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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...