his sons in the family home
(Schurman 1998: 4–5; Eukleria 80–82). Other female scholars, whose families were less wealthy,
benefitted from growing up with fathers who were educators, and who had noticed their
daughters’ abilities. Bathsua Makin’s father Henry Reynolds was a schoolteacher, whose prize
pupil was his daughter; presumably, the education he provided at home enabled her to develop
as a scholar while also giving her the tools she would need throughout her life to support her
family. 32 The classicist Anne Dacier (1651–1720) was the daughter of the educator Tannegui le
Fevre, a professor of Greek and Latin at the Protestant academy of Saumur (Farnham: 1976;
Bury: 1999). In a story that is mirrored in Van Schurman’s own autobiographical account, the
beginning of Dacier’s education is described as a consequence of the lessons her father was pro-
viding to someone else:
He had a son, whom he was educating with great care. Anne le Fèvre, the girl with whom
we are concerned, was eleven years old at the time. While he was giving lessons to his son,
she was usually present. One day it happened that this young schoolboy gave a wrong answer
to one of his father’s questions. His sister, while still continuing to work on her embroidery,
whispered to him, and suggested the answer he should give to their father. Their father over-
heard, and delighted by this discovery, he resolved to extend his care to her, and to educate
her in letters.33
21
Carol Pal
Later, as Dacier gained a reputation throughout Europe as a classicist and professional translator, her
father’s pedagogical methods would gain credibility through being associated with her success –
an example that resonates powerfully with Bathsua Makin as her father’s most famous pupil.
Other negotiations for educational space involved female scholars making alterations to the
concept of the family itself. One of those ways was historical – the creation of an intellectual gene-
alogy of exemplary women; and the other was contemporary – the construction of an intellectual
family, or famille d’alliance.
For female scholars, an intellectual genealogy constituted a diachronic family. It was a line of
memory, in which their names – even if they did not have children – would not disappear. For
the fifteenth-century humanist Laura Cereta, female scholars constituted a “noble lineage”. They
were a respublica mulierum whose members were accomplished, virtuous, and scholarly women:
I am impelled to show what great glory that noble lineage which I carry in my own breast
has won for virtue and literature – a lineage that knowledge, the bearer of honors, has exalted
in every age. For the possession of this lineage is legitimate and sure, and it has come all the
way down to me from the perpetual continuance of a more enduring race…the republic of
women, so worthy of veneration.
(Cereta 1997: 76–80)34
Cereta’s respublica mulierum was a lineage of female scholars and teachers bound together through
time by common intellectual interests – it was her own version of Christine de Pisan’s City of
Ladies, with its own genealogy and history.35
In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), de Pisan had recounted being visited in a dream by
three noble Ladies named Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who authorized her to construct a city
by and for virtuous women. She had been feeling isolated and despondent over misogynist attacks;
however, Lady Reason told Christine that she need not feel alone, because in fact she was not
alone – there were and had been other learned women like her.36 This was followed by a catalogue
of exemplary women throughout time – over 165 women, mythical, biblical, and historical. That
genealogical catalogue would continue to be remembered, embellished, and invoked by female
scholars throughout the early modern era; and in 1673, we find it again in Bathsua Makin’s Essay,
where the name of Anna Maria van Schurman was now added to the list (Makin 1673).
The other alternative family institution for female scholars was the famille d’alliance. The famille
d’alliance was a form of mentoring that appears to have been both profoundly meaningful on
an emotional level, and quite strategically successful in the intellectual formation of the female
scholar (Pal 2009). One of the earliest documented uses of this term comes from 1588, when the
philosopher Michel de Montaigne offered to make Marie de Gournay his fille d’alliance, or unof-
ficial adoptive daughter and intellectual protégée. This was a well-known relationship – both to
the Republic of Letters and to Montaigne’s actual wife and daughter – and it was often referred
to in learned correspondence. Yet what is less well-known is that this arrangement gave birth to
another generation; Gournay became the mère d’alliance of Anna Maria van Schurman, who in
turn had a père and soeur d’alliance in André Rivet and Marie du Moulin. Moreover, apart from
fathers, mothers, and daughters, there were also brothers in the abstract intellectual family. The
use of these terms was specific, explicit, and repeated; thus the intent of intellectual kinship is
quite clear. However, the conventions of the intellectual family were also quite singular in pro-
viding a profound and multivalent level of mentorship and an alternative family for the formation
of the early modern female scholar.
Education also worked as an adaptive mechanism for women with respect to the institution of
the Church. The practice of cloistering was complex, and represented a wide spectrum of wom-
en’s experience. On one end was the undeniable fact that many young women, despite having
22
no religious vocation, were warehoused in convents because their families could not afford the
dowries that would enable them to make worldly matches.37 And on the other end of that spec-
trum, we see convents ruled by learned and active abbesses who embraced their vocations, and
had careers of erudition and influence. An outstanding example here is the twelfth-century nun
Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in a convent from the age of eight, and later wrote texts on
natural history and medicine, in addition to creating works of art, music, and theology.38
Outside the convent, female scholars were able to envision alternative cloisters. They imagined
protected environments in which women could pursue lives of learning and devotion, and where
they, not the Church, would be in control. Christine de Pizan’s 1405 City of Ladies was one of
these visions, and it had a descendant in Mary Astell’s 1692 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. In her
Proposal, the deeply Protestant Astell sought funds to establish an all-female enclave, a women’s
“Retreat from the World.” Although she called her institution a “Seminary,” its purpose, she
assured her female readers, was to communicate knowledge; it was “rather Academical than Monas-
tic” (Astell 1697: 286; 42).39
Thus despite the ways in which the institutions of the family and the Church worked to pre-
serve the hierarchical structures that restricted women’s achievements, these examples demon-
strate how that ideal was consistently subverted by the real – and that reality included the ways in
which female scholars managed to attain education by creating alternative structures.
2.4 Conclusion
In 1928, Virginia Woolf addressed the students at Newnham and Girton, the two colleges for
women at Cambridge University.40 In those lectures, she discussed the paradox one immediately
encountered in looking for basic historical evidence of women’s life and work. What she had
wanted to find was “a mass of information” about real women in the past; what she had encoun-
tered instead was an impossible woman-creature who pervaded poetry from cover to cover, but
was “all but absent from history”. So she remained stymied by her inability to find any documen-
tation of scholarly women from the early modern era:
…what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing
is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn
about this way and that.
(Woolf 1935: 66–69)
Documentation of the lives of early modern women was something that Woolf not only wanted –
she in fact felt that she needed it. Like Christine de Pizan in 1405, she needed to know that there
had been other learned women before her, and she was not alone. She needed a lineage, a model,
and some archival validation.
This essay has attempted to address the historical void that Woolf deplored. Not by finding
the early modern women she sought – it is no longer the case, as it was in 1928, that “noth-
ing is known” about them – but by investigating the nature of the void itself. The problem for
Woolf, as for us, is that the evidence was not recorded where one would first look to find it, in
the institutional records of the family, the Church, and the university. And of course, this makes
perfect sense. Early modern institutions existed to preserve order – social, cultural, religious, and
domestic – and female scholars represented a potential threat to each one of these interlocked
systems. As Bathsua Makin wrote in 1673, “A Learned Woman is thought to be a Comet, that
bodes Mischief, when ever it appears” (Makin 1673: 1). So by looking for these learned women
in the archives of those very institutions that were most threatened by their success – universities,
churches, and scientific societies – we were looking in the wrong places.
23
Carol Pal
The women Woolf was seeking had always been there. Despite the intertwined institutions
mandated to prevent women’s scholarship, these women had managed to accomplish lives of
learning, and they had done so by constructing alternative versions of those same institutions.
Thus it is in the historical traces of those alternative institutions – the Republic of Letters, the
famille d’alliance, the imagined Cities of Ladies, the intellectual genealogies – that the lives and
work of female scholars will be found. And the next step, perhaps, might be to reconstruct our
concept of early modern intellectual culture based on the assumption that the women were always
part of it, rather than the assumption that they were not.
Notes
1 In this essay, the word “Church” is capitalized when referring to the umbrella institution, while
“church” will refer to a physical place of worship.
2 The Great Chain of Being was a concept that began with Aristotle’s scala naturae. It was codified, multi-
plied, illustrated, and adapted over time, becoming particularly important in Neoplatonism and Renais-
sance philosophy.
3 A notable exception to that general acceptance was Marie de Gournay. In 1622, in Égalité des hommes et
des femmes, she pointed out that, “nothing more resembles a male cat on a windowsill than a female cat.”
(Gournay 1993: 49).
4 On Anna Maria van Schurman see, most recently Larsen (2016) and Pal (2012).
5 In the Republic of Letters, the name of Caspar van Baerle (1584–1648) was Latinized as Barlaeus. He
was a poet, érudit, melancholic, and Professor of Logic at the University of Leiden. He lost his position
in the purge that followed the triumph of orthodox Calvinism at the Synod of Dort in 1619, after which
he was befriended by Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and moved to Amsterdam. On Barlaeus, see
(Blok 1976).
6 Original in Latin. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Caspar Barlaeus to Constantijn
