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46 24 AN AGE OF TRANSFORMATION Religion and Philosophy Finally, something should be said about religion, which was an important part of the context in which people philosophized in early modern times. Religion was central to daily lives and at the heart of contemporary politics. Across Europe, the seventeenth century was a period of religious strife and fragmentation. 47 In the British Isles as in Europe major tensions divided Protestants from Catholics and anti-Catholicism is a persistent theme in both politics and religion throughout the seventeenth century.

43 As with their male counterparts, the first women philosophers emerge from the ranks of the nobility: Anne Conway was a Viscountess, Margaret Cavendish a Duchess. Subsequently, British women philosophers are drawn from the educated middle classes: Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Another aspect of the extra-mural move of philosophy was, literally, the new spaces which served as fora for philosophical discussion. There had always been circles where philosophical ideas were discussed in a non-academic context, and the seventeenth century is no exception.

Jennifer Ashworth, ‘Text-books: A Case Study—Logic’ [1400 to 1557]. In J. B. Trapp and Lotte Hellinga (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 380–6; E. Jennifer Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company); W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956). For a survey of British logic books, see Marco Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism: Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570–1689) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).