Abstract

The ‘celebrated’ Catharine Macaulay was both lauded and execrated during the eighteenth century for her republican politics and her unconventional life. This comprehensive biography in the “life and letters” tradition situates her works in their political and social context and offers an unprecedented, detailed account of the content and influence of her writing, the arguments she developed in her eight volume history of England, and her other political, ethical, and educational works. Her disagreements with conservative opponents, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson are developed in detail, as is her influence on more progressive admirers such as Thomas Jefferson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay emerges as a coherent and influential political voice, whose attitudes and aspirations were typical of those enlightenment republicans who based their progressive politics in rational religion. She looked back to the seventeenth century levelers and parliamentarians as important precursors of the struggles for liberty and political rights that she advocated for Great Britain, America, and France. Her defence of republican liberty and the equal rights of men offers an important corrective to certain misleading contemporary accounts of the origins of democratic republicanism during this crucial period.