May 2023

Hidden in others' fonds

Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2023. 'Hidden in other's fonds', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/may-2023

In May 2023 I visited La Biblioteca Moreniana in Florence to read Sophie Germains’ letters there to her friend, fellow mathematician and first biographer Guglielmo Libri (1803-1869). It was good to be back in the archives, Italy again but not for an Italian woman’s mathematician papers this time, but for a French one.

This geographical criss-crossings are very interesting for the archival history of Germain’s papers. Germaine first met Libri in Paris in 1825, at one of the parties that the astronomer François Arago used to hold at the Observatory every Thursday evening. However they knew of each other’s work and they had corresponded on the area of number theory as their correspondence reveals.

Libri was born in Florence and studied mathematics at the university of Pisa, where he was also appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1823. He travelled extensively in Europe, became a French citizen and got heavily involved in the cultural politics of the July monarchy.

Despite his abilities as a mathematician and the fact that some of his theorems in number theory are still quoted (see Del Centina 2005, 61), Libri’s passion turned out to be documenting and writing the history of mathematics and through this interest he became an avid collector of rare books and manuscripts. He amassed a large collection of manuscripts and books and turned out to own one of the largest private libraries in Europe.

Libri had to flee Paris after the demise of the 1848 revolution and a large part of his archive, which included some of Germaine’s letters were confiscated, although they are now housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Some of the manuscripts and letters that Libri took with him, were later sold at an auction that he held in London in 1859. In the same year the French academy received another part of Germaine’s archive as a donation from her sister and her nephew. When Libri died, ten years later his archive and therefore Germaine’s papers, manuscripts and letters were dispersed, while half of Libri's archive, including his correspondence with Germain has been lost for good, or they might appear some day unexpectedly, given that Germain’s archive is still open with several unanswered questions demanding further research. (see Musielak 2020).

As I have written elsewhere at length, women did not get the opportunity to have collections of their papers or fonds created, in the archival tradition, whether they were literary theorists, artists, activists or scientists. Their papers are usually included in the fonds of famous men, dispersed in different archives around the world, if at all. (see Tamboukou 2020)

Germain’s letters in the Fondo Palazzi-Libri is an exemplary case of this dispersion and it is these letters that I went to the Moreniana Library for. It was worth it: the first letter I opened is dated July 2, 1819: ‘I have read with the greatest attention the memoir that you have made me the honour of sending me’ Germain writes. Since this is a draft letter of the one actually sent we can see that she had initially written ‘the greatest satisfaction’, but the work is deleted and is replaced by the most appropriate ‘attention’. I was very much interested in this deletion, which does not appear in the published transcription of the letter by delCentina (2005, 63). There are actually two drafts of this letter in the N.376 of the Moreniana Library. The second draft has more deletions of more substantial mathematical parts, which shows that Germain was really struggling to be perfect, not only with her prose (attention instead of satisfaction), but also with the mathematical parts of their epistolary exchanges. But since Libri was only sixteen years old in 1819, one wonders why Germain should be so careful in her epistolary prose. What has therefore transpired from a careful study of this letter, is that despite its attribution to Libri in the Moreniana catalogue, the letter was actually addressed to the French mathematician Louis Poinsot. (see del Centina 2005, 63)

I was further very much moved by the letter dated February 2, 1831, a period when she was really struggling with her cancer. Her handwriting is visibly rougher, she was of course 12 years older, but it is also in this letter that she talks to Libri openly about her suffering: ‘I changed my medicine, the new says that I become better but while waiting I suffer terribly and it is quite impossible to be occupied by anything’. And yet in the midst of her suffering she writes to Libri about her new work in number theory and a large part of this letter is devoted to a new paper that was soon to be published.

Beginnings and ends are being meddled together in Sophie Germain’s correspondence and it is in the archive that the researcher can have some glimpses and some feeling of the process of becoming a mathematician.

Archival sources

Biblioteca Moreniana de Firenze, Fondo Palagi-Libri , filza 432.

References

Del Centina, Andrea. 2005. ‘Letters of Sophie Germain Preserved in Florence’. Historia Mathematica 32, 60–75.

Del Centina, Andrea and Fiocca, Alessandra. 2018. ‘On the Correspondence of Sophie Germaine’. In Mathematical Correspondences and Critical Editions, edited by Maria Teresa Borgato, Erwin Neuenschwander, Irène Passeron, 147-166. Cham: Birkhäuser.

Musielak, Dora. 2020. Sophie Germain: Revolutionary Mathematician, 2nd edition. Cham: Springer.

Tamboukou, Maria. 2020. ‘Epistolary Lives: fragments, sensibility, assemblages in auto/biographical research’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography, edited by Anne Chapell and Julie M. Parsons, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 157-164.