Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France . By Nina Rattner Gelbart
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/knac244
ISSN1468-2931
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Natural History
ResumoA detail of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s searching portrait of Mademoiselle Ferrand méditant sur Newton (1752) stares out at the reader from the jacket of the book. The artfully posed sitter in her beribboned and lace-edged toilette du matin is shown in front of an impressive tome, its size swollen to denote its importance. The running headline ‘DE NEWTON’ allows us to identify the volume as a copy of an Enlightenment bestseller: Voltaire’s Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, dedicated to the most famous ‘woman of science’ of the French Enlightenment, Émilie Du Châtelet, ‘France’s Minerva’, herself the first translator into French of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. The cover illustration is a perfect choice for this series of short monographic chapters on six remarkable Frenchwomen, born between 1700 and 1740, who all deserve to be remembered for their practice of and contribution to scientific research. Along with the ‘celebrated Mlle Ferrand’, the author deals with Nicole-Reine Lepaute, ‘astronomer and “learned calculator”’; botanists Madeleine Françoise Basseporte and Jeanne Barret; the anatomist Marie Marguerite Biheron; and the chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. Nina Rattner Gelbart draws on a wide variety of sources — some of them unpublished — from academic memoirs to letters, legal documents, and traces of more or less scurrilous gossip. Some of the six figures she presents are a little better known than others but all are fascinating. Many of them had to fight prejudice to be allowed to acquire an education and pursue their scientific activity. All too often their discoveries were attributed to male figures. The main merit of Gelbart’s study lies in granting them a degree of visibility often denied them by traditional historiography. This is without a doubt a worthy ambition. It is however legitimate to question whether it is served by the book’s strange hesitation between academic prose and ‘interludes’ composed of chirpy letters purporting to be written directly to the subjects. The latter are called by their first names in a practice reminiscent (presumably unintentionally) of the bracketing of women and children as minors. Whilst one can understand the essayist’s engagement with her subjects, the quasi-identification she sometimes appears to feel as she speculates about their reactions to having streets named after them or articles dedicated to them sits uncomfortably at times with a scholarly approach. One struggles to imagine a book with similar intentions dedicated, say, to eighteenth-century male scientists, oscillating between straightforward biographical sketches and pseudo-epistolary chit-chat: ‘Hey René-Antoine, you who were so interested in measuring the temperature right, how do you feel about global warming?’ might be an opening gambit for a chapter about Réaumur in a similarly conversational vein to the one adopted here. Such an angle is certainly imaginative but this reader at least is, alas, far from convinced that there was no better way to serve the intended (and once again admirable) purpose.
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