Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith

Until recently, studies of Mary Astell, focusing on her proto-feminist arguments, have tended to occlude the full extent of her contribution to the theological, political, philosophical, and historiographical debates of the early modern period.Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith moves the study of Astell to a mature phase, accommodating a variety of disciplinary perspectives so that the scope of Astell's work can be understood in its manifold contexts. Works considered here span the full range of Astell's political, theological, philosophical, and poetic writings. The volume does not eschew the more traditional scholarly interest in Astell's concerns about gender; rather, it reveals how Astell's reflections on gender were always mediated through her diverse set of convictions. Astell's work is shown to require attention not only for its role in the development of early modern feminism, but for its interventions on subjects ranging from political authority to individual agency, from political eros to divine service, from civil war historiography to Lockean epistemology. Given the vast breadth of her writings, her active role within early modern political and theological debates, and the sophisticated complexity of her prose, Astell has few parallels among her contemporaries. Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith bestows upon Astell the attention which she deserves not merely as a proto-feminist, but as a major figure of the early modern period.