Until recently, the marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was

more remembered as the companion of Voltaire than as

an intellectual in her own right. While much has been

written about his extraordinary output during the years

he spent in her company, her own work has often been

overshadowed. This volume brings renewed attention to

Du Châtelet's intellectual achievements, including her

free translation of selections from Bernard Mandeville's

Fable of the bees ; her dissertation on the nature and propagation

of fire for the 1738 prize competition of the Académie

des sciences; the 1740 Institutions de physique and

ensuing exchange with the perpetual secretary of the

Académie, Dortous de Mairan; her two-volume exegesis

of the Bible; the translation of and commentary on Isaac

Newton's Principia ; and her semi-autobiographical Discours

sur le bonheur. It is a measure of the breadth of her interests

that the contributions to this volume come from

experts in a wide range of disciplines: comparative literature,

art history, the history of mathematics and

science, philosophy, the history of publishing, and translation

studies. Du Châtelet's partnership with Voltaire is

reflected in a number of the essays; they borrowed from

each other's writings, from the discussions they had together,

and from their shared readings. Essays examine

representations of her by her contemporaries and posterity,

that range from her inclusion in a German portrait

gallery of learned men and women, to the scathing

portrait in Françoise de Graffigny's correspondence, and

nineteenth-century accounts coloured by conflicting

views of the ancien régime. Other essays offer close readings

of her work, and set her activities and writings in their

intellectual and social contexts. Finally, they speculate on

the ways in which she presented herself and what that

might tell us about the challenges and possibilities facing an

exceptional woman of rank and privilege in eighteenth-century

society.