Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy

Madame, are you ready to enter into the sanctuary of philosophy?

—Francesco Algarotti

Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Giuseppe Compagnoni created the last of a number of fictional women whose questions about scientific learning facilitated the popularization of new doctrines in the early modern period. His Chemistry for Ladies (1796), explicitly modeled upon Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) rather than Marie Meurdrac’s Chemistry Made Easy for Ladies (1666), began as a series of letters between himself and Countess Marianna Rossi of Ferrara on the ideas of Lavoisier. Expressing skepticism over a woman’s desire to learn a subject as dry and difficult as chemistry, Compagnoni is reassured by the countess that she indeed wishes to be initiated into the mysteries of Lavoisier’s new language because chemistry “by now has become the fashionable science.” ¹

Like so many of her fictional predecessors, the countess knows nothing of this particular science and is incapable of attaining the knowledge on her own. She awaits instruction. Salon conversations about this new science have excited her curiosity; as part of her participation in the social world of the elites, she must constantly inform herself about the latest intellectual novelties in order to be a full-fledged member of civil society. Like Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Marquise de G*** and Algarotti’s Marchesa di E***, she seeks a pleasurable understanding of science. General knowledge rather than expertise is required; it is enough to put Lavoisier in the ordinary idiom, without attempting to explain the details of the decline of phlogiston theory.

As the conversation between Compagnoni and his countess progresses, we discover that their current talks about chemistry are part of an ongoing dialogue between the two about scientific affairs that has spanned much of the preceding century. In their youth, they had read and discussed Algarotti’s Newtonianism for Ladies in the countess’s palace, reenacting the optical experiments it described. Recalling these past events, Compagnoni offers us a vivid portrait of the imagined life of a female natural philosopher in eighteenth-century Italy: “In those days, your dressing table was all cluttered with prisms, lenses, and every other tool needed for those studies.” ² Compagnoni and the countess experimented so often that it was a marvel no one had accused them of magic. The ideal readers of Algarotti, they had fulfilled his promise “to call wild philosophy from the solitary cabinets and libraries of the learned to introduce it into the circles and dressing rooms of ladies.” ³ Domesticating science was a means of civilizing it; as Algarotti suggested, the transposition of experimental philosophy from the academy to the salon had made it sociable. In the intimacy of the experimental boudoir, strewn with the artifacts of Newtonian science, the philosopher and his female companion denuded nature to integrate it better into civil discourse. “We anatomized light and, stripping it of its luminous glitter, by our will we made it descend into your cabinet, constraining it to show us its best secrets.” Such activities were done, not only with an eye to the fictional encounters of Fontenelle and Algarotti, but also in imitation of famous noblewomen who had made a reputation for themselves as Newtonians. During that period, the countess’s palace in San Andrea had become “a little Cirey” and she the “Châtelet of Romagna,” lacking only Voltaire to complete her image. ⁴

In this nostalgic portrayal of Newtonian optics as an affaire du coeur between philosophers and ladies, Compagnoni captured well the spirit in which Algarotti himself and Fontenelle before him had portrayed the popularization of science. As Fontenelle wrote in the preface to his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), “I’ve placed a woman in these Conversations . . . to make the work more enticing, and to encourage women through the example of a woman who, having nothing of an extraordinary character, without ever exceeding the limitations of a person who has no knowledge of science, never fails to understand what’s said to her.” ⁵ Throughout the eighteenth century...