INTRODUCTION
In 1633, twenty-five-year-old Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) etched, engraved, and sent a self-portrait to male figures eminent in the Dutch Republic and the transnational Republic of Letters. She depicted herself as an elite young woman dressed in fashionable attire, with an intricate lace collar, a richly embroidered bodice, bouffant sleeves, and a French hairstyle enhanced by a delicate row of pearls. Her reserved demeanor and pose recall courtship portraiture of the time, in which young women’s attractiveness, self-containment, and fine apparel were emphasized to draw suitors. According to art historian Wayne Franits, such portraits present “exemplars of courting etiquette.”Footnote 1 But Van Schurman’s self-portrait is not intended to attract suitors or cast her as a bride-to-be. Instead, it signals self-promotion of a very different kind.
Building on recent scholarship on early modern women’s portraiture, one may see her as making a bold bid to enter the Republic of Letters. She had two years earlier corresponded with the internationally renowned scholar André Rivet (1572–1651), a Reformed pastor, theologian, and professor at the University of Leiden, who became her père d’alliance (covenant father)—their correspondence lasted until his death in 1651.Footnote 2 As père d’alliance, Rivet introduced her to his learned colleagues, thereby opening a world of contacts. Rivet was one of the first savants to recognize her linguistic gifts. A child prodigy, she knew Dutch, German, French, Latin, and Greek, and in November 1634, she began studying Hebrew, New Testament Greek, and the Greek church fathers with Gisbertus Voetius (Gijsbert Voet, [1589–1676]), the Utrecht minister, theologian, and reputed scholar in Semitic languages, who in 1636 became the rector of the newly founded University of Utrecht. As the first and only woman admitted to the university (albeit hidden in a small, closet-like space or cubicle with a lattice grid to protect her modesty), she mastered several Near Eastern languages, including Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldaic (or Aramaic), and she later studied Persian, Samaritan, and Ethiopian on her own. In 1633, buoyed by Rivet’s support, she began to seek a wider engagement with other scholarly correspondents (although always shrouding her interest in socially scripted modesty), not only through epistolary exchanges but also through the medium of art. It is in this context that her decision to circulate her first signed and dated self-portrait played an important but fraught role (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Anna Maria van Schurman. Self-Portrait, 1633. Etching, 198 x 152 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. RP-P-OB-59.344.
Scholars have long commented on the construction and dissemination of Van Schurman’s self-portrait. In an early discussion in 1909, Una Birch describes it as belonging to the “frivolous time of her life” when, as a noble woman, “she took a great deal of trouble with her appearance.”Footnote 3 Katlijne van der Stighelen notes that Van Schurman’s self-portrait inspired Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687)—polymath poet and composer, diplomat, art collector, and secretary to the Stadholder at the Court of The Hague—to write poems over the “curious detail” of her missing hands.Footnote 4 Pieta van Beek remarks that the portrait occasioned Huygens and Caspar Barlaeus (Caspar van Baerle, 1584–1648)—renowned Neo-Latin poet and professor of philosophy and rhetoric at Amsterdam’s Athenaeum Illustre—to express poetic “facetiousness” over Van Schurman’s “virginity,” an exchange she qualifies as “unusual in the Protestant Republic.”Footnote 5 For Martha Moffitt Peacock, Van Schurman’s self-portrait not only increased her fame but was also “a means of controverting the frequent imaging of women that emphasizes their beauty”: Van Schurman wanted her viewers to focus on her “artistic striving” rather than her physique.Footnote 6 Lieke van Deinsen, in studies on image formation in portraits of early modern learned women, observes that Huygens’s and Barlaeus’s eroticization of Van Schurman’s 1633 self-portrait indicates how both men refused to take her “intellectual talent” seriously.Footnote 7 Additionally, their responses to Van Schurman’s ambition to join the sodality of learned men are “indicative of the broader attitude towards women’s portrait engravings and the reception of (aspiring) female intellectuals in the strongly male-orientated early modern learned world more generally.”Footnote 8 Martine van Elk discusses the sexualization of Van Schurman as “an inevitable by-product of the notion of female publicity as visibility” and links it to the latter’s “self-conscious combination of self-display and concealment.”Footnote 9
Investigating the implications of and responses to Van Schurman’s bid to seek entrance into the transnational community of letters will bring her self-portraiture into sharper focus. Recent scholarship illuminates how early modern figures such as Van Schurman viewed portraits as a means of “transactional agency”: an “active affect” and a “relational agency,” according to Saskia Beranek and Sheila ffolliott, enabled such portraits to function within “a network of relationships and transactions.”Footnote 10 Ann Jensen Adams observes that these portraits “redefine the portrayed individual and the systems within which he or she is positioned.”Footnote 11 The early modern portrait, in effect, “sets the terms through which perceptions about the individuals it portrays are produced.”Footnote 12 Reflecting elsewhere on the uses of portraits in seventeenth-century Dutch art, Adams comments that they addressed “the ever elusive question of personal identity,” and that “the portrait’s role in the sitter’s self-perceptions and desires … and the viewer’s role as interpretive audience” need further study.Footnote 13
Van Schurman, this article will argue, exemplified in her 1633 self-portrait the ambitious goal of attaining distinction in the larger world of male scholarship. It focuses on how, as a rising female erudite, she may have hoped her self-portrait would help define her scholarly identity, allowing her to function within the network of relationships and transactions of the Republic of Letters. She may have thought her portrait would establish a framework through which her intellectual efforts could be understood. However, the tensions between her perceived self-casting as an attractive, marriageable young woman and the masculine nature of her enterprise triggered oppositional reactions to her desired outcome. My intention in this article is to offer an extended close reading of Van Schurman’s self-portrait and its reception. How, in her complex self-portrayal as sitter, artist, and agent of her own erudition—an unusual combination for an early modern woman—did she mean to be constructing herself? How was her self-portrait received within the Republic of Letters in which she sought a place? What measure of agency did she truly have in anticipating and guiding the viewer’s response?Footnote 14
Van Schurman’s use of self-portraiture also expresses her attempt to contribute to a Europe-wide debate on the notion of the intellectual equality of the sexes. The debate had been occasioned in 1622 by Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), who, in her Égalité des hommes et des femmes (The equality of men and women), made a case for a woman’s right to an equal Latinate education based on the equal moral and intellectual capability of the sexes. Van Schurman likely read Gournay’s treatise in the 1620s, when she was beginning to draw the attention of Dutch savants. She mentions Gournay’s treatise twice in letters to Rivet in 1637 and 1638 on female higher learning (more on these letters later). As Van Schurman rose to international prominence, her own writing would famously extend Gournay’s case. Between them, both developed, as Derval Conroy puts it, “the concept of equality as an intellectual category.”Footnote 15
To assess the portrait’s dual significance, I first discuss its contextual background, what went into its making, and how it negotiates Van Schurman’s bid for entrance into the Republic of Letters. While most members of the Republic of Letters welcomed her portrait as representative of her exceptionality, some drew attention particularly to her unmarried state. I thus examine Constantijn Huygens’s response in his flirtatious and eroticizing poems on Van Schurman’s missing hands.Footnote 16 I further frame Huygens’s preoccupation within a jesting homosocial epistolary exchange with Caspar Barlaeus.
