John Toland's role in shaping the early, radical, Enlightenment is increasingly well appreciated.Footnote ¹ But Toland's own conception of enlightenment was not focused solely on the role of religion and on ‘ungodding’ the worldFootnote ² – even if the critique of ‘priestcraft’, superstition and vestigial theocracy was central in his oeuvre. Toland offered sustained arguments against xenophobia and anti-Semitism, for example: his 1714 Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews Footnote ³ has been lauded for its prescient critique of ethnic ‘essentialism’, its historically based prognoses, and its full-frontal assault on unthinking prejudice. He also offers a series of arguments and assertions that can be regarded as feminist (or at least proto-feminist) in their intent; it is this aspect of his work that I want to focus upon here. I shall concentrate on Toland's 1720 account of Hypatia (Toland, Reference Toland1720, pp. 103–136),Footnote ⁴ the brilliant neo-Platonist of ancient Alexandria; but I shall also consider a segment of his 1704 Letters to Serena, and suggest various conjunctions between the two texts – conjunctions which underscore the general case we can make for Toland as a kind of feminist.Footnote ⁵

For sure, positing Toland's feminist commitment and his religious critique as wholly discrete entities is ultimately artificial – and mistaken. Hypatia may present a woman as emblematic of reason, but the particular status that he gives her depends, for its full efficacy, upon a ‘theological’ contrast: Hypatia's philosophical prestige shines all the more brightly in its polar opposition to the darkness of a famed churchman. Nonetheless, and as I hope to show, here, this same fusion (of feminist commitment and critique of priestcraft) serves to accentuate Toland's intellectual audacity, when we treat it as a thesis that is as much about contemporaneous affairs and attitudes as it is about ancient Alexandria. The implicit yet clear message Toland gives is that ‘enlightenment’ must mean – at one and the same time – establishing women's equality and overcoming religious tyranny.

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Born and raised in fourth-century CE Alexandria, Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, a noted astronomer and mathematician, who established herself as an equally important astronomer and mathematician,Footnote ⁶ and also as a learned neo-Platonist philosopher. She built a reputation for her knowledge and wisdom, was highly respected by civic and political figures (as well as academics and scholars), and attracted several generations of followers and students, many of whom would go on to become influential figures themselves in Egypt and beyond. The extent of her career is worth highlighting: although the myth that emerged around Hypatia often depicts her as being barely into her twenties at the time of her horrific murder, a scholarly consensus has started to emerge that has her being considerably older – probably in her sixties.Footnote ⁷ It seems almost certain, then, that she helped to shape several generations of Alexandrian intellectual and cultural affairs.

In terms of the mythologized picture that built up, Toland, it seems fair to say, played a highly important, formative, role.Footnote ⁸ Nonetheless, he was not quite the first early modern writer to consider Hypatia's significance. The theologian and church historian Schmidt had looked at aspects of her mathematical thought, as part of a study the Greek astronomer Hipparchus;Footnote ⁹ and the pietist scholar Arnold had also given her brief consideration in his (sympathetic) history of heresy (Arnold, Reference Arnold1669, pp. 229–30). More importantly, Gilles Ménage gave Hypatia the single largest entry in his 1690 History of Women Philosophers (more of which anon):Footnote ¹⁰ he synthesised a range of sources to provide an account that would almost certainly prove foundational for Toland's. Yet, whatever the scholarly precedents (and sources), it seems that the rhetorical charge of Toland's treatment ignited a far more partisan line of presentation, one which stretches from Voltaire's Dictionary, to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, to the Victorian melodrama of Charles Kingsley (Kingsley, Reference Kingsley1853) and the ‘Parnassian’ poetry of Leconte de Lisle,Footnote ¹¹ right through to Amenábar's 2009 movie Agora. It is Toland who establishes Hypatia as anti-Christian martyr.Footnote ¹²

Which is not to suggest that Toland's case is some unsubstantial diatribe. On the contrary, and typically, he demonstrates ample (if not quite sober) scholarship by drawing on a range of sources that follow Gilles Ménage's lead and that have become standard for subsequent research on Hypatia:Footnote ¹³ principally, Socrates Scholasticus, but also Philostorgius of Cappadocia, the fifth century church historians and contemporaries of Hypatia; Damascius, the last scholarch of the Academy, and author of the Life of Isodore (most likely composed early in the sixth century); Nicephorus Callistus and Nicephorus Gregoras, Byzantine historians of the 13^th and 14^th centuries; as well as the Suda (or Suidas), the 10^th century Byzantine encyclopaedia (which itself probably relied on the sixth century historian Hesychius of Miletus for its information about Hypatia). However partial it might be, Toland's account is hardly devoid of historical ballast.

