More from "The Other Voice" in early modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Constance Jordan

Perhaps the most curious example of an a-historical perspective is that of Anna Maria van Schurman, who began her life as an exponent of education for women and ended it by repudiating all secular learning in the hope of securing eternal life. The daughter of a noble Protestant family of German origin who settled in Utrecht, the precocious Anna Maria was noticed by the Protestant theologian Gisbertus Voetius. He allowed her to attend lectures at the University, although in doing so she had to remain behind a screen and invisible to male students. (In this respect, her position was like that of the first woman president of Bryn Mawr College, M. Carey Thomas, who earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins also attending lectures behind a screen.) Van Schurman's literary output, which to me seems strangely retrograde, defeats all efforts to read the cultural history of early modern women in Whiggish terms. Whether Protestantism offered women greater authority within their households and communities than did Catholic pra ctice is a moot question. But in van Schurman's case, the extraordinary inwardness of her later adult life, apparently demanded by the mystical Calvinism of her teacher Jean de Labadie, made impossible any realization of the courageous program of self-education she had devised in her youth.

This was a program she announced and defended in a logical manner in her Dissertatio logica. It rests on the important distinction between a private person on the one hand, and a public person on the other. The latter will necessarily require education, she declares, but the former, a private person, can also pursue and cherish it. The distinction cuts across differences of gender and equates the situation and attributes of the private man with that of the typical woman, who is necessarily private (with notable exceptions among royalty). it allows van Schurman to dilate upon the advantages of education in a broad sense: it provides the private person (one who need not work) with prudence, knowledge against heresies, and honest delight, among other benefits (31). Van Schurman's rather arid reasoning in the Dissertatio becomes inspired pleading in her several letters to the theologian Andre River, her self-assigned mentor. There van Schurman rejects Rivet's charge that women lack the desire for learning, howev er apt they are for it. Rather, she asserts that such a view depends on "received custom" and that reason would represent the case differently. To van Schurman, the benefits of women's education include one conferred particularly on the body politic. Because women are part of the polis, they need to derive knowledge of public life through letters if the polis is to thrive, however much they are also prevented from actively participating in its life. A "whole economy of moral virtue" depends on educating the "crowd" (including uneducated women) to abandon "ignorance" (46). Educated women are necessary if a society is to remain stable. This is a principle, she argues, that must not be regarded as susceptible to the Lesbian rule of a flexible and discriminatory application (42). It must be honored as a universal.