This enjoyable, accessible, thoroughly researched book reinserts women into a significant scene in modern Western intellectual history. Carol Pal identifies seven women who were active participants in the seventeenth-century republic of letters: women who were sufficiently educated, confident, and leisured to engage in correspondence and sometimes face-to-face communication with such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, Robert Boyle, John Amos Comenius, and Marin Mersenne. Depicting the republic of letters as transnational and multiconfessional, Pal writes to correct the perception that it excluded women. Instead, she nominates Anna Maria von Shurman (German-Dutch, 1607–78); Bathusa Makin (English, 1600–80); Dorothy Moore (Anglo-Irish, 1612–64); Katherine Jones (also known as Lady Ranelagh, Anglo-Irish, 1615–91); Marie de Gournay (French, 1565–1645); Marie du Moulin (French, 1613–99); and Princess Elisabeth (Bohemian, 1618–80) as full citizens of this republic.

Drawing from their letters, and letters by others about them, Pal documents the ways in which these women were, saw themselves to be, and were seen by others as active participants in the exchange and advancement of many branches of scientific, humanistic, and religious inquiry. This sense of community held despite differences of nation, religion, and intellectual orientation. The author identifies four major types of community-building and sustaining practices that male and female denizens of the republic engaged in: correspondence, networking, publication, and mentorship. As an illustration of networking, Pal notes that along with the princess herself, three of her seven female scholars (van Schurman, Moore, and de Moulin) attended Elisabeth’s court in exile in The Hague during the 1630s. The other three were linked to it via connections with other individuals at the court.

Pal reflects briefly on the social and political forces that made women’s involvement in this virtual republic possible. They include the political instability of the time—the wars of religion, civil war in England, the massive intellectual upheaval and ferment associated with the scientific revolution, and the fact that knowledge production and transmission were not yet fully institutionalized within universities and academies. The author also touches at several points on the key role that fathers played in the formation of these female scholars by either encouraging their daughters to acquire an education at home or even just allowing them to audit the lessons their brothers were receiving. We do not, unfortunately, get any insight into the motivation of those fathers who encouraged or permitted their daughters’ unconventional education. As the book draws to a close, Pal mentions some of the changes in the organization of knowledge and learning that were unfolding at the end of the seventeenth century. Knowledge was becoming more organized along disciplinary lines, the lingua franca of Latin was losing ground to vernacular languages, and institutions of learning that excluded women were becoming more influential.

The author refers throughout to the issue of women’s intellectual abilities and proper roles as itself one of the topics debated by the republic’s men and women, noting that sometimes male scholars who professed women’s intrinsic limitations and unsuitability for this domain in their published works simultaneously encouraged individual women in their scholarly pursuits. The Christian norm of feminine modesty posed a challenge for these female scholars because it seemed to counsel against the sort of boundary pushing that defined membership in the republic of letters and against the pride in one’s intellectual accomplishments that these women could justly take. But having said that this sort of internalized struggle “surfaces again and again in the correspondence of . . . female scholars” (p. 63), Pal observes shortly afterwards that “[b]alancing modesty and pride was a conundrum for all Christian scholars” (p. 65). She also notes that four of the seven women featured in her study never married, and that seems to have been a choice on each one’s part. However, without knowing wider marriage rates at the time, particularly for their socioeconomic strata, it is hard to weigh the significance of this sample. Nor does Pal give comparable information about male members of the republic of letters: Perhaps many of them also remained unmarried?

Call me a social scientist, but I would have found it really helpful had Pal provided a chart with boxes and arrows indicating who was connected to whom and how in the republic (Networking? Mentorship? Correspondence?), or at the least among the seven women she spotlights in the book. It is hard to keep track of who knew who and how just by following the prose, even though her style is eminently readable. I would also have appreciated some pictures of the seven women, or as many as are available. We have images of male scholars of the seventeenth century, and it would be a great complement to have visual representations of their female counterparts. I suspect that the “rethinking” of Pal’s subtitle is also a reimagining of the past, and it helps such exercises to be able to visualize female scholars, or at least representations of them.

I am also confused by the title of the book. As Pal is keen to emphasize, “The Republic of Women” is more of a county or neighborhood within the larger republic of letters. It is not a separate self-governing entity, so why call it a republic? The book is really about restoring our knowledge of women’s role within the republic of letters, not as members of a separatist unit. In her conclusion, Pal explains that this idea of a republic of women dates back to the fifteenth-century humanist Laura Cereta, who in turn is hearkening back to Christine de Pisan (pp. 278–79). But despite the appealing matrilineage of the ideal of the republic of women, it seems at odds with Pal’s purpose. At one point, she describes her seven figures as “female fellow travellers” (p. 125), which strikes me as a better image of what she is trying to convey about the place of these women in this larger network.

The details of this study will most likely recommend themselves to specialists in seventeenth-century thought. Even though some of the women studied were politically informed and active, there are few references to political theorists of this period. Like other feminist histories, Pal’s larger project gives us all pause for thought before we generalize about women’s exclusion from knowledge production and transmission in previous centuries. Pal teaches us that “posthumous obscurity” (p. 21) is not a reliable guide to what was actually going on at the time. Instead, she gives us a group of women who leaned in and linked in.