The next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be given by Dr Francesca Antonelli (University of Bologna) who will present:
Family historians? Women and the construction of scientific memory, from Mme Lavoisier (1758-1836) to Lucie Laugier (1822-1900)
This will be live on Thursday, 25 September 2025, beginning at 5.00pm (London time). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.
As with recent seminars the Zoom link can be freely accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, by booking through the following Ticket Source link:
The seminar will be also accessible live on YouTube at
https://youtu.be/-IqrYQ3h9gg
Most previous on-line seminars can be found on the SHAC YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/SocietyforHistoryofAlchemyandChemistry
Family historians? Women and the construction of scientific memory, from Mme Lavoisier (1758-1836) to Lucie Laugier (1822-1900)
Francesca Antonelli
Family history is widely recognized as one of the first domains where women engaged with modern historical writing, often being regarded as the “natural” custodians of family memory. But what about the history of science? This presentation focuses on how women between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped the posthumous memory of scientists within their families, particularly through the curation of scientific and personal archives, the management of instruments and other objects, and biographical writing. Beginning with the well-documented case of Mme Lavoisier (1758-1836), who crafted her husband’s memory in the early nineteenth century, I turn to the largely overlooked figure of Lucie Laugier (1822-1900), François Arago’s niece and author of biographical accounts of her uncle (published only in the 1990s). Both women served as “secretaries” – as they would put it – to their relatives and managed extensive material and paper collections in radically different political contexts—from post-Revolutionary rehabilitation to Second Empire hostility. Significantly, both are commemorated in public monuments—Arago’s in 1879 and Lavoisier’s in 1900—depicted precisely in these roles. I will thus deal with their cases to raise some questions on women’s agency in constructing scientific memory and the complex negotiations between family and institutional narratives of scientific commemoration.