Herrad of Landsberg, Abbess, Author, and Artist

Herrad of Landsberg, abbess of Hohenburg Abbey (died 25 July 1195)

The exact date of Herrad of Landsberg's birth is unknown, but most sources agree that she was probably born about the year 1130, making her about thirty years younger than Hildegard of Bingen, to whom she is sometimes compared. 

Although Herrad's place of birth was widely thought to be the castle of Landsberg, located in Alsace, France, more recent scholarship has called into question Herrad's association with the noble family associated with this castle. Today scholars prefer to identify her as Herrad of Hohenburg, though it is often hard to avoid the older name. (And I've used it here.)

A "self portrait,"
Herrad of Hohenburg,
detail from 
Hortus deliciarum

Little is known about Herrad's early life. There is no surviving evidence about her parents, where she might have been born, or when she may have entered the the Augustinian convent of Hohenburg, where she would spend her life and where she became abbess. 

While her former identification with the noble family of Landsberg castle is almost certainly incorrect, Herrad is likely to have had some aristocratic connection in order to have become abbess of such an institution.

The abbey of Hohenburg had been restored by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who placed it under the direction of the abbess Rilinda of Bergen. While Herrad would succeed her as abbess, probably about 1176, the exact date isn't known. And, as Joan Gibson notes, "Although Herrad acknowledges that she was instructed by Rilinda's 'admonitions and examples', it is not certain that Herrad was in fact a pupil of Rilinda, nor even necessarily educated at the abbey of Hohenburg."

Not is it clear when Herrad began compiling the encyclopedic work for which she is today remembered, the Hortus deliciarum or Garden of  Delights. The title, with its reference to a garden, clearly recalls Paradise, but it also refers to the nature of the work itself, as a florilegium, a collection of extracts. And here is the playful simile Herrad's uses in her preface, addressed to the nuns in her convent: 

I myself, the little bee, composed this book titled Garden of Delights, and drew from the sap of the diverse flowers of Holy Scripture and from philosophical works, inspired by God, and I constructed it by my love for you, in a manner a honeycomb full of honey for the honor and the glory of Jesus Christ and the Church.

A collection of 1,160 "textual extracts," Herrad's encyclopedia includes poetry, prose, and dialogue as well as song texts accompanied by musical notation, and some 340 illustrations in its 324 folios (648 pages). The sources from which Herrad draws for her encyclopedia include some classical authors (though not poets--her illustrations include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Muses, and Odysseus), the philosopher Boethius, the writings of the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine, and more contemporary philosophers, among them, notably, Hildegard of Bingen.

The final illustration from
Hortus deliciarum,
Herrad address her sisters,
caption identifying her as
"Herrat hohenburgensis abbatissa"

As Thomas Head writes in his entry on Herrad in the Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, the collection "provided information on a wide range of biblical, theological, spiritual, and historical topics," though its specific purpose--and its intended audience--aren't altogether certain.

Again, it has been widely said that Herrad intended her encyclopedia for the education of the novices at the abbey, though more recent scholarship has questioned that assumption. The collection was certainly addressed to members of the community, as her preface indicates, but its specific audience and purpose have been debated. As Gibson notes, the encyclopedia contains material on marriage, so lay women may also have been "considered" as part of the audience for whom the the "garden" was intended. "Although there is a general agreement that the Hortus deliciarum is a remarkable and very important work of the late twelfth century," she writes, "it is nevertheless extremely difficult to classify."

However difficult it may be to classify, the encyclopedia itself was the product of Herrad's wide-ranging knowledge. Abbess Rilinda may have had some part in its origins, but Herrad is its singular inspiration, and she worked closely on all aspects of its production. 

As if to compound the many difficulties and uncertainties associated with the manuscript, the Hortus deliciarum no longer exists. Well, the original manuscript no longer exists. After the abbey of Hohenburg burned in 1546, the contents of its library went to the bishop of Strasbourg. The manuscript eventually wound up in the municipal library in the Central Registry of Strasbourg in 1803. It was destroyed in 1870, during Prussian bombardment of Strasbourg during the Franco-Prussian War.

What remains of Herrad's "garden of delights" are copies of the miniatures made in 1818 by Christian Moritz Engelhardt (head of the Strasbourg police!) and various (incomplete) copies of its texts, sketches, and tracings made before the book's destruction. (Evidently one man who copied parts of the manuscript took it to Paris and kept it for ten years!) Two scholars, A. Straub and G. Keller, produced a reconstruction of the Hortus deliciarium, beginning work in 1879 and publishing in 1899 (after Straub's death in 1891). It is from this late nineteenth-century "edition" that the illustration I have used here--Herrad addressing the nuns of her convent--is taken.

Herrad of Hohenburg died on 25 July 1195. 

For a discussion of the manuscript, you might start with the website of the Bibliothèque Alsatique du Crédit Mutuel (click here). It's particularly good on the history of the manuscript from the time it entered the municipal library in Strasbourg until its destruction. It also offers a gallery of illustrations that have been given some color.

A colorized version of
the final manuscript illustration,
Bibliothèque Alsatique

To view 12 black-and-white drawings made by Engelhardt in 1818, turned into copperplates, and now digitized, click here. You can see Engelhardt's drawing of the final manuscript illustration, Herrad and the convent's nuns, which was later reproduced by Straub and Keller in their reconstructed edition.

I've already linked you, above, to this nineteenth-century "facsimile." In 1979, the Warburg Institute produced a "partial facsimile" of the Hortus deliciarum with commentary by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff, and Michael Curschmann. It is now considered the best available edition, but only 750 copies were produced. (As of this writing, two copies are available on Amazon--one for the low, low price of $2,160, the other $4,458.03--three cents???!!!)

