The two books under review share a laudable commitment to bringing to the fore the philosophical contributions of early modern women authors, many of whom have long been forgotten, misunderstood, or partially overlooked. Although she discusses others, Jane Duran's book focuses on five figures: Mary Sidney Herbert, Katherine Parr, Elizabeth I, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. These she considers to be exemplars of the idea of the woman Guardian. Guardianship is the thread that connects her treatment of these five women, whom she thinks of as aristocratic or, in the case of Aphra Behn, linked to the aristocracy. Although Cavendish also makes her presence very much felt in Jacqueline Broad and Karen Detlefsen's edited volume, the latter examines a greater number of writers, including what is termed “women‐friendly male philosophers.” These come from a larger social and economic pool and not all are English. As their titles indicate, the concept that links the chapters together in this book is liberty. Both works question disciplinary demarcations; more particularly, both query the line regrettably all too often drawn between literature and philosophy, and both speak to and from the lived experience of the authors they study.
Partly inspired by Susan Moller Okin's outstanding 1977 article in Philosophy & Public Affairs, “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family,” Queenly Philosophers is the fruit of a thought experiment prompted by inquiring female students: “what would women intellectuals do in a society that, as an ideal, is run by intellectuals?” (xi). This is without a doubt an interesting and important question for us all to keep addressing. The question itself might take any number of forms. One might ask what, taking the world more or less as it is, would women philosopher rulers seek to achieve? What institutions would they create or abolish? What laws would they pass and in what order? What would a female utopia be like? What would it take to make such a world? Would each of the current feminisms give different answers to these questions? How one goes about thinking about this subject is itself a problematic question.
Duran turns to history, first that of sixteenth‐century England and the Tudor Court, and second that of the following century and its Stuart Court. Informed by the research of historians of Renaissance and early modern England and established scholars of their respective literatures, such as Margaret Hannay, Susan E. James, and Janet Todd, Duran provides the political and intellectual contexts in which her five “queenly” authors considered conceptual issues in a variety of genres. She is eager to show that the celebrated poet and translator into English of a hundred psalms, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), engaged in metaphysical pursuits in her poetry and translations and that this aspect of her writings merits further consideration than studies of her literary styles have been able to provide. The countess wrote on the nature of divinity as well as free will and responsibility, as did Katherine Parr (1512–48), the last of Henry VIII's wives, author of Prayers or Meditations (1545) and The Lamentations of a Sinner (1547). Like her stepdaughter, Elizabeth I (1533–1603), Parr sought to increase religious learning and understanding of the Protestant faith. The Queen herself was a prolific writer and translator, and like the other women discussed in this book, highly skilled in the art of rhetoric. All three women, Duran stresses, were keen didacts. Exceptionally cultured and gifted, they perceived themselves as instructors, acted as patrons to other writers, and promoted the study of the humanities and theology. Their position in society, their learning, and their desire to impart this knowledge enables Duran to see them as female Guardians.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), the fourth of Duran's subjects, was even more prolific, and her intellectual range almost limitless. She was no more indifferent to the natural sciences than she was to any other discipline, as they are now called, and her writings cover the entire spectrum of philosophical subjects, from epistemology to moral and political philosophy. Duran's chapter is a plea for her to be treated seriously, happily something that Susan James's The Political Writings of Margaret Cavendish (2003), and the work of Sarah Hutton, Jacqueline Broad, Karen Detlefsen, and others has been rectifying, not least among whom is David Cunning, whose insightful entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy secures Cavendish's place in the canon.
By Duran's own admission, it is not evident how Cavendish fits into the model of female Guardian, other than possibly by her rank, her closeness to Queen Henrietta Maria, and the fact that her Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places (1662) “is very largely an instructive work” (201). Indeed, does this category suit any of the four other women? As Okin was at pains to stress in her article, Plato's conception of the ideal city and of the life of its Guardians was a radical one, anchored in the abolition of private property, and the attendant creation of a communal family. One need not count all the many ways in which these women's circumstances are a far cry from Plato's conception of the life of the Guardians to hesitate before thinking of them in this manner. To be sure, these women were exceptionally learned and intelligent; indeed, one might even say that they contemplated the form of the good in an arguably comparable way to that of the Guardians. It would be stretching Plato's epistemology quite a bit, but it could not be distended any further on account of the nature of the application to which the respective knowledge of Plato's imaginary Guardians and Duran's queenly philosophers was to be put. Given the purpose of the city/soul analogy in the Republic, the Guardians, whatever their sex or gender, could not instruct in the sense of imparting knowledge, but only instruct in the sense of ruling, one might say by diktat.
Be this as it may, does thinking of Cavendish, Pembroke, Parr, and Elizabeth I in this manner enhance our understanding of them? As Duran shows, these women had to navigate very complex political terrains and very specific sets of expectations in each of their very particular circumstances. Bringing them together raises interesting issues and calls for seeing them in their very specificity. Asking how women would rule is a good question. Trying to make even Queens and Duchesses into anything remotely resembling Plato's Guardians might distract from Duran's commendable effort to encourage us to break down disciplinary barriers and look for the philosopher in the poet and the translator, or indeed the playwright, so as not to leave unmentioned her fifth Queenly author, Aphra Behn (1640–1689), the commoner. This distraction, it has to be said, is in itself by no means intellectually unrewarding.