The material circumstances of the events Toland describes are hugely important – whether or not we subscribe to the kind of anti-clerical morality tale that Toland crafts out of them. Drawing on a range of recent and relatively recent scholarship, and bracketing Toland's own account, temporarily, we can present a composite narrative along the lines that follow.Footnote ¹⁴ Christian hegemony was beginning to emerge, in fifth century Alexandria, from a volatile swirl of rival energies. Crucial to this process seems to have been the action of Theophilus, the patriarch (or pope) of Alexandria, who, at the end of the 4^th century CE, made manifest a growing Christian confidence by razing pagan temples to the ground and stamping out any perceived heresy. When he died, in 412, two main players emerged as rivals for his title: Timothy, who had been archdeacon of Alexandria, and Cyril, a zealous hardliner who was also Theophilus's nephew. Timothy may have had more official and ecclesiastical backing, but Cyril could draw on the power of the Alexandrian mob, and – after three days of riots and street fighting – he was duly confirmed as his uncle's successor.

Once in power, Cyril soon made clear that he would outdo Theophilus in terms of missionary zeal. Any supposed heretics (such as the Novatians) were ruthlessly pursued. Perhaps more tellingly, much of the city's Jewish population – a central part of the polity since its foundation – was expelled, after Cyril had deliberately ratcheted up tensions. (Cyril's virulently anti-Jewish sentiments are made explicit in writings from the start of his episcopacy.)Footnote ¹⁵ Alexandria was being cast, or recast, as ‘essentially’ Christian. And such a reconfiguration necessarily meant that the patriarch's dominion stretched way beyond sacerdotal and ecclesiastical affairs: one of Cyril's primary concerns became how he might undermine, and ultimately usurp, Orestes, the Roman governor of Egypt.

In the power-play that unfolded, Cyril stirred hundreds of zealous Nitrian desert monks – the so-called Parabolani Footnote ¹⁶ – to take up his cause on the streets of Alexandria. They confronted Orestes and almost managed to murder him; he survived only thanks to ordinary Alexandrians protecting him from this ‘holy’ mob, after his own guards had fled. In response, Orestes executed Ammonius, the main monkish offender; but, in turn, Cyril tried to trump politics with theology by decreeing Ammonius a martyr deserving veneration. The atmosphere in what for centuries had been a famously cosmopolitan and tolerant city turned increasingly poisonous. And it was within this febrile constellation that Hypatia met her horrific end.

The precise circumstances are hazy. What seems fairly certain is that Hypatia supported Orestes politically, and that – given her status, and given the prestige and power of so many of her former students – this support, in turn, provided Orestes (and his faction) with a force and gravitas to which Cyril could never realistically aspire and of which he was profoundly jealous. Cyril responded by instigating a propaganda campaign that transformed Hypatia's academic pursuits into black magic: the bishop recast the philosopher as a witch. And as these necromantic allegations took root in the collective imagination of Alexandria, so suspicions grew and festered to such a degree that, one fateful day in March 415, a mob led by a minor clergyman, Peter, hauled Hypatia from her chariot, stripped her naked, battered her to death with shards of pottery, and then burned her corpse, outside the city limits. No charges were ever brought; no-one was ever convicted.Footnote ¹⁷

Returning to Toland's narrative, we find him unsparing in his condemnation of Cyril as instigator of the murder. ‘A Bishop, a Patriarch, nay a Saint, was the contriver of so horrid a deed, and his Clergy the executioners of his implacable fury’, he tells us (H, p. 103). And there can be no question, Toland claims, that the Christians of Alexandria somehow acted beyond Cyril's wishes, and that he neither knew of nor could have prevented this ‘black deed’ (H, p. 131): the evidence in favour of Cyril's direct involvement is overwhelming, Toland states (claiming support from Socrates Scholasticus, Damascius and the Suda). In short: political expediency (and sheer personal jealousy) rendered Hypatia ‘a sacrifice to the Prelate's pride’ (H, p. 129).

