Martha Laurens Ramsay: An Enlightend Christian?

In her Memoirs, Martha read various books, which served as the ground for her to build a dense and diversified mental life. Through reading she made books a site for experiments in personal meditations. Martha made reading a vehicle for her self-fashioning: “the achievement of a distinctive personality, a particular address to the world, a way of acting and thinking.” Mary Kelley believes that Martha’s Memoir presents “a woman fully engaged with reading.” Moreover, she presumes “reading could be a highly self-conscious act. Employed to achieve a variety of ends, it could be a means of education, a source for self-fashioning, or a basis for collective practice. Simultaneously, reading could be much more anarchic.” Kelley argues readings could offer her a good lens to enter Martha’s mind and examine how she constructed her own self-fashioning.


Joanna Bowen Gillespie also plays a very important role for us to understand Martha’s mental world. On the one hand, Gillespie pays attention to the Enlightenment ideas penetrated in her Memoirs. In interpreting the correspondence letters between Martha Laurens Ramsay and her son David Ramsay Jr., Gillespie explains that “the Enlightenment article of faith animating it is evident: knowledge itself should produce good behavior,” and her rationale was specific to the era. Moreover, she points out, “Martha Laurens Ramsay styled herself a woman of reason, a female who gloried in the use of her own mental powers and enjoyed epistolary oversight of a citizen under construction— a duty usually regarded as male. We see her touting reason as its own value as well as being a family standard.” On the other hand, she notices the significance of the leadings of Providence in shaping her own character. According to her, Martha “was less visionary and more theologically rational than seventeenth-century Puritan and Quaker prophetesses, and more domestically circumscribed or constrained than her nineteenth-century successors would be.” Through considering the intellectual trajectory, Gillespie touches the tension of her inner mind, but she doesn’t explore how enlightened Christianity worked on Martha’s mentality, as well as her intellectual tension between the enlightened thinking and religious faith.