Apprehending the nature of this homosocial exchange requires situating Van Schurman within the larger sociocultural and economic context of the place of learned women in Dutch culture. Briefly stated, a key social development that implicitly frames her self-representation is the driving domestic ethos intended especially for Dutch middle- and upper-class women. By the 1630s, domesticity had become the underpinning of the richest economy in Europe. The enormous wealth of the Dutch merchant or regent class was firmly rooted in high-value trade, manufacturing, and overseas investments. The responsibility for managing the newfound wealth of the home was delegated to the housewife, whose position acquired considerable social and moral importance.Footnote 17 This ethos of domesticity and accompanying matrimonial ideology, inherited from Renaissance Christian humanists Juan Luis Vives and Desiderius Erasmus, were summed up anew in two key works, Houwelijck (Marriage, 1625) by poet, moralist, and statesman Jacob Cats (1577–1660), and Van de wtnementheyt des vrouwelicken Geslachts (Of the excellence of the female sex, 1639, 1643) by physician and author Johan van Beverwijck (1594–1647). These works promoted educating women into becoming better wives, mothers, and household managers.Footnote 18 How learned women fared in this relatively new sociocultural and economic context can be assessed from the reception and treatment of sisters Anna Roemers Visscher (1583–1651) and Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher (1594–1649). Both wrote poetry, corresponded with learned men, and were celebrated—Tesselschade especially—at the musical soirees of the Muiden circle hosted by the prominent Dutch poet and historian Pieter Corneliszoon Hoft. James Parente notes two notable aspects of their treatment. First, they were compared to the Muses and the Graces, and, also, to “virtuous men”—Huygens referred to them as “meyssjes, mannelick van sin” (“maids of manly spirit”),Footnote 19 since women’s writing was considered “an inferior female version of a male poetic voice.”Footnote 20 The Visscher sisters were valorized and mythologized not on account of their writings but as “muses” of elite men.Footnote 21 Their writings remained largely unpublished until the nineteenth century.Footnote 22 Second, when Tesselschade married she ceased her literary activity, as the ethos of domesticity discouraged a married woman from seeking a public writerly identity separate from her husband’s; upon soon becoming a widow, Tesselschade was considered “the more desirable spouse for a learned man” and was courted by three widowers: Huygens, Hooft, and especially Barlaeus.Footnote 23 Anna Roemers married late, at age forty, after which she gave up writing. Even as the Visscher sisters—and Van Schurman—were bringing to the fore the reality of their independent intellects, and even as they corresponded with learned men, partnering with them in mixed-sex conversation, they were profiled and largely defined by men. They were beholden to matrimonial expectations. As Amanda Capern observes, “the learned lady of the Dutch Golden Age showed her learning to make her more marriageable.”Footnote 24
The responses of Huygens and Barlaeus reveal the risks inherent in Van Schurman’s youthful use of self-portraiture. Her entire career would involve negotiating with prominent male scholars for access and respect, from the consistently fatherly André Rivet to the flirtatious and sexualizing Huygens and Barlaeus, and many others whose treatment of her fell somewhere in the middle. Self-portraiture inevitably embedded her quest for recognition within a contingent sexuality. As Jane Stevenson remarks, “to acquire fame” in the case of a female erudite is “to risk defamation.”Footnote 25 How Huygens and Barlaeus expose the limits of Van Schurman’s ability to anticipate and forestall their and others’ responses will be examined. Nevertheless, her bold bid for wider visibility opened the way for her to defend—and, indeed, to exemplify, as Marie de Gournay had done—the equal potential of the sexes. Her engraved work would find its ultimate deployment and raison d’être in the print publication of her defense of women’s education and equal cognitive capacity.
THE MAKING OF ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN’S 1633 SELF-PORTRAIT
Van Schurman’s 1633 self-portrait reflected her emerging visibility. She had first gained attention locally in the 1620s, while in her teens, and her growing fame as a scholar and artist became a constant source of fascination to the intellectual community in the Dutch Republic and beyond.Footnote 26 Claudius Salmasius (Claude Saumaise, 1588–1653), the French Huguenot philologist and classical scholar at the University of Leiden, sent a copy of her self-portrait to his friends at the Cabinet Dupuy in Paris. The Parisian academy of the brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy, which met at the library of their uncle, the historian and magistrate Jacques-Auguste de Thou, was the premier arena for scholarly life in France during the first half of the seventeenth century and a social haven reserved for men.Footnote 27 In an exchange with Rivet in January 1634, Salmasius describes the portrait as “a cabinet collection piece and of the rarest kind, as much of she who has created it as of the person it represents, who are one and the same.”Footnote 28 He highlights the portrait as a simultaneous creation of the sitter—an emerging female scholar—and the artist. As such, Van Schurman was a rarity with immense curiosity value and Salmasius was performing a service to his Parisian peers by sending her engraving for display in their portrait gallery of hommes illustres (famous men).Footnote 29 Van Schurman, moreover, by disseminating her self-portrait, was engaging in the customary exchange of portraits by savants. The French medical doctor Guy Patin (1601–72), for instance, upon writing for the first time to Johan van Beverwijck, sent him his portrait, stating, “I am sending you my portrait, on the sole condition that you send me yours; I will consider it a splendid gift from a man whom I cherish and will hold as my model.”Footnote 30
Van Schurman’s initiative was made possible through her early 1630s apprenticeship with Magdalena van de Passe (1600–38), daughter of the Utrecht engraver Crispijn van de Passe the Elder (ca. 1564–1637). Guillaume de la Rivière, a contemporary biographer of Van Schurman, states that Van Schurman’s precocious ability at embroidery and papercutting, which her mother had taught her and which she accomplished so well that “one admired her for these,” led her father to “send her to stay with Magdalena de Passe, daughter of a famous engraver, who engraved as perfectly as him. It was from her that she learned to draw and to handle with dexterity the burin and the pencil.”Footnote 31 Magdalena was a rare, if not unique, female engraver, whose precocity and abilities became widely known. At age fourteen she had begun to sign some of her own engravings, and by age twenty she was already praised as a lead engraver in her collaborative work with her brother Willem on a series of sixty-five portraits of famous Tudor and Jacobean monarchs, scholars, and clerics.Footnote 32 These portraits appeared in printer and publisher Henry Holland’s Heroologia Anglica (English heroes, 1620), issued in folio format at the expense of Crispijn van de Passe the Elder and the bookseller Janson of Arnhem.Footnote 33 Arnoldus Buchelius (Aernout van Buchell, 1565–1641), a lawyer and antiquarian from Utrecht and a close friend of both the Van de Passe and Van Schurman families, composed the Latin verses in the portraits’ cartouche, which he signed with his initials, A.B. In a liminary poem to the volume, Buchelius applauded the siblings for their work and singled Magdalena out, capitalizing her first name and adding that her brother’s “achievement well-nigh matches hers.”Footnote 34 One engraved portrait in the Heroologia Anglica would especially have caught Van Schurman’s attention, that of early English Reformist Lady Jane Grey (1537–54), known throughout Europe as the Nine Days Queen, who became a martyr to her faith when she was beheaded for treason at age sixteen (fig. 2).Footnote 35 In her 1637 letter to Rivet on women’s education, Van Schurman praises “the incomparable Jane Grey, to whom no other nation, and no other age (and everyone agrees with this) will ever provide an equal.”Footnote 36 Grey, she states, had declared on the eve of her martyrdom that “nothing in her whole life had pleased her more than knowing the three languages reserved for the learned”—namely, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—which enabled her to study “the liberal arts and especially the Holy Scriptures.”Footnote 37 Shown in half-length, the portrait of Lady Jane Grey bears an overall resemblance to Van Schurman’s self-portrait. In comparing the two, one finds similarities in the positioning of the arms, the graceful arc of the broad shoulders, the turn of the neck and face, the shaded cheek, chin, and nose, and the sideways glance. Other similarities emerge: the cartouche inscribed in Latin, the background’s neutral space, and the lack of a frame. The engraved portrait of the martyred Lady Jane Grey may well be regarded as a model for Van Schurman’s own self-portrait, and her teacher Magdalena as a major influence on her choice of this art form to gain visibility in the wider community of savants.
