Catharine Macaulay

Catharine Macaulay represented everything the eighteenth century abhorred in a woman. She was learned, politically-minded, and actively engaged with public and philosophical issues of the day. Her private life, and especially her "imprudent" second marriage to a man twenty-six years her junior, led to much malicious gossip. Yet in her lifetime she also won considerable fame as the author of an eight-volume history of England in the seventeenth century, a republican, a follower of John Wilkes, and a political polemicist who engaged with Edmund Burke. She not only influenced the nature of eighteenth-century radicalism in England, but also played an important contributory role in shaping American revolution ideology. Among her American friends and correspondents were Mercy Otis Warren, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Ezra Stiles, and George Washington. Long before the Revolution, she was also closely concerned with events in France. Both Mirabeau and Brissot were familiar with her History and much influenced by it; translated into French it was welcomed by patriots as an effective response to the counter-revolutionary influence of Hume's history. The first major biographical study of this remarkable and influential figure, this book should not be ignored by anyone interested in English radicalism or revolutionary politics.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy examines Wollstonecraft's attempts to revise representations of women to give them a more active role in public life. Combining history of ideas with close textual reading, Bahar insists that Wollstonecraft's political claims cannot be separated from her desire to develop more convincing aesthetic representations of women.

Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States represents the cooperative effort of a group of American and German scholars to move the historical debate on republicanism and liberalism to a new stage. By systematically studying the similarities and differences in the understanding of republicanism and liberalism in the United States and German states, the collection stimulates new efforts toward a comprehensive interpretation of political, intellectual, and social developments in the "modernizing" Atlantic world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Catherine Villanueva Gardner is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan at Flint.