Cyril's significance is not only as a directly ‘political’ figure, however. As well as assuming his central role in Hypatia's murder, Toland emphasizes Cyril's posthumous imprint on the increasingly metaphysical complexion of Christological and Trinitarian discourse during the patristic period; in effect, the figure of Cyril of Alexandria becomes a composite, or cluster, in which political chicanery and violent fanaticism are fused with ‘Scholastic fictions’ (H, p. 133) and metaphysical hair-splitting. (And, of course, stressing this fusion will be so important for the contemporaneous points that Toland wants to make via the figure of Cyril – more of which anon.) Specifically, what Toland focusses on is Cyril's influence on debates regarding Jesus’ status as both divine and human, and, even more specifically, on whether Jesus was to be regarded as ‘of the same substance’ as God (homoousios), or ‘of similar substance’ (homoiousios). The fine details of these bitter, sometimes sophistical, yet ultimately world-historical disputes do not have to concern us, here. We can note, however, that Cyril took a particularly hard line against the Nestorian claim that Jesus had two distinct natures, human and divine, which were connected in the person of Christ; Cyril insisted, instead, that Christ's ‘two natures’ were fused in the Word of God.

Cyril's campaign culminated in the victory he enjoyed at the Council of Ephesus, in 431, when Nestorius, until then the bishop of Constantinople, was excommunicated and his doctrine condemned as heresy. (Cyril, it seems, positioned himself as opposing Nestorianism in a structurally similar way to how Athanasius, his predecessor as bishop of Alexandria, had opposed Arianism, a century earlier.Footnote ¹⁸) We can note, as well, that Cyril's thinking had a profound impact on the Council of Chalcedon of 451 CE, seven years after his death – and that it thus helped shape the character of subsequent Christological and Trinitarian debate.

As it happens, Toland pays little attention to the distinction between Arian and Nestorian heresies.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, he uses the broader, Alexandrian, context to express his disdain for the kind of theological debate that he associates with the name of Cyril: ‘with me’, he tells us, ‘the Homoiousion and the Homoousion are of no account, in comparison of the Bible, where neither of them are to be found’ (H, p. 134). And, regarding the supposed problem of ‘ARIAN poyson’, Toland scoffs that he is ‘not a whit concern'd’ (ibid.) The approach is hardly finessed, then; but Toland's principal aim is broad condemnation of how the supposedly pure ethical core of Christian religion became obscured by layers of theological sediment. As such, his position in Hypatia is essentially unchanged from that articulated a quarter of a century earlier, in Christianity Not Mysterious.Footnote ²⁰ There, in order ‘to shew how Christianity became mysterious,’ Toland claims to demonstrate ‘how so divine an Institution did, through the Craft and Ambition of Priests and Philosophers, degenerate into mere Paganism’ (CNM, p. 96). Pure and straightforward in its first century or so, Christianity was gradually overcome by dubious interest groups and political forces: a self-serving caste of philosopher-priests set itself up as the only possible arbiter of divine truth; the plain message of the gospel was ‘absolutely perverted and destroyed’ (CNM, p. 97) by ever-more elaborate rituals, rites and metaphysical speculation; and the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman emperors took the religion even further from its marginal origins (as well as producing a swathe of purely expedient conversions).

Toland's treatment of Hypatia is located in the same narrative of decline – although in this case, the focus is on a specific point rather than the wider arc. Proper learning and discourse in the 5^th century CE suffered ‘irreparable damage’, Toland claims, from the vogue for ‘metaphysical distinctions about the Trinity, and extravagant notions about the essence of GOD (whose majesty they blasphem'd by their profane distinctions)’ (H, p. 112). Christianity's primal significance as a vehicle for promoting a universal ethical code, accessible to all, became increasingly obscured by Trinitarian, eschatological or soteriological disputes. And so, as far as Toland is concerned,

To reiterate, though: Toland's Cyril is a composite figure, a fusion of absurdly rarefied theological abstraction, on the one hand, and bloody realpolitik, on the other; the metaphorical violence done to Christianity's core becomes causal, it seems, in producing the literal violence committed in the name of the Church (and its rule). Moreover, in the course of his treatment, Toland's rhetorical position broadens – subtly yet distinctly – from historical account and retrospective judgement to contemporaneous implication and insinuation; accordingly, Toland is able to raise supposedly perennial theological-political issues (in which, of course, the hyphenation is crucial).

