The Eloquence of Mary Astell by Christine Mason Sutherland, and: Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England ed. by Jennifer Richards, Alison Thorne, and: Rhetoric (The New Critical Idiom) ed. by Jennifer Richards

232 RHETORICA Christine Mason Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. xxi + 202pp. ISBN 1552381536; Jen­ nifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds., Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 2007. x + 254pp. ISBN 978-0-415-38527-5; Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric (The New Critical Idiom), London and New York: Routledge, 2008.198pp. ISBN 978-0-415-31436-7 If early modern men were educated to speak, then early modern women were educated (if at all) to be silent, and the three books under review add to the still growing pile in which modern feminist historians—educated, of course, to be highly articulate—try to negotiate this difficult and troubling fact. They do so in various ways. Christine Sutherland, for example, presents the learned and prolific Mary Astell (1666-1731) as a remarkable exception to the rule. As she is the first to admit, even those enlightened humanist figures who had argued for female education in the sixteenth century did not go so far as to allow women to speak in public or to argue in print. Rather, they endorsed a silence that was, in Sutherland's words, "the feminine equivalent of the masculine virtue of eloquence" (p. 18). In spite of this cultural discour­ agement, however, and a class position that offered her no privileges to speak of, Mary Astell devoted her life to writing—and publishing—a series of re­ ligious, philosophical, and political works. Sutherland's main justification in presenting her subject as above all else a "practising rhetorician" (p. 53) is her claim that, in the course of her writing career, Astell moved from the relatively private genre of sermo to the more public genre of contentio, these two literary modes being gendered as "feminine" and "masculine" respec­ tively. In terms of Astell's publications—which range from works published in the letter format (such as her—originally private—correspondence with John Norris, published anonymously as Letters Concerning the Love ofGod, or her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, addressed to high-ranking women) to what were effectively treatises addressed to a wider reading public (such as Some Reflections upon Marriage, The Christian Religion, or her political pamphlets), this is not particularly contentious. There are times, however, when I think Sutherland overstates her case. The fact, for example, that Astell adapts her style and tone according to her destined audience—developing a "tender" and "maternal" voice when addressing a specifically female readership, and a more strident, argumentative one for everyone else—certainly demon­ strates a sensitivity to and understanding of decorum on her part, but is not in itself the major contribution to rhetorical theory that is claimed for it. This book also shows a (sometimes explicit) tendency toward self-reflection: that is to say, what makes Astell so remarkable a figure—and the natural choice of subject for a book of this kind—seems to be precisely the wav in which she comes to exemplify the feminist writer (otherwise so absent from the early modern scene) and to mirror the feminist academic who is writing or reading about her. Thus Astell's correspondence with Norris, for Reviews 233 example, is said to be an experience of further education that we might compare with the modern graduate school" (p. 42), and to have the same qualities as most good tutorial relationships" (p. 48); the letter-writing that she cultivated was the early modern equivalent of publishing in "learned journals (p. xx, citing with approval an article by Judith Rice Henderson). In her political pamphlets Astell emerges as the model scholar who "had read all the relevant books and documents, had studied all the arguments, and above all was thoroughly familiar with the historical background" (p. 117). By the end of the book, Astell is presented as being of "benefit" to "modern feminist scholars" precisely because she is "one of the earliest of their kind" (p. 153). This is not in any way to diminish Astell's achievement, of course, but only to raise the concern that, in situations where the reader is invited to identify with the subject in hand, a degree of critical distance might be...

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