Fountains of knowledge: middling women and the production, consumption and transmission of natural knowledge, 1760-1810

Women’s engagement with natural knowledge in the late eighteenth century has long been regarded as the province of the wealthy and a handful of exceptional individuals. This interdisciplinary thesis demonstrates that on the contrary, women of the middling sort inhabited a cultural landscape where knowledge of the natural world was a regular presence. Drawing on manuscript recipe collections, journals, correspondence, periodicals, newspaper advertisements, booksellers’ accounts and pedagogical texts, it reveals a much greater depth of knowledge and understanding of the natural world than previously recognised.

Six interlocking chapters, each adopting a specific historiographical approach, underscore a continuum of engagement, from creating better fermented goods to attending lectures on natural philosophy and writing introductory scientific texts. The chapters variously examine: middling women’s deployment of household knowledge and the twin drivers of enquiry and economic improvement; women’s engagement with public lectures and encounters with natural knowledge in books and periodicals as an aspect of self-improvement; the hidden role of the natural world in girls’ education and pedagogical texts whose writers’ female characters undertook empirical activity.

These chapters are underpinned by five case studies rooted in everyday practices which offer a social history of knowledge. Farmer Mary Stacey (fl.1764-1801), seeking to improve the speed of fermentation for gooseberry vinegar in rural Somerset, Jane Ewbank (1768-1824), discussing her scientific ‘difficulties’ with lecturer Henry Moyes in York, Elizabeth Leathes (1748-1815), systematically testing imitation wines in Norwich, Penzance Ladies Book Club (1770-1895), circulating volumes on volcanoes, and Ann Evens (fl.1788-c.1831) at Plymouth Dock, reading and copying to improve her family’s medical outcomes.

This thesis argues that these women were active agents who constructed complex and multi-layered knowledge as readers, writers, educators and knowledge makers and suggests that the extent and depth of this engagement requires us to rethink the boundaries of the history of science.