Letters - let me first check whether I can get them via interlibrary loans here in Germany, or whether the Stabi has them. Unfortunately, it will be October till I am in Munich again, by which time I hope we won't have another lockdown, but 80 Dollars is still a lot.
The Marquise: well, Algarotti dissertation writer as I recall also points out that Algarotti didn't invent the "noble lady has science explained to her as a way for author to explain it to reader" concept but copied it from a previous work by someone else. Lady Mary's biographer Grundy, btw, argues that Lady Mary as well as Émilie might have influenced Algarotti's depiction, and points out that lacking erotic enthusiasm for her or not, he did take her serious as an author and did learn from her (not the other way around):
Of the poems of hers which he kept, in her handwriting or his own, several are not original but extemporary adaptations, either from others or from herself . This does not mean that he sapped her originality but that she was thinking and writing on the spur of the moment, as she often did in topical writing. Now she was mediating for him the English poetic tradition . Among other things this was a tutor -pupil relationship , with the woman , unusually, as tutor . Algarotti kept the erotic addresses, from woman to man and from man to woman, which she crafted out of Lansdowne or Addison ( who in turn was just then drawing on Horace) . He also kept a political epigram which she had already adapted and updated , and a dramatic speech she wrote for Brutus, justifying his murder of Caesar. (...)
During his months in England Algarotti was finishing his version of Newton's Optics ( published at Milan , late 1737) . Lady Mary (an experienced collaborator) and Hervey listened , praised, and offered linguistic and other finishing touches. Algarotti set the scientist - narrator's dialogues with his noble, brilliant , and beautiful female pupil in an arbour or private Parnassus, which reflects both Lady Mary's Twickenham garden and Voltaire's Cirey. The pupil is a marchesa (Emilie du Châtelet's title) . She speaks strongly against war, and is called a citizen of the world ( as Lady Mary called herself ). Early in volume ii comes a more unmistakable allusion . To prove the utility of science to women, the narrator cites inoculation, which now preserves the charms of English as well as of Circassian beauties. On the scale of tributes to Lady Mary's inoculation work, this ranks somewhere between The Plain Dealer's gallantry and Voltaire's heroinizing. Algarotti does not name her; he stresses the saving of beauty, not of life; and he takes no note ofher engagement in social struggle. However, his treatise won from her a commendatory poem which he placed first in the volume when the Newtonanismo was reprinted at Naples, 1739 .
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (III)
Date: 2020-09-09 09:22 am (UTC)The Marquise: well, Algarotti dissertation writer as I recall also points out that Algarotti didn't invent the "noble lady has science explained to her as a way for author to explain it to reader" concept but copied it from a previous work by someone else. Lady Mary's biographer Grundy, btw, argues that Lady Mary as well as Émilie might have influenced Algarotti's depiction, and points out that lacking erotic enthusiasm for her or not, he did take her serious as an author and did learn from her (not the other way around):
Of the poems of hers which he kept, in her handwriting or his own, several are not original but extemporary adaptations, either from others or from herself . This does not mean that he sapped her originality but that she was thinking and writing on the spur of the moment, as she often did in topical writing. Now she was mediating for him the English poetic tradition . Among other things this was a tutor -pupil relationship , with the woman , unusually, as tutor . Algarotti kept the erotic addresses, from woman to man and from man to woman, which she crafted out of Lansdowne or Addison ( who in turn was just then drawing on Horace) . He also kept a political epigram which she had already adapted and updated , and a dramatic speech she wrote for Brutus, justifying
his murder of Caesar. (...)
During his months in England Algarotti was finishing his version of Newton's Optics ( published at Milan , late 1737) . Lady Mary (an experienced collaborator) and Hervey listened , praised, and offered linguistic and other finishing touches. Algarotti set the scientist - narrator's dialogues with his noble, brilliant , and beautiful female pupil in an arbour or private Parnassus, which reflects both Lady Mary's Twickenham garden and Voltaire's Cirey.
The pupil is a marchesa (Emilie du Châtelet's title) . She speaks strongly against war, and is called a citizen of the world ( as Lady Mary called herself ). Early in volume ii comes a more unmistakable allusion . To prove the utility of science to women, the narrator cites inoculation, which now preserves the charms of English as well as of Circassian beauties.
On the scale of tributes to Lady Mary's inoculation work, this ranks somewhere between The Plain Dealer's gallantry and Voltaire's heroinizing. Algarotti does not name her; he stresses the saving of beauty, not of life; and he takes no note ofher engagement in social struggle. However, his treatise won from her a commendatory poem which he placed first in the volume when the Newtonanismo was reprinted at Naples, 1739 .