Lady Montagu y el dragomán

The cultured, curious, and polyglot Mary Wortley Montagu never took the easy path. The eventful life of this English aristocrat (Nottingham, 1689-1762) shows us a self-taught woman who managed to be recognized for her intellectual finesse, a pioneer of women's rights, the center of public controversies and love scandals, and, above all, great writer of both private letters and poems and essays. Among the latter, those dedicated to her travels through the great capitals of the moment, from Vienna to Istanbul, and through the cradle countries of Western civilization, from Italy to France, stand out with their own light. This singular testimony is enriched by a restless and awake gaze and, paradoxically, by the privileged access that she, as a woman and a British woman, had to certain spaces that were forbidden to foreign men. Thus, during her stay in Ottoman lands as the wife of the English ambassador, she learned how the old women of the place preventively inoculated an attenuated dose of the then fearsome smallpox. Lady Montagu tried it successfully with her own son and was involved in the dissemination of this technique in the European Courts, against the initial criteria of some specialists.