Enlightenment Europe Was Gripped by a fascination for science and for scholarship more generally. The previous century had witnessed a “scientific revolution” — the historic breakthroughs of Galileo, Descartes, Newton — and there was great excitement among the next generation as its members now digested, debated, and advanced new ideas pertaining to the natural world. Indeed there was new enthusiasm for all branches of learning: it was felt that the whole universe should be examined using rational, empirical methods and knowledge collected together as a basis for the future. This was the age in which science — or learning — became absorbed into society. (“Science” of course did not exist as a separate discipline but was seen in close relation to ideas about philosophy and religion and indeed was also known at the time as “natural philosophy.”) It saw the foundation of scholarly institutions across Europe following the model of the Royal Society in London (1662) and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris (1666); it saw the creation of observatories and botanical gardens; and it saw scientific knowledge increasingly impinging on the lay public, who read about new publications in the journals, discussed current debates in the salons, attended public lectures, and stood by as experiments were staged to demonstrate the wonders of lightening or magnetism or balloon-flight.

Gottsched’s curiosity about this new knowledge was undoubtedly nurtured in her parental home. Her father was an eminent doctor — personal physician to the king of Poland — who had received a thoroughly modern education at the universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Leiden and formed progressive views on the practice of his profession (he rejected “scholastic medicine,” which drew on classical or biblical wisdom, in favor of modern approaches based on experiment and observation). He was a member of the Academia Naturae Curiosum, the first scholarly society for medical practitioners and natural scientists in Germany. The Danzig house was frequented by men of science; Gottsched’s lute teacher, for example, was another medical man who had a special interest in physics. As we know, Gottsched received a wide-ranging education. She apparently spent some of her happiest hours immersed in natural history, and developed a passion for astronomy that endured throughout her life, as her husband reported in his account of her life: