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.
By:
Karen Green
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 560g
ISBN: 9780367358976
ISBN 10: 0367358972
Pages: 266
Publication Date: 02 June 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction 1. The Formation of a Female Republican: Kent, 1731–60 2. Influences from the Scottish Enlightenment: St James’s Place, 1760–66 3. A Republican Coterie; Berners St, 1766–71 4. Wilkes, Fever, and Wilson: London and Bath, 1771–77 5. France, Marriage, and Scandal: 1777–79 6. Completion of the History and Emergence as a Moral Philosopher: Knightsbridge, 1780–84 7. America and France: 1784–86 8. On Education and the French Revolution: Binfield, Berkshire, 1787–91 9. Macaulay’s Lasting Significance
Karen Green is Associate Lecturer and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. In 1995 she published The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought; in 2009, with Jacqueline Broad, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700; and in 2014, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800. She is the editor of The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (2019) and author of many articles in philosophy, feminism, and political theory.