I find Joan Gibson's "Herrad of Landsberg," to which I've already linked you, to be the best overall analysis. Her essay is in A History of Women Philosophers . . . , vol. 2, edited by Mary Ellen Waithe. (Which is also ridiculously expensive, so I've linked here to what's available via Google Books.)

Luisa de Medrano, the First Female Professor?

Luisa de Medrano (born 9? August 1484)

Born in Atienza (Guadalajara), Spain, some time in August 1484--on 9 August, according to some sources--Luisa de Medrano was one of the doctae puellae (learned young women) favored by Isabella of Spain, who attracted and supported a number of such well-educated women to her court. (Women like Beatriz Galindo, about whom I have already posted.)

In Juan de Pereda's Sibyls of Atienza,
the face of the sibyl on the left has been
identified as belonging to Luisa de Medrano

Medrano was the daughter of Diego López de Medrano and Magdalena Bravo de Lagunas.

Her paternal family was one of the "Twelve Lineages of Soria," a chivalric military order established in the Middle Ages.

Little biographical information is available in English, and my Spanish is more than a little rusty, but the bare outlines of Lucia de Medrano's story emerge nonetheless. 

After Luisa de Medrano's father and grandfather were killed during the campaign to conquer Granada, at the battle of Gibalfaro (1487), her mother and her eldest sister, Catalina, were established at the court of Isabella of Castile. The rest of the Medrano children--eight of them, including Luisa--were likely to have been too young to have served at court, but seem to have joined other noble children, including those of the Spanish monarchs.

Medrano received an extraordinary humanist education, probably tutored by a professor associated with the University of Salamanca. According to an account of her life in El Mundo, Medrano may have been present at the reception for Christopher Columbus, celebrating his return from his first voyage, and she is likely to have met Beatriz Galindo.

In 1508, when she was twenty-four years old, Luisa de Medrano addressed scholars at the University of Salamanca. The event was noted by the rector of the university, Pedro de Torres: "Ad 1508 die 16 novembris hora tertia legit filia Medrano in Catedra Caconum" ("on November 16, 1508, at the third hour, read the daughter of Medrano").

The nature of this event isn't clear--Medrano may have read a lesson, perhaps on Latin or even canon law, or she may have actually have taken up a position, likely for the year 1508-09, following the departure of the scholar Antonio de Nebrija. In either case, Medrano is regularly cited as the first (known) female professor at a European university.

A further tribute was offered by the Italian scholar Lucio Marineo Sículo, who taught at the University of Salamanca (1484-96), in a 1514 letter to Luisa de Medrano: 

Ahora es cuando me he convencido de que a las mujeres, Natura no negó ingenio, pues en nuestro tiempo, a través de ti, puede ser comprobado, que en las letras y elocuencia has levantado bien alta la cabeza por encima de los hombres, que eres en España la única niña y tierna joven que trabajas con diligencia y aplicación no la lana sino el libro, no el huso sino la pluma, ni la aguja sino el estilo.

[Now I have been convinced that Nature did not deny women intelligence ("wit"), because in our time and through you it can be proven that in letters and eloquence you have raised yourself head high above the heads of men, that in Spain you are unique, a young woman who works with diligence and application not in wool but in the book, not with the spindle but the pen, not the needle but the stylus.*]

In a will written in 1527, Magdalena Bravo de Laguna, Luisa de Medrano's mother, notes her daughter's recent death. If she died in 1527, Luisa de Medrano was just forty-three years old. 

Medrano is said to have written poetry and philosophy, but if so, none of her work has survived.  

Today an institute of secondary education in Salamanca is named for her, the Institute of Lucia de Medrano. The Luisa de Medrano International Prize, named in her honor, is awarded by the Instituto de la Mujer, Castilla-La Mancha. In announcing the name of the prize, the awards committee noted that Medrano was "the first female professor of a European university." 

Logo for the prize named in honor of
Luisa de Medrano

*Sorry for any inaccuracies in my translation!

There is a brief biography in Spanish (click here), as well as a novel, María López Villarquide's La catedrática.

Update, 23 March 2021: The comment from Ana (see below) points to the 2019 essay by Ana María Carabias Torres, "Beatriz Galindo y Lucía de Medrano: ni maestra de reinas ni catedrática de derecho canónico" ("Beatriz Galindo and Lucía de Medrano, Neither a Teacher of Queens Nor a Professor of Canon Law") Investigaciones Históricas, época moderna y contemporánea 39 (2019): 179-208. The piece is in Spanish, but here is the article abstract, in English: 

Study of documentary sources that have lead a majority of researchers to believe that Beatriz Galindo, “La Latina,” was Queen Isabella the Catholic’s teacher, and that Lucía, or Luisa de Medrano, was a professor of Canon Law at the University of Salamanca. In this article we try to prove that none of this has been true, through critical analysis of primary documentary sources. 

A .pdf of the article is available online--to access it, click here. 

In light of Professor Carabias Torres's analyses, I've added a question mark to the title of this post!

M

ARÍA

C

ARABIAS

T

ORRES

Elisabeth of Bohemia, Philosopher and Princess-Abbess

Elisabeth of Bohemia  (born 26 December 1618)

Elisabeth of Bohemia was the daughter of Frederick V, elector of the Palatine (a German territory that was part of the Holy Roman Empire) and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James Stuart, the English king who had succeeded Elizabeth Tudor as ruler of England. 

Elisabeth of Bohemia,
c. 1636

First, a few words about Elisabeth of Bohemia's parents. The glamorous teenaged couple--Elizabeth Stuart was later called the "Queen of Hearts"--was married in a dazzling Valentine's Day ceremony in 1613, the ceremony itself following fireworks displays, pageants, and extravagant celebrations (including a mock sea battle on the Thames), accompanied by dozens of wedding poems written for the occasion (John Donne contributed one), and followed by weeks of feasting. (For an extended description of the festivities, you can read Richard Cavendish's "The Marriage of the Winter Queen," from History Today, by clicking here.)

