Martine Bertereau

Martine de Bertereau ( 1590 – after 1642), also known as Baroness de Beausoleil, was a French mineralogist who was the first recorded female mineralogist and mining engineer. She and her husband, Jean de Chastelet, traveled extensively throughout Europe in search of mineral deposits and fresh ground water under the employment of various nobles and royals. During one such mining expedition, which saw Martine and Jean surveying potential mine sites in France for Louis XIII, the family were accused of witchcraft and forced to flee to Hungary. While her success came from a thorough understanding of geology, Martine was not forthcoming in her writings about her actual methods. Earlier accounts have placed her origins in Touraine or Berry and have proposed several different birth years, but modern scholarship has not established a precise place or date of birth. The first article also describes mineral deposits in France, as well as the somewhat ‘esoteric’ use of dowsing rods to locate water. This document also contains many practical and scientific considerations that allow us to understand the state-of-the-art hydrogeology of the 17th Century.

The second was in the form of poetry, addressed to Cardinal de Richelieu La restitution de pluton (1640), which in reality is a plea for the couple, more specifically for Martine, to be paid for the work they undertook for the king. In it she seeks to defend her unusual position as a woman in the mining industry.

"But how about what is said by others about a woman who undertakes to dig holes in and pierce mountains: this is too bold, and surpasses the forces and industry of this sex, and perhaps, there is more empty words and vanity in such promises (vices for which flighty persons are often remarked) than the appearance of truth. I would refer this disbeliever, and all those who arm themselves with such and other like arguments, to profane histories, where they will find that, in the past, there have been women who were not only bellicose and skilled in arms, but even more, expert in arts and speculative sciences, professed so much by the Greeks as by the Romans.”