Carol Pal reconstructs a forgotten network of female scholars and rewrites the intellectual biography of the seventeenth-century republic of letters.

Prologue; Introduction; 1. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia: an ephemeral academy at The Hague in the 1630s; 2. Anna Maria van Schurman: the birth of an intellectual network; 3. Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, and Anna Maria van Schurman: constructing intellectual kinship; 4. Dorothy Moore of Dublin: an expanding network in the 1640s; 5. Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh: many networks, one 'incomparable' instrument; 6. Bathsua Makin: female scholars and the reformation of learning; 7. Endings: the closing of doors; Conclusions.

Carol Pal is an Assistant Professor of History at Bennington College, Vermont. She received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Stanford University, California, where her dissertation won the Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfield Dissertation Prize. She has held a number of library fellowships, including a Francis Bacon Foundation fellowship from the Huntington Library and an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Clark Library, University of California. Los Angeles; she has also won research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Jacob K. Javits program. The focus of her current research is a reconsideration of the history of the book, using case studies highlighting the phenomenon of corporate scribal publication.