The journey of the elector of the Palatinate and his new electress to Heidelberg was equally lavish. Once in Heidelberg, Elizabeth gave birth to three children (she ultimately gave birth to thirteen), including Elisabeth, the subject of today's post. In 1619, Frederick and Elizabeth were offered the throne of Bohemia, and the golden couple became--briefly--king and queen of Bohemia. 

But Elizabeth Stuart is now best known as the "Winter Queen," signifying the brevity of her reign. Frederick and Elizabeth assumed the throne of Bohemia in November 1619--within a year, the Protestant couple had been run out of Bohemia by Frederick II, the Catholic Holy Roman emperor, who took possession of the Palatinate as well. The two were exiled, taking up residence in The Hague. Frederick V died in 1632, just thirty-six years old. The Winter Queen lived for another thirty years. She returned to England on 26 May 1661, just after the restoration of her nephew, Charles II, and died in London less than a year later, on 13 February 1662. 

A formidable woman who was a skilled player in the games of international politics, Elizabeth Stuart is now largely a forgotten figure. For a quick read, Lisa Jardine's "The Winter Queen of Bohemia," written for the BBC Magazine, will suggest why you need to know more about Elizabeth Stuart.

And now for the subject of today's post. While her mother was, for more than thirty years, "one of the foremost power brokers for the Protestant cause in Europe," Elisabeth of Bohemia was an equally accomplished daughter.

When her parents left for Prague in 1619, Elisabeth and her siblings remained behind with their grandmother, Louise Juliana of Orange, who had been regent of the Palatinate for her son, Frederick V--she had also discouraged her son from taking the throne of Bohemia, fearful of just the sort of religious conflict that did, indeed, erupt. Frederick V's deposition was the trigger for the Thirty Years' War.

Elisabeth would remain with her grandmother until 1628, but the two could not stay in the Palatinate--once the emperor had captured Bohemia and turned his attention on Frederick's German territories, Louise Juliana fled with Elisabeth to Berlin, taking refuge there with her daughter, Elizabeth Charlotte, the wife of the elector of Brandenburg. (In 1631, after Elisabeth had rejoined her parents in The Hague, Berlin was under siege, and Juliana Louise relocated with the rest of the Brandenburg court to Konigsberg, in east Prussia.)

Despite the turmoil, Elisabeth received an excellent education. In 1639, she began a correspondence with the Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman, whose response, filled with praises for Elizabeth Tudor and Jane Grey, acknowledged Elisabeth's English connections.

Elisabeth met Descartes while he was in The Hague, and the two began a philosophical exchange--initiated by Elisabeth of Bohemia in 1643, the correspondence continued until Descartes' death in 1650. Fifty-eight letters survive--thirty-two from Descartes and the remaining twenty-six from the princess Palatinate.

In her excellent overview of Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical work for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Lisa Shapiro notes that Elisabeth is not merely soliciting answers from Descartes but is, instead, developing and expressing her own philosophical views. "It is evident from the correspondence," Shapiro writes, "that Elisabeth has a remarkable and wide-ranging critical philosophical acumen. Careful reading of her side of the correspondence does suggest she has some positive philosophical commitments of her own, on matters including the nature of causation, the nature of the mind, explanations of natural phenomena, virtue, and good governance."

Beyond her interest in Cartesian philosophy, Elisabeth's correspondence with Descartes illustrates a wide range of interests and involvements: 

The correspondence . . . reveals her to have been involved with an appointment in mathematics to the University of Leiden and in negotiations on a number of matters, including the imprisonment of her brother Rupert in conjunction with his efforts around the English Civil War, negotiations of the marriage of her sister Henrietta, negotiations of the Treaty of Westphalia, and the finances of her family after the end of the Thirty Years War.

After Descartes' death, Elisabeth returned to Heidelberg in 1653 where her brother, Charles Louis, had been restored as elector of the Palatinate. Disturbed by her brother's abandonment of his wife, Elisabeth managed to secure the release of her sister-in-law, Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel and move on with her to to Hesse.

In 1660 she joined the convent of Herford Abbey. The eighth-century convent was the oldest in Saxony, at one time an imperial abbey within the Holy Roman Empire. Although it was now a Protestant convent, it retained its status, and in 1667 Elisabeth of Bohemia became its head, with the title of "princess-abbess."

The Abbey of Herford,
where Elisabeth of Bohemia
served as princess-abbess

As Shapiro notes, Elisabeth also had a keen interest in political philosophy--this may have helped to make her an effective administrator of the convent, its lands, and the surrounding community; she also welcomed those from oppressed religious sects, in particular the Quakers, and engaged in an ongoing correspondence with members of the Quaker community.

Of course you won't find an entry on Elisabeth of Bohemia in the Encyclopedia Britannica--the only mention of her is in the entry for Descartes, where she is mentioned in connection to his 1644 Principles of Philosophy: "He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth (1618–79), daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in correspondence with whom he developed his moral philosophy."

Lisa Shapiro's edition of Elisabeth of Bohemia's correspondence with Descartes, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, contains an excellent biographical and critical introduction as well as carefully edited translations of the original letters. 

You might also enjoy Elizabeth Godfrey's 1909 biography, A Sister of Prince Rupert: Elizabeth Princess Palatine and Abbess of Herford. It's available at the Internet Archive, by clicking here.

(And, by the way, we've already met Elisabeth of Bohemia's younger sister, Sophia of Hanover, who is also to be noted for her contributions to philosophy.)

Margaret Cavendish Blazes Through the World

Margaret Lucas Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (died 15 December 1673)

If you’ve encountered Margaret Cavendish before, it may be the same place I first did--in the pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. There, after her discussion of the fictional Shakespeare’s sister, Woolf describes several Englishwomen writing before the eighteenth century, Margaret Cavendish among them.

