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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2025
This essay argues that emerging scholar and artist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) disseminated her 1633 engraved self-portrait as a bid to enter the Republic of Letters and add her voice to the Europe-wide debate on women’s intellectual equality. To assess the portrait’s significance, I examine its sociocultural and artistic complexities, as well as its effect on two elite viewers, poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and Neo-Latin poet Caspar Barlaeus (1584–1648). I conclude that although Van Schurman was unable to control the responses to her self-portraiture, its circulation afforded a crucial inflection point in her life’s journey, both outward and inward.
It is a great pleasure to thank the anonymous RQ reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version. I thank Jane Couchman, Steve Maiullo, Cornelia Niekus Moore, Alice Ward, and Colette Winn as well for their thoughtful suggestions for revision and Erika Gaffney, Mary Garrard, and Sheila Barker for their generous assistance in tracking several of the figures.