At the end of September, our PhD student Hanne Berendse returned to Innsbruck after a six-month visiting studentship at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, she worked on the final stages of her dissertation with Professor Dániel Margóscy, a social and cultural historian of early modern science.

During her time at Cambridge, she also presented work from the SRA’s subproject on Women’s Voices in Neo-Latin, which aims to broaden the canon of early modern women’s writing towards Northern and Eastern Europe and into scientific and political discourse. She spoke about the political writings of Johanna Otho at the Cambridge Political Thought and Intellectual History Graduate Workshop, and also discussed the various forms of classical reception in Johanna Otho’s poetry at the Classical Reception Seminar, hosted by the Cambridge Faculty of Classics. In July, she visited the University of Oxford to speak at the interdisciplinary Body in History, where she discussed how the representation of the female body in early modern anatomical images helped stabilise and legitimise negative preconceptions about women’s creative abilities.

July also saw the publication of the Bloomsbury Academic Anthology of Neo-Latin Literature Written by Women (edited by Stephen Harrison and Gesine Manuwald), to which both members of the Women’s Latin subproject contributed a chapter. In line with the project’s aims, Berendse’s chapter focuses on the defence of women’s learning written by Johanna Otho, who hailed from Northern Europe, whilst Luggin‘s treats Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the first woman to be appointed as professor of mathematics.