Woolf’s profile of Cavendish is memorable, but not kind. “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!” Woolf exclaims, “as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”

Margaret Cavendish,
duchess of Newcastle

Woolf acknowledges Cavendish’s “passion for poetry,” but she concludes that her writing is “disfigured and deformed.” Disfigured and deformed by her “rage,” disfigured and deformed because “no one taught her.” 

When the students in my literature classes read Woolf’s description of Margaret Cavendish--disfigured and deformed, a kudzo-like vine devouring everything in its path--they would laugh. At least until they realized that they would be reading Cavendish later in the semester.

In 1623, Margaret Lucas was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, the daughter of Sir Thomas Lucas and his wife, Elizabeth Leighton. Like so many of the women about whom I've posted this year, she received no formal education, and she was keenly aware of this deficiency. 

Reflecting on her childhood, she would later write that she was educated “according to my birth, and the nature of my sex.” That is, she “only learned to read and write at home, taught by an ancient decayed gentlewoman, whom my mother kept for that purpose.” She also learned music and was instructed in needlework, but “rather for formality than for benefit.” 

She was, nevertheless, a great reader, even in her childhood, and Shakespeare was her favorite author. Just as Moderata Fonte had done, a century earlier, the young Margaret Lucas supplemented her meager education by consulting her brother John, whom she said was “a great scholar.” As she later described the process, “when I read what I understood not, I would ask my brother . . . the sense or meaning thereof.” 

The Lucas family's social position secured for their daughter a place as lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta-Maria, the French-born wife of King Charles I; when the queen fled the strife-torn country in 1644, Margaret Lucas left England with the her. 

In Paris with the English court-in-exile, Lucas met and married William Cavendish, marquess (then later duke) of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a widower some thirty-four years her senior. The young Margaret was noted for her extreme shyness and her beauty, William for his wealth and his loyal service to the king. After their marriage, the couple spent the remaining years of the English Civil War and the period of the Commonwealth on the continent, moving to Antwerp in 1648; after the execution of Charles I in 1649, William Cavendish was barred from returning to England, and his estates were confiscated. (As an interesting note, William Cavendish was the grandson of a woman we've met before, Bess of Hardwick.)

Margaret Cavendish returned to London in 1651, where she worked tirelessly with her husband’s younger brother to save some of the Cavendish family’s wealth. She went back to Antwerp in 1653 and remained there with her husband until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 allowed them to return to England. 

William Cavendish and his younger brother, Charles, would both contribute to Margaret Lucas Cavendish's education. They read to and with her, engaged with her and challenged her, and fostered her interests in a broad range of topics, including politics, science, and scientific experimentation. She was later to characterize herself as an “apprentice” to her husband, who in his role as teacher became her “master.” In her estimation, “I have learned more of the world from my lord’s discourse, since I have been his wife, than I am confident I should have done all my life, should I have lived to an old age.” She was an “apt” student, “industrious” enough to remember everything her husband taught her.

Cavendish’s literary career began in 1653, with the publication of her first poems and “philosophical fancies” and continued until her death in 1673. Unlike most women of her day and certainly of her class, she published what she wrote, she made sure her authorship was proclaimed on the title-pages of her books, and she displayed engraved images of herself in frontispieces inside the covers.

She did not limit herself by writing only in genres “acceptable” for those few women who did publish in the early seventeenth century, lyric poems, devotional works, and personal letters, for example. 

In the twenty years between 1653, when she published two volumes, Poems and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies, and her death in 1673, she published fourteen books, including two volumes of plays; a number of philosophical and scientific works, including Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1668), and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668); a utopian romance, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), that has often been called the first work of science fiction in English, a biography of her husband, the 1667 Life of William Cavendish, and her own autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life. 

As her recent biographer, Kate Whitaker, notes, “In the first forty years of the [seventeenth] century fewer than eighty books by women had been published in England—making up only one-half of 1 percent of all books.” Margaret Lucas Cavendish wrote and published as if she were trying to make up the difference all by herself. 

She died at age fifty, survived by her much older husband, who buried her in Westminster Abbey and then published a tribute to her, Letters and Poems in Honor of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle in 1676.

But by the middle of the eighteenth-century, most of Cavendish's work had disappeared. She had published second editions of a few of her books, most notably of The Blazing World, originally published in 1666, with the second edition appearing in 1668, but she did not reprint her plays. After Cavendish’s death in 1673, Whitaker reports that her “original volumes had become so rare and so expensive” that a would-be biographer, George Ballard, intent on compiling information about Cavendish for his 1752 Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writings of Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences, had great difficulty finding many of them.

Today Margaret Cavendish's many interests and accomplishments have blazed back into view. You can read about Cavendish "The Scientific Revolutionary" at the website of Epigenysys, an educational organization funded by the European Community ("our public education mission will communicate the science in an accessible and interesting fashion while awakening young pupils' interest in research").*

You can read about Cavendish the philosopher in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (in the entry on Cavendish, topics include "Arguments for Materialism," "The Intelligibility of the Capacities of Matter," "Occasional Causation and the Orderly Behavior of Bodies," "God," and "Social and Political Philosophy") or in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which divides Cavendish's philosophical work into two major topics, natural philosophy and political philosophy.

You can read about Cavendish the poet at the Poetry Foundation website and read a sample of her poetry there. You will also find her work in print, published by Penguin, Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins, and Routledge Press. 

And you can always catch up with the latest news about Margaret Cavendish on Facebook.

*Update, 14 December 2022: Publication on this site was suspended in January. (Be careful--the old Epigenesys website now seems to have been taken over by someone selling sketchy "prescription" drugs.) The link I’ve provided here is to the original article, as it has been preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.    

