Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fh/crac018
ISSN1477-4542
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Studies
ResumoMinerva’s French Sisters pairs imaginative reconstruction with meticulous archival research in order to illuminate the lives of six women scientists of the Enlightenment. Practitioners of diverse STEM disciplines, from astronomy to mathematics to chemistry to anatomy, these women cannily navigated the homosocial worlds of Ancien régime science and found varying degrees of recognition and success ‘in the golden moment before the Revolution sent women back into their homes, disenfranchised and out of sight’. Well-known in their own day but probably unknown to each other and certainly little-known today (especially in Anglophone scholarship), they symbolize the successes and failures of the French Enlightenment to make the natural sciences a more hospitable place for women. The book develops across five chapters, each one offering a rich and lively biography of one of the six women, with the exception of the third chapter’s double portrait of the group’s two botanists. One of the book’s great strengths is the wealth of detail Nina Rattner Gelbart has unearthed and assembled in order to bring these long-neglected women to life. We learn about the life and career of Elisabeth Ferrand, a reclusive mathematician, early champion of Newtonian natural philosophy, and close collaborator of Condillac; Nicole Reine Lapaute, an astronomer who accurately predicted the return of Halley’s Comet in 1759; and Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, who leveraged her skill in botanical illustration to become the only woman ever to hold the prestigious post of dessinateur du roi at the Jardin du Roi. We also meet Marie Geneviève d’Arconville, the daughter of a wealthy tax farmer who built a chemical laboratory on her husband’s estate and did important work on putrefaction; the anatomist Marie-Marguerite Biheron, whose innovative wax models of human anatomy advanced medical education and obstetrics and became a must-see on any Grand Tourist’s visit to Paris; and Jeanne Barret, a woman of peasant origins who travelled around the world on Bougainville’s voyage disguised as the valet of a botanist named Commerson and with him collected huge numbers of plant specimens representing thousands of species previously unknown to Europeans. These are scientific biographies, to be sure, but also ‘tales of lives lived whole’, in which the pursuit of knowledge is shown to be inseparable from life trajectories, social networks and cultural milieux.
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