A New Political Pamphlet by Mary Astell

Early in 2020, Catherine Sutherland, the Deputy Librarian of the Pepys Library and Old Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, identified—during a provenance search of the older items in her collection—a cache of books that had been owned by the philosopher and pioneering feminist, Mary Astell (1666–1731). Some of the books bore her name, M. Astell, written on the flyleaf; some had a written acknowledgment of who had given the book to her. Consulting Ruth Perry’s 1986 biography The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Sutherland noted that the antiquarian George Ballard had mentioned Astell’s donation to Magdalen college in his unpublished notes, although he omitted this fact from his published sketch of Astell in his 1752 Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain—possibly because he had been unable to find her collection of books at the Magdalen College in Oxford.¹

There are ninety-two titles in the Old Library of Magdalene College’s collection of Mary Astell’s books and manuscripts, including works of philosophy, natural history, religion, political history, and current controversies. They include numerous works by René Descartes and Nicholas Malebranche; Elizabeth Elstob’s translation of Aelfric’s Anglo-Saxon Homily on the Birth-day of St. Gregory (1709); two books by Lady Damaris Masham—another seventeenth-century philosopher, daughter of Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, and a good friend of John Locke; and single works by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Norris of Bemerton, and the theologian Henry Dodwell. There are also a number of titles written by Astell herself. The collection contains books in English, French, and Latin dating from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. The oldest text in the group is Baldwin of Forde’s Reverendissimi in Christo patris . . . (1521) and the most recent is George Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowlege (1710). As a collection, the texts significantly extend our knowledge of what this powerfully intellectual woman knew, which languages she read, and what interested her.

One of the most exciting finds in the collection is a bound volume of seven pamphlets printed between 1703 and 1706 that deal with loyalty to the Church of England and to the Crown, particularly as these were now to be defended by the Occasional Conformity Bill.² This volume of seven pamphlets, with a list of the contents in Mary Astell’s handwriting, contains three pamphlets known to be written by Mary Astell (although like everything she wrote, they were published anonymously), and one pamphlet likely written by Francis Atterbury. There are three more pamphlets that are similarly anonymous, one of which was probably written by Astell and another that might have been written by her. The authorship of the last anonymous pamphlet remains uncertain. Before describing the literary and political qualities of these pamphlets linked to Astell by their provenance, a summary of their historical context is in order.

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The Occasional Conformity Bill, proposed soon after Queen Anne ascended the throne in 1702, stipulated that only members of the Anglican church could hold public office—and that the practice of occasionally conforming, or occasionally taking communion in the Church of England in order to qualify for public office, would no longer be permitted. Queen Anne represented the hereditary Stuart line returned to the throne of England, a “divinely appointed monarch” to the high Church way of thinking, following the Whiggish regime of William and Mary of Orange, which had conceded too much to the Dissenters. Anne’s reign promised a more securely Anglican government, and the Occasional Conformity Bill was meant to roll back the Toleration Act of 1689 which had permitted Dissenters to hold public office if they practiced “occasional conformity” in the national church. This piece of legislation, sometimes called “The Act for Preserving the Protestant Religion,” failed in 1703 and 1704 because of Whig opposition, but ultimately passed in 1711.

Mary Astell supported the Occasional Conformity Bill fervently; she did not think that anyone who would not sincerely adhere to the Church of England should be permitted...