Ann Finch

  Notes and Events:

• Note. She was born in London in 1631, and raised in the house now known as Kensington Palace, which then belonged to the Finch family.

• Note. ¹¹³ In 1651 Anne Conway married Edward, third Viscount Conway, who was heir to estates in Warwickshire and County Antrim in Ireland. Their one child, Heneage, died in infancy. The Conway family possessed one of the finest private libraries of the period, and her husband appears to have encouraged his wife's intellectual interests. However, from her teens she suffered from periodic bouts of illness, which became more acute and more frequent as she got older. It was as a result of a search for relief from this that she came into contact with the Flemish physician and philosopher, Francis Mercury van Helmont, son of the iatrochemist, Jan Baptiste van Helmont. During the last decade of her life, the younger Van Helmont lived in her household. It was through Van Helmont that Anne Conway was introduced to kabalistic thought and to Quakerism. These encounters resulted in radical new departures for her; on the one hand, her study of the Jewish kabbalah contributed to her decisive break with the Cartesianism of her philosophical upbringing; on the other hand, her encounter with Van Helmont's Quaker friends led to her conversion to Quakerism, shortly before she died in 1679.

• Note. Lady Anne Conway (nee Anne Finch) was one of a tiny minority of seventeenth-century women who was able to pursue an interest in philosophy. She was associated with the Cambridge Platonists, particularly Henry More (1614-1687). Her only surviving treatise, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously and anonymously in 1690. This propounds an ontology of spirit, derived from the attributes of God, which she sets out in opposition to More, Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. Her concept of the monad, which is indebted to the Kabbalism, anticipates Leibniz.

Ann married third Viscount Edward Conway, Earl of Conway, son of Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway and Frances Popham, about 1651.¹¹² (third Viscount Edward Conway, Earl of Conway was born about 1623 and died in 1683.)