CUNITZ, Maria, a celebrated astronomer, born about the beginning of the 17th century, was the eldest daughter of a doctor of medicine in Silesia, and the wife of a Dutch physician, Elias de Loewen, whom she married in 1630. She is said to have understood Polish, German, French. Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and to have had an extraordinary general culture, but her principal study was mathematics and astronomy. Her tables, published under the title Urania Propitia, sive Tabulae Astronomica?, which gained for her a great reputation, were composed in a Polish convent, where, with her husband, she had taken refuge at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. They were printed in Latin and German (Gels, 1650, and Frankfort, 1651), and dedicated to the Emperor Ferdinand III.