The sixth Balzan Skinner Lecture with Balzan Skinner Fellow 2014-15 Dr Anna Becker.

While ‘gender’ is a well-established subject in many historical disciplines, such as cultural history, social history and global history, the same cannot be said for the history of political thought. Especially once we turn to the sort of early modern political thought that can be seen as republican in a broad sense, women seem to disappear. They are simply not political: they are not citizens, they cannot participate in the sphere of the city or the commonwealth. In my lecture I shall develop a methodological approach to the question of how to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms and show – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.