Anne Conway and the Metaphysics of Vital Monism

Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway (1631–1679), born Anne Finch, was largely self-taught in philosophy through correspondence and study at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, since as a woman she was barred from university education at Cambridge, where her brother John Finch studied. She nonetheless developed a close intellectual relationship with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who tutored her by letter beginning around 1650 and later described her, in the dedication to his Antidote against Atheism (1653), as possessing a mind that outstripped his own; through More she was also exposed to the Kabbalist scholar Francis Mercury van Helmont, who lived at Ragley Hall for over a decade and introduced her to Lurianic Kabbalah and to contact with radical religious dissenters including Quakers, a faith Conway herself formally adopted late in life, in 1677, partly through the influence of her chronic and excruciating migraines, which drove her toward heterodox medical and spiritual remedies.