Anne Finch Conway, English Philosopher

Anne Finch Conway, viscountess Conway (born 14 December 1631)

There are two Anne Finches about whom I might post in this women's history daybook--and they are related, somehow, but in such a complicated way that I won't attempt to untangle the knot of their familial connections. Before  you run off to Google, though, let me at least sort out the identities of the two Anne Finches.

The Latin translation
of Anne Finch Conway's
philosophical treatise,
published anonymously
and posthumously

Anne Kingsmill Finch, countess of Winchelsea, was born in 1661 and married the English peer Heneage Finch, 5th earl of Winchelsea. This Anne Finch is now recognized as a noted poet--if you're interested, I'll link you here to her biography at The Poetry Foundation. There you will also find a sample of her work, critical essays, and, for further reading, a bibliography.

But today's Anne Finch, Anne Finch Conway, was born on 14 December 1631. To make matters more confusing, she was the daughter of Sir Heneage Finch--an English politician whose mother was, wait for it . . . the countess of Winchelsea (the 1st countess of Winchelsea)--though her father died a week before Anne's birth.

Anne Finch was raised in the London home of the Finches, now known as Kensington Palace. Although there is no surviving evidence about her education, it is clear that, as Margaret Atherton writes in her Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, "she does not seem to have been discouraged from educational pursuits, but, among other things, learned Latin and Greek."

Through her half-brother John Finch, Anne was encouraged to pursue her intellectual interests, and John introduced his sister to the philosopher Henry More, his tutor at Christ College, Cambridge. More agreed to instruct Anne Finch in philosophy, though, as a woman, she obviously could not attend his classes. Her instruction was principally through letters.

In 1651, Anne Finch married Edward, who became third viscount of Conway (and later earl of Conway) a few years later, in 1655. Anne Finch's marriage did not end her studies; to the contrary, her husband, who had also been a student of More's, encouraged his wife's intellectual pursuits--and his family owned one of the largest private libraries in England.

Although her husband held numerous political positions (he became a member of the Irish Privy Council in 1660 and governor of Charlmont Fort [Ireland] in 1671), Anne Conway suffered from debilitating headaches and spent much of her time at the Conway estate in Ragley. (The current Ragley Hall, one of the great stately homes of England, was constructed after Anne Finch Conway's death--but there was a large castle at Ragley Park before Edward Conway began the construction of the "new" Ragley Hall in 1680.)

There her friendship with More grew, and her philosophical work ripened. She hosted More and members of his circle of Cambridge Platonists. She also sought treatment from the Flemish physician Francis Mercury van Helmont, who became her personal physician and lived at Ragley from 1671 until Anne Conway's death in 1679. Under his influence, she developed an interest in the Kabbala and then in Quakerism--she converted shortly before her death.

One of the primary sources for Conway's philosophical work is her correspondence with More and his associates--for many early-modern women, their philosophical work survives only in their letters. (Think of Madame de Sévigné or Sophia of Hanover, for example--and, in a few days, I'll be posting about another philosopher, Elisabeth of Bohemia, whose work survives only in her correspondence with Descartes.)

The current magnificent Ragley Hall,
constructed by Edward Conway,
after Anne Finch Conway's death, however

But Anne Conway also completed a philosophical treatise, though it was published posthumously and, as Atherton writes, it has "a rather checkered history." After Conway's death, when the physician van Helmont left Ragley, he took with him Conway's "philosophical notebook," which contained the text of her treatise, left unrevised. Van Helmont and Henry More revised her work and translated it into Latin. The treatise was then published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1690 as Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae. This Latin version was then translated back into English and published as The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (London, 1692). 

I am not a philosopher, so I will leave the technical aspects of Conway's philosophical views to those who can best explain them. I'll link you here to Sarah Hutton's excellent essay in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I will include her summary of Conway's philosophical significance:

Anne Conway presents her system as an answer to the dominant philosophies of her time. Several chapters of her treatise are devoted to a refutation of the dualism of Henry More, and Descartes. (She does, however, express her admiration for Descartes' physics). She also takes issue with Hobbes and Spinoza, whom she charges with material pantheism, which confounds God and created substance. Anne Conway's concept of substance probably owes much to Platonism and Kabbalism (which, in the version she encountered was heavily Platonised). Her thinking also shows the impact of the teachings of the heterodox Christian theologian, Origen, who was much admired by her teacher, Henry More. As a theodicy and monadology, her system anticipates the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who owned a copy of her treatise (probably a gift to him by their mutual friend, Van Helmont), and who received her work favourably. However, although she was unusual as a female philosopher of the seventeenth century, by virtue of the fact that her philosophy achieved publication, the anonymity of her work has ensured that she has suffered the same neglect that has been the lot of most pre-modern female philosophers.

You can read Conway's Principles, posted by Mary Mark Ockerbloom at A Celebration of Women Writers by clicking here. For the correspondence, see Marjorie Hope Nicholson and Sarah Hutton's The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their Friends, 1642-1684. (I've linked here, even though this book is so expensive it may be beyond the reach of those interested in women philosophers!)

Anna Maria van Schurman--One More "Tenth Muse"!!

Anna Maria van Schurman (born 5 November 1607)

Born in Cologne, the daughter of Frederik van Schurman and Eva von Harff, who had fled from Antwerp to avoid increasing conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, Anna Maria van Schurman was a prodigy. She was widely recognized and admired for her skill in languages (she reputedly knew fourteen, including Arabic and Syriac), philosophy, poetry, music, and painting.

Anna Maria van Schurman, 1649,
portrait by Jan Lievens

And, of course, she became known as "the Tenth Muse"! How many women have I posted about this year who have been awarded that "praise"! I know it's meant as high praise, but, really--any and every highly regarded and accomplished woman becomes the "Tenth Muse."*

Anyway, after about five years, the family returned to the Netherlands, settling in Utrecht, where Anna Maria would spend the better part of her life. She was sent briefly to a local French school, but after two months returned home, where she was tutored along with her brothers, the children's education supervised and directed by their father.

