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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was an outstanding example of what the early Enlightenment chose to describe as Scientific Ladies. She is best known today for her correspondence; in an age of letter-writing, she is perhaps the nearest English counterpart of the great French epistolist, Madame de Sevigne. Her interests and accomplishments, however, ranged as widely as those of any of her male contemporaries; she wrote a series of "Court Eclogs," poetry which Alexander Pope felt moved to preserve a manuscript copy of, though "she was prevented by the decorum of her sex and social class from publishing under her name" (Montagu, 1977, p. vii), and distinguished herself as a proto-feminist two generations before Mary Wollstonecraft.

She was also keenly interested in scientific subjects of all sorts; writing her daughter about her granddaughter's education,

I believe there are few heads capable of making Sir I. Newton's calculations, but the result of them is not difficult to be understood by a moderate capacity. Do

not fear this should make her affect the character of

Lady --, or Lady --, or Mrs --: those women are

ridiculous not because they have learning, but because

they have it not. (Alic, 1986, pp. 90-91)

As the wife of the English Ambassador to Turkey, she had the opportunity and the powers of observation to take note of an indigenous practice among Turkish peasants which caused them to be nearly free of the scourge of smallpox, a disease that then raged in Europe, killing or disfiguring persons of every class. (Lady Montagu herself had suffered its ravages as a young woman.) Upon her return to England, she introduced smallpox inoculation to that country, using her social position to encourage the practice among the highest ranks of a stratified society. Princess Caroline, daughter of King George I, had her own children inoculated upon Lady Montagu's suggestion.

In spite of this...

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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:07, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690870.html