Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science

Abstract

This essay reflects on the ambivalent reception of <i>The Death of Nature</i> among English-speaking historians of early modern science. It argues that, despite its importance, the book was mostly ignored or marginalized by these historians (as opposed to historians interested in feminist or environmental studies) for a variety of reasons. These included the special role played by the "Scientific Revolution" in the grand narrative that increasingly shaped the historiography of science beginning in the 1940s and the subsequent "hyperprofessionalism" of the discipline as a whole. The essay concludes by placing Carolyn Merchant's work in the context of feminist utopian writing of the late 1970s and calls for renewed attention to the history of the utopian genre as a resource for teachers and feminist scholars of the history of science.