Overview

Catharine Macaulay was a celebrated republican historian, whose account of the reasons for the seventeenth-century English Revolution, the parliamentary period, and its aftermath was widely read by the mothers and fathers of American Independence and by central players in the French Revolution. As well as publishing her eight volume history, spanning the period from the accession of James I to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, she wrote political pamphlets, offered a sketch of a republican constitution for Corsica, advocated parliamentary reform, and published a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Her Letters on Education of 1790 made a decisive impact on the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, and her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth opposed the skeptical and utilitarian attitudes being developed by Hume and others. This volume brings together for the first time all the available letters between her and her wide-ranging correspondents, who include George Washington, John Adams, Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, James Otis, Benjamin Rush, David Hume, James Boswell, Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Horace Walpole, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, and many other luminaries of the eighteenth-century enlightenment. It includes an extended introduction to her life and works and offers a unique insight into the thinking of her friends and correspondents during the period between 1760 and 1790, the crucible for the development of modern representative democracies. The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay will appeal to scholars of philosophy, political thought, women's studies, and eighteenth-century history, as well as those interested in the development of democratic ideas.

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9780190934453

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Green's newly published edition of Macaulay's correspondence allows us to understand the historian and political figure in her own terms as opposed to a representative of a supposedly coherent commonwealth or republican tradition, as she has often been considered since the work of Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock. Her contextually rich intellectual biography is strengthened by her immersion in Macaulay's correspondence and, for this reason alone, it offers a significant advancement on Hill's pioneering study from 1992. -- Max Skjoensberg, Intellectual History Review

Green's newly published edition of Macaulay's correspondence allows us to understand the historian and political figure in her own terms as opposed to a representative of a supposedly coherent commonwealth or republican tradition, as she has often been considered since the work of Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock. Her contextually rich intellectual biography is strengthened by her immersion in Macaulay's correspondence and, for this reason alone, it offers a significant advancement on Hill's pioneering study from 1992. * Max Skjoensberg, Intellectual History Review *

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Karen Green has been a pioneer in the movement to include women's philosophical texts in the history of philosophy, concentrating on their contributions to political and ethical thought. In 1995 she published The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (Polity) and most recently A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1700-1800 (Cambridge, 2014).

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