Ladies in the Scientific Revolution

Two exhibitions were recently held in the Library of the Society, one on Women in Science and another on the Archives of the Scientific Revolution. The first did not go so far back as the scientific revolution, with one exception, the translation of Newton's Principia by the Marquise du Chàtelet. Yet it was in the scientific revolution, conveniently taken as running from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, that women are first known to have engaged in natural philosophy. Eight ladies certainly had some part in the scientific revolution, not just as tricoteuses watching the heads roll, but themselves helping to bring down the guillotine upon Aristotelians, Cartesians, astrologers, hermetics and mystics.