And so people did. One of the most influential treatments of the history of philosophy in the English speaking world is the hugely ambitious and admirably clear study by Frederick Copleston, an Oxford trained classicist who converted to Catholicism, became a Jesuit priest, and famously debated his friend A. J. Ayer as well as Bertrand Russell on philosophical and theological matters. In elegant concise prose, Copleston kept to the lengthwise approach, displaying the whole history of philosophy in nine volumes, published between 1946–75 and widely read in the English-speaking world. Although Copleston includes mystics like Master Eckhart (1260-1328) and prominent Jesuit scholastics like Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), he entirely ignores the richly philosophical spiritual writings of even the most prominent late medieval women, reducing the entirety of philosophy to a series of great men, each responding to the ones who went before.

Analytically trained historians working in the mid-20th century were satisfied to rummage through the “great systems” of the canonical great men to find their philosophical gems. And who can blame them? From Bertrand Russell’s book on Leibniz (1900) to Peter Strawson’s study of Kant (1966), prominent philosophers could grind their own philosophical axes using historical texts. They felt justified in restricting themselves to the standard story about modern philosophy and its limited range of problems, to which they could apply their philosophical tools with the hope of producing innovative ideas and arguments for themselves and their colleagues. One did not need to worry one’s head with the social and political complications of early modern Europe, much less dirty one’s hands with the messiness of its theology. One could focus on what mattered to properly educated philosophers.

This approach was doomed to fail. The richness and diversity of early modern philosophy were bound to become evident, engendering a growing awareness of the inadequacy of the standard story.

The engendering of that inadequacy was itself gendered. When feminist scholars in the 1980s began to explore early modern women writers, they discovered both the richness of the period’s philosophy and the inadequacy of the lengthwise approach. Scholars like Eileen O’Neill dared historians to widen their scope and include long-forgotten figures, foreseeing how women’s philosophies would offer significant insights into the period’s central debates. This strategy has produced significant results and begun to influence the way historians of philosophy think about the period.

Most relevant to the reconsideration of Descartes and the subjective individual that he was supposed to have invented is the recent recognition that late medieval spiritual meditations — especially those written by women like Julian of Norwich, Hadewijch of Brabant, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila — involved the need to focus on the meditator’s subjectivity as a means to rethink everything the meditator has previously learned about the world. The point was to learn not to care about the external matters so as to develop new habits and beliefs. For most meditators, the only proper means to do this was through subjective exploration.

Longstanding prejudice against women, their capacities to reason, and their right to teach had left women out of philosophy for centuries. But the 12th century witnessed the beginning of a shift to meditative practices emphasizing introspection and feelings. Although created by men, the new forms of spiritual practice gave women the right, for the first time in centuries to write and be read.