Abstract

This essay presents Elisabeth of Bohemia’s intellectual trajectory as a completely consistent lifelong investigation. Elisabeth’s intellectual work has generally been parsed in a way that construes the years of her philosophical correspondence with Descartes, from 1643 to 1649, as the apex of her thinking life, after which her scholarly investigations were gradually subsumed into a morass of family quarrels and questionable forays into religion. This essay argues instead that throughout her thinking life, Elisabeth was always seeking to extract the strongest, brightest, clearest essences from all the branches of knowing that crossed her path—philosophical, scientific, mathematical, and religious—in order to answer one central question: How best to rule? By putting together what can be gleaned from a number of underutilized sources, a clearer picture emerges. It is the picture of a relentless, persistent, and eternally unsatisfied intellect, seeking for the answer she could never find, and which perhaps could never exist—a way to have her philosophical forays and Calvinist commitments work together to produce a clear pathway to truly ruling well.