Introduction
On 8 February 1686, a girl who will perhaps remain forever anonymous walked into a room full of gentlemen to stand before a meeting of the Dublin Philosophical Society.Footnote 1 She was ‘not yet eleven years of age’.Footnote 2 The Dublin Philosophical Society was even younger. According to William Molyneux, the group first met ‘in a coffeehouse, on Cock hill’, before formally constituting itself in January 1684 at Robert Huntington's lodgings in Trinity College.Footnote 3 It would have been either there, or to one of the rooms of a house on Dame Street, also used by the group, that the she was taken.Footnote 4 The justification for the presence of this girl – nervous or not, we have no way of knowing –was at first rather sparingingly recorded as the result of the fact that
she is to a prodigy skilled in mathematics. She was examined before the society in the most difficult propositions of Euclid, which she demonstrated with wonderful readiness. She extracts the square root of a number of 20 places by memory, and is to be examined …Footnote 5
Summarily described as this initial encounter is, the ‘mathematical girl’, as she would be known when the occasion demanded it, soon proved more than a means by which the fledgling group might while away a few spare hours.Footnote 6 She became a recurring interest, continuing to appear before the society into the spring of 1686 – and as a topic of correspondence for some time afterwards. An analysis of the minutes shows that no other item received the same degree of attention during these months. Indeed, so much weight was placed on this special series of interactions that, after one of her ‘examinations’, the then secretary, St George Ashe, declared, ‘we think we have in no small measure answered the end of our institution’.Footnote 7
This child, and the importance attached to her, clearly differ in interesting ways from that which has been encountered in other studies of female prodigies in an early modern European context. To begin with, there is little evidence that the abilities on show were a vehicle for the social enhancement of an ambitious father, as is thought to have been the case with the young Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799).Footnote 8 Nor would the talents of this unnamed girl go on to find a place in the dissemination and refinement of philosophical ideas, as those of the recognized prodigies Laura Bassi (1711–1778) or Emilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) would.Footnote 9 To make a comparison closer to home, but away from questions of prodigious talent, the identity of this child seems to have remained unrecorded even while Irish women, and other girls of the same age exhibited before the society to demonstrate deformities, were often named in the minutes of the Dublin group.Footnote 10
This paper argues that the importance of this young Irish child prodigy consisted at least partly in the fact that her identity could be ignored. Even at the height of her fame, she proved a canvas on which the men who interested themselves in her could paint whatever they thought most useful.Footnote 11 She was, to begin with, well suited to the possibility of establishing philosophical parity with London, the centre of the new knowledge, whose developments reached Dublin in the form of news. Yet the mathematical abilities she instantiated – when she was ‘the mathematical girl’ – could be emphasized to demonstrate important contrasts. In particular, the strength of her natural faculties, such as memory, could be shown to rival the artificial organs created by the rise of instrumentalized observation in London and Oxford, and elsewhere across Europe. This was no small advantage in a region which had, since the 1650s, suffered from the perception that it was a desert for experimental philosophy. But this special focus on the faculty of memory could still be relaxed when a different emphasis was needed. She was a remarkable musician, an accomplishment which could be emphasized by placing her on the stage, where she could meet patrons’ expectations of display. The importance of this child rested, therefore, on her ability to perform a range of roles, flitting from ‘the mathematical girl’ to a ‘musical prodigy’ in order to answer the needs of the hour. In doing so, she exhibited a fluidity which precluded the possibility of a strong identity of her own.
The way, therefore, in which a little girl became so important to the growth of the Dublin group during its own infancy amounts to more than an interesting story about a talented and exploited child. It also takes us further than the truism – as it now is –that wonders held a peculiar currency in the academies of the seventeenth century.Footnote 12 This episode offers insight into what made a spectacle useful in a philosophical climate with unique features among the British Isles. It not only affirms the alacrity with which spectacular phenomona were discovered and displayed, but also shows how they could be used to seek parity with more established neighbours like the Royal Society of London.
Some months in the minutes
From her first appearance on 8 February, the minutes of the Dublin Philosophical Society evidence an interest in a child ‘prodigy’ persistent enough to make her a feature of at least six meetings up until 19 April. The close contact between the group in Dublin and its counterparts, the Oxford Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of London, meant that the fame of this child did not need to remain as localized as it did. Yet while some individuals in England found the story significant, there was never the same use made of the girl there as on Irish soil. Although frustratingly terse, the formal records of the Dublin group betray a peculiar and unique interest in the child. During the period in which she regularly reappeared in the minutes, no other item was mentioned more than once. This sustained attention thus attests to her rather special importance.
