Mary Astell's theory of friendship is rich and interesting: it presents the reader with an interpretive puzzle that addresses the nature and roles of virtue and love in friendship, among other things. Recently, Jacqueline Broad and Nancy Kendrick have tackled this puzzle. Broad offers a loosely Aristotelian interpretation, and Kendrick offers an anti‐Aristotelian Christian Platonist interpretation. However, neither fully discharges the apparent tensions within Astell's account, nor do they address what I take to be the most significant result of Astell's theory. I offer a third interpretation that both makes sense of Astell's account and incorporates aspects of both Broad and Kendrick's views. With this account in hand, I turn to the upshot of Astell's theory of friendship, a nascent view of relational autonomy that emerges from friendship. Astell's theory of friendship is fascinating because relational autonomy was not formally theorized until hundreds of years later.

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.

Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo, though thinking and writing in different social contexts, each offer an account of prejudice which bears a deep philosophical resonance to that of the other. This resonance is striking and mutually illuminating: Gournay and Amo develop a view of prejudice as a kind of epistemic and moral viciousness that damages both the prejudicial person and their socio‐epistemic neighbors. Their accounts highlight how agents are rightly held responsible for prejudice, as it is the agents' epistemic negligence and moral failure that allows prejudice to take hold. As such, their view offers a balance between a critical examination of individuals and an acknowledgement of the deep sociality that pervades the epistemic domain.

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