The overall Preface to the Tetradymus, the collection within which Hypatia appeared, had already located Toland's account of Cyril and Hypatia, quite explicitly, in terms of contemporary events – specifically, a very public clash between Henry Sacheverell, the High Church Tory who argued for the divine right of kings, passive obedience and suppression of dissent (and around whom angry, violent, opposition to Whig ideology coalesced), and William Whiston, Newton's successor as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, confirmed Whig, and avowed anti-trinitarian.Footnote ²¹ At the start of 1719, in an act of provocatively passive aggression, Whiston had attended a service at Sacheverell's church, St. Andrew's in High Holborn, London, and (pointedly) refused to stand during the Athanasian creed – much to the chagrin, not just of the minister, but of most of the congregation; Sacheverell had duly published an attack on Whiston and his ‘gross Arianism’.Footnote ²² Toland, in his Preface, tells us that he was moved to write his account of Hypatia in response to ‘the unlawful and unchristian usage’ that Whiston had received from Sacheverell (H, ‘Preface’, p. vii): Toland mocks High Church indignation and mob denunciations in the name of ‘religion’ – although he also suggests that it was only ‘the good nature of the English people’ that prevented Whiston from being ‘torn to pieces for all his gown and innocence’ (H, ‘Preface’, p. viii).

In Hypatia itself, the indications of contemporary relevance are more subtle and allusive, but probably all the more effective, as a result. For example, and as we have already noted, the register of his comments regarding the homoiousian versus homoousian debates is designed to suggest that the intrinsic irrelevance of these same debates is ongoing (so to speak). We are also given a barbed abstraction from the particularities of fifth-century Alexandria when Toland asks: ‘where was it otherwise [in terms of outcome] when the Clergy where [sic] permitted to share in the government of civil affairs?’ (H, p. 127) The absurdity of any continuing reverence for Cyril is made explicit when Toland also asks of his readers: ‘how insufferable a burlesquing of God and Man is it to revere so ambitious, so turbulent, so perfidious, and so cruel a man, as a Saint?’ (H, p. 135) But perhaps the most significant comment, in this respect, and one of the most telling sentences in Toland's account, overall, is his claim that

With this particular charge, past and present are folded into each other, and the horrors of theological-political thuggery are made manifest as a continuous danger. For Toland, it was not just ancient Alexandria that faced the consequences of a ‘deluge of Ignorance, Superstition, and Tyranny’ (H, p. 136): fanaticism remains an ongoing threat to freedom, he tells us.

We can gauge something of the effect of this very particular appropriation of history by turning to one of the first critical responses that Hypatia engendered: Thomas Lewis’ pointedly titled The History of Hypatia, A most Impudent School-Mistress of Alexandria: Murder'd and torn to Pieces by the Populace (Lewis, Reference Lewis1721). Lewis, a High Church Anglican cleric who also published a vitriolic periodical, The Scourge, in Vindication of the Church of England, immediately suspected the ‘Dis-ingenuity’ of Toland's history, and countered by casting Cyril as ‘a zealous Christian, or (in vulgar phrase) a High-Churchman in those days’ (Lewis, Reference Lewis1721, p. 5), and Socrates Scholasticus as ‘an Unforgiving, Inflexible Puritan’ (Lewis, Reference Lewis1721, p. 13); for Lewis, it seems, two could play at Toland's game. Purporting to present the true story of ‘this She Philosopher’, Lewis depicted Toland's account as ‘a mere Lampoon, dress'd up with malice, prejudice and ignorance’, and designed ‘to blast the reputation’, not only of Cyril, but also of Henry Sacheverell, who, according to Lewis, was ‘[Cyril's] faithful successor in Zeal, against the Modern Novations and Arian Heresie’ (Lewis, Reference Lewis1721, p. 3). Lewis's case may be overwrought; nonetheless, it was as clear to him then as it should be to us now that Toland's scholarly efforts were by no means disinterested.Footnote ²³