She was first brought in by the mathematician and founding member of the society George Tolet, and was introduced as a young ‘scholar of his’. In this way, the child initially entered the minutes as someone else's achievement.Footnote 13 Not a lot is known about Tolet, although it is clear that accompanying his preoccupation with mathematics was practical experience, and probably a theoretical interest, in education. In London at least, mathematical practitioners could advertise their services as teachers to guarantee a more reliable income.Footnote 14 In this case, an allusion from William Molyneux raises the possibility that this particular ‘scholar’ lived with Tolet.Footnote 15 At first glance, the encounter is quite at home amongst the catalogue of curiosities, wonders and oddities offered up to readers of the minutes.Footnote 16 What begins to set this episode apart is that, only two weeks after her first appearance, ‘Mr Tolet's scholar’ returned.Footnote 17 No mention is made of her original trick of extracting the square roots of large numbers, but fresh talents were uncovered: ‘Mr Tolet's scholar was again examined before the society in algebra, mechanics, and the theory of music, and chronology of the calendar. She answered with all great readiness and judgement, and to admiration.’Footnote 18 No less than one week after this second visit, the increasingly familiar curiosity of ‘Mr Tolet's girl’ was again ‘examined’, this time in ‘geography and the use of globes’.Footnote 19 Two weeks later she was back again, and pressed on a different subject – ‘examined in astronomy, the doctrine of parallaxes and refraction’.Footnote 20 Then another two weeks after this she was ‘examined in geography, particularly in what relates to the latitudes and longitudes of places’.Footnote 21 On her final recorded appearance, which took place on 19 April, there is no mention of her being ‘examined’ at all.Footnote 22 The entry simply states, with rather cruel economy, ‘Mr Tolet's scholar was accompanied by a consort of excellent music’.Footnote 23
The ongoing correspondence between Dublin, London and Oxford gave this peformer every chance of seizing wider attention. The special focus on the abilities of this one girl, her months in the minutes, and the habits of exchange in which these documents were embedded, make it clear that she had a chance to absorb the attention of the older houses of new knowledge in the British Isles. In March, for example, before the ‘consort of excellent music’ recorded in April, it was noted at a meeting of the Royal Society that the group in Dublin had ‘several curiosities before them’, and that this included
particularly a girl of eleven years of age, prodigiously skilful in most parts of Mathematics, having been examined before the Dublin Society with severity enough in Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Chronology, speculative music, and Mechanics, in all of which she answered with great readiness and judgement.Footnote 24
But this is her only mention in the Royal Society minutes. The Oxford society also received the records of the Dublin group.Footnote 25 While the Oxford virtuosos clearly found some items from Dublin especially interesting, singling them out for summaries, this was not the case with those concerning the Irish ‘mathematical girl’.Footnote 26 The relative frequency of entries on this girl in the records of the Dublin group makes them conspicuous, suggesting that the men in Oxford and London were aware of her, but were simply not as interested – although this may also perhaps reflect the level of detail with which discussions in Oxford and London were recorded.
But if she was of such interest to the Dublin group, it is at first hard to understand why her identity was so unimportant. As a guide to what attracted curiosity in Dublin, the minutes are replete with what Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have called ‘strange facts’.Footnote 27 Containing everything from girls covered in horns to plagues of insects, the records kept by the Dublin group support the view that for the academies of the seventeenth century, ‘extraordinary phenomena’ could be digested ‘with nearly as much zeal as … natural laws and regularities’.Footnote 28 Just as this appetite for unexplained wonders ate into the space devoted to the normal and predictable, the wondrous phenomena instantiated could attract more curiosity than the more mundane subjects of these marvels, and the ordinary facts about their lives. At one meeting, for example, the group turned from examining ‘Mr. Tolet's Scholar’ to the two days of ‘violent vomet without convulsions’ suffered by a woman identified not by name, but by the events leading up to this extraordinarily uncomfortable episode: among them, the fact she was ‘given two handfuls of foxglove’.Footnote 29 On another day, ‘a boy was brought to the society’, identified only as one ‘troubled with unaccountable fits’ in which he manifested ‘a most greedy canine appetite’.Footnote 30 Yet an object of interest did not need to be anonymous: subjects were often kept in view, their names and individual lives remaining part of their story even as interest came to centre on their marvelous characteristics. An instructive example is the case of ‘one Elizabeth Dooly of the County Kilkenny, aged thirteen years in January’, whose name and native county were spread far and wide as a consequence of the fact that she had not far from her eye ‘a piece of flesh resembling a cow's teat’.Footnote 31 Just one week before ‘Tolet's scholar’ appeared, the group spent some time discussing ‘Jane Hodge of the County Tyrone, who fasted near 3 months’.Footnote 32 Given that women –even girls of around the same age – known for no more than their strange behaviours or physiologies could have their local identities brought with them into this new and contrived life as a curiosity, the continued anonymity of the prodigy with whom the group spent so many of their meetings is one of the more intriguing elements of this episode.