Huygens, 8 January, 1630 (Huygens 1911: 1, 273). Huygens was a scholar, courtier, and poet who called
his scientist son Christian “my Archimedes.” On Huygens, see (Bots 1973; Jardine 2008).
7 Van Schurman swore this oath at her dying father’s bedside in 1623, when she was 16. She repeated it to
the Quaker William Penn when he visited her in 1677, saying she “desired to be found a living sacrifice,
offered up entirely to the Lord.” (Penn 1835: 99). According to Pierre Yvon, Van Schurman’s youthful
choice was one in which both parents concurred. On the doctrinally peripatetic Jean de Labadie; see
(Saxby 1987).
8 Gisbert Voët (1589–1676) was Latinized as Voetius in the Republic of Letters. He was a Dutch Cal-
vinist theologian, a professor of Oriental Sciences at the University of Utrecht, and a mentor for Anna
Maria van Schurman. He was also a staunch opponent of René Descartes. On Voetius, see (Ruler 1995;
Goudriaan 2006).
9 From Inclytae & Antiquae Urbi Trajectinae Nova Academia nuperrime donatae gratulatur Anna Maria a Schur-
man… (Schurman 1648).
10 According to an 1899 history of the University of Utrecht, this cubicle was to the north of the rostrum
in the hall designated for theological lectures. It endured until 1825, when it was replaced by a staircase
(Cohen 1920: 536 n.4).
11 Caspar Barlaeus to Contantijn Huygens. 30 April, 1636 (Huygens 1911: II, 164).
12 Blok locates these sorts of writings within a longstanding humanist tradition of using Latin exclusively
when writing anything obscene, since it was “their own male language, Latin, which was generally nei-
ther used nor understood by women, even those of some education.” In this case, however, Van Schur-
man’s Latin proficiency would certainly have rendered this linguistic screen completely meaningless.
Agnes Sneller, on the other hand, sees the letter as a demonstration of Barlaeus’ complete disrespect for
Van Schurman’s choice of a celibate life. (Blok 1976: 6–7; Sneller 1996: 148–49).
13 When Voetius arranged for the dangers of Cartesianism to be formally debated at the University of
Utrecht, Descartes joked to his friend Regius that he himself would come audit the proceedings, but
only if he could do it in secret: “…but for now let no-one know, and I will be able to lie hidden in that
cubicle from which Mlle. van Schurman used to listen to lectures.” Descartes to Regius. Leiden 24 May,
1640. (Descartes 1975: III, 70). Regius (Henri le Roy 1598–1679) was a physician, natural philosopher,
and Professor of Medicine at the University of Utrecht.
24
14 Van Schurman’s Dissertatio (1641) was a disputation on: “A Practical Problem: Whether the study of
letters is fitting for a Christian woman.” While Van Schurman argued forcefully for the appropriateness
of women’s access to learning, she did so within certain constraints. One of these was, “that a woman’s
vocation is confined within narrow boundaries, certainly within the limits of private or domestic life.”
(Schurman 1998: 36).
15 Due to high infant mortality and the lack of written evidence for non-elite families, it has not infre-
quently been assumed that in the case of love, a lack of evidence constituted an evidence of lack. This
unfounded assumption has since been challenged. As E.P. Thompson noted in a review, this interpreta-
tion is in fact “the most unlikely answer of all,” since “for the vast majority throughout history, familial
relations have been intermeshed with the structures of work. Feeling may be more, rather than less,
tender or intense because relations are ‘economic’ and critical to mutual survival.” (Thompson 1977).
16 For an excellent overview, see (Wiesner-Hanks 2019).
17 For a sense of the nonstop daily procession of tasks for early modern women at every social level, see the
excerpts from women’s diaries and correspondence in: (O’Faolain and Martines 1973: 234–43).
18 On this widespread phenomenon, see: (Fissell, 2008; Leong, 2018; Rankin, 2013).
19 This number is an average; it therefore flattens out considerable variances across time and place in early
modern Europe (Hajnal 1965; Konnert 2006: 22–23).
20 New scholarship is analyzing the realities of same-sex preference in early modern Europe. See (Brown
1989; Traub 2016).
21 The other three – Bathsua Makin (c.1600–c.1681), Dorothy Moore (c.1612–1664), and Katherine Jones,
Lady Ranelagh (1615–1691) – were or had been married, and all had children. On this network, see (Pal
2012).
22 For instance: The sisters Anna Roemers and Maria “Tesselschade” Visscher were artists, poets, and
inspirations for Van Schurman; they were active until they were joined to wealthy but unexceptional
husbands, and at this point they disappeared from the literary scene. In Renaissance Italy, the Venetian
scholar Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465–1558) was a public phenomenon from the age of 12, giving public ora-
tions in Latin and Greek; her scholarly career ended when she got married at the age of 34. See (Parente
1994; Fedele 2000).
23 A growing body of scholarship, together with new source translations, is addressing the complex subject
of these interrelationships and oppressions. See, for example: (Hsia 1992; Franklin et al. 2014; Glikl of
Hameln 2019).
24 Aristotle (384–322 BCE) analyzed nature as a series of opposites. The male principle was hot, dry, and
active; the female was cold, moist, and passive. A male baby represented reproductive success; a female
was Nature’s failure. The physician Galen of Pergamon (c.129–216) turned Aristotelian theory into a
complete medical system of humors. This system dominated medicine until finally challenged by the
Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. (Allen 1985).
25 Genesis 1:27, King James Version, emphasis mine. The “rib” account is found in Genesis 2:18–23.
26 The gospels speak of a number of women named Mary, and they are often conflated. It was one of
those conflations that resulted in Mary Magdalene being recast as a prostitute, identified with the “sin-
ful woman” in Luke 37:50. However, the non-canonical Gospel of Mary (considered a gnostic text)
describes her as having received teachings directly from Jesus and then relaying them to the other
apostles – which gets a very negative reaction from Peter (Di Caprio and Wiesner 2001: 87–89).
27 This is of course the ideal case of the law, and multiple court cases provide evidence for the ways in
which women could defy and manipulate the system, especially if and when they became widows.
28 William Monter refers to these sovereigns as “female kings.” ( Jansen 2002; Monter 2012).
29 Comenius was the Latin name given to Jan Amos Komensk ỷ (1592–1670) in the Republic of Letters. On
Comenius, see (Čapková 1994).
30 Modesty was the public performance of a woman’s private virtue; and, for a woman, the word “virtue”
was almost synonymous with “chastity.” Theoretically, a modest woman could preserve her chastity by
controlling her own behavior – her carriage, clothing, gestures, and glances – in order to avoid inciting
men to unchaste thoughts and immoderate actions.
31 For an analysis of the role played by fathers in early modern women’s intellectual accomplishment, and
the development of “household academies”, see (Ross 2009). See also: (Smet 1997).
32 For a contemporary’s view of Makin and her father, see (D’Ewes 1845: 63–64, 94–96).
33 Original in French. Interestingly, this anecdote comes from Queen Christina of Sweden’s first biog-
rapher, because the two women had been in touch. See (Arckenholtz 1751: II, 187–89, and Appendix
LXXXIII).
25
Carol Pal
34 Born in Brescia in 1469, the learned Cereta was married at 15, widowed at 16, and died at the age of 30.
35 Christine de Pisan (c.1365–1430) was an educated woman and a widowed single mother, who supported
her three children, her mother, and herself through her writing. City of Ladies was a powerful defense
of the female sex against the misogyny of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose
(c.1275), and it was de Pisan’s entry into the querelle des femmes.
36 “If it were customary to send daughters to school like sons, and if they were then taught the natural
sciences, they would learn as thoroughly and as well as sons. And by chance there happen to be such
women.” (Pisan 1982: 63).
37 It has been estimated that in seventeenth-century Venice, for instance, 60% of upper-class women were
in convents, “many against their will.” (Wiesner-Hanks 2019: 254).
38 On Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), see (Bingen 1994–2004).
39 On Astell, see (Perry 1986; Sowaal and Weiss 2016).
40 Girton College was founded in 1869, and Newnham in 1871. Woolf published these lectures in 1929 as
A Room of One’s Own.
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28
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Boyd and Covington formed a division commanded by Major-
General Morgan Lewis. The second division was intended for Major-
General Hampton; a reserve under Colonel Macomb, and a park of
artillery under Brigadier-General Moses Porter, completed the
244
organization.
The men were embarked in bateaux, October 17, at Henderson’s
Bay, to the westward of Sackett’s Harbor. The weather had been
excessively stormy, and continued so. The first resting-point to be
reached was Grenadier Island at the entrance of the St. Lawrence,
only sixteen or eighteen miles from the starting-point; but the
bateaux were dispersed by heavy gales of wind, October 18, 19, and
20, and the last detachments did not reach Grenadier Island until
November 3. “All our hopes have been nearly blasted,” wrote
Wilkinson October 24; but at length, November 5, the expedition,
numbering nearly three hundred boats, having safely entered the
river, began the descent from French Creek. That day they moved
forty miles, and halted about midnight six miles above Ogdensburg.
The next day was consumed in running the flotilla past Ogdensburg
under the fire of the British guns at Prescott. The boats floated down
by night and the troops marched by land. November 7 the army
halted at the White House, about twenty miles below Ogdensburg.
There Wilkinson called a council of war, November 8, to consider
whether the expedition should proceed. Lewis, Boyd, Brown, and
Swartwout voted simply in favor of attacking Montreal. Covington
and Porter were of the opinion “that we proceed from this place
245
under great danger, ... but ... we know of no other alternative.”
More than any other cause, Armstrong’s conduct warranted
Wilkinson in considering the campaign at an end. If the attack on
Montreal was seriously intended, every motive required Armstrong to
join Hampton at once in advance of Wilkinson’s expedition. No one
knew so well as he the necessity of some authority to interpose
between the tempers and pretensions of these two men in case a
joint campaign were to be attempted, or to enforce co-operation on
either side. Good faith toward Hampton, even more than toward
Wilkinson, required that the secretary who had led them into such a
situation should not desert them. Yet Armstrong, after waiting till
Wilkinson was fairly at Grenadier Island, began to prepare for return
to Washington. From the village of Antwerp, half way between
Sackett’s Harbor and Ogdensburg, the secretary wrote to Wilkinson,
October 27, “Should my fever continue I shall not be able to
246
approach you as I intended.” Three days later he wrote again
from Denmark on the road to Albany,—
“I rejoice that your difficulties are so far surmounted as to