By 1620 and still in her early teens, she was recognized by the Dutch artist, poet, and translator Anna Roemers Visscher, who praised Schurman's knowledge of the classical languages, her drawing, and her musical accomplishments as a singer and as a performer--in particular, she excelled at the harpsichord and lute.

(By the way, Anna Roemers Visscher was herself described as a muse and a second Sappho, her sister Maria Tesselschade Visscher described as, you guessed it, "the Tenth Muse." See what I mean?)

By the 1630s, Schurman was corresponding with a number of scholars, including André Rivet, a French Huguenot theologian at the University of Leyden, and the Dutch theologian Gisbertus Voetius, rector of the University of Utrecht.

It was in her correspondence with Rivet that Schurman took up the question of women's education, specifically the subject of “whether the study of letters is fitting for a Christian woman,” the topic of a brief dissertation she wrote for him in 1632. While she defends women's capacity for education, Anna Maria van Schurman is more cautious about women and certainly never argues for their equality. 

Schurman knew the work of both Marie le Jars de Gournay and Lucrezia Marinella, for example, but she disapproved of both of them. In her correspondence with Rivet on the subject of women’s education, she denies the arguments of those who have made the “invidious and groundless assertion of the preeminence” of women. Schurman says that her “maidenly modesty” and “innate shyness” have been troubled by Marinella’s work, and while she “can by no means disapprove of the little dissertation of the most noble Gournay,” neither does she entirely approve of it. 

The virtues of women “ought to be proved rightly,” Schurman asserts, but instead of undertaking the proof herself, she writes that she “very much desire[s] that role be handed over” to Rivet, “a sublime herald of the virtues.” Her treatise on the subject, Num feminæ Christianæ conveniat stadium litterarum? (Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated) is, as editor Joyce Irwin observes, "purely academic, a formal exercise in logic": "Nowhere does she suggest changes in the power structure of political or religious institutions."

And the question of whether women "ought" to be educated was further qualified--only women who had private means ("those women who enjoy wealth as their lot in life") and women who were unmarried and thus had no children to care for--the "study of letters" is "appropriate" for a woman who needs to follow a pastime at home." 

Anna Maria van Schurman's association with Voetius dates to 1636, when he enabled her to attend lectures at the University of Utrecht. It is frequently claimed online that Schurman was the first female student at the university, which is not quite the case at all--she could attend some lectures, sitting in a special niche that concealed her from male students, but she was never formally enrolled as a student. 

By this point, too, René Descartes came to know of Schurman, and she was impressed by his philosophy. In 1640, Descartes visited Schurman in Utrecht, but was disappointed by the turn in her thinking. "This Voetius has blighted Miss Schurman," Descartes wrote, "for she did have an eminent talent for verse, painting and other pleasures. But in the past five or six years he has gained complete mastery over her. She is occupied entirely with theological deliberation, which has caused her to lose contact with all cultured society."

By the 1650s, Schurman withdrew from her intellectual pursuits--whether from "deepening piety" or "because family obligations" became more pressing. She dedicated twenty years to caring for two elderly, blind aunts and then, after their deaths, she joined a religious community in Friesland, where she died in May of 1678.

Anna Maria van Schurman's correspondence with André Rivet, including her "logical dissertation" on women's education, was published in Paris in 1638 as Amica Dissertatio inter Annam Mariam Schurmanniam et Andr. Rivetum de capacitate ingenii muliebris ad scientia, though she would claim this was published without her consent.

Three years later, in 1641, she published Dissertatio de ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et meliores Litteras aptitudine in Leyden (later translated and published in English as The Learned Maid or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar. Her collected works, including letters and poems, Opuscula Hebraea, Graeca, Latina, Gallica, prosaica et metrica, was published in 1648.

Her autobiography, defending her choice to follow the Labadie religious sect, Eukleria seu Meliores Partis Electio (Eucleria, or Choosing the Better Part), was published in 1673.

In addition to her familiarity with the work of Gournay and Marinella, she corresponded with Gournay as well as with another women we have met, Bathsua Makin. She was also visited in Utrecht by Queen Christina of Sweden. 

Joyce Irwin's edition of Schurman's works is Anna Maria van Schurman: Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle.

And here's the only mention of Anna Maria van Schurman in my favorite love-to-hate resource, the Encyclopedia Britannica (it comes from an entry on glassmaking!): "engraving was practiced there [Venice] widely by talented amateurs in the 17th century, among them Humanists such as Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher, her even more famous sister Anna Roemers Visscher and Anna Maria van Schurman. The latter two decorated their glasses with flowers and insects drawn with a gossamer touch, often accompanied by epigrams in Latin or Greek capitals. . . ." Sheesh!!!

*You can access my posts about various women called the "Tenth Muse" by clicking the label, below.

Sophia of Hanover, Princess Palatine--and Philosopher

Sophia of the Palatine, electress of Hanover (born 14 October 1630)

Sophia of the Palatine was the twelfth child of Frederick V, elector of the Palatine, and Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of King James I of England. (A thirteenth and final child, a son, would be born in 1632.)

A young Sophia of the Palatine

Since her parents had lost the Palatinate during the Thirty Years' War, Sophie was born in the Hague, where her parents had taken refuge.

She was married to Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1658; in 1692, he became elector of Hanover, which gave Sophia the name, Sophia of Hanover, by which she is most commonly known.

It was her Stuart connection that led ultimately to Sophia being named the heiress presumptive to the throne of England in the 1701 Act of Settlement--with William III dying and childless, and Anne Stuart's only surviving child, another William, having died at the age of eleven, in 1700, Sophia and the "heirs of her body" ("being Protestant") were determined to be the most acceptable successors to the English throne. 

