First published in 1797, these lectures were written for the then controversial purpose of introducing young women to scientific topics.

This volume includes methodological considerations and descriptions of some of the texts compiled in The Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA), together with a number of pilot studies using these texts showing how the corpus can be used to investigate English Astronomy writing between 1700 and 1900, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.CETA is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). Since the CC was designed in 2003 with a sampling method by which extracts of 10,000 words were selected, this method has been followed in CETA, with samples from 42 different authors both from Europe and North America. Some extralinguistic parameters, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres have been considered for text selection. According to late Modern English text typology, the samples in CETA can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as some other metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. CETA, together with the Coruña Corpus Tool purpose-designed software by IrLab, was originally made available with the volume on CD-rom. As of early 2019, these are also accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850 and CETA at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21848

Taking inspiration from Siv Cedering’s poem in the form of a fictional letter from Caroline Herschel that refers to “my long, lost sisters, forgotten in the books that record our science”, this book tells the lives of twenty-five female scientists, with specific attention to astronomers and mathematicians. Each of the presented biographies is organized as a kind of "personal file" which sets the biographee’s life in its historical context, documents her main works, highlights some curious facts, and records citations about her. The selected figures are among the most representative of this neglected world, including such luminaries as Hypatia of Alexandra, Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabetha Hevelius, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi. They span a period of about 4000 years, from En HeduAnna, the Akkadian princess, who was one of the first recognized female astronomers, to the dawn of the era of modern astronomy with Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. The book will be of interest to all who wish to learn more about the women from antiquity to the nineteenth century who played such key roles in the history of astronomy and science despite living and working in largely male-dominated worlds.