On Translating and Editing the “Star of Utrecht”: The Autograph Letters of Anna Maria Van Schurman (1607–78) to André Rivet and Constantijn Huygens

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the challenges we faced when translating and editing the autograph letters of Anna Maria Van Schurman that span four decades from 1631 to 1669. Van Schurman was regarded as the most learned woman in Europe throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century. Most of the letters, primarily in Latin, are addressed to André Rivet (1572–1651) and Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), towering figures in the Dutch Republic and the Republic of Letters. Our greatest challenge in translating and editing the letters was rhetorical: to discern and identify the gender dynamics at work when Van Schurman self-consciously entered the lettered world of male power and authority. Presenting the distinctive epistolary relations Van Schurman shared with Rivet and Huygens necessitated the identification of particularities in content, tone and material culture. Similarly, exploring these relations meant highlighting subtle and complex material markers in Van Schurman’s letters, such as handwriting, visual presentation, and closing subscriptions and signatures, as well as postscripts, deferential spacing and quantity of paper used. We present Van Schurman’s manuscript exchanges with Rivet and Huygens as a window into how a learned woman negotiated the challenges of epistolary networking in the Republic of Letters.