A Woman of Letters and Science, Translator in the Enlightenment: Mme d’Arconville and the preface to her Essai pour servir à l’histoire de la putréfaction

Abstract

This paper attempts to survey the life and work of one of the most important women scientists of the 17th century: Mme d’Arconville, translator of English and Italian works, as well as of her own essays. The fact that she contracted smallpox when she was 22 and its subsequent physical aftereffects made her an indefatigable worker, properly educated in the fields of physics, anatomy, chemistry, medicine, botany and agriculture. She was in close contact with the most relevant French humanists and scientists thanks to her high social and economic status. Her melancholic and thoughtful nature, together with an unusual thirst for knowledge led her to publish seventy volumes of works anonymously, although her biographers believed that she had written and translated many more. In the laboratory she owned in her country house at Meudon she carried out experiments on gums, resins and the effects of putrefaction in order to improve food preservation.