A woman between Buffon and Sauvage: Mariangela Ardinghelli, the Italian translator Hales’ books

When do books start living? When the author first conceives them, when they are written, when they are published or when they are known by a large public? It is not easy to answer, but the eighteenth century is full of translations of scientific texts, which are published much later than the original one, but they are very in-teresting for the circulation of knowledge and they can become much more inter-esting when realized by a woman translator. The seminal work of Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (1727), was translated in-to Italian by a brilliant young woman whose name was Mariangela Ardinghelli (1730-1825). This book initiated new ideas in chemistry and medicine, but many Italian scholars knew the discoveries of the famous English physiologist from the first and only Italian translation published in Naples (i.e. Southern Italy) in 1756. The contribution of Ardinghelli to the dissemination of this work deserves some reflection, as her translations are quite different from the French translations of Hales’ works published by the famous Buffon and Sauvages. She added her notes to the text and she also made the theory fit her local context, converting, e.g., all English weights, measurements and scientific terms into their Neapolitan equivalents. This essay seeks to understand who this talented woman scholar was, analysing the way in which she constructed her translations and why she chose to dedicate herself to them. This is not an essay about a woman; the Italian eighteenth century was rich in femmes savantes and this phenomenon has already been studied using various approaches. Here, we will analyse what it meant to publish that translation in Na-ples, at that moment and, above all, to do so as a young woman.