Catherine Macaulay Critical Essay | Critical Essay by F. G. A. Pocock

Critical Essay by F. G. A. Pocock

SOURCE: “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda L. Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 243-58.

In the following essay, Pocock analyzes Macaulay's History of England in the context of the age in which she lived, concluding that the greatness of her work was unfortunately overshadowed by the work of David Hume and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Let us begin by recalling the best-known facts about Catharine Macaulay.¹ She wrote a number of works, of which by far the most prominent is a History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (i.e., that of George I), which appeared in eight volumes between 1763 and 1771 and, after an interval of ten years, 1781. During that interval she began a separate history of England from the revolution of 1688 to her own time in a series...
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