Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings

Description

The writings of republican historian and political pamphleteer Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) played a central role in debates about political reform in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. A critical reader of Hume's bestselling History of England, she broke new ground in historiography by defending the regicide of Charles I and became an inspiration for many luminaries of the American and French revolutions. While her historical and political works engaged with thinkers from Hobbes and Locke to Bolingbroke and Burke, she also wrote about religion, philosophy, education and animal rights. Influencing Wollstonecraft and proto-feminism, she argued that there were no moral differences between men and women and that boys and girls should receive the same education. This book is the first scholarly edition of Catharine Macaulay's published writings and includes all her known pamphlets along with extensive selections from her longer historical and political works.

Max Skjoensberg is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has previously been a lecturer in history and politics at the University of St Andrews and the University of York, and held post-doctoral positions at the University of Liverpool and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh. He is the author of The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His research has also been published in leading journals, including the Historical Journal, Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought and Modern Intellectual History.