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As already indicated, above, Toland's account of Hypatia seems to have been all the more historically significant for its rhetorically intensified dualisms: reason and philosophy shining in their virtuous opposition to superstition and brutal clerical ambition. Unsurprisingly, however, the historical actuality is probably a more complex affair. In terms of the specific role attributed to Cyril, for example, there seems little doubt that he was a ruthless operator, envious of Hypatia's popularity, and determined (at just about any cost) to establish Christian hegemony. Nonetheless, and as Dzielska has demonstrated, convincingly, we cannot simply assume, as Toland tends to, that Cyril was directly responsible for her murder (even if he did much to create the climate in which it took place): the evidence is equivocal, and there is nothing that suggests an explicit order or directive on his part.Footnote ²⁴

Furthermore, and leaving aside the specifics of Cyril's role, so many other aspects of the more general binary opposition that animates Toland's version of events seem historically questionable. Hypatia was accomplished in mathematics and logic, for sure; but she was also a not untypical neo-Platonist seeking to employ ‘philosophy’ for an ultimately mystical end. (We know, too, that astrology, alchemy and dream-interpretation were all important concerns for her circle.) Her followers and acolytes included Christians as well as pagans: she may have come emblematically to stand for ‘the violent end of classical Greek thought’, but her overall milieu was more likely a very eclectic and ‘multicultural’ affair.Footnote ²⁵ (One of her most important students was the Christian neo-Platonist Synesius of Cyrene, who would become bishop of Ptolmais.) Furthermore, in backing the Roman governor, rather than the Alexandrian pontiff, she was not necessarily taking some kind of principled anti-religious stand, in the name of philosophy: Orestes himself was an avowed and committed Christian (a point that Toland omits mentioning). Toland may have done a huge amount to create the legend of Hypatia; but his account is a loaded affair, for sure.Footnote ²⁶

For anyone familiar with Toland's wider project and modus operandi, there is little surprise in finding that he is thoroughly partisan and partial in his use of historical sources. Indeed, if there is anything like a consistent Tolandian ‘method’ to be identified, across his writings, we could say (with only some exaggeration) that it consists of utilizing any possible source, ancient or modern, to further his general campaign of ‘ungodding’ the world. What I want to focus on for the remainder of my consideration, however, is not so much the lack of historical nuance and subtlety, but the fact that Toland has chosen a woman as emblematic of philosophical enlightenment. Why and how might this be significant?

One could say that Hypatia's status qua female intellectual is peripheral to Toland's use, or exploitation, of the horrible events regarding her murder: the main point he wants to make seems to be about religion versus reason, in general. And, inasmuch as there is any ‘gendered’ significance to Toland's Hypatia, it might seem more dubious than it is anything else: after all, he conjoins Hypatia's knowledge with her ‘beauty’ and ‘innocence’; he tells us that her students were ‘powerfully affected by a charming mind in a charming body’ (H, p. 108), that she was ‘a Lady of such beauty, modesty, wisdom and virtue’ that she was ‘eagerly sought’ in marriage (H, p. 119); and he even pontificates on her sex life and whether or not she died a virgin (H, pp. 121–22). It hardly needs pointing out that these kinds of consideration simply never arise when Toland is writing about male thinkers – even those with whom he is in profound disagreement.Footnote ²⁷

Nonetheless, and without wanting to dispute that Toland is capable of condescension, I want to look at aspects of the opening paragraphs of Hypatia, where Toland (once again) makes points that are designed to be simultaneously historical and perennial. Discussing the way in which Hypatia's father, Theon, had ensured that she had a broad education in ‘the most abstruse sciences’, Toland notes that these are ‘reputed [to be] the proper occupation of men, as requiring too much labour and application for the delicate constitution of women’ (H, p. 105); against which assumption he immediately replies: ‘That this notion is a vulgar prejudice, the vast number of ladies who have in every age distinguished themselves by their professions or performances in Learning, furnishes an un[an]swerable argument’ (ibid.). He adds that ‘whole volumes have been written, containing nothing else but the lives of such women, as became eminent in all kinds of literature, especially in philosophy, which, as it is the highest perfection, so it demands the utmost effort of human nature’ (ibid.). It seems that we can establish a legitimate and fruitful link between the remarks here and the Preface to Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena – specifically, the large chunk of it (sections 4–9) which is taken up with the person of ‘Serena’, the position of women in history and in philosophy, various manifestations of misogyny, and what we might term ‘sexual politics’.

