- Mark Tushnet. “An Essay on Rights,” 62 Texas Law Review 1384 (1984).
- Id., at 1380.
- Frances Olsen, “Statutory Rape: A Feminist Critique of Rights Analysis,” 63 Texas Law Review 393 (1984).
- Elizabeth Schneider, “The Dialectic of Rights and Politics: Perspectives from the Women's Movement,” 61 New York University Law Review 589 (1986).
- A useful study of Hume's history in its own historical context is Victor G. Wexler, David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1979). Wexler comments: “Mrs. Macaulay's acclaim as a national historian was second only to Hume's in the eighteenth century, and it is no small compliment to him that she saw the need to revive and revamp the Whig interpretation” (23).
- Two general biographical articles on Macaulay are, Lucy Martin Donnelly, “The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay,” 6 William and Mary Quarterly 173 (1949), and Barbara Brandon Schorrenberg, “The Brood Hen of Faction: Mrs. Macaulay and Radical Politics, 1765–1777,” 11 Albion 33 (1979). For an important analysis of Macaulay's history, see Christopher and Brigit Hill, “Catharine Macaulay and the Seventeenth Century,” Welsh Historical Review 3 (1967), 381–402.
- Donnelly (1870–1948), who deserves the credit of reviving Macaulay for us, was a Professor of English at Bryn Mawr; her authorial persona in this article is, poignantly, that of an antiquarian amateur of the eighteenth century who desires to revive notice of a long-forgotten liberty-loving woman at a moment—World War II—“when liberty is again being fought over the world around.” Her tone in relating the life of “Kate Macaulay” is that of jocose deprecation. The posthumous article was prepared for the press by Edith Finch and Caroline Robbins, the latter presumably eventually the author of The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthmen (1959).
- The “faction” Hume reresented “has not only prevented the establishing of any regular system to preserve or improve our liberties; but lies at this time in wait for the first opportunity which the imperfections of this government may give them to destroy those rights, which have been purchased by the toil and the blood of the most exalted individual who ever adorned humanity.” Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, vol. 1 (London, 1763), “Introduction,” xii.
- Catharine Macaulay, The History of England, from the Revolution to the Present Time, in a Series of Letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson (London, 1778), 4.
- Id., at 72.
- Id., at 5.
- Id., at 73.
- John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). For a brief description of the current historiography of the Revolution itself, see, Harry T. Dickinson, “The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89: A Revolution Made or One Prevented?,” Clark Newsletter, no. 15 (Fall 1988), 1–4.
- Catharine Macaulay, Loose Remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes' Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society with a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government in a Letter to Signior Paoli (London, 1767), 37. The Short Sketch was written in response to the successful Corsican revolution; like other liberals, Macaulay took this opportunity to advise Paoli on the form of an ideal republic that he might, seizing the opportune historical moment, establish.
- G. M. Ditchfield, “Some Literary and Political Views of Catherine Macaulay,” 12 American Notes and Queries 74 (1974). The quotation is from a diary of one Sylas Neville, recording his visit to Macaulay at her London residence on 30 April 1768.
- Lois G. Schwoerer has pointed out that James' subsequent prosecution of the Bishops for seditious libel was the immediate provocation that lay behind article 5. Lois G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 69.
- On seventeenth-century women petitioners, see, Patricia Higgins, “The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, 1640–49, ed. Brian Manning (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 179–222.
- Speech of John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts, upon the Right of the People, Men and Women, to Petition; on the Freedom of Speech and Debate in the House of Representatives of the United States…. (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1838).
- David Hume, The History of Great Britain, vol. I. Containing the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. (Edinburgh, 1754), 323. This was the first volume Hume published of the history, which, later, when the several volumes were collected together, received the more comprehensive title indicated earlier in my text. Hume continued to revise his history throughout his life. See Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 556, 589.
- Perhaps, too, Hume enjoyed the ironic implications of the parallel between the woman of Tekoah in the story of David in Samuel II and these English women. In the Biblical narrative, the woman of Tekoah does come to petition King David, and he is moved by her plea to pardon his son Absalom for avenging the rape of his sister Tamar by killing his half-brother Amnon. So the English women reasonably cite the woman of Tekoah as a precedent authorizing their direct appeal to parliament. But in the Biblical narrative, the story the woman of Tekoah tells is, in fact, a lie put into her mouth by Joab, rather as Hume thought Pym and the parliamentary leaders orchestrated the petitioning of the people. Also, David's agreeing to the woman's plea to pardon Absalom soon leads to Absalom's insurrection against David, thus making this not only an allusion to Biblical precedent for rulers' listening with favor to women petitioners, but also an allusion to an incident in which a ruler yields to the persuasion of a petitioning woman to his own eventual hurt. Parallels between David and Stuart kings were commonplace, and the details of Samuel II in this sort of parallel history had been made especially familiar to contemporary readers by Dryden's great poem, “Absalom and Achitophel.”
