This chapter on Orationsargues that Cavendish displayed a wider vision than she is normally given credit for. There was little that did not interest her or that she did not believe herself competent about which to write. She mostly ignored so-called women’s topics, and she gave slant attention to religious or spiritual subjects. Orations particularly demonstrates her interest in politics and topics of import to the country, including the perspective of peasants and soldiers. She identified with women throughout, although often critical of them. Her introduction makes clear that those considered more educated and knowledgeable (especially men) tried to keep her from writing about “their” domain, but they were not successful. This essay reveals her resistance to such control and her resentment against its power. It reflects, as well, the ways those in power directed her and William’s lives following their return to England in 1660. In her Orations, she documented both her intellectual and political interests and her strength of character in stipulating her goals beyond women’s sphere.

Little attention has been given to women in the intellectual landscape of late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Britain and France. And the existing scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on feminist writings and on writings and efforts associated with the French Revolution, in Britain as well as France. This second part of Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition expands the reach to women writers and intellectuals beyond the radical and feminist debates of the late eighteenth century. Mary Astell and Lady Damaris Mascham are integrated into the philosophical discourse among Cambridge Platonists and Lockean epistemologists of the late seventeenth century, as active participants in the debate. The thought of Mary Wollstonecraft is placed in a broader and comparative context, linking her writings especially to those of her somewhat earlier contemporary, the historian Catharine Macaulay; and her response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is tied not alone to her views of women's place within the revolutionary debate, but to her radical theories of the nature of the state generally. Wollstonecraft's political views are also treated by integrating them into her portrayal of the family in eighteenth-century society. And finally, Emilie du Châtelet, the eighteenth-century French mathematician who produced the definitive translation of Newton's Principia so crucial for the evolution of Enlightenment thought, is studied to examine how genius remained a gendered concept among Enlightenment thinkers.

The last part of this collection of essays concentrates on the political/legal values and structures of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imperial Germany, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. More than the other sections of this work, it provides a comparative framework through which to view the intersection between how women viewed the state and their relation to it. It clarifies the need to move beyond any single form of government, scenario of political change or specific historiography if we are to understand the role gender plays in state formation and political values. While women in each case almost invariably lacked the political standing of men, and wrote less on explicitly political topics than did their male counterparts, still their political selves (and their conception of public space and exchange) were strongly affected by the power realities of their time and place.

These four chapters explore the distinct cultural and material parameters that dictated both the language and acceptable evidence for use by both women and men in framing arguments concerning women's political standing. Chapter 13 reassesses the construction and use of Salic law in late medieval and early modern France to document how jurists and clerics fabricate its origin and authenticity. Chapter 14 turns to imperial Germany and moves beyond the assumptions embedded in the vast majority of scholarship on women's early modern political nature and writings.

Relating women's intellectual history to British political thought in the early modern era leaves one in a perpetual state of schizophrenia. With rare exceptions, scholars working in these distinct areas do not pursue the same primary texts, or trust the judgments of the same set of contemporary scholars. Women's intellectual contribution to the era has been studied mostly through biography, or through a focus on individual authors, with a very few – Aphra Behn; Mary Astell; Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle; and Margaret Fell Fox – garnering the overwhelming attention. Otherwise, women have fallen within categories formed by broader alliances: sectarian women, Leveller women, sympathizers for royalist or revolutionary causes. Or, they have been tied to their genres, as writers of meditations, poets, tractarians, playwrights, and authors of domestic advice.

There has been, and perhaps this is wise, little attempt to characterize women's writings generally, and virtually no attempt to do so for those of non-fiction authors whose primary interest was politics. In contemplating disparate approaches to seventeenth-century women's political writings, a number of questions arise in this volume based on traditional assumptions concerning women and politics. How can women write about what they cannot do? or about what is considered outside, and, by some, antithetical to their nature? or about which they have been kept essentially ignorant? All of these realities covertly and overtly confronted women when they wrote about political topics in the early modern period.

Women as intellectuals, political writers, and simply inhabitants, of early modern Britain lived their lives through frameworks that defined their natures and their interests as distinct from (and inferior to) their male counterparts. This part of the book, while focusing on the writings of individuals including Hobbes, Filmer, Locke, and Catharine Macaulay, treats in greater depth the intellectual and economic structures that restricted, but did not prevent, women's acceptance as public actors and authors. It highlights the power of intellectual values and circles as controlling forces which operated similarly to economic, political, and legal restraints in restricting women's public place and public voice in English society. The questions and assumptions of early modern political thought are assessed not simply for its content but for its force, through inclusion and exclusion of appropriate topics and individuals, in framing the treatment of women politically and as political authors. The authors of this part do not all agree on the nature of such a canon and its influence on women's intellectual and political standing, but they each treat the topic in provocative ways.