Figure 2. Magdalena van de Passe or Willem van de Passe, after Hans Holbein the Younger. Iana Graya from Heroologia Anglica (1620). Engraving, 15.7 x 11.3 cm. London, British Museum. No. 2006, U.776. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Van Schurman studied portrait engraving on copper with Magdalena van de Passe—until the latter’s marriage in 1634.Footnote 38 Van Schurman’s ability was such that the English social commentator and naturalist John Evelyn (1620–1706) observed that she was “a Prodigy of her sex” in the art of engraving.Footnote 39 Early modern engraving, states Robert Fucci, was “a tradecraft” that “generally took some time to master and was usually an apprentice-learnt process,” while etching required only certain tools, “a few recipes for mordant and ground, and the will to experiment.”Footnote 40 Van Schurman loved the process of designing, sketching, etching, and engraving. In a letter to Rivet in October 1633—the same year as her first engraved and signed portrait—she shared how much she enjoyed these activities: “I would dare to affirm that every single moment of working on these portraits has been dear to me.”Footnote 41 The engraved print portraits to which she refers (no longer extant) are those of Marie du Moulin (Rivet’s wife and the half sister of the French Calvinist theologian Pierre du Moulin, 1568–1658), Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80), and Rivet himself.
Van Schurman’s 1633 self-portrait is remarkable for other reasons. While there is a well-established tradition of women painters creating self-portraiture in the Netherlands—Catharina van Hemessen (1528–after 1565) and Judith Leyster (1609–60), to name just two examples—there are very few portraits of Dutch seventeenth-century women writers, and even fewer self-portraits.Footnote 42 The Amsterdam apothecary and linguist Lambert Bidloo (1638–1724), commenting in his Panpoëticon Batavûm (All Dutch poets, 1720) on the scarcity of female author portraits in his collection of 346 miniature portraits, lavishly praised Van Schurman as an exception and included two portraits of her, both created by men after her death. He saw her, states Lieke van Deinsen, as “the blueprint for the ideal woman writer,” and he invited all aspiring women authors to study like Van Schurman so that they, too, could have “a solid chance at succeeding in the world of literature.”Footnote 43
The composition of Van Schurman’s self-portrait bears further examination. As described above, she depicts herself in fashionable attire. Her hairstyle is up-to-date in the style of elite women at the time, which included a fringe and curled or frizzed hair at the temples.Footnote 44 In both dress and coiffure, she resembles her French peer, Charlotte des Ursins (ca. 1570–1646), Vicomtesse d’Auchy, a learned noblewoman who published, under her own name, Homilies sur l’Epistre de Saint Paul aux Hebreux (Homilies on the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews, 1634) (fig. 3). Like Des Ursins, Van Schurman seems somewhat aloof, modest, and deferential. But whereas her peer’s portrait bears no cartouche, her self-portrait is set off by an outsized one taking up almost half of the engraving. The cartouche functions aesthetically as a kind of repoussoir, or stenciled block across the lower part of the portrait, to give greater depth and engage the viewer, and publicizes Van Schurman as the author of its Latin quatrain.Footnote 45 In this, Martha Moffitt Peacock notes, the portrait’s cartouche recalls the “glorifying male portraiture of the era,”Footnote 46 although portraits of male savants usually carried smaller cartouches referring to their talents and writings. Using these cultural conventions, Van Schurman is engaging in performative portraiture to draw attention and exert influence. Philosopher and art critic Louis Marin posits that in portraiture “representation and power share the same nature…. Power is to have the ability to exert an action on something or someone.”Footnote 47 Such a deliberately managed performance on Van Schurman’s part, with her stenciled cartouche as its focal point, shows her overtly seeking visibility in the wider intellectual world.
Figure 3. Charlotte des Ursins, vicomtesse d’Auchy, undated. Etching. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
She seeks publicity, first, by adopting the masculine-gendered pursuit of the art of engraving and, second, by inscribing an authorial poem in Latin. To handle the tools of an engraver, painter, and/or printmaker was to engage in a “manly pursuit”Footnote 48 linked to the male artist’s “sexual prowess.”Footnote 49 This did not go unnoticed. The Flemish rederijker (chamber rhetorician), poet, and jurist Cornelis de Bie (1627–1715/16), for instance, explains in his compendium The Golden Cabinet of the Noble Liberal Art of Painting (1662) that women painters in the Low Countries “instead of plying their needles to sew their seams, /… exercise their intellect in manly occupations [Mannelijcke wercken].”Footnote 50 Concerning Van Schurman, Cornelis de Bie writes:
Cupid, Cornelis de Bie opined, was most certainly banned from Van Schurman’s life, since she spent her time delving into the “deep secrets” of her art. She preferred “Manly occupations” to purely feminine labor and the search for love and marriage prospects. Thus, in both artistry and scholarship, Van Schurman concerned herself with occupations reserved for men.