If King William were succeeded by Queen Anne, and if neither managed to produce an heir--increasingly unlikely--then Sophia of the Palatine would become queen of England. (A German Protestant--even a woman--was preferable to a Catholic [and deposed] James II or, after his death in 1701, James's son, James Francis Edward Stuart.)

Of course, if you do the math, it's easy to see that by time Sophia was named as heir to the English throne she was already seventy years old--she was mother to five surviving children and grandmother to three (legitimate) grandchildren, already teenagers. 

Sophia managed to live until the age of eight-three, dying on 8 June 1714--Queen Anne died two months later, in August. Although Sophia thus missed becoming queen of England, her eldest son, George, became king.

Sophia as electress of Hanover

While all of this is interesting enough, what is more intriguing about Sophia of the Palatinate is her link to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, librarian at the court of Hanover. Sophia corresponded with Leibniz for nearly forty years, from 1676 until her death.

As Lloyd Strickland notes, "In philosophical circles, Sophie is known mainly as the friend, patron, and correspondent of Leibniz, who was employed by the court of Hanover. Although Leibniz and Sophie met often, both professionally and socially, they still corresponded regularly, and around 600 items of their correspondence survive today (this figure is inclusive of drafts and other variants)."

Their correspondence was recognized for its philosophical importance as early as the nineteenth century, when it was first published. (Her correspondence also shows her interest in--and familiarity with--the ideas of Descartes and Spinoza.) 

But, more recently, Sophia of Hanover has been recognized as a philosopher in her own right. Rather than simply displaying a "passive interest" in philosophy, Strickland argues that "Sophie did make interesting philosophical contributions of her own, principally concerning the nature of mind and thought." 

You can access Lloyd Strickland's "The Philosophy of Sophie, Electress of Hanover," originally published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, by clicking here. 

You can also read for yourself--her correspondence with Leibniz, as well as that of her daughter, Sophia Charlotte, queen of Prussia, are published in Strickland's Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence. 

Sophia of Hanover, c. 1706

Of course you won't find a hint of this in the entry for "Sophia, Electress of Hanover" in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Just sayin' . . . 

Also, there is the unpleasant matter of Sophia of Hanover's relationship to Sophia Dorothea of Celle, as we have seen . . . 

Harriet Taylor Mill and the Difficulties of Finding a Woman's Voice

Harriet Taylor Mill (born 8 October 1807)

Harriet Hardy was born in south London, the daughter of Thomas Hardy, a surgeon, and Harriet Hurst. In 1826, when she was eighteen years old, Harriet Hardy married John Taylor, a prosperous merchant--in pharmaceuticals--and the couple had three children. John and Harriet Taylor also became members of the Unitarian church and developed radical political views, including those of the minister, editor, and writer William Johnson Fox who, among other things, was a proponent of women's rights.

Harriet Taylor Mill

Harriet Taylor's life took an unexpected, even scandalous, turn when she met John Stuart Mill in 1830. The two regarded one another as intellectual equals, and shared views on a variety of issues, including marriage and women's economic, professional, and social status. 

They also began an intimate relationship, but one that they claimed was not sexual. Whatever the nature of their connection, John Taylor was able to accommodate their friendship, at least until 1833 when the Taylors established separate households, with John raising their two sons, and Harriet maintaining custody of the couple's daughter, Helen Taylor (who would later play a significant role in the suffrage movement). 

The two friends, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, spent six weeks together in Paris. On their return, Taylor moved into her own home, where Mill would visit on weekends. Their relationship resulted in a scandal and social isolation, at least for Harriet.

In 1849, suffering from cancer, John Taylor asked his wife to return home. After some hesitation--she felt she owed her time and attention to Mill--Harriet did return to take care of her husband during his final illness. John Taylor died  on 3 May 1849. Out of respect for him--and fear of more scandal, perhaps--Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill waited until 1851 to marry.

Up to this point, it looks as though the only thing significant about Harriet Taylor Mill was her unconventional relationships, but that is not at all the case. In fact, Taylor Mill played a significant role in John Stuart Mill's political thinking, writing, and publishing. Indeed, the only "problem" is to figure out exactly how extensive her role was.

Mill himself credited Taylor Mill as a co-author. He described Taylor Mill as a joint-author in newspaper articles he published in the 1840s and 50s, sometimes going so far as to say that very little of certain pieces belonged to him at all. About an 1853 pamphlet about a domestic violence bill, for example, he noted, "In this I acted chiefly as an amanuensis to my wife." In a letter to Harriet, written in 1854, Mill wrote, "I shall never be satisfied unless you allow our best book, the book which is to come, to have our two names on the title page. It ought to be so with everything I publish, for the better half of it all is yours.”

He went further in his Autobiography. There he detailed the role Harriet Taylor Mill played in his Principles of Political Economy, going so far as to describe it as "a joint production with my wife." About On Liberty, he wrote:

The “Liberty” was more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together, turned over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any faults, either in thought or expression, that we detected in it. . . . With regard to the thoughts, it is difficult to identify any particular part or element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers. . . . The “Liberty” is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written (with the possible exception of the “Logic”), because the conjunction of her mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth. . . .

And, on the nature of their collaborative work, he also wrote:

When two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common; when all subjects of intellectual or moral interest are discussed between them in daily life, and probed to much greater depths than are usually or conveniently sounded in writings intended for general readers; when they set out from the same principles, and arrive at their conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other.

Even so, the extent of Harriet Taylor Mill's contribution to the work of John Stuart Mill is hotly contested, with many critics refusing to believe that she contributed--or could have contributed--to his work in any way. For an excellent overview of the debate, I suggest Dale E. Miller's discussion, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which you can access by clicking here. 