The Letters consists of five free-standing yet inter-related essays on a huge range of issues – like the origins of prejudice, the genealogy of the (spurious) idea of an immortal soul, the political abuse of theological notions, and the denial of any transcendent or transitive cause of motion or movement in the wider cosmos. The work emerged from an intense eighteen-month period that Toland spent in the royal courts of Hanover and Berlin, in 1701 and 1702, during which he became ensconced in the brilliant intellectual circle of Sophia, the empress of Hanover, and her daughter, Sophie Charlotte, the queen of Prussia – a circle that pivoted around the great polymath, and one of the towering figures of Western thought, Gottfried Leibniz. Both of the princesses were devoted to philosophical and theological debate, and it is generally accepted that Leibniz's most important later work (like the Theodicy and the New Essays) emerged from conversations and correspondence between the three of them (and various other interlocutors): the princesses’ probing intellects seem to have forced Leibniz to hone his arguments into the shapes by and in which they have since come to be known.Footnote ²⁸

The first three of Toland's Letters were apparently written for the edification of Sophie Charlotte, and were designed to clarify, develop and consolidate the kind of arguments he had offered in person, at court: the princess is never named, but there is little doubt about the identity of the ‘Serena’ of Toland's title. These three, and two further, more metaphysical essays, were published along with a Preface, which is styled as ‘a letter to a gentleman in London’, probably Pierre Desmaizeaux, the exiled French Huguenot intellectual who would later write a posthumous biography of Toland (as well as produce a translation of Bayle's Dictionary). It is this Preface that bears consideration alongside the account of Hypatia.

Here, without identifying Sophie Charlotte, Toland reveals that the first three letters were intended for a female recipient (whom he is styling as ‘Serena’). And from the text, it seems that this is a problematic issue for Desmaizeux – Toland says he can immediately imagine what his correspondent is thinking, and (intriguingly) refers to some history between them when he writes: ‘You may remember how often I took the part of the other sex against your prejudices rather than your judgement’ (Toland, Reference Toland and Leask2013, p. 51).

Toland goes on to recount how he was often forced to describe men as ‘rude, unmannerly, ignorant, and rough-hewn monsters’; he poses the question of whether women's exclusion from education is the result of unthinking prejudice or more cynical design; he reminds his correspondent how he had demonstrated ‘the parity of the intellectual organs in both sexes’ and the way in which women would be ‘equally capable of all improvements, had they but equally the same advantages’ as those enjoyed by men; and he goes on to catalogue women in history who – despite the social and structural impediments they faced – were able to achieve political and even military success (Toland, Reference Toland and Leask2013, p. 51).

What I want to highlight, here, are some of the precise details of Section Six of the Preface – not least, some of the implications of Toland's reference points. For a start, Toland mentions the significance of Gilles Ménage's 1690 History of Women Philosophers – the collection of 65 dictionary-style entries covering the entirety of Western thought, and which (as indicated above) devotes its single largest entry to Hypatia herself. (Ménage also seems to supply Toland with his scholarly leads.) This text is almost certainly uppermost in his mind, in his Hypatia, when he tells us about the ‘whole volumes’ that have been written on the subject. Here, it seems, we have a direct link – in terms of reference as well as subject-matter – between Hypatia and the Preface.

