Pre-Print: An Unrecorded 1785 Discourse by Catharine Macaulay

This article examines a previously overlooked discourse entitled ‘A Quaker’s Sermon’, which was published in the September 1785 issue of the European Magazine, purportedly by Catharine Macaulay, the celebrated historian, philosopher, and republican writer. It provides some reasons in support of the European Magazine’s attribution of the discourse to Macaulay and explicates the work’s connections to her wider social thought. It also suggests that Macaulay might have published the discourse to engage in a rhetorical exercise that was prohibited by most eighteenth-century religious denominations other than the Quakers: writing a sermon as a woman.