enable you to say with assurance when you will pass Prescott. I
should have met you there; but bad roads, worse weather, and a
considerable degree of illness admonished me against receding
farther from a point where my engagements call me about the
1st proximo. The resolution of treading back my steps was taken
247
at Antwerp.”
From Albany Armstrong wrote, November 12, for the last time,
248
“in the fulness of my faith that you are in Montreal,” that he had
sent orders to Hampton to effect a junction with the river expedition.
Such letters and orders, whatever Armstrong meant by them, were
certain to impress both Wilkinson and Hampton with a conviction that
the secretary intended to throw upon them the whole responsibility
for the failure of an expedition which he as well as they knew to be
hopeless.
Doubtless a vigorous general might still have found means if not
to take Montreal, at least to compel the British to evacuate Upper
Canada; but Wilkinson was naturally a weak man, and during the
descent of the river he was excessively ill, never able to make a
great exertion. Every day his difficulties increased. Hardly had his
flotilla begun its descent, when a number of British gunboats
commanded by Captain Mulcaster, the most energetic officer in the
British naval service on the Lake, slipping through Chauncey’s
blockade, appeared in Wilkinson’s rear, and caused him much
annoyance. Eight hundred British rank-and-file from Kingston and
Prescott were with Mulcaster, and at every narrow pass of the river,
musketry and artillery began to open on Wilkinson from the British
bank. Progress became slow. November 7, Macomb was landed on
the north bank with twelve hundred men to clear away these
249
obstructions. The day and night of November 8 were consumed
at the White House in passing troops across the river. Brown’s
brigade was landed on the north shore to reinforce Macomb. The
boats were delayed to keep pace with Brown’s march on shore, and
made but eleven miles November 9, and the next day, November 10,
fell down only to the Long Saut, a continuous rapid eight miles in
length. The enemy pressed close, and while Brown marched in
advance to clear the bank along the rapid, Boyd was ordered to take
all the other troops and protect the rear.
The flotilla stopped on the night of November 10 near a farm
called Chrystler’s on the British bank; and the next morning,
November 11, at half-past ten o’clock Brown having announced that
all was clear below, Wilkinson was about to order the flotilla to run
the rapids when General Boyd sent word that the enemy in the rear
were advancing in column. Wilkinson was on his boat, unable to
250
leave his bed; Morgan Lewis was in no better condition; and Boyd
was left to fight a battle as he best could. Boyd never had the
confidence of the army; Brown was said to have threatened to resign
251
rather than serve under him, and Winfield Scott, who was that
252
day with Macomb and Brown in the advance, described Boyd as
amiable and respectable in a subordinate position, but “vacillating
and imbecile beyond all endurance as a chief under high
responsibilities.”
The opportunity to capture or destroy Mulcaster and his eight
hundred men was brilliant, and warranted Wilkinson in turning back
his whole force to accomplish it. Boyd actually employed three
brigades, and made an obstinate but not united or well-supported
attempt to crush the enemy. Colonel Ripley with the Twenty-first
regiment drove in the British skirmishers, and at half-past two o’clock
the battle became general. At half-past four, after a stubborn
engagement, General Covington was killed; his brigade gave way,
and the whole American line fell back, beaten and almost routed.
This defeat was the least creditable of the disasters suffered by
American arms during the war. No excuse or palliation was ever
253
offered for it. The American army consisted wholly of regulars,
and all the generals belonged to the regular service. Wilkinson could
hardly have had less than three thousand men with him, after
allowing for his detachments, and was alone to blame if he had not
more. Boyd, according to his own account, had more than twelve
hundred men and two field-pieces under his immediate command on
254
shore. The reserve, under Colonel Upham of the Eleventh
255
regiment, contained six hundred rank-and-file, with four field-
pieces. Wilkinson’s official report admitted that eighteen hundred
rank-and-file were engaged; Colonel Walbach, his adjutant-general,
256
admitted two thousand, while Swartwout thought that twenty-one
hundred were in action. The American force was certainly not less
than two thousand, with six field-pieces.
The British force officially reported by Lieutenant-Colonel
Morrison of the Eighty-ninth regiment, who was in command,
consisted of eight hundred rank-and-file, and thirty Indians. The
rank-and-file consisted of three hundred and forty-two men of the
Forty-ninth regiment, about as many more of the Eighty-ninth, and
some Canadian troops. They had three six-pound field-pieces, and
257
were supported on their right flank by gunboats.
On the American side the battle was ill fought both by the
generals and by the men. Wilkinson and Morgan Lewis, the two
major-generals, who were ill on their boats, never gave an order.
Boyd, who commanded, brought his troops into action by
detachments, and the men, on meeting unexpected resistance,
broke and fled. The defeat was bloody as well as mortifying.
Wilkinson reported one hundred and two killed, and two hundred and
258
thirty-seven wounded, but strangely reported no missing,
although the British occupied the field of battle, and claimed upward
259
of one hundred prisoners. Morrison reported twenty-two killed,
one hundred and forty-eight wounded, and twelve missing. The
American loss was twice that of the British, and Wilkinson’s reports
were so little to be trusted that the loss might well have been greater
than he represented it. The story had no redeeming incident.
If three brigades, numbering two thousand men, were beaten at
Chrystler’s farm by eight hundred British and Canadians, the chance
that Wilkinson could capture Montreal, even with ten thousand men,
was small. The conduct of the army showed its want of self-
confidence. Late as it was, in the dusk of the evening Boyd hastened
to escape across the river. “The troops being much exhausted,”
260
reported Wilkinson, “it was considered most convenient that they
should embark, and that the dragoons with the artillery should
proceed by land. The embarkation took place without the smallest
molestation from the enemy, and the flotilla made a harbor near the
head of the Saut on the opposite shore.” In truth, neither Wilkinson
261
nor his adjutant gave the order of embarkation, nor was Boyd
262
willing to admit it as his. Apparently the army by common consent
embarked without orders.
Early the next morning, November 12, the flotilla ran the rapids
and rejoined Brown and Macomb near Cornwall, where Wilkinson
learned that General Hampton had taken the responsibility of putting
an end to an undertaking which had not yet entered upon its serious
difficulties.
Four months had passed since Hampton took command on Lake
Champlain. When he first reached Burlington, July 3, neither men
nor material were ready, nor was even a naval force present to cover
his weakness. While he was camped at Burlington, a British fleet,
with about a thousand regulars, entered the Lake from the Isle aux
Noix and the Richelieu River, and plundered the American
magazines at Plattsburg, July 31, sweeping the Lake clear of
263
American shipping. Neither Hampton’s army nor McDonough’s
small fleet ventured to offer resistance. Six weeks afterward, in the
middle of September, Hampton had but about four thousand men, in
bad condition and poor discipline.
Wilkinson, though unable to begin his own movement, was
264
earnest that Hampton should advance on Montreal. Apparently in
order to assist Wilkinson’s plans, Hampton moved his force,
September 19, to the Canada line. Finding that a drought had
caused want of water on the direct road to Montreal, Hampton
decided to march his army westward to the Chateaugay River, forty
or fifty miles, and established himself there, September 26, in a
position equally threatening to Montreal and to the British line of
communication up the St. Lawrence. Armstrong approved the
265
movement, and Hampton remained three weeks at Chateaugay,
building roads and opening lines of communication while waiting for
Wilkinson to move.
October 16 Armstrong ordered Hampton, in view of Wilkinson’s
probable descent of the river, to “approach the mouth of the
Chateaugay, or other point which shall better favor our junction, and
266
hold the enemy in check.” Hampton instantly obeyed, and moved
down the Chateaugay to a point about fifteen miles from its mouth.
There he established his army, October 22, and employed the next
two days in completing his road, and getting up his artillery and
stores.
Hampton’s movements annoyed the British authorities at
Montreal. Even while he was still within American territory, before he
advanced from Chateaugay Four Corners, Sir George Prevost
267
reported, October 8, to his government, —
“The position of Major-General Hampton at the Four Corners