Toland goes on to mention, as an example of an important contemporary female philosopher, Catharine Trotter (Cockburn), who had published an incisive appreciation and defence of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (a text which Toland revered), and who was also known for dramatic and literary works.Footnote ²⁹ And, although this is never made explicit in the Letters, both of these names – Ménage and Trotter (Cockburn) – are resonant in terms of their wider public reception (and, indeed, public ridicule). Ménage had been satirized by Molière in his play, Les femmes savantes; an English version, The female virtuosos, by Thomas Wright, had been a great success on the London stage, in 1693. (Ménage is presented in the play as the ridiculous pedant, Vadius.)Footnote ³⁰ Three years later, in 1696, Catherine Trotter had been the one of the targets of a grotesque (but anonymous) satire called The Female Wits; or, The Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal; again, it had been performed on Drury Lane, and was then published in 1704, the same year as the Letters. (As well as attacking Trotter, The Female Wits satirized two other writers, Mary Pix and, especially, Delariviere Manley. Part of backlash against the growing success, in the 1690s, of women's writing, the play culminated, ominously, in the silencing of women's drama.)Footnote ³¹

In the Preface, then, Toland is invoking two names that have very particular resonances; we could even say that Toland is retrieving these names, and the efforts they entail, from misogynistic attack. And it seems that this context (of theatrical derision and critical retrieval) might provide an important clue as to why Toland chose to style Sophie Charlotte as ‘Serena’ – and, in turn, how this nomination might provide further evidence of Toland's feminist position.

Specifically, I want to consider another dark corner of Restoration satire – two plays by the English dramatist (and Royalist) Edward Howard,Footnote ³² both of them published in 1671: The women's Conquest, and The six days adventure, or the new Utopia. The first of these depicts a group of Amazons whose female-led society is undermined – and so the ‘natural order’ restored – when they eventually recover their wits and fall in love with men. The second is similar: set on the island of Utopia, it depicts a situation in which – because of an ancient decree – political power shifts from the island's men to its women. In establishing their new regime, the women consider various types of government, but decide on a republic; and the leader who emerges, through good sense and virtue rather than brute power or ambition, is called Serina.Footnote ³³ (She is depicted as calm and sagacious, and possessing a sort of natural authority.) However, faced with a revolt, when the men threaten to leave the island altogether, the women are forced to end their Utopian experiment, after just six days, and a male monarch takes over again: normal service is resumed. And lest we see this as a sly critique of patriarchy, we should note that Howard tells us, in his preface, that the women in his play are ‘made use of to confirm the judgement and practice of the world in rendring them more properly the weaker sex, than to authorize their judgement’.Footnote ³⁴

For sure, there is no conclusive ‘proof’ that Toland knew the play, never mind that he intended to invoke it. But Toland's erudition was wide; and he certainly knew the work of Edward Howard's brother, Robert (which had Socinian overtones to it).Footnote ³⁵ He lived the bulk of his adult life in London, with an astonishing network of political and literary contacts, and we can take it as read that, in general, he would have been familiar with goings-on of the city's stage – after all, Restoration theatre had a cultural and political significance more like that of television and social media today. It hardly seems outrageous to suggest that Toland appreciated, only too well, the implications carried with the name ‘Serena’.

*

In conclusion, we can say that the explicit claims Toland makes in Hypatia and in the Preface to his Letters to Serena demonstrate a consistent ‘feminist commitment’:Footnote ³⁶ he is not a programmatic or systematic thinker, but it seems clear that his vision of enlightenment is broad and inclusive, and entails what today we would term ‘gender equality’. Toland's presentation of Hypatia as a philosophical martyr is meant to underline this commitment: the critique of ‘fanaticism’ from the point of view of virtuous reason is more than a general claim, and one that posits philosophy as capacious and inclusive (and not solely a male preserve).

Beyond this wider point, I am also suggesting that the theatrical and dramatic resonances in the Preface of the Letters to Serena allow us to speculate that Toland's designation – Serena – may be intended as a rebuff to the misogynistic attitudes exemplified by Restoration satire (but reflecting a far wider malaise). And, if this is the case, it again emphasizes the wider, inclusive, culture that Toland is looking to create: Serena has not been ‘put back in her place’, but – instead – has been directly involved in debating and shaping some of the most important issues of the day (as ventilated in Toland's text).

Whether or not we accept that the nomination ‘Serena’ has the very specific charge that I am suggesting it might have, we can certainly see Toland's writings as being part of a vanguard that was creating new conceptual and cultural possibilities. For Toland, it seems, enlightenment that did not involve women's equality was not enlightenment at all.Footnote ³⁷