The Republican Virago

The Republican Virago PDF Author: Bridget Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Catharine Macaulay represented everything the eighteenth century abhorred in a woman. She was learned, politically minded, actively engaged with public and philosophical issues of the day. Her private life, and especially her 'imprudent' second marriage to a man twenty-six years her junior,led to much malicious gossip. Yet in her lifetime she also won considerable fame. The author of an eight-volume history of England in the seventeenth century, a republican, a follower of John Wilkes, and a political polemicist, not only did she influence the nature of eighteenth-century radicalismin England, but she played an important contributory role in the shaping of American revolutionary ideology. Long before the Revolution she was also closely concerned with events in France. Both Mirabeau and Brissot were familiar with her History and much influenced by it; translated into French it was welcomed by patriots as an effective response to the counter-revolutionary influence of Hume's history. This is the first major biographical study of this remarkable and influential figure. For a woman to make such an impact in the restrictive environment of eighteenth-century England was astonishing: no one interested in the development of English radicalism or revolutionary politics can afford toignore Catharine Macaulay.

The Republican Virago

The Republican Virago PDF Author: Bridget Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Catharine Macaulay represented everything the eighteenth century abhorred in a woman. She was learned, politically minded, actively engaged with public and philosophical issues of the day. Her private life, and especially her 'imprudent' second marriage to a man twenty-six years her junior,led to much malicious gossip. Yet in her lifetime she also won considerable fame. The author of an eight-volume history of England in the seventeenth century, a republican, a follower of John Wilkes, and a political polemicist, not only did she influence the nature of eighteenth-century radicalismin England, but she played an important contributory role in the shaping of American revolutionary ideology. Long before the Revolution she was also closely concerned with events in France. Both Mirabeau and Brissot were familiar with her History and much influenced by it; translated into French it was welcomed by patriots as an effective response to the counter-revolutionary influence of Hume's history. This is the first major biographical study of this remarkable and influential figure. For a woman to make such an impact in the restrictive environment of eighteenth-century England was astonishing: no one interested in the development of English radicalism or revolutionary politics can afford toignore Catharine Macaulay.

Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women

Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women PDF Author: Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317078756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women’s literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less well studied. This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history.

Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment

Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment PDF Author: Karen Green
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000066118
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The ‘celebrated’ Catharine Macaulay was both lauded and execrated during the eighteenth century for her republican politics and her unconventional, second marriage. This comprehensive biography in the 'life and letters' tradition situates her works in their political and social contexts and offers an unprecedented, detailed account of the content and influence of her writing, the arguments she developed in her eight-volume history of England and her other political, ethical, and educational works. Her disagreements with conservative opponents, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson are developed in detail, as is her influence on more progressive admirers such as Thomas Jefferson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay emerges as a coherent and influential political voice, whose attitudes and aspirations were characteristic of those enlightenment republicans who grounded their progressive politics in rational religion. She looked back to the seventeenth-century levellers and parliamentarians as important precursors who had advocated the liberty and political rights she aspired to see implemented in Great Britain, America, and France. Her defence of republican liberty and the equal rights of men offers an important corrective to some contemporary accounts of the character and origins of democratic republicanism during this crucial period.

The Creation of the Modern World

The Creation of the Modern World PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393048728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 776

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Book Description
From a critically acclaimed author comes an engagingly written and groundbreaking new work that highlights the long-underestimated British role in delivering the Enlightenment to the modern world. Porter reveals how the monumental transformation of thinking in Great Britain influenced wider developments elsewhere. of color illustrations.

Rethinking the Enlightenment

Rethinking the Enlightenment PDF Author: Geoff Boucher
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558135
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
One of the most persistent, troubling, and divisive of the ideological divisions within modernity is the struggle over the Enlightenment and its legacy. Much of the difficulty is owed to a general failure among scholars to consider how history, philosophy, and politics work together. Rethinking the Enlightenment bridges these disciplinary divides. Recent work by historians has now called into question many of the clichés that still dominate scholarly understandings of the Enlightenment’s literary, philosophical, and political culture. Yet this work has so far had little impact on the reception of the Enlightenment, its key players, debates, and ideas in the disciplines that most rely on its legacy, namely, philosophy and political science. Edited by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd, Rethinking the Enlightenment makes the case for connecting new work in intellectual history with fresh understandings of ‘Continental’ philosophy and political theory. In doing so, in this collection moves towards a critical self-understanding of the present.

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 PDF Author: Karen Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316195503
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination PDF Author: Barbara Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521004176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become an icon of modern feminism: a stature that has paradoxically obscured her real historic significance. In the most in-depth study to date of Wollstonecraft s thought, Barbara Taylor develops an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain s radical Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft s feminist aspirations, Taylor shows, were part of a revolutionary programme for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in the radical-Protestant Enlightenment. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft s works, and locating them in a vividly detailed account of her intellectual world and troubled personal history, Taylor provides a compelling portrait of this fascinating and profoundly influential thinker.

Novel Histories

Novel Histories PDF Author: Lisa Kasmer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611474957
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 explores issues of historical and literary genres, historiography, and the gendering of civic and literary roles. It demonstrates the new and sometimes subversive ways that women authors pushed the limits of writing history in order to participate in contemporary national civic life otherwise closed to them.

Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration

Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration PDF Author: Jacqueline Broad
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402058950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This volume serves as an introduction to a rich and as yet under-explored period in the history of women’s ideas. The volume provides a partial insight into the richness and complexity of women’s political ideas in the centuries prior to the French Revolution. The essays in this collection examine women’s political writings with particular reference to the themes of virtue (especially the virtue of phronesis or prudence), liberty, and toleration.

Elite Women in English Political Life c.1754-1790

Elite Women in English Political Life c.1754-1790 PDF Author: Elaine Chalus
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191535605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Based on wide-ranging, original research into political, personal, and general correspondences across a period of significant social and political change, this book explores the gendered nature of politics and political life in eighteenth-century England by focusing on the political involvement of female members of the political elite. Elaine Chalus challenges the notion that only exceptional women were involved in politics, that their participation was necessarily limited and indirect, and that their involvement was inevitably declining after the 1784 Westminster Election. While exceptional women did exist and gender did condition women's participation, the personal, social, and particularly the familial nature of eighteenth-century politics provided more women with a wider variety of opportunities for involvement than ever before. Women from politically active families grew up with politics, absorbing its rituals, and their own involvement extended from politicized socializing up to borough control and election management. Their participation was often accepted, expected, or even demanded, depending upon family traditions, personal abilities, and the demands of political expediency. Chalus reveals that, although women's involvement in political life was always potentially more problematic than men's, given contemporary concerns about the links between sex, politics, and corruption, their participation was largely unproblematic as long as their activities could be explained by recourse to a familial model which depicted their participation as subordinate and supportive of men's. It was when they came to be seen as the leading political actors in a cause that they overstepped the mark and became targets of sexualized criticism. Contemporary critics worried that politically active women posed a threat to male polity, but what actually made them threatening was that they proved that women were not politically incompetent and implicitly demonstrated that gender was not a reason for political exclusion. Although the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable female political behaviours was sharper from the late eighteenth century onward, Chalus suggests that women who were willing to work creatively within the familial model could and did remain politically active into - and through - the nineteenth century.