on the Chateaugay River, and which he continued to occupy,
either with the whole or a part of his force, from the latest
information I have been able to obtain from thence, is highly
judicious,—as at the same time that he threatens Montreal and
obliges me to concentrate a considerable body of troops in this
vicinity to protect it, he has it in his power to molest the
communication with the Upper Province, and impede the
progress of the supplies required there for the Navy and Army.”
If this was the case, October 8, when Hampton was still at
Chateaugay, fifty miles from its mouth, the annoyance must have
been much greater when he advanced, October 21, to Spear’s,
within ten miles of the St. Lawrence on his left, and fifteen from the
mouth of the Chateaugay. Hampton accomplished more than was
expected. He held a position equally well adapted to threaten
Montreal, to disturb British communication with Upper Canada, and
to succor Wilkinson.
That Hampton, with only four thousand men, should do more
than this, could not fairly be required. The defences of Montreal were
such as required ten times his force to overcome. The regular troops
defending Montreal were not stationed in the town itself, which was
sufficiently protected by a broad river and rapids. They were chiefly
at Chambly, St. John’s, Isle aux Noix, or other points on the
Richelieu River, guarding the most dangerous line of approach from
Lake Champlain; or they were at Coteau du Lac on the St. Lawrence
about twenty miles northwest of Hampton’s position. According to
the general weekly return of British forces serving in the Montreal
District under command of Major-General Sir R. H. Sheaffe, Sept.
15, 1813, the aggregate rank-and-file present for duty was five
thousand seven hundred and fifty-two. At Montreal were none but
sick, with the general staff. At Chambly were nearly thirteen hundred
effectives; at St. John’s nearly eight hundred; at Isle aux Noix about
nine hundred. Excluding the garrison at Prescott, and including the
force at Coteau du Lac, Major-General Sheaffe commanded just five
268
thousand effectives.
Besides the enrolled troops, Prevost could muster a
considerable number of sailors and marines for the defence of
Montreal; and his resources in artillery, boats, fortifications, and
supplies of all sorts were ample. In addition to the embodied troops,
Prevost could count upon the militia, a force almost as good as
regulars for the defence of a forest-clad country where axes were as
effective as musketry in stopping an invading army. In Prevost’s
letter to Bathurst of October 8, announcing Hampton’s invasion, the
governor-general said:—
“Measures had been in the mean time taken by Major-
General Sir Roger Sheaffe commanding in this district, to resist
the advance of the enemy by moving the whole of the troops
under his command nearer to the frontier line, and by calling out
about three thousand of the sedentary militia. I thought it
necessary to increase this latter force to nearly eight thousand
by embodying the whole of the sedentary militia upon the
frontier, this being in addition to the six battalions of incorporated
militia amounting to five thousand men; and it is with peculiar
satisfaction I have to report to your Lordship that his Majesty’s
Canadian subjects have a second time answered the call to
arms in defence of their country with a zeal and alacrity beyond
all praise.”
Thus the most moderate estimate of the British force about

