Catherine Macaulay Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Bridget Hill and Christopher Hill

Critical Essay by Bridget Hill and Christopher Hill

SOURCE: “Catharine Macaulay's History and her Catalogue of Tracts,” in The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 8, No. 2, Autumn, 1993, pp. 269-85.

In the following essay, Bridget and Christopher Hill contest the charge leveled by critics like Lucy Matin Donnelly that Macaulay's historical work lacked scholastic rigor, pointing to the little-known Catalogue of Tracts that Macaulay assembled shortly before her death and which demonstrates her broad range of interests and unusually detailed scholarship.

In the eighteenth century Catharine Macaulay was far from alone as a historian of the seventeenth century, but what made her unique was that she was a woman and that she wrote a republican history of that century.¹ In looking at the various eighteenth-century versions of seventeenth-century events, and in any attempt to evaluate them, the reader is constantly coming up against the question of what sources were available to such historians. Given that we can seldom know...
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