Abstract

In an age when women were not formally admitted to Cambridge, Conway was tutored by mail by Henry More, who had also taught her half-brother John Finch. Her notebooks, now lost, were published post-humously in 1690 in Latin translation by men who respected her and who with self-effacement introduced her work without mentioning their own names. Conway proposed replacing the doctrine of the Trinity with a metaphysical metaphor in which God is the Creator, Christ is mediating “Middle Nature,” and the third element is Creation. Hobbes and Spinoza she critiques for failing to distinguish between Creator and creation. She also criticized the dualism of Descartes and of More, developing instead a “vitalistic monism”. More himself had written of “Monad or Unite” in 1653.