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The Eloquence of Mary Astell University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2005 The eloquence of Mary Astell Sutherland, Christine Mason University of Calgary Press Sutherland, C. M. "The eloquence of Mary Astell". University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49316 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com THE ELOQUENCE OF MARY ASTELL by Christine Mason Sutherland ISBN 978-1-55238-661-3 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: MAY NOT: • read and store this document • gain financially from the work in any way; free of charge; • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution • distribute it for personal use of the work; free of charge; • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; • print sections of the work for • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception • read or perform parts of the of academic usage within educational institutions such as work in a context where no schools and universities); financial transactions take • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its place. function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ the Eloquence of Mary Astell the Eloquence of Mary Astell Christine Mason Sutherland © 2005 Christine Mason Sutherland Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Published by the Sutherland, Christine Mason University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive nw Calgary, Alberta, Canada t2n 1n4 The eloquence of Mary Astell / Christine www.uofcpress.com Mason Sutherland. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval Includes bibliographical references and system or transmitted, in any form index. or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a ISBN10: 1-55238-153-6 ISBN13: 978-1-55238-153-3 licence from The Canadian Copyright ISBN-10 1-55238-153-6 Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an ISBN-13Also issued 13-978-1-55238-153-3 in electronic formats: Access Copyright licence, visit ISBN 978-1-55238-661-3, ISBN 978-1-55238-459-6 www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777. 1. Astell, Mary, 1668-1731—Literary art. 2. Astell, Mary, 1668-1731—Political and social We acknowledge the financial views. 3. Women—Education, support of the Government of Canada, Higher—England. 4. Feminism—Great through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Britain. I. Title. Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the HQ1595.A88S87 2005 305.42'092 support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. C2005-905554-5 This book has been published with the help Design& typesetting, Mieka West. of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, This book is printed on New Leaf Eco 100 through the Aid to Scholarly Publications natural, 100% post consumer waste paper. Programme, using funds provided by the Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Social Sciences and Humanities Research Marquis. Council of Canada. To the best of teachers: Dorothy F. Bartholomew and the late Kathleen M. Lea Table of Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction xi Part I: Mary Astell’s Context 1 The Problem of Ethos 3 2 Mary Astell and the Problem of Ethos 25 Part II: Mary Astell’s Rhetorical Practice 3 Letters Concerning the Love of God 41 4 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I 53 5 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II 65 6 Some Reflections Upon Marriage 79 7 The Christian Religion 93 8 Political Pamphlets 109 Part III: Mary Astell’s Rhetorical Theory 9 Rhetorical Theory, I 125 10 Rhetorical Theory, II 137 Conclusion 153 Appendix A 165 Appendix B 169 Bibliography 171 Notes 179 Index 187 Acknowledgements This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Grateful acknowledgements also go to the following: The Killam Trust for the Resident Fellowship that allowed me to work on this book; the University of Calgary Research Services Committee for awarding me the original starter grant to embark on this research; and the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary for the sabbatical fellowship that gave me the time to finish it. My thanks also go to Tania Smith for helpful sugges- tions on the influence of Bernard Lamy; to Isobel Grundy for sharing the information given in Appendix B; to Isabella Mihai and Kimberley Belton for help with editing; to Joyce Hildebrand for her most useful questions and comments; and especially to Christine Sopczak for her expert assistance with documentation. Lastly, thanks go to Margaret and Joseph Mason, James, Richard, Timothy, Joel, and Aphra Sutherland, Dawn Bryan and Julia Hoover for their loving support. ix Introduction ary Astell is not a well-known figure. Something of a Mcelebrity in her own day, she had fallen out of fashion by the time of her death in 1731, and although her memory was revived and preserved for a time by George Ballard in the 1750s, she quickly faded once more from view. Not until Florence Smith’s important biography of her was published in 1916 was interest in her once more aroused, and even since then the recovery has been slow. Astell was a political writer, a philosopher and an education- ist as well an eloquent advocate for women, but it was principally as a feminist that she was brought forward again by Ruth Perry in her magisterial biography of 1986, The Celebrated Mary Astell. As for historians of rhetoric, they ignored her entirely until the 1980s, and even now she is not as well-known as she ought to be.1 Since the assumed audience for this book is rhetoricians and students of rhetoric, as well as, I hope, some feminists and even general read- ers, the first task must be to introduce Mary Astell and to explain why it is important for us to study her. Why, after nearly three centuries of neglect, should we pay attention to her now? In partic- ular, why should she be studied by rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric? Answering these questions is the purpose of the present enquiry.2 Astell was a native of Newcastle, a city in the far north of England.3 She was born in 1666 to a middle-class family that was coming down in the world. The family belonged to the gentry – they had the right to bear arms. At the time this was an important social distinction. Her standing as a member of the gentry affected not only her sense of her own identity but also her opportunities for employment. Peter Astell, Mary’s father, belonged to a highly prestigious guild known as the hostmen, associated with the coal industry, as was the family of her mother, Mary Errington.4 Peter Astell had served a long apprenticeship, and in fact qualified as a hostman only a few years before his early death. There were only two children in the family, Mary and her younger brother Peter. It was common practice at the time for girls to be included in the primary education provided for their brothers, and Peter and Mary xi The Eloquence of Mary Astell Astell were taught by their uncle, Ralph Astell, an Anglican cler- gyman of a nearby parish.
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