Such masculine-gendered performativity is seen in portraits both of and by Van Schurman dating to the 1630s.Footnote 52 The printmaker Theodor Matham (ca. 1605/06–76) displays in his print her books, pens, and inscribed parchment pages, symbolic of masculine learning (fig. 4). He based his portrait on a more modest bust self-portrait by Van Schurman that originally appeared as a frontispiece in the first edition of Jacob Cats’s Trou-ringh (Wedding ring, 1637). Matham’s image also appeared as a frontispiece in a reissue in 1637 of Cats’s Trou-ringh, as well as in many later editions, thereby allowing him to take advantage of the immense popularity of Cats’s work through contributing his own version of Van Schurman’s self-portrait to its reissue.Footnote 53 Standing beneath a grand baldaquin, with a view of Utrecht’s Domkerk tower as in glorifying male portraiture, she carries a medallion featuring her own self-portrait.Footnote 54 The inscribed quatrain reads: “Whoever will come to see this beautiful portrait, / Will surely find therein the glory of all women / From the beginning of the world to this day, / For none, now or ever, can equal her.”Footnote 55 Matham glorifies Van Schurman as surpassing all other women.
Figure 4. Theodor Matham, after Anna Maria van Schurman. Portrait, undated. Engraving, 68 x 121 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. RP-PB-23.263.
In another undated self-portrait from the 1630s, this time in the medium of sculpture in box wood, Van Schurman casts herself as poet laureate (fig. 5). By crowning herself with laurel leaves, she draws attention to her growing fame and artistic precocity, commenting in her autobiography, Eukleria, seu melioris partis electio (Eukleria, or the choice of the better part, 1673), that she had carved it “with a common knife (no other tool was available, since I did not have access to the advice of a teacher).”Footnote 56 Completed possibly as early as 1630, it was more likely undertaken, I would argue, in the years 1637 to 1639,Footnote 57 at the time of her epideictic poem to Marie de Gournay, where she addresses “the great and noble-minded HEROINE GOURNAY / A strong defender of the cause of our sex,” who “wear[s] the laurels” and “bear[s] the arms of Pallas.”Footnote 58 Gournay, she affirms, authorizes women to follow “[her] standards, / Since a cause superior in strength to [herself] is leading the way!”Footnote 59 Van Schurman wrote in those years her treatise and letters on female learning, citing Gournay’s Equality of Men and Women. Gournay’s frontispiece portrait in her collected works, Les Advis, ou les presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay (The Opinions, or the gifts of the Demoiselle de Gournay, 1641), depicts her with a laurel branch in one hand, while the other is hidden behind a cartouche bearing her own publicity-seeking distich (fig. 6). In October 1639, Gournay thanked Van Schurman for her praise poem.Footnote 60 In defending and exemplifying the cause of female higher studies, Van Schurman found in Gournay an inspiring model.
Figure 5. Anna Maria van Schurman. Self-Portrait with a Laurel Crown, ca. 1630–38. Palmwood. Franeker, Martena Museum.
Figure 6. Jean Mathieu. Marie le Jars de Gournay from Les Advis, ou les presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay, 1641. Engraving, frontispiece. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Crispijn van de Passe the Younger (1594–1670) also represented Van Schurman crowned with laurels in Les vrais pourtraits de quelques unes des plus grandes dames de la Chrestienté, desguisées en bergeres (The true portraits of some of the greatest ladies in Christendom disguised as shepherdesses, 1640). He dressed her as a shepherdess carrying a laurel branch in one hand and a staff in the other (fig. 7), thereby drawing on the Italian and French pastoral and amorous traditions. Van de Passe’s depiction thus differs greatly from that of contemporary female authors and artists who wore the laurels to signify their creative contributions. The Italian feminist poet and natural philosopher Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), for instance, whom Van Schurman mentions in her 1638 reply to Rivet on women’s education, was featured in 1601 crowned with laurels in an engraving after a painting by Giovanni Battista Papa.Footnote 61 Italian women painters Giovanna Garzoni (1600–70), in Self-Portrait as Apollo, completed in ca. 1618–20 (fig. 8),Footnote 62 Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1656), in Clio, Muse of History, completed in 1632 (fig. 9), and Elisabetta Sirani (1638–65), in Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, completed in 1658 (fig. 10), defended the legitimacy of their potential (in Garzoni’s case) and actual (in Sirani’s and Gentileschi’s) careers in their self-promotion as laurel-crowned artists.Footnote 63 Van Schurman appears in Van de Passe’s Reference Van Deinsen, Geerdink and van den Braber1640 imaginary portrait gallery among sixty European queens, noblewomen, and merchants’ wives and daughters, all dressed as shepherdesses. Entitled Appolinea (Female Apollo), the accompanying French and Dutch quatrains highlight her “learning more than human,” and “speechless Apollo…/ And men dumbfounded, since Fame thunders…/ That in this worthy Maid the greatest wisdom dwells.”Footnote 64 Her shepherdess’s attire, however, sends a mixed signal since Utrecht artists were known for the pastoral genre in which shepherdesses conduct themselves, states Alison McNeil Kettering, as “willing playmates in love.”Footnote 65 Van de Passe’s collection also calls to mind his Miroir des plus belles courtisanes de ce temps (A Mirror of the most beautiful courtesans of this time, 1631) from a decade earlier, featuring forty European courtesans and prostitutes depicted as shepherdesses in amorous and flirtatious poses.Footnote 66 In his 1640 portrayal of Van Schurman, Van de Passe undercuts the metaphorical cross-dressing of her 1633 self-portrait where, with arms hugging her body, a concealing gown, and a high collar exposing no flesh, she seeks to communicate sexual continence and modest femininity, while her Latin inscription displays a masculine-gendered ambition. Van de Passe mimics the content of her inscribed cartouche but divests her of a demure, controlled projection of femininity, instead adorning her with a loosened gown, a décolletage, and flowing sleeves, thereby eroticizing and problematizing her self-representation.
Figure 7. Crispijn van de Passe the Younger. Anna Maria van Schurman (right) from Les vrais pourtraits de quelques unes des plus grandes dames de la Chrestienté, desguisées en bergeres, 1640. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 8. Giovanna Garzoni. Self-Portrait as Apollo, ca. 1618–20. Tempera on parchment, laid on linen, 42 x 33 cm. Segretariato Generale della Presidenza della Repubblica, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale. inv. ODP 758.
Figure 9. Artemisia Gentileschi. Clio, Muse of History, 1632. Oil on canvas. Pisa, Palazzo Blu Foundation. © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.
Figure 10. Elisabetta Sirani. Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1658. Oil on canvas, 114 x 85 cm. Moscow, Pushkin Museum. © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.
