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

Mary Astell (1666–1731) was a younger contemporary of John Locke, who defended the intellectual equality of men with women and argued in favor of women’s education. Unlike Locke, Astell was a high-church Anglican and a high Tory in politics, hostile to the demands of religious dissenters for greater political and religious freedoms. Since the ground-breaking studies of Bridget Hill and Ruth Perry in 1986, Astell has enjoyed status as a key early English feminist. Nevertheless modern feminists have struggled to reconcile her conformist piety, Tory politics, and conformity to convention with her championship of women’s autonomy and education. Although Ruth Perry drew attention to her Cartesianism, this too was something difficult to reconcile with her feminism in the last decades of the last century, when Descartes and Cartesian reason were the subject of feminist critique.

It is only relatively recently that Mary Astell has come to be regarded as a philosopher, and Jacqueline Broad has done more than most to establish her philosophical credentials: in her Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (2003) she presents Astell as a dualist, indebted to both Cartesianism and Cambridge Platonism, and an opponent of Hobbes. Others have pointed out her engagement with Locke (Patricia Springborg), Nicholas Malebranche, and John Norris (William Kolbrener, Derek Taylor). But recovering Astell as a philosopher has had its challenges. With book titles like the one under review, one can understand why. Nevertheless, Christian Religion is Astell’s most mature work, which develops themes broached in her better known A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–97) and Reflections upon Marriage (1700), notably her defense of female reason, and her grounding of arguments for female education and equality on Cartesian arguments. Although Astell does not refer to her philosophical sources and targets by name, the footnotes reveal these, especially her use of Cartesianism, and her critique of Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity. The critical apparatus bears out Broad’s assertion that Christian Religion is Astell’s “crowning achievement” (2), while the introduction amply demonstrates how Cartesianism was integral to her feminism and situates the text in relation to both the debates sparked by Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity and his debate with Edward Stillingfleet.

This modern edition of The Christian Religion publishes the text of the second edition (1717), which contains a number of changes to the 1705 first edition, particularly in structure and organization. The introduction and notes highlight Astell’s debt to Cartesian traditions and her engagement with contemporary philosophy. In so doing they broaden the focus of discussion of Astell and Locke to include her response to his non-political writings, and they mark a rehabilitation of the feminist credentials of Cartesianism. Among the other philosophers with whom Astell engaged, there is scope for more on Norris and at least some mention of Malebranche, who was a significant figure in the contemporary philosophical context. The theological controversies reviewed in the introduction, include Astell’s responses to John Toland, John Tillotson, and Stillingfleet, but theologians and historians of religion could wish for fuller footnoting of the religious aspect of the text, and how it engages with debates between Anglicans and dissenters, and, indeed, among Anglicans—not to mention the highly charged topic of ‘thinking matter.’ The editorial decision to include the original index conveys some sense of the indexing priorities of Astell’s time, but it is no substitute for an index for this edition. These criticisms do not detract from the fact that Jacqueline Broad has provided a welcome addition to the canon of Astell’s writings, which offers a model of the kind of historically nuanced reading which is required for reintegrating the women philosophers into the history of philosophy.