From Serena to Hypatia: John Toland's Women

Abstract

AbstractThis paper focusses on John Toland's influential Hypatia (1720), an account of the neo-Platonist philosopher and mathematician murdered in ancient Alexandria; it also considers segments of his Letters to Serena (1704), and suggests various conjunctions between the two texts which confirm Toland's genuine and sustained feminist commitment. As I try to establish, Toland's concern is as much about contemporaneous events as it is about ‘disinterested’ history: by promoting Hypatia as the representative of philosophy in its perennial struggle with superstition and priestcraft, Toland is able to underscore the wider case for an inclusive and capacious conception of ‘enlightenment’.