Jane Jaquette analyzes the operation of gender assumptions in Hobbes's discussion of the social contract in The Leviathan. In so doing, she offers a more positive interpretation of the use women could make of contract theory than does Carole Pateman in her monograph, The Sexual Contract.

This collection emerged from a conference sponsored by the Center for the History of British Political Thought of the Folger Shakespeare Library on Political Women/Political Writings: Early Modern Britain in a European Context, held May 25–26, 1995. It is structured around the interdependent relationship between women's political writings and the intellectual and social institutions that determined their acceptance or dismissal. It focuses on the political ideas of a range of women authors who were more familiar to, but seldom fully accepted by, their contemporaries than they have become to those studying early modern politics and political thought. It is also comparative by design in order to focus on similar, but distinct, arguments offered in differing geographic settings both by women authors concerning women's political standing, and particular political values and customs that helped determined women's public role. It also seeks to move beyond a focus in which political realities and ideas are held constant, and the issue addressed is simply the integration of women into an accepted norm. The arguments of women writers, the political and intellectual institutions of place and period, regional differences, and evolving political and social norms are each considered problematic rather than normative; and the essays in this volume focus on the shifting interactions among them.

Acknowledgments

The conference on Political Writings/Political Women was held through the generous sponsorship of the Folger Institute, and I want to thank Lena Orlin, then Institute director, in particular, for her support.

In January, 1738/9, the Court of King's Bench took up a case, Olive v. Ingram, that seemed legally and politically insignificant. It involved a dispute between two claimants for the post of sexton in the London parish of St. Botolphs without Bishopsgate, and the amount in dispute was just five shillings. Yet the court continued the case for five months and held three separate sessions concerning its resolution. The facts of the case involved a woman who had been elected sexton through the support of women members of the congregation; five of their votes were necessary for her victory. King's Bench thus confronted two separate but related issues: could a woman occupy this minor church office, and could other women vote for her to do so?

The office of sexton had been held by Robert Bly, and upon his death, his widow Sarah Bly and a male rival, John Olive, competed for the post. A popular abridgement of English law describes the contest thus:

Women's political expressions took disparate forms from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, as these chapters make clear. In the early fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan, while today remembered primarily for her writings about women (especially The City of Ladies), wrote a range of political works for a largely aristocratic audience on statecraft, military strategy, the nature of war, and approaches to peace. Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, while remembered for her scientific writings and works of fantasy (as well as her standing as an intellectual eccentric among the English aristocracy) in the middle of the seventeenth century also characterized the nature of the state in general and royal government in particular. Further, a range of genres (including prophecy, political tracts, and advice to political leaders) documents the growing political voice of women following 1640. Thus Aphra Behn's drama displayed not only her well-known Tory loyalties but her clear and purposeful use of past events (most often from the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81) to illustrate the perfidy of the Whigs and the moral qualities of her Tory heroes.

Berenice Carroll's treatment of Christine de Pizan greatly expands our understanding of Christine's corpus. While there has been recent scholarship on her political thought, little of this scholarship has seeped into the broader academic assessment of her importance.

Women, or ‘woman’ to use language more familiar to sixteenth and seventeenth century authors, composed a group that early modern writers felt obliged both to define and to advise. Women existed more clearly as a category in the minds of Renaissance authors than as disparate individuals. This chapter will focus on understanding what the category ‘woman’ meant during the Renaissance, and what values and social realities placed women there. What qualities most defined them? What realities clearly constrained them? Which social classes mattered (and which did not) in developing this concept of woman? Such questions emerge from issues embedded within ‘woman’ as Renaissance concept, and they aid us in understanding major early modern texts which treat women.

Sixteenth-century humanism, whose authors produced the most important Renaissance works on women, was an educational and philosophical movement that criticised the limited academic universe of late medieval scholasticism. Humanism, originating in fourteenth-century Italy, spread throughout the educated classes of early sixteenth-century England and continued its influence into the seventeenth as well. This chapter will focus on the broad outlines of Renaissance humanism, its treatment of women, and its growth and ultimate decline. Sixteenth-century humanism, as exemplified in the works of Thomas More, Thomas Elyot and Juan Luis Vives, offered an educational and linguistic programme for those who wished to pursue the ‘New Learning’.