The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God

Abstract

Pietro turned his palazzo into the site of an elegant salon, and rather than marrying off his gifted daughter, he trained her to offer intellectual stimulation to the magistrates, crown representatives, lawyers, physicians, ecclesiastics, and distinguished foreign guests who eventually came expecting to be impressed by the female Wunderkind - including Charles de Brosses, then counselor (later president) of the parliament of Dijon, who wrote about the episode in his famous travel book Lettres d'Italie (c. 1799). According to this reading, her enthusiasm for the sciences lapsed as soon as she was no longer the cornerstone of a family advancement strategy, and so she turned her attention almost exclusively to spirituality and philanthropic interests that she had nurtured from the time of her upbringing, inspired by the ecclesiastics in the family's private circle.

The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God. By Massimo Mazzotti. [Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Mathematics.] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2007. Pp. xxii, 217. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-801-88709-3.)

Gaetana Agnesi is best known as the author of one of the earliest Newtonian mathematics textbooks published in Italy (Istituzioni analitiche, 1748). That she was also regarded in her time as a holy woman and benefactress of the poor in her native city of Milan has so far escaped the attention of most scholars on early-modern culture. In this concise study Mazzotti attempts, as the title suggests, to explain how these two aspects were interrelated. The key appears to be in the city of Milan itself. There, Pietro Agnesi, father of Gaetana, attempted to pilot a moderately wealthy family into the upper echelons of local polite society. It was the springtime of the Italian preEnlightenment, which had far less to do with the Spinozist movement championed by Jonathan Israel (New York, 2006) in his rather narrow interpretation of eighteenth-century thought than it did with Lodovico Antonio Muratori and the subsequent reformist current charted in the five volumes of Franco Venturi 's still unsurpassed Settecento riformatore (Turin, 1969-90); and new salons and academies were dedicated to public education and social welfare. Pietro turned his palazzo into the site of an elegant salon, and rather than marrying off his gifted daughter, he trained her to offer intellectual stimulation to the magistrates, crown representatives, lawyers, physicians, ecclesiastics, and distinguished foreign guests who eventually came expecting to be impressed by the female Wunderkind - including Charles de Brosses, then counselor (later president) of the parliament of Dijon, who wrote about the episode in his famous travel book Lettres d'Italie (c. 1799). Of the education that led Gaetana to join twin interests in spirituality and mathematics, there exists a remarkable documentary record, including her notes on Edmond Pourchet's Carte sian/Malebranchian philosophy textbook, which she augmented with citations from Newton and John Keill. Although she was never allowed to attend formal schools (like Elena Cornaro Piscopia, the first female laureate at Padua a half-century before), her home education was so rigorous that she published her theses (Propositiones philosophicae) in 1738, according to the practice of Jesuit students, thus securing her position as a woman intellectual in a world of men. She was already a member of the best Italian academic societies (including the Bolognese Academy of Sciences) before she produced the crowning achievement of her education, the Istituzioni, a book designed to convey the latest advances in mathematical analysis. An appointment as honorary lecturer (without teaching duties) at the University of Bologna, made personally by Pope Benedict XIV at the height of a program of cultural improvement that also included the appointment of Laura Bassi to the same institution, confirmed her widespread reputation.

That Gaetana chose to withdraw from the world of philosophy and mathematics shortly after her appointment to the university is explained by her father's death. According to this reading, her enthusiasm for the sciences lapsed as soon as she was no longer the cornerstone of a family advancement strategy, and so she turned her attention almost exclusively to spirituality and philanthropic interests that she had nurtured from the time of her upbringing, inspired by the ecclesiastics in the family's private circle. In various capacities, culminating in her appointment as an administrator of a foundation for the urban poor, she lived on to age eighty-one, writing no more books, but producing a flood of correspondence, much of which has survived.

Fortunately, Mazzotti largely ignores his own prescription in this book of undertaking "not the pursuit of absolute objectivity . . . but rather the combining of our socio-historical reconstructions with a reflection on the origins of our analytical categories and their meaning" (p. xx). Instead, what he offers is a nuanced and well-documented historical narrative that restores to us a key personage in eighteenth-century science and spirituality, combining cultural and political history with the history of the family.