This article offers a new reading of Hugo Grotius’s early treatise De Jure Praedae Commentarius (Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, 1604-1606), approaching this text from the perspective of material culture. Commissioned by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) after Dutch seafarers confiscated the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina and its cargo, Grotius’s text, this article proposes, deliberately obscures the ways the Dutch valued objects as trophies, loot, and spoils. Analysis of De Jure Praedae reveals that Grotius argues against the display of material wealth that the Dutch had acquired as loot, negatively associating it with the Portuguese and Spanish empires and instead propagating the invisible dispersal of the booty. In this way, De Jure Praedae, an early work by a major apologist of the VOC, rationalised the continuous circulation of objects in the service of Dutch empire-building. The article’s broader project is to speak to scholars of the global circulation of material culture and of empire alike to contribute to a history of how looted objects were conceived as key instruments in Dutch imperial expansion.

The marriage of William II of Orange and Mary Stuart in 1641 has often been viewed as a social and dynastic alliance with far-reaching political consequences for the Houses of Orange and Stuart. The key appointments of the Anglo-Dutch couple Lady Katherine Stanhope and her husband Lord Heenvliet to supervise Princess Mary’s household have been seen as a deliberate power grab orchestrated by the couple themselves. This article argues a more nuanced view of their partnership, however, considering how intangible qualities such as status, motherhood, and widowhood shaped their diplomatic practices alongside more traditional advantages of political connections and access to wealth. The use of soft power and cultural exchange also shaped the couple’s reputation as they operated within the domestic realm of the princess’s household whilst juggling the political demands created by the exiled Stuarts and their supporters, highlighting the duality of their roles. Stanhope was also the wife of a Dutch diplomat and whilst appointed dame gouvernante and surintendant général respectively to the princess by Charles I, they operated without reference to Sir William Boswell, the king’s ambassador at The Hague until 1649. By examining concepts relevant to Stanhope’s agency, this article adds further perspectives to consider in relation to Anglo-Dutch diplomatic practice in the 1640s.

This article examines a letter corpus from the Prize Papers, sent in 1664 by Dutch seafarers’ wives to their men overseas, to explore what early modern letters can reveal about experiences of anxiety. These letters were sent in a time of crisis: the bubonic plague haunted Dutch port cities and the Second Anglo-Dutch War was looming. To overcome the experience-convention dichotomy of epistemic emotions, this article suggests a different approach to epistolary experiences by conceiving them not merely as internal sensations but as a series of affective practices in which the mindful body dynamically interacts with its environment. By approaching letters as sites where the body, the mind, and the environment intersect, this article reveals how women were turning their anxiety into concrete objects of fear, how they tried to communicate anxious feelings in interaction with their environment, and how they experienced these feelings in their bodies. Moreover, it encourages researchers to take formulaic language seriously when discussing the experiences of historical actors arguing that formulae reflect experienced reality and embodied feelings.

This article presents a computational approach to the relationship between gender and character speech in early modern Dutch drama. It evaluates the possibility of automatically classifying gender based on the speeches of 1141 characters and character groups from 98 early modern Dutch plays (1613-1786). The experiment combines three approaches to gender classification: lexical, semantic, and stylistic. The results show that each approach fails to reliably capture distinctions between male and female speech in early modern Dutch drama, in contrast to similar studies of gender distinctions in other literary corpora. The inability to measure a gender binary in Dutch dramatic discourse indicates that gender generally was not performed through the vocabularies of Dutch male and female characters. The absence of clear gender distinctions in character speech is read as a product of the persistent tradition of cross-dressing in the Dutch Republic, creating fictional realities in which gender became fluid and complex.

The importance of the role of women as artists has been recognised and rightly continues to be researched. However, although there are exceptions, the scholarship that has been produced over the past two decades does not sufficiently challenge patriarchal, male-centric art historical research, with its focus on the so-called ‘creative genius’. The result, whether intentional or not, has been a continued emphasis on so-called stars, exceptional women, and trailblazers. Promising scholarship has focused on the role of women as artisan-makers or considered the gender-specific circumstances in which women operated. This scholarship, while of critical importance, unwittingly validates the assumption that the creation and production of (fine) art in the long seventeenth century in the Low Countries was primarily a man’s affair, with women relegated to more peripheral roles. If we are to truly write an inclusive art history, however, we must be willing to re-examine, expand, and even re-define traditional concepts in art history as they relate to the creation and production of art, pursue interdisciplinarity, and adopt the tools at our disposal, notably technical and object-based art history and the digital humanities.