The distinguished scholars writing in Women and Liberty practice what Duran preaches: they take their female authors seriously as philosophers regardless of the genre in which their works might be categorized at present. Consisting of thirteen chapters authored by established contributors to the history of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century philosophy, as well as a helpful biographical appendix, it is an ambitious volume that seeks to recover the subject of female freedom as it was conceived in the early modern period, especially by women themselves. In so doing, it endeavors to bring together different philosophical genres and to lead readers “to think differently about ‘what counts as philosophy’ and ‘what constitutes feminism’” (3). In their introduction, the editors also explain that the volume aspires to offer a richer understanding of liberty than that conceptualized along the lines of the ancient and modern dichotomy associated with Benjamin Constant, or the negative and positive liberty divide identified with Isaac Berlin, or even beyond a neo‐Roman idea of liberty as freedom from domination and dependence of neo‐republicans such as Quentin Skinner. This is no small promise. Given that some of the contributing authors seem to have very much favored the latter conception of freedom in their previous publications, the introduction does raise expectations more than ordinarily.
There is much to be gained from this scholarly collection. Although it does provide some meticulous analyses of the work of well‐known figures such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, it also casts much needed light on authors obscured by the consolidation of a philosophical canon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the attendant shrinkage of what is deemed to be philosophy. In her opening chapter, Detlefsen expresses her concern with personal autonomy, conceived along Kantian lines as the capacity of setting moral rules for oneself, but goes beyond what might be deemed an atomistic conception of freedom by some contemporary feminists to show how it is in what can be seen in Astell's and Cavendish's reflections as relational autonomy, with its emphasis on self‐development through friendships. Martina Reuter's “François Poulain de la Barre on the Subjugation of Women” follows this engaging piece with her own attentive set of readings. Thus Reuter examines how Poulain approached the question of liberty through its opposite, subjugation, manifested in internalized prejudice that striving for self‐knowledge could erode, if not eradicate. She thereby makes a case for the possibility of self‐knowledge as a basis for liberty, a theme also explored in Duran's book. Next is Lisa Shapiro on “Gabrielle Suchon's ‘Neutralist’: The Status of Women and the Invention of Autonomy.” The relatively unknown French author, Suchon (1632–1703) published two major works in French, the first Treatise on Ethics and Politics, Divided into Three parts, namely, Freedom, Knowledge and Authority — where it is shown that despite being deprived of these, persons of her sex retain a natural ability to exercise them — under the pseudonym “G. S. Aristophile” (1693), and the second, “Of Voluntary Celibacy, or Life without Commitment” (1694) under her own name. This absolutely fascinating study explains what Suchon meant by “Neutraliste,” a word she coined to describe a celibate life as a state of indifference, except for the act of choosing that life itself; it is one without any commitment. Shapiro then shows how Suchon can be placed within J. B. Schneewind's narrative of the invention of autonomy as he relates in the book by that title, namely, because “Suchon's Neutralism not only takes an important step from self‐mastery to autonomy, it might even offer us a prototype of that invention of Kant” (65).
The women discussed by Jacqueline Broad in her “Marriage, Slavery, and the Merger of Wills: Responses to Sprint, 1700–01” react to John Sprint's (fl. 1699–1700) The Bride‐Woman's Counsellor (1699) for its allegedly Christianity‐grounded justification of the subjection of wives to their husbands. Freedom for Eugenia (fl. 1700), Mary Astell, and Mary Chudleigh (1656–1710) is the liberty of exercising one's will in accordance with reason for the sake of what is morally good. Not unlike Suchon, they think this very unlikely to be obtained by women in the married state, which for both Astell and Chudleigh at least is best avoided, if at all possible.
Karen Green's “Locke, Enlightenment, and Liberty in the Works of Catharine Macaulay and her Contemporaries” rightly argues that Locke's eighteenth‐century followers did not think of freedom as “the absence of interference with the last determination of the will, or a freedom from the ‘alien control’ of another person, but a positive, ‘enlightened,’ moral self‐realization that would promote and be promoted by political justice” (94). It stands in contrast to Lena Halldenius's “Mary Wollstonecraft and Freedom as Independence,” which contends that at the heart of her subject's political theory “is the idea that unfreedom is constituted by subjection to arbitrary power” (107), while in “Sophie de Grouchy, The Tradition(s) of Two Liberties, and the Missing Mother(s) of Liberalism,” Eric Schliessser seeks to bring his subject from out of the shadow of her husband, Condorcet, in a study of her engagement with Adam Smith that is part and parcel of installing her within the liberal canon.
The philosophical correspondence of a wide number of early modern figures provides much of the material for Sarah Hutton's impressive “Liberty of Mind: Women Philosophers and the Freedom to philosophize,” which furthers themes encountered earlier in the volume, such as intellectual friendships. In particular, it analyzes discussions of the art of conversation and how the latter was seen as essential to the development of the mind by figures such as Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) and Damaris Masham (1659–1708). Duran will be pleased to see Cavendish treated very seriously as a philosopher in Deborah Boyle's “Freedom and Necessity in the Work of Margaret Cavendish,” and Marcy P. Lascano similarly maintains a high level of philosophical scrutiny in her examination of “Anne Conway on Liberty.” Ruth Hagengruber's study of Emilie du Châtelet's (1706–49) thoughts on liberty argues for the complementarity of the scientist's physics and ethics, and Emily Thomas's chapter on Catharine Cockburn (1679–1749) establishes her as an independent thinker, whose underestimated metaphysics gave God greater freedom by demonstrating a broader range of options with regard to divine creation than did rival intellectualist systems. She brings to a close this volume on a high note. Women philosophers of the early modern period are in good hands.