At the focal point of Van Schurman’s engagement with masculine-gendered occupations is her Latin inscribed poem, which fits the genre of the deprecatory epigram found in male author portraits:
The poem seems, at first glance, to signal modesty: Van Schurman uses a Catullan mode of self-deprecation in stating that her untrained hand could “perhaps” ruin her self-portrait. But, as in epigrams attached to male author portraiture, she also gestures toward a future work with the words “prima vice” (at the first opportunity). She asks the viewer to look away from her portrait to her true likeness in a future work. She is aware of the publicity practice, common since about 1610, of authors including portraits of themselves created through engraving on copper on the opening flyleaves of their books.Footnote 68 Was she planning her self-portrait as a frontispiece to a future work? What work could this have been? A year earlier, she had informed Rivet that she was composing “a little book in French” for female readers to “persuade these same young women of the best way to enjoy our leisure.”Footnote 69 The ideas of that “little book” (now lost) were developed in her Latin disputation and letters to Rivet on women’s higher studies—the letters were first published in 1638 in Paris in an unauthorized edition, entitled A Friendly Argument between the Most Noble Maiden Anna Maria van Schurman and Andreas Rivetus, on the Aptitude of the Female Mind for Knowledge and Humane Letters.Footnote 70 The treatise and letters were then reedited in Leiden in 1641 by the renowned Elzevier press under the title A Dissertation on the Aptitude of Women for Knowledge and Humane Letters. To which are added certain letters on the same argument. Footnote 71 Gournay read the Paris edition, and upon receiving Van Schurman’s epideictic poem began corresponding with her.Footnote 72 Van Schurman’s 1633 portrait would thus have linked her ambition to an act of publication, a daring move at the time for a woman of letters in the Dutch Republic.
Lastly, Van Schurman’s self-portrait is striking in what she leaves out. According to Katlijne van der Stighelen, its blank and unshaded background is rare in the genre, qualifying it as a “spiritual print … unique in Van Schurman’s total oeuvre, and in the history of Dutch seventeenth-century engraved portraiture.”Footnote 73 Moreover, it lacks a frame, as is the case of the frontispiece portrait of another Protestant woman author, Georgette de Montenay (1540–81), the first French female devotional emblematist whose Emblemes, ou devises chrestiennes (Emblems, or Christian devices), first published in Lyon in 1567 and 1571, was reissued in a polyglot edition in 1619 (fig. 11). As with Van Schurman’s self-portrait, Montenay’s image carries a cartouche in the form of two rolled bands, inscribed with a poem in French authored by Montenay. Van Schurman’s portrait, unlike Montenay’s, lacks hands. Might this suggest a trope of deferential self-effacement? Or might it, rather, lead viewers to focus on her head—or intellect—in light of the scholastic distinction between mental and manual labor (epistemē and technē) by which Arisotle defines people and their social spaces?Footnote 74 Babette Bohn reminds us of Renaissance Italian portraiture’s emphasis on nobility rather than labor. Bolognese self-portraits before 1650 that explicitly reference artistic vocation are rare because of “painters’ aspirations for higher status” and the fact that noble people did not, by definition, do manual work.Footnote 75 Portraits lacking hands are common in Van Schurman’s artistic oeuvre. In only two of her extant small-scale portraits is there a depicted hand. A 1624 bust-length portrait of her brother, Johan Godschalk van Schurman (1605–64), features his clenched fist holding up a book. And in a miniature, dated to about 1633, in which she depicts herself as Pudicitia (Chastity, or Modesty), her left hand holds up a veil covering her mouth and body, leaving visible only her eyes looking straight at the viewer, while her middle and index fingers point to her forehead (fig. 12).Footnote 76 In both Pudicitia and the 1633 self-portrait, Van Schurman situates herself in an in-between, neutral space, neither recognizably private nor public, but instead belonging to both, and in each case privileging mind over body.
Figure 11. Pierre Woeiriot. Georgette de Montenay. Portrait en buste, 1567. Engraving. Recueil Collection Laruelle, Portraits de femmes. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 12. Anna Maria van Schurman. Self Portrait as Pudicitia, ca. 1633. Oil on copper. Franeker, Museum Martena.
Van Schurman’s omission of hands, finally, may have been for one other reason: the hand played a special role both in Dutch matrimonial imagery and in Renaissance love poetry. Marja van Tilburg remarks that in the emblem opening the chapter entitled “Vrijster” (Sweetheart) in Jacob Cats’s Houwelick (Marriage, 1625), an “analogy between the hand and marriage” is demonstrated in the coat of arms depicting a hand lifting a bunch of grapes from a plate.Footnote 77 And Wendy Hall observes that in Renaissance love poetry, the word hand was used “in its anatomical, erotic, paleographic, and textual registers.”Footnote 78 Libertine erotic literature of the period, in spoofing learned women’s intellectual ambitions, also commended the female hand, James Turner notes, for its “skill at giving men pleasure.”Footnote 79
Thus Van Schurman, who had dedicated herself to lifelong celibacy on the strong encouragement of her father (on which more later), privileges in her 1633 and subsequent self-portraits head over hand, and mind over body. Supported and sponsored by her covenant father and regular correspondent André Rivet, launched into the art of copper etching, engraving, and printmaking by her renowned teacher Magdalena van de Passe, and inspired by the egalitarian thinker Marie de Gournay—the first to situate the concept of equality of the sexes at the center of her argument—Van Schurman aims, in her first dated and signed self-portrait, to enter the transnational community of letters. How was her self-portraiture and search for a scholarly identity within the larger intellectual world received? Constantijn Huygens, a consummate courtier, bel esprit, and versatile poet, cleverly and deliberately refocuses attention away from her head/mind to her hands/body, exploiting in the process the poetic conceit, alluded to by Wall and Turner, of the eroticized hand.
THE LIMITATIONS OF FEMALE AGENCY: CONSTANTIJN HUYGENS’S “ANNA, FOR I WILL CONFESS IT…”
Van Schurman’s self-portrait drew the attention of Constantijn Huygens. During his long career as private secretary and diplomat for four Orange-Nassau stadtholders at the court of The Hague, Huygens achieved a pan-European renown unmatched for his time. A virtuoso poet, patron of the arts, and lifelong instrumentalist and composer, he is known to have written and received over 100,000 letters, 10,000 of which are extant.Footnote 80 He amassed an internationally reputed art collection that specialized in medals, coins, and, above all, portraits of himself and others, especially royals such as Christina of Sweden and Louis XIV, and celebrities in the art and music worlds. But besides his interest in adding Van Schurman’s self-portrait to his famous cabinet of curiosities, Huygens drew on its potential to display his poetic verve. Over a five-day period, between 2 and 6 December 1634, he fired off twelve witty, flirtatious, and eroticizing poems of various length in Dutch, Latin, French, and Italian on her “handeloos” (handless) self-portrait.Footnote 81 This would not have surprised viewers of women’s self-depictions at the time. Portraits of women—even when situated within gendered boundaries of decorum and modesty—inevitably highlighted for male viewers, as Caroline Trotot observes, their status as “reproductive vessels … and their value as objects of desire.”Footnote 82 Women artists, in depicting themselves, asserted their right to claim a role outside biological reproduction through deliberately accentuating their lives as creative artists and thinkers.
