Primary Sources

• Arnauld, A. and Nicole, P., Logic or the Art of Thinking: Containing, besides rules, several new observations appropriate for forming judgment, J. V. Buroker (tr. and ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Astell, M., The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England. In a Letter to the Right Honourable, T.L. C.I., London: R. Wilkin, 1705. (Scholar)
• –––, Astell: Political Writings, P. Springborg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• –––, [SP], A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Parts I and II, P. Springborg (ed.), Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002.
• –––, The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, J. Broad (ed.), Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Iter Publishing, 2013.
• Astell, M. and Norris, J., Letters Concerning the Love of God, Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris: Wherein his late Discourse, shewing That it ought to be intire and exclusive of all other Loves, is further cleared and justified, London: J. Norris, 1695.
• –––, Letters Concerning the Love of God, E. D. Taylor and M. New (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
• Descartes, R., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (eds. and trs.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Vol. I (abbreviated as ‘CSM’ and cited by page number). (Scholar)
• –––, Oeuvres de Descartes, C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds.), Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1996, Vol. VI (abbreviated as ‘AT’ and cited by page number). (Scholar)
• Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P. H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• Norris, J., Practical Discourses Upon several Divine Subjects, London: S. Manship, 1693.

Secondary Sources

• The secondary sources listed below will be of particular interest to philosophers who are pursuing further examination of Astell’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.
• Achinstein, S., 2007, “Mary Astell. Religion and Feminism: Texts in Motion”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener & M. Michelson, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 17–30. (Scholar)
• Acworth, R., 1979, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1712), Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag. (Scholar)
• Alvarez, D. P., 2011, “Reason and Religious Tolerance: Mary Astell’s Critique of Shaftesbury”, Eighteenth Century Studies, 44(4): 475–494. (Scholar)
• Apetrei, S., 2008a, “‘Call no man master upon earth’: Mary Astell’s Tory Feminism and an Unknown Correspondence”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41(4): 507–23. (Scholar)
• –––, 2008b, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Atherton, M., 1993, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason”, in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, L.M. Antony and C. Witt (eds.), Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, pp. 19–34. (Scholar)
• Bejan, T.M., 2019, “‘Since All the World is mad, why should I be so?’ Mary Astell on Equality, Hierarchy, and Ambition”, in Political Theory, 47(6): 781–808. (Scholar)
• Broad, J., 2002a, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Broad, J., 2002b, “Mary Astell (1666–1731)”, in British Philosophers 1500–1899, P.B. Dematteis and P.S. Fosl (eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography 252, pp. 3–10. (Scholar)
• –––, 2003, “Adversaries or Allies? Occasional Thoughts on the Masham-Astell Exchange”, Eighteenth-Century Thought, 1: 123–49. (Scholar)
• –––, 2007, “Astell, Cartesian Ethics, and the Critique of Custom”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 165–179. (Scholar)
• –––, 2009, “Mary Astell on Virtuous Friendship”, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 26(2): 65–86. (Scholar)
• –––, 2014, “Mary Astell on Marriage and Lockean Slavery”, History of Political Thought, 35(4): 717–738. (Scholar)
• –––, 2015, The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2016, “Mary Astell and the Virtues”, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, Alice Sowaal and Penny A. Weiss (eds.), State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 16–34. (Scholar)
• Broad, J. and K. Green, 2009, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Bryson, C.B., 1988, “Mary Astell: Defended of the ‘Disembodied Mind’”, Hypatia, 13(4): 40–62. (Scholar)
• Carroll, B. A., 1990, “The Politics of ‘Originality’: Women and the Class System of the Intellect,” Journal of Women’s History, 2(2): 136–63. (Scholar)
• Coogan, M. D., et al., (eds.), 2010, The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version: An Ecumenical Study Bible. College ed.; Fully rev. 4th ed, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Detlefsen, K. 2016. “Custom, Freedom and Equality: Mary Astell on Marriage and Women’s Education”, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, Alice Sowaal and Penny A. Weiss (eds.), State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 74–92. (Scholar)
• Duran, J., 2000, “Mary Astell: A Pre-Humean Christian Empiricist and Feminist”, in Presenting Women Philosophers, C. Tougas and S. Ebenreck (eds.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 147–154. (Scholar)
• –––, 2006, Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics, and Feminism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2014, “Christianity and Women’s Education: Anna Maria van Schurman and Mary Astell,” Philosophy & Theology, 26(1): 3–18. (Scholar)