‘The end of our institution’: embodying the aims of a nascent society
The preservation of this prodigy's anomyity was symbolic of the multiplicity of ways in which she could be used. The rhetoric and representations of the newly formed group in Dublin were often similar to those of its neighbours, but they could still manifest unmistakably proximate needs – needs soon reflected in the use of their new prodigy. Some of these needs were legacies of the society's formation in, and close links with, the coffee house and its unique forms of sociability: particularly that of newsgathering – an activity close to natural philosophy in a place where so much of it was thought to be happening elsewhere. Other needs arose more directly out of prevailing perceptions that Dublin was somehow on the periphery of developments in the trade in instruments and experimental wares that had elsewhere betokened a new and reformed knowledge. Still other requirements originated in some of the more peculiar promises through which local patronage had been secured. A versatile curiosity could meet these ends, embodying solutions to different sets of problems, without appearing tired and too obviously redeployed. An amorphous, intrinsically undeveloped figure proved peculiarly perfect: as she transformed through the minutes, from producing feats of memory through to ‘excellent music’, so too did her fluidity provide the form of a solution to some very different needs and problems.
‘I should say something to you of a wonderful young girl here …’
Whereas the Royal Society of London had a contested relationship with coffee houses, even being viewed at times as a royal reaction to the most notorious of clubs to emerge from such settings, James Harrington's Rota club, the society in Dublin began its insitutional trajectory unambiguously ensconsced in one.Footnote 33 Meetings in the Cock Hill coffee house took place against a background in which the experimental knowledge performed and witnessed in London reached Dublin as news. For an enterprise so situated, reflecting the achievements of London was conceivably more a matter of manufacturing similar intelligence. The abilities of a ‘wonderful young girl’ became worthy in an environment in which objects posessed utility to the degree they seemed newsworthy.
By the early Restoration, coffee houses had emerged as one of the ‘prime sites in which news was consumed’.Footnote 34 According to Molyneux, when the group in Dublin first met – at the Cock Hill coffee house – it was ‘mereley to discourse’.Footnote 35 In November of 1684, William Petty, a founding member of the Royal Society, drafted his ‘Advertisements’: a set of guidelines for the activities of the Dublin group.Footnote 36 Although Petty showed considerably less enthusiasm for ‘discourse’, urging that the group ‘chiefly apply themselves to the making of experiments’, he clearly saw the value of these as deriving from their ability to produce news, and added, ‘not contenting themselves without such as may surprise and astonish the vulgar’.Footnote 37 Petty, throughout his life, showed a geat capacity for so treating ‘the vulgar’. The experimental works for which he became best known, a series of twin-hulled ships that attracted enormous attention, were eminently newsworthy items, reports of these designs and their fortunes on the sea being furiously consumed in coffee houses and taverns across more than one metropolis.Footnote 38 Whilst these spectacularly public and closely followed experiments were, along with the news and noisy disputes they generated, increasingly disowned by the Royal Society, they found a new home when Petty resumed work on them in the early 1680s – the birth of the Dublin society heralding a fresh opportunity for immersion in these controversial projects.Footnote 39 Enshrined in quasi-legislative form, therefore, and reflected in the interests of Petty himself, was an insistence on what could attract attention quickly: ‘comon, triviall, and cheap experiments & observations’.Footnote 40 It was a reactionary vision, in Petty's case accommodating projects that had generated too much attention for the increasingly cautious London virtuosos.Footnote 41
It can only have helped that conversation and the conveying of news were arts particularly endorsed by the society's patron, Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. ‘There is no great pleasure in the world’, Clarendon declared to his friend John Evelyn, after his arrival in Dublin, ‘as the Company & Conversation of friends’.Footnote 42 For Clarendon, correspondence was the natural extension of this ‘pleasure’ among ‘friends’, so that ‘when one cannot enjoy them personally … to converse with them by letter, is the next satisfaction’.Footnote 43 Petty's ‘Advertisements’ show a telling sensitivity to this patronly understanding of matters, instructing members rather directly to ‘provide themselves with Corrispondents in severall places’.Footnote 44 Publications like the Philosophical Transactions arguably enhanced the connection between news and experiment, correspondence and comprehension, more so in Dublin than in London – the wait for the packet boat compounding the sense of distance from events that could only be encountered through description. In 1686, Molyneux was bitterly annoyed with his inability to read about philosophical developments in England, after failing to acquire copies of the Transactions speedily enough.Footnote 45 Explicit imperatives to conversation and correspondence, and the implications these had for the objectives of the society, emerged out of a sense of temporal as well as geographical separation.
