This collection brings a new perspective to the history of philosophy, by highlighting women's contributions to philosophy and testifying to the rich history of women's thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Ruth Edith Hagengruber is Professor at Paderborn University, Germany, where she is Director of the Centre for the History of Women Philosophers. Her research is dedicated to uncovering the contributions of women in the history of philosophy and focusses among others on the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, with publications such as Émilie Du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton.

Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. She has pioneered research on women in the history of science and philosophy. Her publications include Anne Conway. A Woman Philosopher; Women, Science and Medicine (co-editor Lynette Hunter); and British Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century. She is President of the International Society for Intellectual History.

Introduction: New Perspectives on Women Philosophers 1. Women, philosophy and the history of philosophy 2. Leone Ebreo in Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogo. Between Varchi's legacy and philosophical autonomy 3. Patriarchal power as unjust: tyranny in seventeenth-century Venice 4. Oliva Sabuco de Nantes and her Nueva Filosofia: a new philosophy of human nature and the interaction between mind and body 5. Elisabeth of Bohemia's Neo-Peripatetic account of the emotions 6. Monism and individuation in Anne Conway as a critique of Spinoza 7. Tutor, salon, convent: the formation of women philosophers in early modern France 8. Mary Astell's critique of Pierre Bayle: atheism and intellectual integrity in the Pensées (1682) 9. On some footnotes to Catharine Trotter Cockburn's Defence of the Essay of Human Understanding 10. Susanna Newcome's cosmological argument 11. 'Mon petit essai': Émilie du Châtelet's Essai sur l'optique and her early natural philosophy