Framing the “Tenth Muse”: Gendered strategies of intellectual legitimacy in the case of Maria Selvaggia Borghini (1654-1731)

Recent scholarship in the history of science and gender studies has increasingly interrogated the structural exclusion of women from early modern institutions of knowledge, while also illuminating the multifaceted strategies through which they negotiated intellectual authority. This article contributes to this historiographical field by examining the case of Maria Selvaggia Borghini (1654-1731), a Pisan poetess who actively participated in the literary, philosophical, and scientific culture of seventeenth-century Tuscany. Drawing on a corpus of letters exchanged with figures such as Francesco Redi, Alessandro Marchetti, and Antonio Magliabechi, alongside Borghini’s decision to translate part of the Tertullian’s work, this study traces the rhetorical, epistemic, and social strategies through which she crafted and asserted her intellectual persona. Borghini’s case invites a rethinking of early modern knowledge production not merely as a space of female marginalization, but as one actively negotiated through poetic and philosophical agency, rhetorical humility, and epistolary sociability.