Sensitive Witnesses - by Kristin M Girten (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Kristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments. This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the philosopher-authors that Girten takes up asserted themselves as intimately entangled with matter - boldly embracing their perceived close association with the material world as women. Girten shows how Lucy Hutchison, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith took inspiration from materialist principles to challenge widely accepted "modest" conventions for practicing and communicating philosophy. Forerunners of the feminist materialism of today, these thinkers recognized the kinship of human and nonhuman nature and suggested a more accessible, inclusive version of science. Girten persuasively argues that our understanding of Enlightenment thought must take into account these sensitive witnesses' visions of an alternative scientific method informed by profound closeness with the natural world"--

Book Synopsis

Kristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments.

This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the author-philosophers that Girten takes up asserted themselves as intimately entangled with matter--boldly embracing their perceived close association with the material world as women. Girten shows how Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith took inspiration from materialist principles to challenge widely accepted "modest" conventions for practicing and communicating philosophy.

Forerunners of the feminist materialism of today, these thinkers recognized the kinship of human and nonhuman nature and suggested a more accessible, inclusive version of science. Girten persuasively argues that our understanding of Enlightenment thought must take into account these sensitive witnesses' visions of an alternative scientific method informed by profound closeness with the natural world.

Review Quotes

"Sensitive Witnesses excels in bringing to light the ways that these five women sought to understand the world around them and disseminate their findings.... Girten [uses] their work to reveal that early modern natural philosophy was more heterogenous than traditional readings, viewed through the lens of Bacon and the Royal Society, suggest." --Peter West, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

"Sensitive Witnesses transitions smoothly from early women writers who were engaged in classical debates to later eighteenth-century women who responded to a world more firmly situated in empiricism, which was still largely the purview of male thinkers. In so doing, Girten's work builds an essential bridge between canonical literature by women and the dominating trends in gendered scientific discourse during the Restoration and the eighteenth century." --Laura Miller, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Girten illuminates Enlightenment thinkers who utilized 'sublime knowledge-making and sensitive witnessing' to 'develop an appreciation for their continuity with the material world.' She also connects the Enlightenment past to the present, calling for 'a new, sensitive, "great instauration" in which we learn how to touch and be touched by nature, with a sense of continuity, relationality, gentleness, and care. Recommended.'" --M. G. Spencer, CHOICE

"Kristen Girten's Sensitive Witnesses crafts an exhilarating and revisionary argument for Enlightenment women's material attunement to nature." --Helen Thompson, Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Sensitive Witnesses is a fluently written and well-researched study that moves nimbly between philosophical sources and a wide range of literary genres to enrich our understanding of Enlightenment ways of knowing." --Sarah Tindal Kareem, University of California, Los Angeles

"A figure for our own time, Girten's sensitive witness emerges as the unashamed hero of a history of scientific passions." --Wendy Anne Lee, New York University

"Girten demonstrates, thoroughly and convincingly, that materialism constituted an alternative conception of early science to the mainstream, Baconian view. This is an important book, very much part of one of the central conversations currently unfolding in science and literature studies." --Jess Keiser, Tufts University

About the Author

Kristin M. Girten is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.