The course Marginalia in Books from Christopher Ohge is just crying out to have an annotated syllabus.

Wish I could follow along directly, but there's some excellent reference material hiding in the brief outline of the course.

Perhaps a list of interesting people here too for speaking at https://iannotate.org/ 2022 hiding in here? A session on the history of annotation and marginalia could be cool there.

Online

• http://jacquelinebroad.com/
• https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/jacqueline-broad
• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3095-6770
• https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bZ0f2BIAAAAJ&hl=en

Short Bio

Jacqueline Broad is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Her area of research expertise is early modern women’s philosophy. She writes on early modern theories of virtue, the ethical and religious foundations of women’s rights, historical conceptions of the self, and connections between feminism and Cartesianism in the seventeenth century.

She has recently become Series Editor for Cambridge University Press’s new Elements series on Women in the History of Philosophy.

Select bibliography

• Jacqueline Broad, ‘Undoing Bayle’s Scepticism: Astell’s Marginalia as Disarmament’, in Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins, edited by Patrick Spedding and Paul Tankard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 61–84.

I'm really glad she thought women should write as they spoke, rather than with an inflated style. If this first sentence is plainspeak, I'm not sure I could handle much verbosity.

I'm struck by how much this statement rejects Locke's idea that simple ideas and concepts were related to universal ideals which all humans understood. Here Astell notes that our knowledge "is at best defective," a move that seems almost fatalistic if not for the additional qualifier of "always progressive." So we'll never know everything (or anything) perfectly (whatever that means), but you can still grow in knowledge.

Prejudices come back again--Hume, Vico, Astell...those are three that in recent memory have used this word (or the intros to them did).

Is it possible to have the situation that Sheridan refers to here, one without prejudice entirely? Even in a new subject, couldn't one jump to conclusions or make assumptions about (to pre-judge) it?

Complete opposite of Astell's claim on the lack of "material" difference between speaking and writing

You shouldn't need to wear too much makeup/use too much rhetoric, you are naturally beautiful/telling the truth.

Would I be wrong in assuming that she expects the reader to use rhetoric strictly for noble purposes?

Astell

Astell: you don't need a lot of fluff, people are naturally attracted to the truth.

It seems like Palmer holds a view somewhere between Astell and Grimke, in that women have appropriate spheres in which to "act," but that sometimes God will allow women to "be brought out of the ordinary sphere of action" in order to do His will. The fact that God approves this allows women to keep their "womanly grace".

Opposite of Astell, who said that women should not speak publicly and should instead speak in "appropriate spheres".

I suppose Astell would allow a little style and effect, as long as the substance was true.

Why is there such a move from the classics?