For Huygens, Van Schurman was foremost a marriageable and fetching young noblewoman, an object of desire. He might have found her position on matrimony inconvenient to his fantasy of her. Her father had, for the sake of her deep piety and love of learning, repeatedly “warned” her from the “contamination” of the world and “especially the inextricable and corrupting chains of marriage,” as she explains in Eukleria.Footnote 83 She had thus resolutely committed herself to celibacy. Huygens likely did not know of her commitment to the single life. He flirts with her image in an epigram in French. Her “masle beauté” (“virile beauty”), he notes, fills him with envy of all other (presumably male) viewers, since she is attractive enough to draw men like him. He queries:
Huygens fashions himself into a poet-lover, wooing Van Schurman’s image. In effect, he reminds her of her comely bodily attributes and corporeal similitude to women in courtship portraits.
In another poem in Dutch, he puzzles over the reason for her hidden hands:
Huygens asks the reader to imagine that she hid her hands because they had been “stained” by her activity of turning copper “this way and that.” He implores the reader to forgive her—more exactly, to help her forgive herself—given that this was her “first cut.” In part, Huygens references the masculine-gendered nature of engraving, a craft performed in a print shop staffed by male workers. Engraving necessitated physical strength and the use of dangerous chemicals like nitric acid to dissolve the metal.Footnote 86 Like sculpture, it was considered an art that “stained” one’s hands. But Huygens also underscores Van Schurman’s doing her “cut” for the first time. Agnes Sneller explains the double entendre: “een meisje van de eerste snee” (“a girl of the first cut”) is a sexual metaphor for “a girl just come to maturity”—who is ripe for sexual intercourse.Footnote 87 Martine van Elk develops Sneller’s point, stating that “if, by this logic, Van Schurman gives herself the first cut, she is male and female, strangely sexual and asexual at once.”Footnote 88 In her self-portrait, Huygens finds two meanings. Van Schurman is crossing gendered boundaries by glorifying her ability to move into masculine-coded spaces. But, because she is unmarried, her efforts make her available for courtship and all that is supposed to come after it.
Van Schurman’s 1633 self-portrait created risks in yet another way: it exposed her to accusations of going against nature. Huygens addresses her desire to live by her mind alone through rejecting the human propensity to fall in love:
The opening to the poem “Anna, fatebor enim” (Anna, for I will confess it) invokes Dido, in Virgil’s Aeneid, who begins to confess her love for Aeneas to her sister Anna.Footnote 90 Huygens imagines Van Schurman falling in love, as did Dido, and coming within reach of the gleaming “apple” of knowledge in the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden. His reference to the “brightly painted apple” is also a subtle allusion to the famous golden apple evoked at the wedding of the mythological sea god Peleus and the nymph Thetis, on which the inscription, “for the fairest,” turns this allusion into a veiled compliment to Van Schurman’s beauty.Footnote 91 But Van Schurman refuses such knowledge, as well as her own physical “beauty” and ability to “marry a man,” since she has vowed to “exist merely as a mind.” For Huygens, her choice boils down to one of two options: either to engrave herself in her “embodied … true form,” as a flesh-and-blood woman (with hands), or to live “forgotten,” her face covered with the “creta,” “white powder” or cosmetic chalk, a lead pigment with which Roman women whitened their faces for protection from the sun. Van Schurman’s nickname for Huygens was Phoebus (a byname for Apollo, god of the sun and poetry). He thus intimates that Van Schurman should affirm her body through turning it toward the sun—that is, himself.
The real problem, states Huygens in another poem in Dutch, is Van Schurman’s inscribed cartouche. The inciting element in her self-display is the contradiction or tension between her fashionable attire and comely pose, recalling courting portraits of young women, and the intellectual, masculine-gendered accomplishment of her inscribed Latin poem:
Huygens goads Van Schurman to leave aside her publicity-seeking cartouche and expose her hands and body, not her mind, to his prying eyes. In a sort of titillating challenge, he tells her that even if she doesn’t discard the cartouche, he will always see her as an attractive woman to court at pleasure. Like Van de Passe the Younger, who later plays with and sexualizes her in his 1640 engraved portrait of her as a shepherdess, so Huygens plays, in multiple languages, with her polyglot fame and the singular casting of her body and mind. He reminds her repeatedly of her marriageable status. It did not take him long to forward his poems on her self-portrait to his colleague and friend Caspar Barlaeus.
OBJECTIFICATION AND HOMOSOCIAL BONDING
Caspar Barlaeus first contacted Huygens about Van Schurman’s 1633 self-portrait between mid-December 1634 and early January 1635. Their ensuing interchange, in Latin, constitutes a classic case of triangulation where learned men’s bonding with one another comes through the involvement of a woman.Footnote 93 Put another way, the phenomenon of “literary fraternity,” according to Courtney Quaintance, is one in which men’s relations depend on “companionship and conversation, and, especially, the practice of exchanging texts about women.”Footnote 94 This section addresses the ways in which Barlaeus and Huygens relate to each other through playing with and joking about Van Schurman’s self-portraiture. Also addressed is the matter of how they perceive both her bid to enter the male Latinate world and her implicit call for recognition of the cognitive equality of the sexes.
