OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018The past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are helping to make.
William Morris, Introduction to Medieval Lore by Robert Steele, 1893
To celebrate its 350th anniversary, in 2010 the Royal Society invited a panel of female scientists and historians to choose the ten women who have had the most influence on science in Britain. The emails soon started flying. Being pernickety academics (and here I mean myself), they naturally began by questioning the question: what does “most influence” mean? One easy choice was Dorothy Hodgkin, pioneering chemist and still the only British woman to have won a scientific Nobel Prize. But should the list include the seventeenth-century aristocrat Margaret Cavendish? In her favour, she was the first woman to enter the meeting rooms of the Royal Society—but as opponents pointed out, she was often ridiculed (by ...