Combining literary analysis with book history, this short essay examines how representations of women within a play may be complicated by considering the context of individual printed versions. Ariadne, by Katharina Lescailje, offers a translation of Thomas Corneille’s tragedy, with its complicated female protagonist, for the Dutch stage. In the 1693 single edition and the 1731 complete edition of Lescailje’s work, this ambivalent representation of femininity is accompanied by title pages, a frontispiece, and a dedicatory poem that present Ariadne as eroticised and victimised, conflating her with Lescailje herself. In addition, Lescailje appears on title pages as translator, author, and stationer. All of these representations together show how printed versions of plays can add to the depiction of women in drama to display a variety of female roles for the reader to contemplate and explore.

This article brings together the main historiographical discussions that concentrate on women in science and science on women in the early modern Low Countries, with a focus on recent decades and the Dutch Republic. Modern scholarship on the early modern Dutch scholars, writers, and thinkers that discussed the female nature in this period is relatively limited. The first part of the article brings together publications on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in Dutch anatomy, studies that discuss the ideas of particular scholars, for example Johannes Swammerdam (1637-1680), Reinier de Graaf (1641-1673), and Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), and the recent work on the early modern debate on female education. In contrast, current scholarship that discusses the role of women in scientific and scholarly debates in the Dutch Republic is a broad and varied field, consisting of studies on the genres in which the debate about the (potential) position of learned women was conducted, of in-depth explorations of the lives and works of individual women, and, more recently, of projects that construct a more collective understanding of female participation in the intellectual domain. Building on recent insights, this contribution makes a plea for interdisciplinarity and a more integral perspective that moves beyond the disciplinary, the singular, and the exceptional.

While the field of technical art history has progressed tremendously over the last decades, there has been little technical research into paintings made by early modern women artists. As archival and documentary evidence on these women is often scarce, the objects made by them are our best sources for learning more about them as artists. This article explores the potential of this methodology: how can technical examinations of paintings provide us with more information on women artists, and more specifically their studio practice, training, and artistic and professional network? Michaelina Wautier’s Flower Garland with Butterfly serves as a case study. Technical research into this painting revealed a clear technical influence of Antwerp-based specialised flower painters on the materials and painting techniques employed by Wautier. The way Wautier used a lay-in to prepare the composition shows many similarities with a specific painting technique developed and employed by specialised flower painters from Antwerp. Moreover, Wautier’s use of the pigment orpiment shows more of this technical influence from flower painters.

In the past decades, historians have taken great strides in uncovering the central position of women in Dutch maritime and colonial contexts. Emphasis is shifting, however, from a focus on maritime women in the Dutch Republic and women who were part of the colonial elites towards marginalised African, Asian, and Indigenous women in Dutch colonies and the Dutch Republic itself. Large digitisation projects are increasing the possibilities of further extracting their underrepresented perspectives from written documents, although this leads to new methodological challenges. Great care needs to be taken to not amplify biases already existing in the sources, and an awareness newly created bias by selections made when digitising is crucial. Moreover, the limitations of the written documents emphasise the importance of employing other types of sources. The future of scholarship on women in Dutch maritime and colonial worlds needs to include more object-based approaches, and quantitative patterns must be more closely explored through qualitative, interdisciplinary analysis. Various topics can be further studied to centre women in early modern colonial and maritime scholarship, including (family) networks, cross-generational patterns in family histories, strategies of survival and resistance, emotions and sexuality in empire-building, and gendered divisions in global labour and production.

When wealthy widow Judith Stuyvesant died in her seventh decade of life, she left a will passing down her possessions to her descendants. Judith Stuyvesant’s 1684 will exposes the fraught connections between family, race, property, and power in colonial New Netherland. Her life intersected with diverse women, and her legacy was shaped by their lives as well. Among them was Mayken van Angola, an African woman who petitioned for her freedom and later married in Judith’s chapel, and Judith’s granddaughter, Anna, whose inheritance was marked by loss and violence. This article examines how wills, court petitions, and depositions offer insight into the lives of women who shaped, and were shaped by, a colonial world defined by landownership, labour, and enslavement. Through an analysis of Judith’s bowery, the family vault, and the chapel, it considers how material spaces reflected both privilege and dispossession in early New York.