This special issue investigates women's scientific networks in Europe roughly between 1720 and 1830, an interesting period from a gender point of view. The articles analyse the role that networks played in enabling, shaping and circumscribing women in their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and ideals. They also focus on the nature of the members' relationships, how women negotiated their scientific identities and how often women could use their femininity to create new social spaces for themselves and their families. We traced different types of networks such as ‘paper’, ‘technical’, ‘distant’ (in its special and temporal sense), ‘moral’ and ‘mixed’, as well as how many of these networks were characterized by broad intellectual engagement that was never exclusively scientific, but also literary, poetic, educational and philosophical.

本期特刊调查了大约 1720 年至 1830 年间欧洲女性的科学网络，从性别角度来看，这是一个有趣的时期。这些文章分析了网络在支持、塑造和限制女性在智力追求、社会愿望和理想方面所起的作用。他们还关注成员关系的性质、女性如何协商她们的科学身份以及女性如何经常利​​用她们的女性气质为自己和家人创造新的社交空间。我们追踪了不同类型的网络，例如“纸质”、“技术”、“遥远”（在其特殊和时间意义上）、“道德”和“混合”，以及这些网络中有多少具有广泛的智力参与特征这从来不完全是科学的，而且是文学的、诗意的，