Pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell is the star of a kid’s book using an ancient language she happened to know: Latin.
Massachusetts-born Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) is best known for discovering a comet in 1847 and working to inspire women astronomers as a professor of astronomy at Vassar College, which she joined in 1865. Some 205 years after her birth, Mitchell continues to inspire as the first U.S. woman astronomer.
Her legacy inspired Rachel Beth Cunning, a Latin and English as a second language teacher, to take on the challenge of making a children’s science book — a journey that brought Cunning back to her childhood, when she subscribed to astronomy magazines and read about the stars. Her Latin-language book is called Astronomia: Fabula Planetarium (Astronomy: Stories of the Planets; Bombax Press, 2022), and you can buy it on Amazon (opens in new tab).
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“One of the things that I am generally very interested in — as someone who loves history and who loves nerdy science things and who loves literature and languages — is all the voices that get lost through time,” Cunning told Space.com in an interview earlier in March, which is Women’s History Month.
“There are a lot of voices that get lost,” Cunning continued, “and unfortunately, they tend to be women’s voices.”
Latin was the language of ancient Rome and, for a time, much of the world the imperialist ancients conquered; Latin then continued for centuries afterward as the primary language of the Christian church.
Much of the existing Latin literature today is male, but a precious minority of writing is female and receiving more scholar attention. It is thought that female voices were lost over the ages due not only to a lack of literacy or time to write, but also because the medieval preservationists who rewrote fading ancient manuscripts in what we now call Europe and the Middle East were not as inclined to include female voices.
Mitchell was fluent enough to read Latin-language science books (opens in new tab) in her childhood, which was not unusual in the 19th century; today, however, Latin’s schooling role has shifted considerably.
Latin’s descendants live on today in languages like French, Spanish and Portuguese (as well as English, given that the language began borrowing heavily from French after the Norman Conquest). But Latin is barely taught in schools or universities any more. That said, there is a growing “living Latin”…
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