269
Montreal gave at least fifteen thousand rank-and-file under arms.
Besides this large array of men, Prevost was amply protected by
natural defences. If Hampton had reached the St. Lawrence at
Caughnawaga, he would still have been obliged to cross the St.
Lawrence, more than two miles wide, under the fire of British
batteries and gunboats. Hampton had no transports. Prevost had
bateaux and vessels of every description, armed and unarmed,
above and below the rapids, besides two river steamers constantly
plying to Quebec.
Hampton’s command consisted of four thousand infantry new to
270
service, two hundred dragoons, and artillery. With such a force,
his chance of suffering a fatal reverse was much greater than that of
his reaching the St. Lawrence. His position at the Chateaugay was
not less perilous than that of Harrison on the Maumee, and far more
so than that which cost Dearborn so many disasters at Niagara.
The British force in Hampton’s immediate front consisted at first
of only three hundred militia, who could make no resistance, and
retired as Hampton advanced. When Hampton made his movement
to Spear’s, Lieutenant-Colonel de Salaberry in his front commanded
about eight hundred men, and immediately entrenched himself and
271
obstructed the road with abattis. Hampton felt the necessity of
dislodging Salaberry, who might at any moment be reinforced; and
accordingly, in the night of October 25, sent a strong force to flank
Salaberry’s position, while he should himself attack it in front.
The flanking party failed to find its way, and the attack in front
272
was not pressed. The American loss did not exceed fifty men.
The British loss was reported as twenty-five. Sir George Prevost and
273
his officers were greatly pleased by their success; but Prevost did
not attempt to molest Hampton, who fell back by slow marches to
Chateaugay, where he waited to hear from the Government. The
British generals at Montreal showed little energy in thus allowing
Hampton to escape; and the timidity of their attitude before
Hampton’s little army was the best proof of the incompetence
alleged against Prevost by many of his contemporaries.
Hampton’s retreat was due more to the conduct of Armstrong
than to the check at Spear’s or to the movements of Prevost. At the
moment when he moved against Salaberry, October 25, a
messenger arrived from Sackett’s Harbor, bringing instructions from
the quartermaster-general for building huts for ten thousand men for
winter quarters. These orders naturally roused Hampton’s suspicions
that no serious movement against Montreal was intended.
“The papers sunk my hopes,” he wrote to Armstrong,

274
November 1, “and raised serious doubts of receiving that
efficacious support that had been anticipated. I would have
recalled the column, but it was in motion, and the darkness of
the night rendered it impracticable.”
275
In a separate letter of the same date which Hampton sent to
Armstrong by Colonel King, assuming that the campaign was at an
end, he carried out his declared purpose of resigning. “Events,” he
said, “have had no tendency to change my opinion of the destiny
intended for me, nor my determination to retire from a service where
I can neither feel security nor expect honor. The campaign I consider
substantially at an end.” The implication that Armstrong meant to
sacrifice him was certainly disrespectful, and deserved punishment;
but when Colonel King, bearing these letters, arrived in the
neighborhood of Ogdensburg, he found that Armstrong had already
done what Hampton reproached him for intending to do. He had
retired to Albany, “suspecting ... that the campaign ... would
terminate as it did.”
A week afterward, November 8, Hampton received a letter from
Wilkinson, written from Ogdensburg, asking him to forward supplies
and march his troops to some point of junction on the river below St.
276
Regis. Hampton replied from Chateaugay that he had no supplies
to forward; and as, under such circumstances, his army could not
throw itself on Wilkinson’s scanty means, he should fall back on
Plattsburg, and attempt to act against the enemy on some other road
277
to be indicated. Wilkinson received the letter on his arrival at
Cornwall, November 12, the day after his defeat at Chrystler’s farm;
and with extraordinary energy moved the whole expedition the next
day to French Mills, six or seven miles up the Salmon River, within
the United States lines, where it went into winter quarters.
Armstrong and Wilkinson made common cause in throwing upon
Hampton the blame of failure. Wilkinson at first ordered Hampton
under arrest, but after reflection decided to throw the responsibility
278
upon Armstrong. The secretary declined to accept it, but
consented after some delay to accept Hampton’s resignation when
renewed in March, 1814. Wilkinson declared that Hampton’s conduct
279
had blasted his dawning hopes and the honor of the army.
Armstrong sneered at Wilkinson for seizing the pretext for
280
abandoning his campaign. Both the generals believed that
Armstrong had deliberately led them into an impossible undertaking,
and deserted them, in order to shift the blame of failure from
281
himself. Hampton behaved with dignity, and allowed his opinion to
be seen only in his contemptuous silence; nor did Armstrong publicly
blame Hampton’s conduct until Hampton was dead. The only happy
result of the campaign was to remove all the older generals—
Wilkinson, Hampton, and Morgan Lewis—from active service.
The bloodless failure of an enterprise which might have ended in
extreme disaster was not the whole cost of Armstrong’s and
Wilkinson’s friendship and quarrels. In November nearly all the
regular forces, both British and American, had been drawn toward
the St. Lawrence. Even Harrison and his troops, who reached
Buffalo October 24, were sent to Sackett’s Harbor, November 16, to
protect the navy. Not a regiment of the United States army was to be
seen between Sackett’s Harbor and Detroit. The village of Niagara
and Fort George on the British side were held by a few hundred
volunteers commanded by Brigadier-General McClure of the New
York militia. As long as Wilkinson and Hampton threatened Montreal,
Niagara was safe, and needed no further attention.
After November 13, when Wilkinson and Hampton withdrew from
Canada, while the American army forgot its enemy in the bitterness
of its own personal feuds, the British generals naturally thought of
recovering their lost posts on the Niagara River. McClure, who
occupied Fort George and the small town of Newark under its guns,
saw his garrison constantly diminishing. Volunteers refused to serve
282
longer on any conditions. The War Department ordered no
reinforcements, although ten or twelve thousand soldiers were lying
idle at French Mills and Plattsburg. December 10 McClure had about
sixty men of the Twenty-fourth infantry, and some forty volunteers, at
Fort George, while the number of United States troops present for
duty at Fort George, Fort Niagara, Niagara village, Black Rock, and
Buffalo, to protect the people and the magazines, amounted to four
companies, or three hundred and twenty-four men.
As early as October 4, Armstrong authorized McClure to warn
the inhabitants of Newark that their town might suffer destruction in
case the defence of Fort George should render such a measure
283
proper. No other orders were given, but Wilkinson repeatedly
284
advised that Fort George should be evacuated, and Armstrong
did nothing to protect it, further than to issue a requisition from
Albany, November 25, upon the Governor of New York for one
285
thousand militia.
The British, though not rapid in their movements, were not so
slow as the Americans. Early in December Lieutenant-General
Gordon Drummond came from Kingston to York, and from York to
the head of the Lake where the British had maintained themselves
since losing the Niagara posts in May. Meanwhile General Vincent
had sent Colonel Murray with five hundred men to retake Fort
George. McClure at Fort George, December 10, hearing that Murray
had approached within ten miles, evacuated the post and crossed
the river to Fort Niagara; but before doing so he burned the town of
Newark and as much as he could of Queenston, turning the
inhabitants, in extreme cold, into the open air. He alleged as his
286
motive the wish to deprive the enemy of winter quarters; yet he
287
did not destroy the tents or military barracks, and he acted
without authority, for Armstrong Had authorized him to burn Newark
only in case he meant to defend Fort George.
“The enemy is much exasperated, and will make a descent