Barlaeus first learned of Van Schurman from Buchelius in 1627.Footnote 95 Two years later, her brother introduced himself to him and took the occasion to depict his sister as “unsurpassed” and “quite well known” (she was then twenty-two years old): “I don’t know if you have heard of her. Your writings have won her full attention.”Footnote 96 Barlaeus, in turn, immediately wrote to Huygens, in January 1630, stating that in Utrecht there lived “a rare young woman, Anna Maria van Schurman, who … speaks Latin. She paints, writes, versifies, reads, and understands Greek.”Footnote 97 In this letter, Barlaeus includes a draft of a panegyric to Van Schurman, “Ad doctissimam virginem, ANNAM MARIAM à SCHURMANS, Trajecti in Batavis habitantem” (To the learned virgin, Anna Maria van Schurman, living at Utrecht in Batavia), which focuses on her brilliance and (especially) marriageability.Footnote 98 Her “genius,” he states, is superior to men’s:
But she also shares with men a “common intellect,” thereby attaining equality with men: “No longer is sex of any account. You, learned men, / Share with this maiden a common intellect, our vilest part / Alone remains our own.”Footnote 100 “Our vilest part,” or sexual organ, Barlaeus laments, is now man’s only remaining distinctive marker. To make sense of this, Barlaeus falls back on the masculinized female erudite, the “facunda virago” (eloquent warrior woman), as he terms her:
Humanist catalogues of famous women, such as Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On famous women, ca. 1362), described man-like women as transcending their sex. Called viragos or prodigies (monsters) of nature, such women had a man’s mind in a woman’s body. Women artists were also considered marvels of nature.Footnote 102 Van Schurman, however, does not cater to this notion. Her 1633 self-portrait exhibits her ambition to be accepted as a woman intellectual. Her subsequent writings on female education demonstrate her desire to forge a path for other women to enter the wider community of learning, an appeal for which several of her female contemporaries lauded her.Footnote 103
Barlaeus then depicts Van Schurman not as an independent scholar but as a muse married to a male poet. Like Polla Argentaria married to the poet Lucan, Van Schurman “would similarly help the studies of men” if she were to marry.Footnote 104 He ponders whom she might choose as husband: “Who, fair one, will ascend your [bridal] couch as lover? / On whom will you smile as his betrothed, and on what husband as his bride?”Footnote 105 He imagines the “dowry” she would bring in the arts, languages, and virtues, and hints that she could look to him as a potential groom. Should she refuse his suit, she “will find another, if this Alexis displeases.”Footnote 106
Upon receiving Huygens’s poems on Van Schurman’s self-portrait, Barlaeus composed a thirty-two-line ode, “In Virginem Ultrajectinam, sine manibus pictam” (On the Virgin of Utrecht, depicted without hands). In a brilliant display of mythological references, he strings together women from the Hebrew scriptures and antiquity who committed “sins” with their hands.Footnote 107 Eve, the archetypal biblical example, plucked with her hand the forbidden fruit, while deceitful Rebecca, revengeful Sarah, and lying Rachel all committed sins with their hands. So did Lucretia, who committed suicide with her own hand. No wonder “Anna” refuses to depict her hands, writes Barlaeus.Footnote 108 By implication, she does not want to be associated with these women. Besides, her mind has a hand all its own. And the final reason? She is in a league all her own: “A virgin, she wants to touch no man.”Footnote 109
Not wanting to be outshone, Huygens replied with a salacious piece, stating that although he was no “bigamist,” he had “a thing going with this Virgin.”Footnote 110 Fortunately for him and Barlaeus, the “long distance [coïtus] intercourse” that both were having with the “virginal” Van Schurman enabled them to become “a parent bearing fruitful offspring.”Footnote 111
Barlaeus responded by upping the ante in a poem entitled “Rem cum Virgine eminus habentem” (On having a long-distance thing going with a Virgin):
Barlaeus pointedly reminds Huygens that he had been the one to introduce Van Schurman to Huygens “many harvests ago” and that (as noted earlier) he had been the first to eulogize her. He concludes by noting that although Van Schurman’s “virginity” remained intact, both men had “consorted” with her, making him just as much as Huygens—on paper, at least—an “adulterer.”
A year and a half later, in April 1636, Huygens’s flirtatious admiration for—and obsession with—Van Schurman became the subject of a letter from Barlaeus to Huygens. Van Schurman at that time had begun attending Voetius’s lectures. She did this enclosed in a small cubicle, to screen her from being ogled by the male students. In his letter to Huygens, Barlaeus states that things would be much easier for everyone, not least Huygens, if Van Schurman had a sex change. As things stand, he quips, “Anna is Anna, and she is also Annaeus, both male and female, truer than a prodigy, and like a hermaphrodite, and a well-known virgin. If you want nothing to be removed, and something to be sewn on, wouldn’t you be turning a virgin into an androgyne?”Footnote 113 Barlaeus’s ascription of hermaphrodism to Van Schurman speaks to contemporary concerns about maintaining, as Thomas Laqueur explains, clear-cut “categories of gender”: “Thus for hermaphrodites the question was not ‘what sex they are really,’ but to which gender the architecture of their bodies most readily lent itself…. The nearer a creature approaches ‘creativity,’ the more it is male.”Footnote 114 For Barlaeus, Van Schurman was projecting a confusing mix: she bore all the social and cultural marks of a man, and thus “Jupiter,” he continues, “should remove something and sew on something else, so that Anna becomes what once happened to that girl Iphis in Ovid.”Footnote 115 He links her to the Ovidian tale of Iphis, who, born a girl, was raised as a boy. When Iphis fell in love with a young woman, Ianthe, Iphis’s distraught mother brought her to the temple of Isis, where the goddess transformed Iphis into a man, enabling him to marry Ianthe.Footnote 116 Barlaeus’s take on Ovid is that Van Schurman, like Iphis, should be changed into what she truly is—a man. As proof, he contends that Van Schurman’s verses are those “only men can write”Footnote 117 —just one month before, at Voetius’s invitation, she had composed the customary Latin ode for the March 1636 ceremonies on the founding of the University of Utrecht, entitled “Anna Maria Van Schurman Congratulates the Famous and Ancient City of Utrecht with its Recently Founded University.”Footnote 118 Besides, Barlaeus continues, if she were a man “there would be no danger that a good man would become inflamed with love for her, nor would he fall in love with another man,”Footnote 119 thereby intimating that Huygens had fallen in love with Van Schurman. Moreover, access to her would be much simpler since “she is afraid of kisses, and she allows herself to be greeted and beheld as if she were the Empress of the Ottomans.”Footnote 120 She would not have to hide in her cubicle in a corner of the auditorium at the University of Utrecht. As a man, she could “openly profess her poetic work, in which she excels, and the writings in Hebrew which she can read without the aid of vowels under the guidance of Foot Doctor [Voetius].”Footnote 121 As a man, she could publicly reach the pinnacle of her abilities, even to the extent of “guiding the rudder of a republic and she could teach by example.”Footnote 122
Huygens’s and Barlaeus’s homoerotic exchanges display both masculine entitlement over the body of a woman and anxiety as to her intellectual power and supreme ability to become like and even surpass men. Van Schurman’s 1633 self-portrait, a cross between masculine-gendered authority and feminine modesty and sexual containment, evokes in their exchanges a radical incomprehension as to how she could possibly operate in the male world of learning as a woman with authority in her own right.
VAN SCHURMAN’S CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS
Van Schurman could scarcely have known of this private correspondence. Barlaeus warned Huygens that their “jokes” were strictly entre nous and seems to have considered them compatible with affirming her exceptionality: “But, my dear Huygens, let these things be kept as jokes between just the two of us. Indeed, it would not honor this extremely serious and extremely honorable virgin for more people to know these jokes.”Footnote 123 Nevertheless, Van Schurman was aware of—and resisted—the tendencies of both Barlaeus and Huygens (and others) to treat her flirtatiously through downplaying her anti-matrimonial resolve. She engaged in oppositional discourse when she countered Barlaeus at one point with a terse and witty reply indicating that she would, in effect, not reply to him, except to acknowledge receipt of his poem:
Van Schurman set firm limits in her exchanges with Huygens as well. In her first extant letter to him in 1636, she declares that she was no dupe to his praise, which she qualifies, in Greek, as an hyperboladen or exaggeration. Mixing admiration and praise with a guarded distance—a mix that characterizes her exchanges with Huygens over a period of some thirty-three years, from 1636 to 1669—she ends with an oblique reference to the gushing request in his first letter to her that she consider him “worthy to love … or a good thing to be loved.”Footnote 125 Huygens imagines himself as a Petrarchan lover and her as the object of his love. She, in response, tries to define the terms and the boundaries for their continued correspondence: “Farewell, most cultured of men, and to the extent that you talk of heavenly love, I very much desire that you pay attention to one who is very admiring of your virtue.”Footnote 126 She implicitly references the two Venuses of Plato’s Symposium, one celestial and the other terrestrial, so as to clearly signal the nonsexual nature of the love she desires.Footnote 127 To Huygens’s invitation to grant him “supreme happiness” by “loving him,” Van Schurman replies that her desire is for a spiritually informed relationship, nourished through an intellectual kinship.
