Abstract
This article examines two similar but non-identical areas: early modern women (writers) and science, and early modern women (writers) and natural philosophy. Using the term “science” to indicate ways of knowing the natural world that developed especially from the program that Francis Bacon laid out in his Great Instauration—knowledge drawn from empirical observation or data gathered from the senses, from experimentation, and from inductive reasoning—implicitly suggests that “natural philosophy,” while rigorous in its own way, is not exactly or not quite science. The first section of this article surveys the many historians and critics from the last few decades who have argued forcefully that women were active participants in the scientific practices of early modernity, even though they may have been excluded from the formal institution of science of the seventeenth century, the Royal Society. The second section focuses on women writers of science, those who recorded their knowledges in print and manuscript. The third section argues that we should take seriously the role of natural philosophy in order to see a clearer picture of the rich range of “natural knowledges”—and the participation by women in those natural knowledges—in early modernity. The article as a whole highlights the difference it makes to think not just about women (women and science, women and natural philosophy), but about women writers: the occlusion of women’s scientific and natural philosophical work from the stories we tell about early modernity comes from the different access to publishing opportunities between the genders.
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Blake, L. (2022). Early Modern Women, Science, and Natural Philosophy. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_368-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_368-1