on this frontier if possible,” wrote McClure from the village of
Niagara, December 13; “but I shall watch them close with my
handful of men until a reinforcement of militia and volunteers
arrives.... I am not a little apprehensive that the enemy will take
advantage of the exposed condition of Buffalo and our shipping
there. My whole effective force on this extensive frontier does
not exceed two hundred and fifty men.”
Five days passed, and still no reinforcements arrived, and no

regular troops were even ordered to start for Niagara. “I
288
apprehended an attack,” wrote McClure; and he retired thirty
miles to Buffalo, “with a view of providing for the defence.” On the
night of December 18 Colonel Murray, with five hundred and fifty
regular rank-and-file, crossed the river from Fort George
unperceived; surprised the sentinels on the glacis and at the gates of
Fort Niagara; rushed through the main gate; and, with a loss of eight
men killed and wounded, captured the fortress with some three
hundred and fifty prisoners.
Nothing could be said on the American side in defence or
excuse of this disgrace. From Armstrong at the War Department to
Captain Leonard who commanded the fort, every one concerned in
the transaction deserved whatever punishment the law or army
regulations could inflict. The unfortunate people of Niagara and
Buffalo were victims to official misconduct. The British, thinking
themselves released from ordinary rules of war by the burning of
Newark and Queenston, showed unusual ferocity. In the assault on
Fort Niagara they killed sixty-seven Americans, all by the bayonet,
while they wounded only eleven. Immediately afterward they “let
289
loose” their auxiliary Indians on Lewiston and the country around.
On the night of December 29, Lieutenant-General Drummond sent a
290
force of fifteen hundred men including Indians across the river
above the falls, and driving away the militia, burned Black Rock and
291
Buffalo with all their public stores and three small war-schooners.
These acts of retaliation were justified by Sir George Prevost in a
292
long proclamation dated Jan. 12, 1814, which promised that he
would not “pursue further a system of warfare so revolting to his own
feelings and so little congenial to the British character unless the
future measures of the enemy should compel him again to resort to
it.” The Americans themselves bore Drummond’s excessive severity
with less complaint than usual. They partly suspected that the
destruction effected on the Thames, at York and at Newark, by
American troops, though unauthorized by orders, had warranted
some retaliation; but they felt more strongly that their anger should
properly be vented on their own government and themselves, who
had allowed a handful of British troops to capture a strong fortress
and to ravage thirty miles of frontier, after repeated warning, without
losing two hundred men on either side, while thousands of regular
troops were idle elsewhere, and the neighborhood ought without an
effort to have supplied five thousand militia.
Fort Niagara, which thus fell into British hands, remained, like
Mackinaw, in the enemy’s possession until the peace.
CHAPTER IX.
Military movements in the Southern department attracted little
notice, but were not the less important. The Southern people entered
into the war in the hope of obtaining the Floridas. President Madison,
like President Jefferson, gave all the support in his power to the
scheme. Throughout the year 1812 United States troops still
occupied Amelia Island and the St. Mary’s River, notwithstanding the
refusal of Congress to authorize the occupation. The President
expected Congress at the session of 1812–1813 to approve the
seizure of both Floridas, and took measures in advance for that
purpose.
October 12, 1812, Secretary Eustis wrote to the Governor of
Tennessee calling out fifteen hundred militia for the defence of the
“lower country.” The force was not intended for defence but for
conquest; it was to support the seizure of Mobile, Pensacola, and St.
Augustine by the regular troops. For that object every man in
Tennessee was ready to serve; and of all Tennesseeans, Andrew
Jackson was the most ardent. Governor Blount immediately
authorized Jackson, as major-general of the State militia, to call out
two thousand volunteers. The call was issued November 14; the
volunteers collected at Nashville December 10; and Jan. 7, 1813, the
infantry embarked in boats to descend the river, while the mounted
men rode through the Indian country to Natchez.
“I have the pleasure to inform you,” wrote Jackson to Eustis

in departing,293 “that I am now at the head of two thousand and
seventy volunteers, the choicest of our citizens, who go at the
call of their country to execute the will of the Government; who
have no Constitutional scruples, and if the Government orders,
will rejoice at the opportunity of placing the American eagle on
the ramparts of Mobile, Pensacola, and Fort St. Augustine.”
The Tennessee army reached Natchez, February 15, and went

into camp to wait orders from Washington, which were expected to
direct an advance on Mobile and Pensacola.
While Jackson descended the Mississippi, Monroe, then acting
294
Secretary of War, wrote, January 13, to Major-General Pinckney,
whose military department included Georgia: “It is intended to place
under your command an adequate force for the reduction of St.
Augustine should it be decided on by Congress, before whom the
subject will be in a few days.” A fortnight later, January 30, Monroe
295
wrote also to Wilkinson, then commanding at New Orleans: “The
subject of taking possession of West Florida is now before
Congress, and will probably pass. You will be prepared to carry into
effect this measure should it be decided on.”
Neither Madison nor Monroe raised objection to the seizure of
territory belonging to a friendly power; but Congress showed no such
readiness to act. Senator Anderson of Tennessee, as early as Dec.
296
10, 1812, moved, in secret session of the Senate, that a
committee be appointed to consider the expediency of authorizing
the President “to occupy and hold the whole or any part of East
Florida, including Amelia Island, and also those parts of West Florida
which are not now in the possession and under the jurisdiction of the
United States.” After much debate the Senate, December 22,
adopted the resolution by eighteen votes to twelve, and the
committee, consisting of Anderson, Samuel Smith, Tait of Georgia,
Varnum of Massachusetts, and Goodrich of Connecticut, reported a
297
bill, January 19, authorizing the President to occupy both
Floridas, and to exercise government there, “provided ... that the
section of country herein designated that is situated to the eastward
of the river Perdido may be the subject of future negotiation.”
The bill met opposition from the President’s personal enemies,
Giles, Leib, and Samuel Smith, as well as from the Federalists and
some of the Northern Democrats. January 26, Samuel Smith moved
to strike out the second section, which authorized the seizure of
Florida east of the Perdido; and the Senate, February 2, by a vote of
nineteen to sixteen, adopted Smith’s motion. The vote was sectional.
North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana
supported the bill; Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island opposed it; Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont were divided; New
Jersey threw one vote in its favor, the second senator being absent.
Had Leib not changed sides the next day, the whole bill would have
been indefinitely postponed; but the majority rallied, February 5, and
by a vote of twenty-one to eleven authorized the President to seize
Florida west of the Perdido, or, in other words, to occupy Mobile. The
House passed the bill in secret session February 9, and the
298
President signed it February 12.
In refusing to seize East Florida, the Senate greatly disarranged
Madison’s plans. Three days afterward, February 5, Armstrong took
charge of the War Department, and his first orders were sent to
Andrew Jackson directing him to dismiss his force, “the causes of
embodying and marching to New Orleans the corps under your
299
command having ceased to exist.” Jackson, ignorant that the
Administration was not to blame, and indignant at his curt dismissal,
marched his men back to Tennessee, making himself responsible for
their pay and rations. On learning these circumstances, Armstrong
wrote, March 22, a friendly letter thanking him for the important
services his corps would have rendered “had the Executive policy of
occupying the two Floridas been adopted by the national
300
legislature.”
After the Senate had so persistently refused to support
Madison’s occupation of East Florida, he could hardly maintain
longer the illegal possession he had held during the past year of
Amelia Island. February 15, Armstrong wrote to Major-General
301
Pinckney, “The late private proceedings of Congress have
resulted in a decision not to invade East Florida at present;” but not
until March 7, did the secretary order Pinckney to withdraw the
302
troops from Amelia Island and Spanish territory.
The troops were accordingly withdrawn from Amelia Island, May
16; but nothing could restore East Florida to its former repose, and
the anarchy which had been introduced from the United States could
never be mastered except by the power that created it. Perhaps
Madison would have retained possession, as the least of evils, in
spite of the Senate’s vote of February 3, had not another cause,
independent of legislative will, overcome his repugnance to the
evacuation. The Russian offer of mediation arrived while the
President was still in doubt. The occupation of Florida, being an act
of war against Spain, could not fail to excite the anger of England,
and in that feeling of displeasure the Czar must inevitably share.
From the moment their cause against Napoleon was common,
Russia, England, and Spain were more than likely to act together in
resistance to any territorial aggression upon any member of their
alliance, the evacuation of East Florida by the United States evaded
a serious diplomatic difficulty; and probably not by mere coincidence,
Armstrong’s order to evacuate Amelia Island was dated March 7,
while Daschkoff’s letter offering the Czar’s mediation was dated
March 8.
The Cabinet was so little united in support of the Executive
policy that Madison and Monroe ordered the seizure of Mobile
without consulting Gallatin, whose persistent hostility to the Florida
intrigues was notorious. When Monroe in April gave to Gallatin and
303
Bayard the President’s instructions for the peace negotiations,
among the rest he directed them to assert “a right to West Florida by
cession from France, and a claim to East Florida as an indemnity for
spoliations.” On receiving these instructions, Gallatin wrote to
304
Monroe, May 2, asking, —
“Where is the importance of taking possession of Mobile this