The abilities of the prodigy discovered in February fell well within the broad conversational diet of ‘philosophy, mathematicks, and other polite literature’,Footnote 46 so that their ability to travel widely was never the subject of doubt. If the Philosophical Transactions ultimately passed over the girl and her abilities, this ambivalence on the part of London was probably unforeseen, and the Nouvelles de la république des lettres picked them up.Footnote 47 The intelligencer Henri Justel brought to Pierre Bayle's attention ‘une petite fille de onze ans en Irlande qui scait la geometrie, l'algebre, & la musique fort bien’.Footnote 48 The epistolary effort required to export the girl so far was exactly what Clarendon had demanded. Indeed, his expectations were in this instance completely undisguised when he wrote to Evelyn, ‘I should say something to you of a wonderful young girl here, but I doubt not you have an account of her from better and more skilful persons.’Footnote 49 It was just that such an ‘account’, though manifestly presumed upon by Clarendon, was acknowledged elsewhere with indifference. William Musgrave, the secretary of the Oxford society, responded to news of the prodigy with ambivalence, declaring, ‘we shall glady hear further concerning the little mathematical girl, or anything else you shall think fit to communicate’.Footnote 50 The hopes pinned on the ability of prodigious talent to generate news were thus resoundingly local; they expressed aims integral to the founding of the Dublin Society, which before then had not always found a home in London.
‘… a young mathematical female in this place …’
Another way in which this prodigy suited needs in Dublin related to the model of epistemological independence into which she could be so easily fashioned. Stressing the ‘mathematical’ nature of her abilities aligned with a vision of knowledge as fundamentally achievable without the kinds of material apparatus famously assumed to be scarce in Ireland. This was part of a process in which knowledge claims came to float free of the material and technological substrates to which they had been so emphatically pegged in London and Oxford. Embodied in this spectacle was the hope for a knowledge that could perform without such aids to the human senses.
If Oxford had been the early centre of instrumentalization in the 1650s, by the 1660s London was the major site for its promulgation and justification – key elements of which centred on the problems with human perception.Footnote 51 Robert Hooke, who had moved to Oxford in 1655, was back in London and firmly ensconsced in Gresham College when his Micrographia laid such emphasis on the poverty of the human senses, ‘outdone’ even by ‘those of other creatures’.Footnote 52 These sensory inefficacies on the part of humans were what motivated ‘the supplying of their infirmities with Instruments’ and the ‘adding of artificial organs to the natural’.Footnote 53 Before him, Christopher Wren had also designated instruments a ‘means’ of discovery, augmenting the poverty of the human senses so that men were compelled to ‘stretch out their Eyes, as Snails do’.Footnote 54 Underpinning the plausibility of this programme of redemption through technological prowess was the ability of its apologists to argue, from as early as the 1660s, that the technologies were there to do this redeeming work. Thomas Sprat was not just advertising the accumulated stock of ‘better sorts of instruments’, but staking the future success of the then relatively young Royal Society upon them – contending that their ‘noblest Inventions’ were ‘Instruments’, and so, in this sense, ‘means, for the finding out of others’.Footnote 55
This approach to justifying new knowledge was more difficult in Ireland: up until the 1680s it was fashionable, and probably obligatory, to bemoan the availability of instruments and other resources there. Robert Boyle memorably condemned Ireland as ‘a barbarous country, where chemical spirits were so misunderstood and chemical instruments so unprocurable, that it was hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it’.Footnote 56 Some decades later, William Molyneux complained to the English astronomer John Flamsteed that he lived ‘in a kingdom barren of all things … wholly destitute of instruments’.Footnote 57 St George Ashe, who was supposed to have ‘assisted’ Molyneux ‘heartily’ in ‘forming a society in this city’, joined him no less heartily in lamenting the deficiency of equipment to which it had access.Footnote 58 Part of gratifying Lord Clarendon had even involved Ashe explaining that in Dublin the ‘telescope and quadrant’ were ‘as unknown as a frog or toad’, animals supposed to be widespread in England but rare in Ireland.Footnote 59 Robert Huntington, who had provided his room in Trinity College to the group for their meetings, told Robert Plot that ‘we are destitute of all helps and advantages’.Footnote 60
