This volume of the Cambridge History of Science covers the period from roughly 1490 to 1730, which is known to anglophone historians of Europe as the “early modern” era, a term pregnant with expectations of things to come. These things were of course mostly unknown and unanticipated by the Europeans who lived during those years, and had they been asked to give their own epoch a name, they would perhaps have called it “the new age” (aetas nova). New worlds, East and West, had been discovered, new devices such as the printing press had been invented, new faiths propagated, new stars observed in the heavens with new instruments, new forms of government established and old ones overthrown, new artistic techniques exploited, new markets and trade routes opened, new philosophies advanced with new arguments, and new literary genres created whose very names, such as “news” and “novel,” advertised their novelty.

Some of the excitement generated by this ferment is captured in Nova reperta (New Discoveries), a series of engravings issued in Antwerp in the early seventeenth century, after the late sixteenth-century designs of the Flemish painter and draftsman Jan van der Straet (1523–1605). The title page shows numbered icons of the first nine discoveries celebrated in the series: of the Americas, the compass, gunpowder, printing, the mechanical clock, guaiacum (an American wood used in the treatment of the French disease, or syphilis), distillation, the cultivation of silkworms, and the harnessing of horses (Figure 1.1). Later editions of the series include depictions of the manufacture of cane sugar, the discovery of a method for finding longitude by the declination of the compass, and the invention of the techniques of painting using oil glazes and of copper engraving itself.

INTRODUCTION

At the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle cautioned against confusing the kind of evidence and degree of certainty suitable to various disciplines: ‘For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.’ Seventeenth-century thinkers from the most varied backgrounds and with the most varied objectives made Aristotle’s warning their motto but turned it to quite non-Aristotelian ends. Theologians, jurists, historians, and natural philosophers vastly expanded the realm of the probable at the expense of that of the demonstrative and denied the possibility of irrefragable certainty to all disciplines except mathematics and perhaps metaphysics. Whereas Aristotle had hoped for sciences of, inter alia, physics and astronomy worthy of the name, grounded in demonstration, the seventeenth-century admirers of the introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics doubted that any part of natural philosophy could aspire to such certainty. However, theirs was not a counsel of despair. On the contrary, they regarded contemporary developments in natural philosophy as marked advances over scholastic achievements. They were able simultaneously to demote the new physics to the status of probable knowledge and to affirm its superiority to Aristotelian physics because they understood ‘probable’ in a new way.

Introduction

It was predestined that the history of gender and the history of science and medicine would converge, for they share a central preoccupation with the understanding and uses of nature. They also share a framework for analyzing conceptions of nature and their applications, that of naturalization. Reduced to its essentials, “naturalization” refers to ways of fortifying various social, cultural, political, or economic conventions by presenting them as part of the natural order. Naturalization is a leitmotif of gender studies, many of which show how forgers and enforcers of gender identities have appealed ceaselessly to the authority of nature, and how the interpreters of nature – natural philosophers, natural scientists, and physicians – have often aided and abetted that transfer of authority. In the context-dominated science studies of the last decade, naturalization has been the bridge carrying the heaviest traffic between science and its social context: Galileo, for example, “naturalizes” the shaky political legitimacy of the Medicis by christening the newly discovered moons of Jupiter in their honor; Darwin “naturalizes” the contested theories and practices of British political economy in the theory of natural selection. In both gender and science studies, naturalization is ideology at full strength, hardening the flimsy conventions of culture into the immutable, inevitable, and indifferent dictates of nature.

In this essay, I would like to use the history of early modern conceptions of the female intellect to challenge the notion of naturalization as it is currently deployed in both gender and science studies.