Mary Astell's Ironic Assault on John Locke's Theory of Thinking Matter

Abstract

Mary Astell (1666-1731), most famous today for her call for the establishment of Protestant nunneries in Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part 1 (1694) and for her acute Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), has lurked for years at the edges of that infinitely contentious category feminism, but she is only now beginning to receive her rightful inheritance as a theological and philosophical thinker, probably the title she would most have preferred.' This is not to say that Astell's Christian-Platonism has been ignored. In her 1986 biography Ruth Perry gave cogent expression to the centrality of Astell's idealist Christianity to all aspects of her thought2 and in the same year, Bridget Hill thoughtfully warned her readers against attempting to force Astell, a religious conservative, into some preconceived idea of what late seventeenth and early eighteenth century feminism ought to have been. 3 More recently, Patricia Springborg has written two significant essays that rely in part on Astell's more neglected theologicalphilosophical works, Letters concerning the Love of God (1695), a collection of Astell's correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton (1657-1711), and The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705; 3d edition 1730), far and away her most developed theological-philosophical