Those with experimental proclivities in Ireland were thus obliged to apologize for, rather than advertise, the conditions in which they worked, and tended to shift the goalposts of that work accordingly. The anatomist Allen Mullen began his Anatomical Account of the Elephant Accidentally Burnt in Dublin on Fryday by apologizing that his ‘Observations’ could not meet ‘great expectations’ because ‘My want of Optick glasses, and of other helps for curious observations were considerable.’Footnote 61 Indeed, Mullen professed himself unable to find a group of competent surgeons for his opportunistic, candlelit, dissection of an elephant destroyed by a freak circus fire. Pressed ‘to have the business done that night’, because of the ‘noisesome steams’ produced by the beast, Mullen resorted to the help of some local butchers for ‘expedients sake’: ‘But their forwardness to cut and slash what came first in their way, and their unruliness withall did hinder me from making several Remarks which otherwise I would have made.’Footnote 62 If it was fashionable to decry the paucity of local resources, enterprising men like Mullen crafted reputations by flagging this hardship – and adapting their approach accordingly. This was exactly what Ashe had done when he attempted to persuade Clarendon that the group's ‘progress’ had been ‘wholly considerable’ given ‘whence we began’.Footnote 63 Contributing to knowledge was here a matter of going without, epistemological prowess splintering off from the resources and equipment on which it had been staked in England.
Just as Mullen sought to hedge his epistemological legitimacy on new stocks, as though despairing to meet English instrumentalism on its own terms, so too did the outgoing correspondence of the Dublin society during the months of the girl's visits focus for the most part on what she could do herself. Correspondence to London and Oxford emphasized the abstract, decidedly non-physical, nature of the accomplishments of their ‘scholar’. In the first of his letters to the Royal Society secretaries, John Gale and John Hoskings, Ashe discussed the abilities of what he pointedly called ‘the girl prodigiously skilled in most parts of mathematics’.Footnote 64 Despite her possessing an incredible range of abilities, he mentioned only ‘speculative music’, alongside ‘arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, chronology … and mechanics’, as her principal achievements – and all of these he resolutely termed ‘parts of mathematics’.Footnote 65 As Mullen, now an active attendee at meetings in Dublin, had sought new, instrumentally independent, measures for philosophical success, so too did Ashe find them in ‘our mathematical girl’.Footnote 66 In a seperate letter to Musgrave, Ashe did confess that his carefully crafted exponent of ‘speculative music’ happened to understand ‘the pratic part also and plays well on the violin’.Footnote 67 But even here he insisted upon embarking on another long list of the kinds of ‘difficult questions of arithmetic’ in which she had been ‘with all severity examined’.Footnote 68 This included ‘the troublesome doctrine of fractions’, ‘the most knotty questions of algebra’, and ‘all trigonometry’.Footnote 69 He then concluded by offering to send through ‘the particular papers wherein all that she has done is contained’, thus leaving precious room for doubt as to how he wished to construe ‘all that she has done’.Footnote 70
Emphasizing to such an extent the ‘mathematical’ nature of the child's achievements, or forming the ‘mathematical girl’ out of someone who could be many other things, kept this embodiment of learning free from a dependence on the very resources felt scarcer in Dublin than in London. She became a model of how learning could be had directly: independent from, and unmediated by, cumbersome or difficult apparatus. Certainly, this was evident when Ashe elaborated on the subject of
our mathematical girl … whereby ’tis manifest how soon the powers of our mind are capable of being improved, what strength of memory, even judgement, may be expected in the most tender age, and that perhaps mathematics of all studies is the most fit to be learned while we are very young, for this girl seems not to have a more particular genius for those studies than any others.Footnote 71
The natural ‘strength’ Ashe conferred on the faculty of ‘memory’ here contrasts sharply with the rhetoric emenating from London. In Hooke's hands, ‘memory’ and ‘reason’ had been among the ‘former perfections’ in need of recovery – and instrumental rectification – in the post-Adamic situation.Footnote 72 But then again, Hooke had also been clutching the resources which, conveniently for him, were in this account supposed to make that reformation possible. Ashe was living on an island systematically denounced as a ‘barbarous country’ lacking such assets.Footnote 73 Regardless of what might be made of the girl, when addressing London and Oxford the priority was very often to show how easily and ‘how soon the powers of our mind are capable of being improved’.Footnote 74 If Dublin was not renowned for its instrumentalism, ‘memory’ and ‘judgement’ were appealing avenues through which the enlarging of the ‘the powers of our mind’ could be achieved. These were methods of knowledge production that could be judged to operate in Dublin with more plausibility than artificially winnowing down ‘the proportion of object to organ’, as Hooke had urged from London.Footnote 75
