Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Anna Maria van Schurman, Star of Utrecht About this episode Polymath Anna Maria van Schurman was a very well-educated woman in the 17th century, making her exceptional. She’s described as the most learned woman of her time, and she basically became a celebrity because of it.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Holly Frey? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do
0:43 Holly Frey? we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
1:07 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations
1:51 Tracy V. Wilson? start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
2:10 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. I think a lot of my episodes lately have been really concentrated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Me too. And that's for a lot of reasons. Like one topic leading me to another related topic in the research. Holly's nodding for listeners at home. Pulling topics from the suggestions that our listeners have sent in, which do tend to be kind of clustered toward more recent stuff. That is not a complaint at all. We love listener suggestions. That's just an observation. But a lot of them are in the 19th and 20th century range. A lot of the episodes that I have worked on this year have also been inspired by things that
3:05 Tracy V. Wilson? are going on in the world right now that have some kind of relatively recent antecedent or context or parallel. I don't want to feel like I'm only talking about one time period on the show, though. So this week, I made a point of going at least a little bit farther back than the 19th century, and I made it all the way back to 17th century polymath Anna Maria von Sherman. She would have been considered very well educated among people of any sex in Europe for most of the early modern period. The fact that she was a woman, though, made her truly exceptional. She's described as the most learned woman
3:49 Tracy V. Wilson? of her time. She basically became a celebrity because of it. One thing that I do want to note is that a lot of the places that we are talking about in this episode are pronounced a little bit differently in Dutch or German than they are in English. And I found trying to adopt like a slightly different
4:15 Tracy V. Wilson? German or Dutch pronunciation for things to be just kind of a little bit jarring in terms of the, you know, the names that people in our audience would expect to hear. So we are not trying to pronounce things in a very Dutch or German way, which are the two languages that are relevant to the most of this.
4:34 Holly Frey? Anna Maria von Sherman's life was deeply affected by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her father Frederick was from Antwerp, which is in Belgium today, but was part of the Spanish Netherlands at the time. Frederick's family were Calvinists, and in 1568, they had to flee from Antwerp because of religious persecution and violence. Philip II of Spain, who was staunchly Catholic, had dispatched Fernando Alvarez de Toledo y Pimental, Duke of Alba, to put a stop to a growing Calvinist uprising in the Spanish Netherlands. To that end, the duke established a special court called the Council of Troubles, which
5:17 Holly Frey? sentenced rebels and so-called heretics to imprisonment or death without due process. This council earned the nickname the Council of Blood, and this conflict was at the start of the Eighty Years' War, which was both a religious war and a fight for Dutch independence from Spain.
5:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Frederick von Sherman was about four years old when his family left Antwerp. They eventually made their way to Cologne, which is in Germany today, but at the time was a free imperial city in the Holy Roman Empire.
5:49 Holly Frey? In 1602, Frederick married Eva van Harf de Drieborn, and they had four children together. Anna Maria was their only daughter. She was born on November 5, 1607. Her older brothers were Hendrik Frederick and Johan Hodgechok. Sadly, her younger brother Willem died at the age of about five, when Anna Maria was about eight years old.
6:14 Tracy V. Wilson? When Frederick van Sherman's family first arrived in Cologne, the area had been relatively tolerant toward Protestantism, especially compared to what was happening in Antwerp at the time. But that changed over the years that followed, and reformed Protestant worship was eventually banned. So in 1615, the same year that Willem died, the family moved again, this time to Utrecht, which is in the Netherlands today, and at the time was part of the Dutch Republic, also called the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The Eighty Years' War was still ongoing, and the Dutch Republic had been formed through an alliance of seven Spanish Netherlands provinces in 1579.
7:00 Tracy V. Wilson? The Dutch Republic had declared its independence from Spain two years after that. It was a Protestant nation that also allowed more freedom for other religions than a lot of other parts of Europe did. Frederick van Sherman's former home of Antwerp had also joined the Dutch Republic, but it was besieged and recaptured by Spain five years later.
