Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century

Republic of Women recaptures a lost chapter in the narrative of intellectual history. It tells the story of a transnational network of female scholars who were active members of the seventeenth-century republic of letters and demonstrates that this intellectual commonwealth was a much more eclectic and diverse assemblage than has been assumed. These seven scholars - Anna Maria van Schurman, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, Dorothy Moore, Bathsua Makin and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh - were philosophers, schoolteachers, reformers and mathematicians. They hailed from England, Ireland, Germany, France and The Netherlands. And together with their male colleagues - men like Descartes, Huygens, Hartlib and Montaigne - they represented the spectrum of contemporary approaches to science, faith, politics and the advancement of learning. Carol Pal uses their collective biography to reconfigure the intellectual biography of early modern Europe, offering a new, expanded analysis of the seventeenth-century community of ideas.

Author: Carol Pal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 06/07/2012
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781107018211

About the Author
Pal, Carol: - Carol Pal is an Assistant Professor of History at Bennington College, Vermont. She received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Stanford University, California, where her dissertation won the Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfield Dissertation Prize. She has held a number of library fellowships, including a Francis Bacon Foundation fellowship from the Huntington Library and an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Clark Library, University of California. Los Angeles; she has also won research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Jacob K. Javits program. The focus of her current research is a reconsideration of the history of the book, using case studies highlighting the phenomenon of corporate scribal publication.