On the whole question, I like Jo Ellen Jacobs's sensible response in her essay "Harriet Taylor Mill’s Collaboration with John Stuart Mill" (in Presenting Women Philosophers, ed. Cecile T. Tougas and Sara Ebenreck): "Without substantial evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to believe that work is collaborative if the participants say it is so."

The one work which is almost certainly Harriet Taylor Mill's is "The Enfranchisement of Women," an essay published in 1851 in The Westminster Review--though it was published under John Stuart Mill's name. You can access "The Enfranchisement of Women" by clicking here. There is also an excellent anthology of the writing and speeches of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor, Ann P. Robson's Sexual Equality: A Mill-Taylor Reader--it's out of print, but used paperback copies are readily available.

Harriet Taylor died of tuberculosis in November 1858. In Avignon, she and John Stuart Mill had sought treatment for the disease at the same time they were working on The Subjection of Women. After her mother's death, Helen Taylor continued to live and work with Mill, helping him to complete the work. As Mill said in his autobiography, "Whoever, either now or hereafter, may think of me and my work I have done, must never forget that it is the product not of one intellect and conscience but of three, the least considerable of whom, and above all the least original, is the one whose name is attached to it."

For further reading, I recommend Jo Ellen Jacobs's The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, which includes a good biographical introduction to Harriet Taylor Mill in addition to its discussion of the authorship question.

Marie le Jars de Gournay and the Writing Woman

Marie le Jars de Gournay (born 6 October 1565)

Marie le Jars was the first of six children born to Guillaume le Jars, a minor aristocrat living in Paris, and his wife, Jeanne de Hacqueville, whose family included noted jurists and writers. Her father purchased the estate of Gournay-sur-Aronde; after his death in 1578, the family suffered financial difficulties and relocated to the estate, thus adding "de Gournay" to Marie's name.

A frontispiece from Gournay's
collection of her work.

There were two usual possibilities for young women like Marie de Gournay--a religious profession (one of her sisters did become a nun) or marriage. While her mother planned an advantageous marriage for her daughter, Marie resisted and undertook a rigorous--and largely secret--self-education, focused on the classics and French literature.

For most of the centuries since her death in 1645, Marie le Jars de Gournay was known for her association with the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne.

It was Montaigne himself who referred to the young woman as his "fille d'alliance," his adopted daughter. In her novella, Le Proumenoir de M. de Montaigne, par sa fille d'alliance (The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne, by His Adopted Daughter (1588), Gournay addresses Montaigne in her dedicatory epistle as "Father."

As Gournay's editors note, the young scholar found in Montaigne "the reincarnation of the ancient sages" and an "impeccable patriarchal authority to sponsor her own interests against those of her mother--even, pretty clearly, a safely inaccessible substitute for the husband her mother would have chosen for her."

Their correspondence began after Marie read Montaigne's Essays in 1584. In 1588, she visited him in Paris, and he returned the visit, staying in at the Château de Gournay for three months. 

Gournay's mother died in 1591, leaving her in a very difficult financial situation, while Montaigne's death in 1592 left her in a difficult intellectual situation. Along with a younger brother and sister, she first moved into the household of the provincial governor of Cambrai before she relocated to Paris where she lived "in genteel poverty."

Then, in 1593, Montaigne's widow,  Françoise de la Cassaigne, asked Gournay to edit a posthumous edition of Monntaigne's works. Gournay spent more than a year working at Montaigne's estate, producing a new edition, prefaced by her own introduction, published in 1595. Subsequent editions enhanced and promoted Montaigne and his reputation.

But, in addition to her editorial work, Gournay produced verse and translations while she was living in Paris, as well as the significant works that have drawn new attention to her more recently: Égalité des hommes et des femmes (The Equality of Men and Women), first published in 1622, Apologie pour celle qui escrit (Apology for the Woman Writing), first published in 1626, and Grief des dames (Complaint of Women or The Ladies' Complaint), also published in 1626. Gournay continued to revise her work throughout her writing career, with final versions published in Les Advis ou les presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay (The Offerings or Presents of Demoiselle de Gournay,1641).

In The Equality of Men and Women, dedicated to Anne of Austria, queen of France (who would become regent for her son Louis XIV in 1643), Gournay argues that women's subordination is not "natural" but based on prejudice. Women have been denied their rightful place in society by men, who have reduced women by denying them an education. 

In arguing against women’s subservience and for their education, an education "of a kind equal to men’s," Gournay includes a history of women, citing a "vast number of . . . intellects, ancient and modern, of illustrious name" to support her view of women's potential and accomplishments. Her citations to support her arguments--drawn from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Boccaccio, Tasso, and Erasmus--illustrate the depth of her education. (In her history of women, she notes the achievements of Sappho, Hypatia, and Catherine of Siena--but, although she knows the French Roman de la rose, she does not know Christine de Pizan.)

In The Ladies' Complaint, Gournay again addresses misogyny and education. "Blessed are you, Reader," she begins, 

if you are not of the sex to which one forbids all goods, depriving it of freedom. One denies this sex just about everything: all the virtues and all the public offices, titles, and responsibilities. In short, this sex has its own power taken away; with this freedom gone, the possibility of developing virtues through the use of freedom disappears. This sex is left with the sovereign and unique virtues of ignorance, servitude, and the capacity to play the fool, if this game pleases it.

In her Apology for the Woman Writing, Gournay writes to defend herself against the slanders that threaten her--that seek to undermine not only her income but, more importantly, her reputation. It is, her recent editors note, a "profuse autobiographical self-justification."

For an excellent biographical essay from the Encyclopedia of World Biography, click here. For John Conley's careful analysis of Gournay's philosophy, published at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click here.

As the result of an amazing (and amazingly generous) digitization effort, you can "leaf through" a number of original editions of Gournay's works through the Bibliothèque nationale de France website by clicking here. For an excellent English translation of Gournay's works, see Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel's Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works.