The concept of a spiritually informed love in epistolary exchanges during the Renaissance, as Aileen Feng has argued, is founded on the “classical rhetoric of affection and friendship” in Cicero’s De amicitia (On friendship) and Epistolae ad familiares (Letters to friends).Footnote 128 Huygens echoes in his letter to Van Schurman not Cicero but Italian classicist and poet Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), who, in praising the renowned female humanist Alessandra Scala (1475–1506) for her Greek learning, pitches his praise as a summons to love: she was, he stated, the one “I have always been seeking, what I was asking from Eros.”Footnote 129 As Feng observes, learned women are treated as “more ‘feminine’” in epistolary exchanges, courted as beloveds like Petrarch’s Laura, because of how their erudition masculinizes them in the minds of their male counterparts.Footnote 130 Female humanists, on the other hand, claimed a Ciceronian affective form of exchange, devoid of eroticism. But their male interlocutors did not respond in kind. Huygens and Barlaeus spoke from a position of power and dominance in their appropriation of the lexicon of Petrarchan desire when addressing a female erudite. Like her Italian predecessor, Van Schurman is transformed into the objectified beloved of Petrarchan discourse.
Though Van Schurman was unable to control the responses to her 1633 self-portrait, circulating it afforded a crucial inflection point of lasting significance in a journey both outward and inward. Outwardly, it was a consequential bid to enter the international Republic of Letters at the very start of her career. Her celebrity before this was largely concentrated in the Dutch Republic. It now crossed borders. Salmasius forwarded her self-portrait to his colleagues in Paris. They indicated their great interest in her, which increased exponentially after her delivery of her Latin ode on the founding of the University of Utrecht in 1636, and, especially, after the unauthorized publication in Paris in 1638 of the Amica Dissertatio (Friendly dissertation) containing her writings on the education of women.
Inwardly, however, Van Schurman’s celebrity became increasingly burdensome. Her path would oscillate for years as a result of this burden. She keenly felt the necessity of working within the social mores of modesty expected of an early modern elite woman. Her devout Reformed piety also contributed to this oscillation. In correspondence with male savants, she began expressing a need to flee the limelight. In a revealing letter to Rivet in 1639—he was then trying to get her permission to publish her treatise and letters to him on female education—she stresses the deep ambiguity of her position:
Even if (as you say) I am unable to conceal myself entirely because of my fame, still I am drawn to the solitary life especially, and this has always been the case. I will insist on this with others that I have never lacked the desire to conceal myself. But you think that I owe to certain powerful men my permission to allow certain tokens of my little creative mind to be published. Because I agree with you, as in everything else, I would also agree with you here if I were to rightly fear nothing other than your judgment. But I cannot say whether my writings would be able to sustain the sharp attacks of malevolent critics (attacks to which, doubtless, my writings would be exposed).Footnote 131
Allowing print publication, she continues—neither she nor he had yet seen the unauthorized and flawed 1638 Amica Dissertatio—would inevitably lead critics to accuse her of “chasing after the popular aura of a certain whiff of glory if I were to publish my little scribbles which, such as they are, seem nearly empty of learning. Thus, I beseech you, again and again, to permit these writings of mine to remain hidden between your private walls until an opportunity worthier of praise at some point smiles on us.”Footnote 132 By rejecting any desire for the very fame that had accompanied her 1633 self-portrait’s bid for entrance into wider scholarly masculine networks—which would be amplified a hundredfold with the print publication of her writings on women’s education—she hoped to lessen her exposure and vulnerability to public criticism.
At the same time, she was clearly also hoping that she could write a work “worthier of praise” and more closely related to her (and Rivet’s) theological interests.Footnote 133 She fully intended to limit herself at that point to the manuscript circulation of her writings on women’s higher studies. But after receiving a copy of the Amica Dissertatio and seeing its flaws, Van Schurman unexpectedly not only gave permission but eagerly invited Rivet to release “one or two more letters” in French so that an authorized and clean version of their letters could appear.Footnote 134 The expanded version, flawlessly edited in 1641 by Johan van Beverwijck and published by the Elzeviers, the premier academic printers in the Dutch Republic, catapulted her name into the far reaches of Europe, reaching even American shores. These writings, along with her many epistolary exchanges with European savants, were edited and published by the Elzeviers in her Opuscula (Minor works) in 1648, reprinted in 1650 and 1652. She included a 1640 self-portrait as its frontispiece.
CONCLUSION
This essay details the complex dynamics set in motion by Van Schurman’s bold use of her 1633 self-portrait to find a voice and place in the scholarly world of early modern elite Dutch culture and the Republic of Letters. The responses to her bid would, among the transnational community of savants, oscillate between extravagant praise and jesting of a “comic-erotic” nature.Footnote 135 Salmasius and his colleagues at the Cabinet Dupuy, as well as many others, fulsomely lauded her exceptionalism, likening her to a “Dutch Minerva” and a “Batavian miracle” in service to the Dutch Republic.Footnote 136 Huygens and Barlaeus also joined the chorus: for Huygens, she was a “Batavian goddess” and an “illustrious jewel of our fatherland,” while Barlaeus eulogized her as born “for the Batavians.”Footnote 137 Both, however, jested in correspondence over her virginity, her unmarried state, and what they characterized as her hermaphrodism. Such responses, while in one sense welcoming and inviting her into their sodality as a “manly”Footnote 138 woman, did scarce justice to the cognitive equality of the sexes that she embodied and strove to defend. Nevertheless, her refusal of matrimony, encouraged by her own father, allowed her to affirm her youthful agency as a female intellectual. In practice, she traced for herself a different path which collided with the expectations of her day, creating complexities in her course of action. Her agency—enabled by supporters such as André Rivet and teachers such as Magdalena van de Passe—is made manifest in the bold use of her 1633 self-portrait, and her accompanying writing at that time on elite women’s uses of their leisure. These paved the way for the later print publication of her defense of female university learning in 1638, 1641, and beyond. Disseminating her first engraved self-portrait thus set the stage for her entering the fray of public opinion, and with the ensuing publication of her writings she joined cause with Marie de Gournay in support of women’s education. In so doing, Anna Maria van Schurman lent her voice to the Europe-wide debate on the intellectual equality of the sexes.
Anne R. Larsen is Professor Emerita in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Hope College. Her work explores the literary writings and the history, biography, and education of European Renaissance and seventeenth-century learned women.