summer? We may do this whenever we please, and is it not
better to delay every operation of minor importance which may
have a tendency to impede our negotiations with Great Britain
and Russia? You know that to take by force any place in
possession of another nation, whatever our claim to that place
may be, is war; and you must be aware that both Russia and
Great Britain will feel disposed, if not to support the pretensions
of Spain against us, at least to take part against the aggressor.”
305
Monroe quickly replied: “With respect to West Florida,
possession will be taken of it before you get far on your voyage. That
is a question settled.” In fact, possession had been taken of it three
weeks before he wrote, in pursuance of orders sent in February,
apparently without Gallatin’s knowledge. Monroe added views of his
own, singularly opposed to Gallatin’s convictions.
“On the subject of East Florida,” wrote Monroe to Gallatin,

306
May 6, “I think I intimated to you in my last that Colonel Lear
was under the most perfect conviction, on the authority of
information from respectable sources at Cadiz, that the Spanish
regency had sold that and the other province to the British
government, and that it had done so under a belief that we had,
or should soon get, possession of it. My firm belief is that if we
were possessed of both, it would facilitate your negotiations in
favor of impressment and every other object, especially if it was
distinctly seen by the British ministers or minister that, instead of
yielding them or any part of either, we would push our fortunes in
that direction, and in Canada, if they did not hasten to
accommodate.”
Gallatin, on the eve of sailing for Russia, replied with good

temper, expressing opinions contrary to those of the President and
Secretary of State.
307
“On the subject of Florida,” Gallatin said, “I have always
differed in opinion with you, and am rejoiced to have it in our
power to announce the evacuation of the province. Let it alone
until you shall, by the introduction of British troops, have a proof
of the supposed cession. In this I do not believe. It can be
nothing more than a permission to occupy it in order to defend it
for Spain. By withdrawing our troops, we withdraw the pretence;
but the impolitic occupancy of Mobile will, I fear, renew our
difficulties. The object is at present of very minor importance,
swelled into consequence by the representations from that
quarter, and which I would not at this moment have attempted,
among other reasons, because it was a Southern one, and will,
should it involve us in a war with Spain, disgust every man north
of Washington. You will pardon the freedom with which, on the
eve of parting with you, I speak on this subject. It is intended as
a general caution, which I think important, because I know and
see every day the extent of geographical feeling, and the
necessity of prudence if we mean to preserve and invigorate the
Union.”
No sooner did the Act of February 12 become law than

Armstrong wrote, February 16, to Wilkinson at New Orleans,
enclosing a copy of the Act, and ordering him immediately to take
308
possession of Mobile and the country as far as the Perdido.
Wilkinson, who had for years looked forward to that step, hastened
to obey the instruction. When Gallatin remonstrated, the measure
had been already taken and could not be recalled.
Since July 9, 1812, Wilkinson had again commanded at New
Orleans. No immediate attack was to be feared, nor could a
competent British force be collected there without warning; but in
case such an attack should be made, Wilkinson had reason to fear
the result, for his regular force consisted of only sixteen hundred
309
effectives, ill equipped and without defences. The War
Department ordered him to depend on movable ordnance and
310
temporary works rather than on permanent fortifications; but with
his usual disregard of orders he began the construction or the
completion of extensive works at various points on the river and
coast, at a cost which the government could ill afford.

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The Routledge Handbook of Women

and Early Modern European Philosophy

Authorizing Early Modern European Women From Biography

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering

Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency 1st

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy, Politics, and

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The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INDIAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BODILY AWARENESS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF AUTONOMY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY

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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro

ISBN: 978-1-138-21275-6 (hbk)

2 Women and Institutions in Early Modern Europe: Making Space for

3 Canon, Gender, and Historiography 29

4 Method, Genre, and the Scope of Philosophy 41

5 God, Freedom, and Perfection in Conway, Astell, and du Châtelet 61

6 Vitalistic Causation: More, Conway, Cavendish 74

7 It’s All Alive! Cavendish and Conway against Dualism 87

8 Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Cockburn on Matter 112

10 Ways of Knowing 140

11 Space and Time 157

12 Method and Explanation 164

13 Physics and Optics: Agnesi, Bassi, Du Châtelet 174

14 Women, Medicine, and the Life Sciences 187

15 Theories of Perception 200

16 Early Modern Women and the Metaphysics of Free Will 215

17 Friendship as a Means to Freedom 228

19 Virtue and Moral Obligation 254

20 Men, Women, Equality, and Difference 267

21 Autonomy and Marriage 283

22 Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth-Century Feminism: Arcangela

24 Early Modern European Women and the Philosophy of Education: Van

25 Critical Perspectives on Religion 337

26 Beauty, Gender, and Power from Marinelli to Wollstonecraft 350

27 Theories of the State 361

28 Italian Women Philosophers in the Sixteenth Century: From a

29 Teresa de Ávila on Self-Knowledge 396

30 (Self-)Portraits between Two Gowns: Marie de Gournay 409

31 Madeleine de Scudéry: Moral Philosophy in a Gendered Key 422

32 The Unorthodox Margaret Cavendish 435

33 Anne Conway 450

34 Gabrielle Suchon on Women’s Freedom 465

35 The Socratic Pedagogy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 479

36 Mary Astell (1666–1731) 493

37 Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Agency, Virtue, and

38 Du Châtelet and the Philosophy of Physics 519

39 The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of

40 Catharine Macaulay’s Philosophy and Her Influence on Mary Wollstonecraft 546

41 Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of the History of Philosophy 558

42 Mary Wollstonecraft 571

43 Remorse and Moral Progress in Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy 584