Judith P. Zinsser

Translating Newton's Principia: The Marquise du Châtelet's revisions and additions for a French audience

In the 1740s, the Marquise du Châtelet translated Newtons Principia (1731, third edition) into French. Hers remains the standard translation. In addition, she wrote an extensive commentary in which she gave her own description of the System of the World, and analytical solutions to key disputed aspects of Newtons theory of universal gravitation. She also included summaries of two mathematical essays that clarified and confirmed Newtons application of his theory to observed phenomena: Aléxis–Claude Clairauts on the shape of the Earth and Daniel Bernoullis on the effects of the Sun and Moon on the tides.

Feminist Biography: A Contradiction in Terms?

This essay describes the contradictions posed for biographers by the imperatives of the feminist historical enterprise: to chronicle the lives of all women, not just the exceptional; to treat all texts critically; to acknowledge personal biases. A number of feminist biographies serve as examples of possible responses to these inherent challenges.

Women's and Men's World History? Not Yet

This article explores why women have been excluded from the narratives and analyses of world historians. It explains, for example, that the usual patriarchal narratives speak in abstractions like: “societies,” “human groups,” and “populations.” These hide the maleness of the protagonists despite women’s presence in all aspects of all histories. The creation of a separate women’s history for every region of the world over the last four decades means inclusion is possible. Obstacles remain. In the interim, the article teaches a gender inclusive world history while continuing to research and write a separate women’s world history by analyzing women’s experiences in cross-cultural comparative, thematic, or global contemporaneous frameworks.

Nancy Mitford: Lessons for Historians from a Best-Selling Author

Few eighteenth-century scholars have heard of Nancy Mitford, the English writer and socialite. Yet, in the 1950s and 1960s she wrote two best-selling biographies: the first, about Madame de Pompadour (1954); and the second, about the philosophe Emilie Du Châtelet, also famous as Voltaire’s companion (thus, Mitford’s title, Voltaire in Love, 1957). This essay describes how this self-educated, lively novelist turned to biography, and offers lessons for scholars in the tone, pace, and humor characteristic of her writing. The essay concludes with discussion of the lingering appeal of Mitford’s portrayal of Du Châtelet as “always something of the whore.” Tragically, Mitford, a woman with an exciting, incisive mind, thus perpetuated this common historical trope, denigrating women of intellect.

The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (review)

to these condemnations were critiques of the regime’s coercion of unfree labor, which some radicals described as a corruption of Christian and republican principles.5 Ultimately, the book’s many strengths outweigh its weaknesses, which are remarkably few given the ambitious scope of the project. Historians must now more than ever wrestle with the English Revolution’s central place in both English imperial history and in the making of the Atlantic world.

A Prologue for La Dame D'esprit

The marquise Du Châtelet (1706-49) offers many challenges to her biographer. The extant lives and scholarly articles are partial. Each tends to highlight only one aspect of her life: her accomplishments as a philosophe or her escapades as a courtier and as Voltaires companion of fifteen years. This prologue is part of a larger project: a biography that will convey not only the multi-faceted nature of Du Châtelets life, but also the various ways in which it has been constructed by others and now reconstructed by this historian. This prologue introduces the marquise, the biographer, and the approach. It presents three different beginnings for the biography to demonstrate the malleability of the past, the interweaving of past and present, and dilemmas common to all story-tellers.