• Dussinger, J. A., 2013, “Mary Astell’s Revisions of Some Reflections upon Marriage (1730)”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 107(1): 49–79. (Scholar)
• Ellenzwig, S., 2003, “The Love of God and the Radical Enlightenment: Mary Astell’s Brush with Spinoza”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63(3): 379–87. (Scholar)
• Ezell, M. J. M., 1993, Writing Women’s Literary History, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. (Scholar)
• Foucault, M., 1997. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow (ed.), New York: New Press, 281–301. (Scholar)
• Forbes, A.F., 2019, “Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice”, Hypatia 34(4): 777–801. (Scholar)
• Gill, M. B., 2006, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Goldie, M., 2007, “Mary Astell and John Locke”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 17–30. (Scholar)
• Hadot, P., 1995, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Arnold I Davidson (ed.),Malden, MA: Blackwell. (Scholar)
• Harris, J., 2012, “Philosophy and sexual politics in Mary Astell and Samuel Richardson”, Intellectual History Review, 22(3): 445–63. (Scholar)
• Hartmann, Van. C., 1998, “Tory Feminism in Mary Astell’s Bart’lemy Fair”, Journal of Narrative Technique, 28(3): 243–65. (Scholar)
• Herberg, E., 1999, “Mary Astell’s Rhetorical Theory: A Woman’s Viewpoint”, in The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, C. M. Sutherland and R. Sutcliffe (eds.), Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 147–157. (Scholar)
• Hill, B., 1986, The First English Feminist: “Reflections upon Marriage” and Other Writings by Mary Astell, Aldershot, Hants: Grower Publishing. (Scholar)
• –––, 1987, “A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery”, Past & Present, 117: 107–130. (Scholar)
• James, R., 1976, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared”, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, Ronald C. Rosbottom (ed.), 5: 121–139. (Scholar)
• Johns, A., 1996, “Mary Astell’s ‘Excited needles’: Theorizing Feminist Utopia in Seventeenth-Century England”, Utopian Studies, 7(1): 60–74. (Scholar)
• Kendrick, N., 2018, “Mary Astell’s Theory of Spiritual Friendship”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 26(1): 46–65. (Scholar)
• Kinnaird, J. K., 1979, “Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism”, Journal of British Studies, 19(1): 53–75. (Scholar)
• Kolbrener, W., 2003, “Gendering the Modern, Mary Astell’s Feminist Historiography”, The Eighteenth Century, 44(1): 1–24. (Scholar)
• –––, 2007, “Astell’s ‘Design of Friendship’ in Letters and A Serious Proposal, Part I”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 49–64. (Scholar)
• –––, 2014, “Slander, Conversation and the Making of the Christian Public Sphere in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England”, in Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660–1760, S. Apetrei and H. Smith (eds.), Farnham Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 131–144. (Scholar)
• Kolbrener W. and M. Michelson, 2007, Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Aldershot: Ashgate. [Reprint of the introduction is available online.] (Scholar)
• Kotva, S., 2020, Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy: Reinventing Philosophy as a Way of Life, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. (Scholar)
• Lascano, M., 2016, “Mary Astell on the Existence and Nature of God”, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, Alice Sowaal and Penny A. Weiss (eds.), State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 168–187. (Scholar)
• Lister, A., 2004, “Marriage and Misogyny: The Place of Mary Astell in the History of Political Thought”, History of Political Thought, 25(1): 44–72. (Scholar)
• Locke, J., 1989, An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Ed. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Scholar)
• –––. Reasonableness of Christianity. The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes. London: Rivington, 1824.
• McCrystal, J., 1992, “A Lady’s Calling: Mary Astell’s Notion of Women”, Political Theory Newsletter, 4: 156–70. (Scholar)
• –––, 1993, “Revolting Women The Use of Revolutionary Discourse in Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared”, History of Political Thought, 14(2): 189–203. (Scholar)
• Miller, S., 2008, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Scholar)
• Myers, J. E., 2012, “Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell and Damaris Masham on Sociability”, Hypatia, 28(3): 533–550. (Scholar)
• Nadelhaft, J., 1982, “The Englishwoman’s Sexual Civil War: Feminist Attitudes Towards Men, Women, and Marriage”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 43(4): 555–579. (Scholar)
• Nelson, A., 2005, “The Rationalist Impulse”, in A Companion to Rationalism, A. Nelson (ed.), Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 3–11. (Scholar)
• O’Donnell, S., 1978, “Mr. Locke and the Ladies: The Indelible Words on the Tabula Rasa”, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 8: 151–164. (Scholar)
• O’Neill, E., 1998, “Astell, Mary (1666–1731)”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 1, E. Craig (ed.), New York: Routledge, pp. 527–30. (Scholar)
• ––, 1998b, “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History,” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, J. A. Kournay (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 17–62.
