A Women's Republic of Letters: Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay, and Female Self-Representation in Relation to the Public Sphere

Abstract

In the study of early modern women writers' participation in trans national networks of epistolary exchange, a remarkable example is the one centered on the polyglot Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678), One of the most famous erudite women in Europe and the most celebrated in the Protestant world, Schurman corresponded with many women, with whom she established a commonality of purpose and a sense of community. She addressed letters both to the well-known—such as the Huguenot Princess Anne de Rohan (1584-1646), Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1689), and the latter's sister Sophie von der Pfalz (1630-1714), later Electress of Hanover—and to the relatively obscure— such as a Madame de Coutel, who shared her interest in portraiture, and Anne de Merveil, Dowager of Prosting.1 The concept of a respublica Ili teraria mulierum (a women's Republic of Letters) emerges strongly from Schurman's letters and poems addressed to her peers in other lands.2 In France, during the first part of the seventeenth century, three notable contemporaries of Schurman, Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565 1645), Anne de Rohan, and Madeleine de Scudery (1607-1701), either entertained an epistolary exchange with her or knew her work firsthand. In the second half of the century, Schurman continued to be admired for her erudition, knowledge of languages, defense of women's higher educa tion, and modesty: Madame de Motteville (1615-1689), in a letter writ ten in 1660 to Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans (1627-1693), Duchesse