Ashe was not alone in grounding such extraordinary displays of knowledge on feats of memory. Tolet, who apart from being the child's tutor had also spent time importing instruments into Ireland from overseas, was interested in demonstrating his own powers of memory.Footnote 76 In fact it was Tolet whom the minutes record as having once ‘by memory easily extracted the root of a number of thirteen or fourteen places’.Footnote 77 His pupil's first recorded appearance involved the same trick: extracting a root of a number of twenty places – again ‘by memory’.Footnote 78 Ashe's subtly expansive locution, ‘strength of memory, even judgement’, suggests that he shared Tolet's interest in conferring on the faculty of memory a greater degree of epistemological value. A strong memory meant that ‘judgement’ was possible without presuming to challenge claims to superiority of ‘invention’, made by Royal Society apologists, and technicians such as Hooke.Footnote 79
Like Ashe, Molyneux saw the learning of a ‘young mathematical female’ as important particularly because it was imitable ‘in this place’.Footnote 80 Writing to Edmond Halley of this embodiment of epistemological autonomy par excellence, Molyneux could not resist pointing out, ‘this is a most plain instance of the force and power of timely education and of the reach that man has naturally’.Footnote 81 Nor did he content himself with having formed out of her such a thoroughly mathematicized examplar of ‘education’. He went on to assert the boundless prevalence of others capable of attaining parity with his young model: ‘we have thought it worth our while to consider and examine it thoroughly, and indeed we find that at last the child seems to have no more inclinations or delight in these things than ordinarily amongst children’.Footnote 82 Molyneux's conclusion was that remarkable abilities could be found in those who had plainly only the most minimal and, importantly, ordinary of exposures to the world. The epistemological import of this is at least highly consistent with that underpinning the rhetoric of Ashe and the spin placed on Tolet's demonstrations. A ‘mathematical female in this place’, not to mention one unproblematically evidencing the prodigious abilities residing ‘ordinarily amongst children’, was a welcome development where prejudice prevented acknowledging technological sophistication and ipso facto attributions of knowledge based on it.Footnote 83 An ordinary exposure to the world, no less than a powerful memory, was a convenient model for knowledge acquisition if the aim was to protect the logical possibility of learned societies far from the technical milieux of London and Oxford.
The peculiar epistemological gloss placed on this episode was absorbed across St George's Channel. Edmond Halley, John Gale and John Hoskings were all enthusiastically briefed on the subject of this perfectly ordinary exercise of the memory. Whether Gale took in the importance attached to ‘our mathematical girl’, he preserved and reversed Ashe's careful repetition of phrase achieving it – so that she was ‘your mathematical girl’.Footnote 84 The Royal Society fellow John Aubrey provides another insight into the success of these rhetorical efforts. His note appearing in the manuscript On Education summarized precisely Dublin's response to the girl of
eleven years of age that understands all arithmetic and algebra, trigonometry and the use of globes, and appears at the Royal Society there. They do not find anything extraordinary in her nature to mathematics, but do impute all to her early education.Footnote 85
Prodigiously skilled, but not too rarely gifted; incredibly able, but ordinary; and, importantly, educated, but young and unpossessed of artificial advantages. (And perhaps, most generally, she was still essentially ‘mathematical’ despite the range of proficiencies she manifested.) This image was a delicate mélange, and Aubrey's willingness to maintain it in its integrity suggests that Molyneux, Ashe and Tolet had not been without success in its fashioning.
The ‘mathematical girl’ promised at least the possibility of a learning that was not hostage to instruments and resources the availability of which was seldom acknowledged in Dublin. Even if Ireland was not in truth an instrumental desert, the fact that it was perceived as such meant that the shortest pathway to a plausible degree of epistemological legitimacy could not be the one so famously taken in London. The safer route was to appeal more readily to natural, resource-independent abilities, such as those embodied in ‘the mathematical girl’. Her ability to model faculties that had been withheld from post-Lapsarian humanity in London was thus a second important way in which she could be used.