• –––, 1999, “Women Cartesians, ‘Feminine Philosophy’, and Historical Exclusion”, in Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, S. Bordo (ed.), University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 232–257. (Scholar)
• –––, 2005, “Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy,” Hypatia, 20(3): 185–197. (Scholar)
• –––, 2007, “Mary Astell on the Causation of Sensation”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 145–64. (Scholar)
• Perry, R., 1981, “Two Forgotten Wits”, The Antioch Review, 39(4): 431–438. (Scholar)
• –––, 1982, “Mary Astell’s Poetry”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1(2): 201–202. (Scholar)
• –––, 1984, “Mary Astell’s Response to the Enlightenment”, in Women and the Enlightenment, M. Hunt, M. Jacob, P. Mack, and R. Perry (eds.), New York: The Haworth Press, Inc., pp. 13–40. (Scholar)
• –––, 1985, “Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18(4): 472–493. (Scholar)
• –––, 1986, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 1990, “Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23(4): 444–457. (Scholar)
• Pickard, C. “Great in Humilitie’: A Consideration of Mary Astell’s Poetry”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot, England: Ashgate, pp. 115–126. (Scholar)
• Schillace, B. L., 2013, “Reproducing Custom: Mechanical Habits and Female Machines in Augustan Women’s Education”, Feminist Formations, 25(1): 111–137. (Scholar)
• Shapiro, L., 2013, “The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early Modern Women”, Review Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, T.: Penser au Féminin Au XVIIe Siécle, 203(3): 327–346. (Scholar)
• Sharrock, C., 1992, “De-ciphering Women and De-scribing Authority: The Writings of Mary Astell”, in Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, I. Grundy and S. Wiseman (eds.), Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 109–124. (Scholar)
• Smith, F., 1916, Mary Astell, Columbia: Columbia University Press. (Scholar)
• Smith, H. L., 1982, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2007, “‘Cry up liberty’: The Political Context for Mary Astell’s Feminism”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 193–204. (Scholar)
• Sowaal, A., 2007, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom”, Philosophy Compass, 2(2): 227–43. (Scholar)
• –––, 2016, “Mary Astell and the Development of Vice: Pride, Courtship, and the Women’s Human Nature Question”, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell, Alice Sowaal and Penny A. Weiss (eds.), State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 57–72. (Scholar)
• –––, 2017, “Mary Astell on Liberty”, in Women and Liberty, 1600–1800, Jacqueline Broad and Karen Detlefsen (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 178–194. (Scholar)
• Spender, D., 1982, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Scholar)
• Springborg, P., 1995, “Mary Astell (1666–1731), Critic of Locke”, American Political Science Review, 89(3): 621–633. (Scholar)
• –––, 1996, “Introduction”, Astell: Political Writings, P. Springborg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xi–xlviii. (Scholar)
• –––, 2002, “Introduction”, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts. (Scholar)
• –––, 2005, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Squadrito, K.M., 1987, “Mary Astell’s Critique of Locke’s View of Thinking Matter”, Journal of History of Philosophy, 25: 433–439. (Scholar)
• –––, 1991, “Mary Astell”, A History of Women Philosophers. Vol. III: 1600–1800, M.E. Waithe (ed.), Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Scholar)
• Stanton, K. S., 2007, “‘Affliction, The Sincerest Friend’”, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 29(1): 104–114. (Scholar)
• Staves, S., 2002, “Church of England Clergy and Women Writers”, Huntington Library Quarterly: Reconsidering the Bluestockings, 65(1/2): 81–103. (Scholar)
• Sutherland, C. M., 1991, “Outside the Rhetorical Tradition: Mary Astell’s Advice to Women in Seventeenth-Century England”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 9(2): 147–163. (Scholar)
• –––, 1995, “Mary Astell: Reclaiming Rhetorica in the Seventeenth Century”, in Reclaiming Rhetoria: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, A. Lunsford (ed.), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 93–116. (Scholar)
• –––, 2005, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, Calgary: University of Calgary Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2009, Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and “The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton”, Farnham: Ashgate. (Scholar)
• Sutherland, C. M. and R. Sutcliffe, 1999, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, Calgary: University of Calgary Press. (Scholar)
• Taylor, E. D., 2001, “Mary Astell’s Ironic Assault on John Locke’s Theory of Thinking Matter”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62(3): 505–522. (Scholar)
• ––, 2005a, “Introduction Mary Astell and John Norris: A Correspondence”, in Mary Astell And John Norris: Letters Concerning The Love Of God, E. D. Taylor and M. New (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–41. [Reprint available online.]
• –––, 2005b–6, “Mary Astell’s Work toward a New Edition of ‘A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II’”, Studies in Bibliography, 57: 197–232. (Scholar)
• Thickstun, M. O., 1991, “‘This was a Woman that taught’: Feminist Scriptural Exegesis in the Seventeenth Century”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 21: 149–158. (Scholar)
• Waters, K., 2002, “Sources of Political Authority: John Locke and Mary Astell”, in Introduction, Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations, Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, pp. 5–19. (Scholar)
• Webb, Simone. 2020, “Philosophy as a Feminist Spirituality and Critical Practice for Mary Astell”, in Metaphilosophy 51(2–3): 280–302. (Scholar)
• Weiss, P., 2004, “Mary Astell: Including Women’s Voices in Political Theory”, Hypatia, 19(3): 63–84. (Scholar)
• –––, 1996, “Wollstonecraft and Rousseau: The Gendered Fate of Political Theorists”, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Series: Re-Reading the Canon), M. J. Falco (ed.), University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 15–32. (Scholar)
• –––, 2009, Canon Fodder: Historical Women Political Thinkers, University Park: Penn State University Press. (Scholar)
• Wilson, C., 2004, “Love of God and Love of Creatures”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 21(3): 281–298. (Scholar)
• Wolterstorff, N., 1976, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (Scholar)
• Zook, M., 2007, “Religious Nonconformity and the Problem of Dissent in the Works of Aphra Behn and Mary Astell”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, pp. 99–113. (Scholar)