WINKELMANN, MARIA MARGARETHA

(b. Panitzsch, Germany, 25 February 1670;

d. Berlin, Germany, 29 December 1720), astronomy, astrology, calendar making.

Winkelmann petitioned the Academy of Sciences in Berlin (founded as the Societas regia scientiarum) for the position of academy astronomer to replace her husband, the celebrated Gottfried Kirch, when he died in 1710. In so doing, she invoked a principle well established within the organized guilds that recognized the right of a widow to carry on the family business. Despite the ardent support of academy president, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, her request was denied. Academy officials did not question Winkelmann’s qualifications but complained that already during her husband’s lifetime the society was burdened with ridicule because its calendar was prepared by a woman. Although the Berlin Academy extended honorary membership to several women of high rank in the eighteenth century, no woman scientist was elected until 1949, when the physicist Lise Meitner became a corresponding member.

European universities were closed to women until the late-nineteenth century. Maria Margaretha Winkelmann, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, was educated privately by her father and, after his death, by her uncle. She received advanced training in astronomy in the home of the peasant and self-taught astronomer Christoph Arnold. Here she met Gottfried Kirch, Germany’s leading astronomer. By marrying Kirch—a man some thirty years her senior—in 1692 Winkelmann secured a career in astronomy. Knowing she would have no opportunity to practice astronomy as an independent woman, she moved, in typical guild fashion, from assisting Arnold to assisting Kirch.

Kirch was called to Berlin as academy astronomer in 1700. Winkelmann assisted her husband in observation, and in this capacity made the academy’s first discovery— the sighting of a previously unknown comet in 1702. Although the report published in the Acta eruditorum, then Germany’s leading scientific journal, bore his name and not hers, Kirch’s notebooks and a report published eight years later in the academy’s Miscellanea Berolinensia make clear that Winkelmann discovered the comet (while he slept).

In addition to daily observation, Winkelmann assisted in the preparation of the academy’s calendars. Each calendar fixed the days and months, predicted the position of the Sun, Moon, and planets (calculated using the Rudolphine tables), the phases of the Moon, eclipses of the Sun or Moon to the hour, and the rising and setting of the Sun within a quarter of an hour for each day. The monopoly on the sale of calendars was one of two monopolies granted to the academy by the king (the revenues helped support the academy). Between 1709 and 1712, Winkelmann also published three astronomical/astrological pamphlets under her own name. Different members of the Kirch/Winkelmann family kept a daily record of the weather from 1697 to 1774 with the aid of a “weatherglass.”

In 1709 Leibniz presented Winkelmann to the Prussian court, where she explained her sighting of sunspots. In a letter of introduction Leibniz wrote:

There is [in Berlin] a most learned woman who could pass as a rarity. Her achievement is not in literature or rhetoric but in the most profound doctrines of astronomy.… I do not believe that this woman easily finds her equal in the science in which she excels.… She favors the Copernican system (the idea that the sun is at rest) like all the learned astronomers of our time. And it is a pleasure to hear her defend that system through the Holy Scripture in which she is also very learned. She observes with the best observers, she knows how to handle marvelously the quadrant and the telescope. (Letter to Sophie Charlotte, January 1709)

Winkelmann’s work was widely celebrated, and in 1711 she received an academy medal.

When Winkelmann lost her bid to become academy astronomer, she moved with her son and two daughters— each of whom she and her husband had trained as astronomers—to Baron von Krosigk’s private observatory in Berlin. Here she served as “master” astronomer with two students to assist her. When Krosigk died in 1714, Winkelmann took a position in Danzig as assistant to a professor of mathematics. She and her son were subsequently invited by Johannes Hevelius’s family to reorganize the deceased astronomer’s observatory for the Winkelmann-Kirch family’s own use. In 1716 the Winkelmann-Kirch family received an invitation from Peter the Great of Russia to become astronomers in Moscow, but they returned instead to Berlin where Winkelmann’s son, Christfried, was appointed observer for the academy. Winkelmann and her two daughters, Christine and Margaretha, worked as his assistants. In 1717 Winkelmann was reprimanded by the academy council for taking too public a role at the observatory and was finally forced to leave. She died of fever in 1720.

Winkelmann was not the only woman astronomer in Germany in this period. Between 1650 and 1710 some 14 percent of all German astronomers were women. These included Maria Cunitz, Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius, Maria Eimmart, Christine Kirch, and Margaretha Kirch. Reflecting on their achievement, Alphonse des Vignoles, vice president of the academy in Berlin, wrote in 1721, “If one considers the reputations of Madame Kirch [Winkelmann] and Mlle Cunitz, one must admit that there is no branch of science … in which women are not capable of achievement, and that in astronomy, in particular, Germany takes the prize above all other states in Europe.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY WINKELMANN

With Gottfried Kirch. Das älteste Berliner Wetter-Buch: 1700–1701. Edited by G. Hellmann. Berlin, 1893.

Vorstellung des Himmels bey der Zusammenkunfft dreyer Grossmächtigsten Könige. Potsdam, 1709.

Vorbereitung, zur grossen Opposition, oder merckwürdige HimmelsGestalt im 1712. Cölln an der Spree, 1711.

Ob vielleicht in diesem Jahre ein neuer Comet erscheinen möchte. Cölln an der Spree, 1712.

OTHER SOURCES

Aufgebauer, P. “Die Astronomenfamilie Kirch.” Die Sterne 47 (1971): 241–247.

Jöcher, Christian G. “Kirchin (Maria Margaretha).” In Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon. Leipzig, 1750.

Leibniz, G. W. G. W. Leibniz to Sophie Charlotte, January 1709. Die Werke von Leibniz, 1864–1884. Edited by Onno Klopp. Hanover. Vol. 9, pp. 295–296.

Schiebinger, Londa. “Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy: A Turning Point for Women in Science.” Isis 78 (1987): 174–200.

———. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Vignoles, Alphonse des. “Eloge de Madame Kirch à l’occasion de laquelle on parle de quelques autres femmes & d’un paison astronomes.” Bibliothèque germanique 3 (1721): 115–183.

Londa Schiebinger