January 2023

Women have often studied mathematics in domestic settings, given their exclusion from universities and other formal scientific societies and institutions up until the turn of the nineteenth century. In this light their letters had both a communicative and pedagogical function: they provided their writers with a familiar and easily accessible form of communicating mathematical ideas, problems, solutions and errors and at the same time, they gave them the opportunity to participate in the scientific debates and discourses of their time, particularly given the fact that travelling abroad was a harsh gendered restriction for them, irrespective of their social class and status. 

 In thus looking at the letters that women mathematicians wrote, I trace ways in which their epistolary writing, contributed to knowledge and research in mathematical sciences, but also reveal the minutiae of their constitution as subjects in science. In doing so I am interested in how the literary structures, persistent patterns, as well as formal characteristics of the letter, what Janet Altman (1982) has theorised as ‘epistolarity’, are entangled in cultural assemblages in mathematics. Here, the notion of the assemblage is taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical vocabulary (1988) as a configuration denoting the complexity of discursive and non-discursive components and formations in the constitution of knowledge, culture, as well as gendered subjectivities in mathematics.

In deploying epistolarity as a way of reading, understanding and analysing women mathematicians’ letters in their interrelation with other auto/biographical documents, I have thus configured the notion of ‘epistolary sensibility’ (Tamboukou 2020) as a methodological move that goes against the dominant trend of using letters as mere ‘sources’ or ‘data’ in socio-historical research and analysis. While recognizing the evidentiary value of letters, the analysis is deeply engaged with pertinent ontological, epistemological and ethical questions revolving around what it is exactly that we do when using letters and correspondences to derive meaning about subjects, their lived experiences, their relation to the world and others, as well as their entanglement in processes of knowledge production and circulation. How is this ‘epistolary sensibility’ to be configured? Drawing on my work with women’s letters in different social, cultural and historical contexts, I have made a cartography of epistolary sensibility that includes amongst other practices, a striving for understandings that are driven by the letters and collections under investigation, considering the content, form and context of letters and analysing them in their interrelation.