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The writings of republican historian and political pamphleteer Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) played a central role in debates about political reform in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. A critical reader of Hume's bestselling History of England, she broke new ground in historiography by defending the regicide of Charles I and became an inspiration for many luminaries of the American and French revolutions. While her historical and political works engaged with thinkers from Hobbes and Locke to Bolingbroke and Burke, she also wrote about religion, philosophy, education and animal rights. Influencing Wollstonecraft and proto-feminism, she argued that there were no moral differences between men and women and that boys and girls should receive the same education. This book is the first scholarly edition of Catharine Macaulay's published writings and includes all her known pamphlets along with extensive selections from her longer historical and political works.

This Element offers the first detailed study of Catharine Trotter Cockburn's philosophy and covers her contributions to philosophical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion. It not only examines Cockburn's view that sensation and reflection are the sources of knowledge, but also how she draws attention to the limitations of human understanding and how she approaches metaphysical debates through this lens. In the area of moral philosophy, this Element argues that it is helpful to take seriously Cockburn's distinction between questions concerning the metaphysical foundation of morality and questions concerning the practice of morality. Moreover, this Element examines Cockburn's religious views and considers her understanding of the relation between morality and religion and her religious views concerning the resurrection and the afterlife.

In 1978 Richard Polwhele published "The Unsex'd Females: A Poem", which exemplifies the condemnatory rhetoric that stigmatized several women writers of the late eighteenth-century, including Catharine Macaulay. Female writers of this time were regarded with suspicion, especially if they addressed subjects such as religion or politics, thus breaking out of their proper, private sphere. Recent criticism has even pointed out that the mere act of writing was seen as subversive, as the pen was considered a symbolic phallus, therefore unsexing. The article explores how those female writers, particularly Catharine Macaulay, challenged the traditional political, social and sexual hierarchies and values, and how they were condemned and ostracized on account of their writings and beliefs, by their contemporary society. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Catharine Macaulay's discussion of freedom of the will in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth has received little attention, and what discussion there is attributes a number of different, incompatible views to her. In this paper the account of the nature of freedom of the will that she develops is related to her political aspirations, and the metaphysical position that she adopts is compared to those of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and others. It is argued that although Macaulay's position is ultimately ambiguous, she is most plausibly interpreted as following Locke's discussion of free will in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and of inheriting, from him, the ambiguity that we find in her account. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

"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 context 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 levelers 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 defense 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"--