The current scholarly trend toward a feminist gaze provides a way to unravel structural, scientific gender bias. Reexploring herstory paves the way for a more holistic history; but to achieve this, we need to reexplore key concepts and debates, such as women's theological-political order and autonomy. Eleonora Cappuccilli fills one of these gaps with her La critica imprevista: Politica, teologia e patriarcato in Mary Astell. The five-chapter book offers an account of the diverse conflicts stemming from the complex network of legal, institutional, political, social, and theological transformations in seventeenth-century England, taking Mary Astell's worldview as a meaningful catalyst for interpreting the sociopolitical environment. The establishment of authority in English constitutional history is reconstructed from its legal and patriarchal focuses with three basic keywords: politics, theology, and patriarchy. In addressing them, Cappuccilli unknots the major ideals of the early modern period. She shows that their relationship is no happenstance: this isosceles triangle simply establishes the basis for the constitution, legitimation, and control of power. This is, in the end, the aim that made Astell brush aside the concept of nature to cast new light on the concept of power through a gendered perspective. Women were not created to live in the narrow confines of domestic space but rather to break down fences.

Astell's most famous and controversial text, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), in which she claims her authorship, was published when certain paths of female subjectivity had already been outlined, both in the territories of the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. By then an intense debate had developed on the possibility of a female identity different from the traditional, inherited one: on the one hand, the new middle classes wanted to endow their daughters a solid education; on the other, Protestants perceived women as the moral pillar of the family. But, more profoundly, Astell's judgment dwelt on the instance that triggered the exchange of views on such a delicate issue: the charismatic figure of Queen Elizabeth I. The queen's achievements bestowed upon English women the right to assimilate her powers and gifts, as well as the possibility to discuss and participate in the construction of history.

That meant to take a stand but also to make proposals. Mary Astell was an original and innovative political thinker who criticized proto-liberalism embodied in the form of patriarchal individualism. Nevertheless, she also advocated the union of church and state in the figure of the queen as a response to the disorder of the English revolutions. By asserting a radical equality of individuals, disunited and alone before God and the sovereign, Astell rethinks the encounter between politics and theology in the face of the consolidation of a new constitutional order. In doing so, she confronts her contemporary counterparts such as Hobbes, Locke, or Shaftesbury, as well as the protagonists of the revolutions.

It is noteworthy that even if this masterpiece finished by highlighting Astell's ability to rewrite the history of mankind—humankind—to end the subordination of women, Cappuccilli chooses these words written in 1697 to introduce the first chapter: “A single woman has the whole world as her family” (19). This perspective enlarges the domestic realm to the whole world, following the current rereadings of the Odyssey's Penelope or even the Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World. Astell's response to the disorder of the English revolutions had to be found in the embodiment and consolidation of a new constitutional order but also in the making of a new world. In Cappuccilli's words: “To defend absolutism and women's freedom at the same time: this is Mary Astell's ambition” (my translation; back cover).