The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England by Mary Astell (review)

[Erratum]

Toronto University Press’s ‘The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe’ presents a range of women’s writings from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The series has presented a range of sacred, secular, medical, and dramatic texts. This edition, number 24 in the series and edited by Jacqueline Broad, features an early eighteenth-century religious text, The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England by Mary Astell.

While The Christian Religion was addressed to women, it is likely that Astell expected some male readers among her readership. She was writing in response to a number of tracts, one of which at least she suspected was authored by John Locke. But as Broad makes clear, her principal intention in writing the text was to instruct other women.

Broad has selected the 1717 re-edition of the work, as this revision of the original 1705 work is Astell’s last word on her subject. Broad’s editorial treatment of the text is exemplary. The text itself is clearly presented and a running series of notes offers commentary and glosses on the text unfolding on the pages. In many instances, these notes restore for the reader Astell’s original marginal notes.

The significance of Astell’s text is twofold. One is that it is a defence of belonging to the established Church of England to the exclusion of any other denominational identity, but one written from the point of view of the ‘other voice’ and permitting insights from a woman. Defences for the Church or apologies for it are hardly rare in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. When Astell produced her first edition in 1705. King William III was not long dead, and the schism his accession had prompted in the English Church and the separation of the non-jurors was still current, resulting in a lively body of controversial literature about loyalty to the Church. But this Church did of course have an entirely male sacerdotal ministry and statements in either Parliament or Convocation about the Church were made by men, which gives some novelty value to Astell’s work.

The other significance is the way Astell widens out her focus beyond the Church of England to construct and elaborate a series of intellectual edifices, especially in her use of Cartesian logic.

While Astell intended her work to defend the Church and to be a statement from a loyal daughter, it is the way she set about doing this which is the more significant aspect of this work. As Broad makes clear, The Christian Religion is the culmination of Astell’s literary achievements, and Broad’s suggestion to consider the work as the end point of a trajectory of Astell’s writings including A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700) is both meaningful and apposite. It continues their emphasis on the need for women to be equipped with a critical apparatus to form their own judgements on issues, including in this case the truth embodied by the established English Church. Astell ranges across various questions and issues, including the need to judge passions and how to improve understanding to how to bear loss.

Astell’s work shows her to have been a well-informed reader of contemporary and earlier European philosophers, including not only Descartes but also Nicolas Malebranche and the Englishman John Norris. She also stands with Tory and High Church principles, meaning she upholds the authority of the Church against dissent. Yet ultimately the Church itself can be an at times elusive or at least oblique presence in the text. Astell’s discussion centres on matters such as virtue, reputation, vice, envy, power, and so on. Of course it is clear that the answers...