Circulation as Translation of Books: the Case Ardinghelli in the 18th Century Naples

When do books start living? When the author thought them, when he wrote them, 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 and translations of that time are more interesting when realized by a woman. The seminal work of Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (1727), was translated into 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 published by the famous Buffon and de 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 tries to understand who this talented woman-scholar was, how she tailored her translations and why she decided to dedicate herself to them