Forming familles d’alliance: Intellectual Kinship in the Republic of

It has long been recognized that early modern knowledge-making was a collaborative and multifaceted endeavor, sustained and promoted by a scholarly network known as the Republic of Letters. It has also long been recognized that a veritable phalanx of barriers-legal, social, cultural, and doctrinal-prevented women from becoming collegial scholars and joining that abstract commonwealth. The first of these recognized facts still stands; the second, however, does not.