Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Chatelet (1706 49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton s "Principia Mathematica" that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured.

In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Chatelet s writings and her contributions to...