Christine de Pizan -- Women of the Italian renaissance -- From Anne de Beaujeu to Marguerite de Navarre -- Queen Elizabeth I of England -- From the Reformation to Marie le Jars de Gournay -- Women of the English civil war era -- Quaker women -- The Fronde and Madeleine de Scudéry -- Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle -- Women of the Glorious Revolution -- Women of late seventeenth-century France -- Mary Astell.