Maria Cunitz(1607 — 1664)

Maria Cunitz mastered at least six languages: Latin, German, Polish, Italian, French, and Hebrew. This exceptional polyglot was able to read the works of Europe's greatest scholars directly in the original, and chose to write her major work in two languages in order to reach both Latin-speaking scholars and a broader German-speaking readership.

During the Thirty Years' War, which ravaged Silesia, Maria Cunitz and her husband Élias von Löwen were forced to flee repeatedly before advancing armies. A fire destroyed part of their manuscripts and astronomical instruments, but she continued her work despite these losses, patiently reconstructing years' worth of calculations.

Her husband Élias von Löwen, a physician and amateur astronomer, was her most devoted supporter. In the preface to *Urania Propitia*, he publicly acknowledged that the calculations and ideas were entirely his wife's own, thereby refuting the insinuations of contemporaries who struggled to believe a woman could have produced such a scientific treatise on her own.

Kepler's Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627, were notorious for their daunting complexity: working astronomers rarely used them, so laborious were the required calculations. Maria Cunitz produced a simplified and corrected edition — noting several of Kepler's errors along the way — making Keplerian astronomy accessible to a far wider circle of educated readers.

Some contemporaries, unable to accept that a woman could master mathematical astronomy, insinuated that she had received supernatural assistance, or that it was in fact her husband who had written everything. These rumors were firmly refuted by Élias von Löwen himself in the preface to the work, where he attested that the science and the writing were entirely his wife's.