- A useful discussion of Macaulay's religious position is to be found in Lynne E. Withey, “Catharaine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda,” 16 Journal of British Studies 59 (1976).
- For a discussion of such jokes in late Restoration comedy, see Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 111–89.
- The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, 5 vols. (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1968; orig. 1927), 4:28.
- Id., at 41.
- Samuel Foote, The Devil Upon Two Sticks, A Comedy, In Three Acts (Haymarket, 1778). Despite the date, this is the first edition; Foote was not always attentive to the publication of his farces and this is one prepared for publication by Coleman, his successor patentee.
- Id., at 5–6.
- Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Oxford University Press for Wesleyan University Press, 1975), Bk. VI, chap, xiv, p. 320.
- See, e.g., Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A history of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 160–88.
- Mary Scott, The Female Advocate; a Poem. Occasioned by Reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead (Los Angles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1984), 27.
- Eleutheria. A Poem. Inscribed to Mrs. Macaulay (London, 1768).
- See, Atti dell'incoronazione de Corilla Olimpica (Parma, 1776).
- “Britannia's Reward. A Vision,” in Six Odes, Presented to that Justly Celebrated Historian, Mrs Catharine Macaulay, on her Birth-day, And publicaly read to a polite and brilliant Audience, Assembled April the Second, at Alfred House, Bath (Bath, n.d.), 43.
- The Poetical Works of John Scott, Esq. (London, 1782); Alexander Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), 17:497.
- Monthly Review 29 (1763) 372–82, 411–20. By 1771 (45: 80–87) in its review of vol. 5 of the History, the Review changed its position on gender to deny that women were naturally inferior to men and to deny that the pursuit of wisdom interfered with female beauty.
- The Critical Review 55 (1783), 212–16, at 16.
- [Richard Paul Jodrell], The Female Patriot: An Epistle From C-t-e M-c-y to the Reverend Dr. W-l-n On her Late Marriage. With Critical, Historical, and Philosophical Notes and Illustration (London, 1779), 10, 11, 28. Some library catalogues attribute this poem to Macaulay herself, an obvious absurdity; usually it is listed as anonymous, but it did later appear in The Poetical Works of Jodrell (London, 1814) and I can see no reason to deny it to him. For other satires, including some illustration of caricatures, see Donnelley, supra, note 6.
- Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education. With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London, 1790), 48.
- “To Richard Shackleton,” ante 15 August 1770, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, Lucy Sutherland, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 2:150.
- James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), 2:336.
- Id., at 3:46.
- Id., at 1:487; the magazine report is reprinted in this volume as Appendix C, 517–18.
- Letters on Education, 166–70. In Boswell's version of the story, Johnson's retort silences Macaulay; in her version, she gives a reasoned reply and uses the anecdote to discuss how a different kind of education might reduce the masculine tendency to “play the sophist for victory in conversation” and teach people to show “patience in attending to the arguments of their opponents.”
- The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:81. For additional comments on the different relations of Hume and Macaulay to historical writing and to their rivalry, see, Natalie Zemon Davis, “History's Two Bodies,” 93 American Historical Review 11 (1988). Davis speculates that the publication of letters between Hume and Macaulay in the European Magazine in 1783, well after Hume's death in 1776 but while Macaulay was still alive, was Macaulay's doing. If that is so, it might be seen as Macaulay's way of forcing at least one man who did not wish to engage in public debate with her into the public arena.
- For a general consideration of the conditions that allowed the first women European historians to write, see Natalie Zeman Davis, “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 153–82. Davis mainly deals with French women historians, but also discusses Macaulay briefly. In general, she points out that the would-be historian needs “a sense of connection, through some activity or deep concern of her own, with the areas of public life then considered suitable for historical writing—namely, the political and the religious. And furthermore, she wants to have an audience who will take seriously her publication on these topics.”
- Catharine Macaulay, A Modest Plea for the Protection of Copy Right (Bath, 1774), 37, 41, 14–15.
- Susan Staves, “Separate Maintenance Contracts,” 11 Eighteenth-Century Life 84 (1987).
- Karl von den Steinen, “The Discovery of Women in Eighteenth-Century Political Life,” in The Women of England: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present: Interpretive Bibliographical Essays, ed. Barbara Kanner (Archon: Hamden, Ct. 1979), 240–41.
Law & Literature
Volume 1, 1989 - Issue 2