Abstract

The friendship between Elisabeth of Bohemia and Anna Maria van Schurman started in the early 1630s and continued for more than forty years. That their friendship lasted so long is really a matter for some surprise, if we consider that Elisabeth clearly developed an intellectual interest in Descartes’s new thinking and Anna Maria van Schurman adhered to the Aristotelian-Christian tradition and the scholastics. This paper seeks to address the following questions: How and when did the first contact between the young Elisabeth and her female mentor come about? What purpose, in their view, did study serve for women? And what linked them still, or again, when their paths crossed once more in the 1670s, Elisabeth then being the abbess of the Lutheran Frauenstift in Herford and Anna Maria van Schurman a member of the religious community of the Labadists founded by the radical Pietist Jean de Labadie? The paper provides new insights on the early years of their friendship as it argues that the first letter from Anna Maria van Schurman to Elisabeth in the Opuscula, d.d. 7 September 1639, was probably wrongly dated. A closer examination of the context shows that it is much more plausible that the date should be 7 September 1633.