‘philosophy … into our palaces and courts’
Not all needs were as directly related to closing the distance between Dublin and its nearer counterparts; the spectacle Tolet introduced to the group in the February of 1686 also proved a solution to problems with origins much closer to the functioning of the society. Geographically further from the royal authority on which the savants of London had been able to lean, patronage in Ireland depended less on promises of usefulness. Instead, the tastes and partialities of court representatives suggested more particular, less utilitarian, obligations. The Earl of Clarendon was one of the most important of such figures, so that the gratification of Lord and Lady Clarendon – Lady Clarendon, or Flower Backhouse, was the daughter of the alchemist and philosopher William Backhouse – became important functions of the society. The fact that satisfying these aesthetes demanded something more sensorily lavish than feats of the memory only made the range of abilities exhibited by the prodigy more important, so that she was soon performing to meet different, patronly, expectations.
There has been much attention given to the relationship between performance and the production of knowledge in the new academies of early modern Europe. Studies of the Royal Society and its experiments have emphasized not just the culture of spectacle propelling the enthusiasm for new knowledge, but also the aspects of rehearsal implicit in its dissemination.Footnote 86 These accounts have been rather focused on the visual, and in particular on descriptions or reports of observations, a tendency implicit in Steven Shapin's argument that its ‘production’ and ‘communication’ were the same thing: a ‘multiplication of the witnessing experience’.Footnote 87 But the experiences in which knowledge was shared and endorsed did not just boil down to a wider kind of ‘witnessing’. In a pattern reminiscent of the Parisian academies of the seventeenth century, Royal Society meetings under Samuel Pepys's presidency aimed to nourish experimental knowledge with more than discourse that might aid visualization: these conversations were ‘a philosophical banquet’, the production and endorsement of ideas depending on a lavish culinary sociability, in a setting leaning on auditory props, such as musical entertainment.Footnote 88 Decades later, the Italian mathematical prodigy Maria Gaetana Agnesi led conversations with visitors to her father's house on a range of physical topics, as part of longer séances that included musical performances.Footnote 89 In his biography of Agnesi, Massimo Mazzotti argues that this entertainment enforced an authority on the discourses themselves, helping bring these performances into alignment with a ‘traditional vision of aristocratic education’.Footnote 90 It was thus through more than an attempt to distribute a capacity for ‘witnessing’ that Agnesi, who on occasion played the viola d'amore while her sister played the harpsichord, constructed her reputation for prodigious knowledge and disseminated her learning. Displays of this kind could also invoke harmony, dispelling perceptions that the knowledge in its midst constituted any great or irresolvable disruption. At least some of the new academies of the seventeenth century situated their meetings within musical sequences, as though attuned to Plutarch's suggestion that such an arrangement concealed ‘strife or rivalry’.Footnote 91 Performances lending authority to the new learning, therefore, did not need to be absorbed through the eyes, or even the imagination upon the reading of literary material. The virtues on which authority depended were often produced, or sought, in lavish displays, depending on an immediate, unenduring, experience of sensory immersion. An appreciation of the potential of engrossing, sensorily rich, and scarcely replicable performances was especially fundamental to the Dublin society from its nascence. Petty's ‘Advertisements’ demanded not just that ‘the vulgar’ be ‘astonished’, but also that members ‘be ready to entertain strangers and Persons of Quality with great and surprising experiments of wonder and ostentation’.Footnote 92 The particular importance of such performances in Dublin is implicit in a speech given by Ashe to Clarendon, in which the secretary promised to dress ‘knowledge’ in the richer sensory detail of courtly splendour:
’Tis true, knowledge was of old for the most part only the study of the sullen and the poor, who thought it the gravest piece of science to condemn the use of mankind, and to differ in habit and manners … it was heretofore condemned to melancholy retirements, kept as a minor under the tuition of ambitious and arrogant guardians, buried in cloisters, or the more dark obscurity of affected jargon … but … when, instead of words and empty speculations, were introduced things and experiments, and the beautiful bosom of nature was exposed to view, where we might enter into its garden, taste of its fruits, satisfy ourselves with its plenty … then philosophy was admitted into our palaces and our courts, began to keep the best company, to refine its fashion and appearance …Footnote 93
If knowledge had once been as a ‘minor under the tuition of ambitious and arrogant guardians, buried in cloisters’, it was now to enter ‘our palaces and our courts’: to have a place not just in the world of ‘fashion and appearance’, but of emotion and ‘taste’.Footnote 94
The problem was that these promises alone were not a performance. Lady Clarendon had throughout her life shown a penchant for real performers, even accomodating an illegitimate daughter sired by Petty, who for some time made her living as an actress on the stage.Footnote 95 Not only that, but Clarendon had followed Ashe's speech closely, and as he recounted to Evelyn, his expectations were aroused:
entered upon my business … I must needs own the great civilities I have already received from all sorts of people … Amongst the many addresses that have been made to me, I have great reason to be proud of one from the Royal Society, who did me the honour to come in a body to the Castle. Though they are yet in their infancy, they have got together a company of very worthy and ingenious men. I am sure they have all the countenance they can expect from me.Footnote 96
Like his wife, however, Clarendon was unlikely to be impressed by promises realized only on a rhetorical level, judging ‘by the speech they made me’ that they ‘were greater flatterers than philosophers ought to be’.Footnote 97
The same young girl that had elsewhere been so much use could here be used again: this time embodying a knowledge fit for ‘palaces and courts’. It was a transformation most impressively realized when she performed for the Clarendons, the full range of her musical virtuosity ‘exposed to view’. Evelyn, one of the greatest admirers of the meetings at Pepys's house, had but little doubt that the earl and his wife would find these proficiencies winning when he wrote to ‘enquire’ about the child:
I am told there is to be seene in Ireland, a Child scarse twelve years of Age, who is not onely perfectly skil'd in the Art of Musique, but in the more abstruse Sciences of Geometrie and Algebra: I am sure, if any such there be, it cannot have Escaped both your Excellencys Curiosities …Footnote 98
Lady Clarendon's response reveals the degree to which ‘Persons of Quality’ were indeed ‘astonished’. Her letter, not dispatched until almost a year after the child's first appearance before the society, illustrates the role this prodigy played in fulfilling knowledge's promised journey from ‘cloister’ to ‘court.’ As Lady Clarendon related to Evelyn,
it was some months … before I could be witness to what I had heard with so much wonder; though still I expected to have that good fortune … At last the day came … and … [she] had such a crowd about her, that one could hardly breathe in the room; then the best musicians in this place joined with her in playing the composure of the last opera in France, her part was upon the violin, which she performed admirably; it was as fine music as ever I heard: the instruments were the orbos, bass, viols, harpsichord, violins, flutes, and oboes …Footnote 99
If knowledge had been stunted from too long in dark retirement, the ‘wonder’ of the ‘crowd’ must have represented handsome antidotes. And if it was the world of ‘fashion’ into which this closely guarded ‘minor’ had been promised an entrée, such a performance could only have realized this hope. The Dublin society had pledged a lavish knowledge: it was not them, but their prodigy, who fulfilled this promise.
The ‘mathematical girl’, her ‘part’ now more handily conceived as ‘upon the violin’, thus represented the realization of rhetoric that had been pivotal in procuring local patronage.Footnote 100 Far from the court in London, where the aesthetic proclivities of local representatives created unique imperatives, the ‘witnessing’ conferring prestige and credibility on the new learning was self-consciously one of inimitable performance. Even in a state of ‘infancy’, the Dublin society was, through these performances, expected to meet the requirements of ‘fashion’ and ‘taste’ in a general sense.Footnote 101 It could only have been an enormous relief for its membership to realize that someone else could do this for them.
Conclusion
The story of this child's relationship with the men assembling in Dublin towards the end of the seventeenth century is sparse, and has many loose ends.Footnote 102 Yet even partially assembled, it offers some fascinating insights into how an object of curiosity could be pressed into performing more than one role. The episode reveals the multiple ways in which spectacles could be used in a unique and challenging cultural environment.
This story illuminates not just the hunger for natural prodigies, but the eagerness with which they could be exploited for performances no philosopher proved able to offer. It was her ability to morph into a variety of shapes and roles that most poignantly accounts for the dependence the group showed on such a young – and unknown – subject. Embodying the kind of novelty pleasing to a club whose links to the coffee house were considerably clearer than those of the Royal Society, she was, to begin with, an easy curiosity, manifesting the eclecticism of its sociability. Further perpetuating her importance was the fact that these abilities, when crafted to make their bearer essentially ‘mathematical’, provided a powerful demonstration of epistemological independence –instantiating faculties, such as memory, which had been much maligned in London but essential in Dublin. Perhaps most dramatically, she could display the kind of knowledge to which the men in Dublin had no less uniquely pledged themselves – one that could play in ‘palaces and courts’. The use of this child thus lay in the ease with which she could perform such varied and important roles.
Reflected in the anonymity of this prodigy was a malleability that guaranteed that her use did not end as quickly as it might otherwise have done. It was the versatility not of the assembly in Dublin, but of the prodigy they pressed into service, that best answered the needs of a society on the periphery. Even if her own name failed to enter the historical record, the importance of this young prodigy lies in her repeated use to ensure that the same fate would not befall the even younger Dublin Philosophical Society.
