Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by David Norbrook

In England, the currents of innovation ran in different directions. The major political struggles centered on rival interpretations of a Scripture whose fundamental authority was unchallenged. As Zaret has argued, Habermas's model of modernizing rationality finds it hard to take account of the confessional politics of the 1640s and 1650s; and yet these struggles were intensely involved with new and more democratic forms of communication. (42) And in this context, van Schurman was more readily assimilable as a woman writer than was Cavendish. She was strongly admired in the very Parliamentarian circles which are often assumed to have been inimical to female learning. Too often Milton's skeptical view of female education is taken as absolutely representative of the mentality of Parliamentarians in general, but in many ways he was behind his contemporaries in the international republic of letters. It is among English Parliamentarians that we find the earliest reception of van Schurman's writings. Notoriously, Milton excluded women from the ideal academy in Of Education, but this tract was written at the behest of the Hartlib circle, which was generally far more sympathetic to women's education. Tantalizingly, in the same year as the 1645 Poems, William Marshall, engraver of the frontispiece portrait of Milton, made a very similar engraving of the educationalist Bathsua Makin, and it may be that she was preparing a reply placing more emphasis on women. (43) Van Schurman was a correspondent and admirer of Makin, under whose auspices there appeared an English translation of part of van Schurman's correspondence with Rivet, a year before the French version. (44) Van Schurman also corresponded with Dorothy Moore, a Puritan who advocated women's preaching and who was to marry John Dury, a leading member of the Hartlib circle. Writing in 1645 to Making friend Sir Simonds D'Ewes, a noted Parliamentarian, van Schurman asks him "please to communicate unto us (partakers of the same cause) whatsoever shall be achieved by your Honourable Assemblie either in Peace or Warre." (45) Explicitly political statements played a limited role in van Schurman's correspondence, and this sense of sharing a common cause with the Parliamentarians seems to be something she takes for granted as not worth laboring.

But how would van Schurman have read such manifestations of a burgeoning public sphere as the Colchester riots? There is an interesting index of a response from her circle in Sir Simonds D'Ewes's account of a contested election in Suffolk in 1640, which Stopes first brought to light. Large numbers of women there and elsewhere turned up at the polls and demanded to vote; and in a number of places their votes were accepted. D'Ewes, however, observed that this was through "ignorance" and accepted that it was "a matter very unworthy of any gentleman and most dishonourable in such an election although they might in law have been allowed." (46) Though his friendship with Makin, which dated back to his school days, would have exposed him to advanced ideas about women's education, he was clearly no more ready than Rivet to have women cross what seemed a very clear line between private and public spheres. It is interesting, however, that he makes the case in terms of propriety rather than legality. At this crucial moment in the development of the public sphere, it was not unambiguously clear to the authorities that women could not form part of this new public. During the 1640s and 1650s, many women engaged in petitions and other agitation for political and religious reforms; and many of them took the great public oaths with which Parliament tried to marshal support for its cause, including the Engagement to support the republic in 1650. (47) Women had frequent occasion to put across their views: in a survey of printed books by women in the later seventeenth century, Maureen Bell has noted "a definite peak in women-authored texts in the 1650s." (48)