ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on placing Damaris Masham in the social and religious context of her time, focusing particularly on her position as an educated woman. It explains the importance of letters for women philosophers, by way of introduction to a discussion of how religion figures in her correspondence with Locke and Leibniz. Damaris Masham acknowledges the various disincentives to female education, among them the discouraging image of the educated lady, especially of the philosophical lady and the reference to philosophy here means that this is quite possibly a self-portrait. Yet her letters to Locke are the most intimate or familiar' letters in her extant correspondence. Damaris Masham had religious and moral issues at her finger tips and some of the best evidence of this is the way in which she invoked religion to facilitate her entry into the Republic of Letters.