7:23 Holly Frey? Frederick and Eva were both from noble families, and they were wealthy. They educated their children themselves and with a private tutor, and they also raised them to be religiously devout. And this was something that they took seriously. The children's reading material included things like stories of people who had been martyred during the Protestant Reformation. Anna Maria was pulled out of school after only a couple of months because her parents thought that the other students were a bad influence on her, and they worried that she would be exposed to things like bad behavior and profanity.
7:58 Tracy V. Wilson? The children's first languages were Dutch and German, and they were taught other languages as well, starting with Latin for the boys and French for Anna Maria. One day when Anna Maria was about 11, her brothers were working on their Latin lessons, and they were struggling with the material. They were asked a question, and when it was clear that they did not know, Anna Maria called out the answer from the other side of the room where she was studying her French.
8:26 Holly Frey? It wasn't unusual for wealthy men to give their daughters some kind of education at this point in history. Having daughters who were intelligent and well-read was seen as a point of pride, and Anna Maria already had a reputation for being precocious. But girls' education also usually focused on subjects that were considered appropriate for ladies, and that is why Anna Maria was studying French rather than Latin. But according to her account, when her father realized she had mastered something that his sons had not, simply by being in the room during their lessons, he decided to include her in what the boys were learning.
9:05 Tracy V. Wilson? For the most part, Latin was the default language of intellectual writing and discourse in Europe, so learning Latin gave Anna Maria access to a wealth of knowledge that she would not have been able to read otherwise. Greek and Hebrew were used in some contexts as well, and Anna Maria learned those too, specifically the Classical Hebrew and Quine Greek that are found in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible.
9:34 Holly Frey? Her father did not just give her run of the library, though. He, for example, did not let her read works that he thought were immoral in any way, and he edited and expurgated some of the classics that he did want her to read. He was particularly focused on removing anything that was about love, adultery, or sex. If someone gave her a book as a gift and it wasn't one that her father thought was appropriate, she was allowed to skim it just enough to write a thank-you note that sounded knowledgeable.
10:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Anna Maria didn't simply read these materials. She was actively engaged with them. She annotated many of her texts and wrote commentaries on them. As she learned more languages, she translated works from one into another. Over time, she compiled her own Greek dictionary.
10:23 Holly Frey? She also sang, and she learned to play the harpsichord and the lute, and she loved art. Drawing, embroidery, and paper cutting were all popular pastimes for women and girls, and she probably learned these from her mother or other women in their social circle. She was doing extremely intricate paper cuts from a very early age.
10:44 Tracy V. Wilson? She also wanted to learn to paint. And the most common way for a young girl to get formal training in painting was through a professional artist in their family. The van Shermans were not related to any painters. So she taught herself, starting by copying the paintings that were hanging in the family home.
11:05 Holly Frey? By her early teens, Anna Maria was thought of as a child prodigy. In 1620, when she was 13, she met Anna Rumers Fisher, who was a poet and a glass engraver. She was in her 30s. Anna wrote a praise poem about Anna Maria, which referenced Anna Maria's harpsichord and lute playing, her singing, her writing, and her painting, saying that if heaven allowed it, Anna Maria would one day be, quote, "the pride of all those maidens who ever pursued knowledge."
11:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Anna Rumers Fisher and her sister Maria Teschelshad Rumers Fisher had already established themselves as part of the Mauden Circle, or Mauderkring, which was a group of writers, artists, and scientists who met at Mauden Castle near Amsterdam. These sisters were the only two women who were really considered to be part of this circle. And they were also connected to a lot of other Dutch artists and scholars that Anna Maria would eventually grow to know herself.
12:07 Holly Frey? In 1623, the van Sherman family moved to Frennaker, which was home to Frennaker University. Her brother Johan Hodgshock was going to study medicine there, and her father Frederick was planning to continue his education as well. But on November 15, 1623, Frederick van Sherman died at the age of 59. His death was unexpected, but he also had enough time to meet with his wife and each of his children privately before he passed. And when he met with Anna Maria, he asked her to promise him that she would never get married. He described marriage as a worldly shackle.
12:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Anna Maria was 16 when she made this deathbed promise to her father, and she kept that promise for the rest of her life. When she received marriage proposals, she rejected them. She described herself as married to her pen, and she took a Latin phrase, meaning, "my love has been crucified," as her personal motto. This motto came from a letter from Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Romans, and it has multiple interpretations, one of those being that my love was a person, not a feeling, and that it referenced Jesus Christ. This was something other people commented on, making remarks about her chastity and their depictions of her.
13:30 Tracy V. Wilson? And in the case of poet Konstantin Huguenz and polymath Casper Barlius, interpreting her hiding her hands in some of her self-portraits as a reference to her virginity. We'll move on to her life after her father's death after we pause for a sponsor break.
13:51 Speaker 02 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
13:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
14:15 Speaker 02 It was could rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
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14:35 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
14:38 Speaker 03 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
14:43 Speaker 02 With the fan's experience, it's incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
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15:59 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them
16:43 Holly Frey? more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
17:01 Speaker 04 Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new Chicken Nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
17:44 Speaker 04 This new Chicken Nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.
18:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Anna Maria's brother, Johan Hadschok, was about 18 when their father died. Johan Hadschok had already been involved in her education, and he had been sharing his university books and other materials with her. Through his own studies and correspondence, he was also building a network of connections to other writers and scholars. After their father's death, Johan Hadschok basically took over Anna Maria's education. He became the primary person to facilitate her connections to the greater world of learning in what's now the Netherlands.
18:40 Holly Frey? But for a while, her father's death really derailed Anna Maria's education. She was grief-stricken, and she had a hard time concentrating. Eventually, she had a dream in which Lady Philosophy appeared to her and advised her to be reasonable, and told her that with time, she would be more focused on happy memories of her father than the pain of her grief. And after this dream, Anna Maria turned to reading and studying to keep herself busy.
19:09 Tracy V. Wilson? The family went back to Utrecht in 1626, and two of Anna Maria's aunts, who were fleeing the Thirty Years' War, came from Cologne to live with them. Anna Maria was 19, and she started expanding her study of art. She learned engraving through self-study and probably with the help of Magdalena van der Pas, daughter of Crispin van der Pas, who was an engraver and publisher who lived in Utrecht. Anna Maria started working in other media as well, including carving things from wood, making wax models, and engraving on glass with a diamond.
19:48 Holly Frey? She produced a lot of portraits and self-portraits in an assortment of media, including gouache, oils, engravings, pencils, and pastels. She was the first person in the Netherlands known to do portraiture in pastels. She also carved portraits from wax and boxwood. But while she learned to do all of this, she never aspired to become an artist. Art was what she did when she wanted to take a break from her academic study.
20:16 Tracy V. Wilson? And there was a lot of academic study. She read classical literature in Latin and Greek and scientific and medical texts. She also became proficient in numerous other languages. In addition to the Dutch, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that she had started studying from a young age, she also became proficient in Arabic, the Ethiopian language of Gez, Flemish, English, and Italian. Some of these languages have different alphabets, and she liked to write out a Bible verse in multiple languages, with each language using its own script, and she would give that to people as a gift, including for people who had asked her specifically to do one of these for them.
21:00 Holly Frey? In her early teens, Anna Maria had started writing letters to poets, artists, and scholars, primarily in the Dutch Republic, but elsewhere as well. One of her correspondents was diplomat and poet Jacob Kots, starting when she was around 14. Kots may have been the person who introduced her to the Vischer Sisters, and he was also one of the people who really promoted her and her accomplishments. As Johan Hodgek guided her academic and religious education, he also connected her to other people who were part of his own network. This included poet and diplomat Konstantin Huggins, and painter Gerard van Hanhors, who ran an art school where she continued to study painting.
21:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Sometime around 1632, Anna Maria von Sherman became connected to Elizabeth, Princess Palatine of Bohemia. Elizabeth was the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V., who were nicknamed the Winter Queen and Winter King because Frederick's reign lasted only from August of 1619 to November of 1620, so only for one winter. Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, is somebody who's been on my list for a while. Frederick's reign had ended with his death, and afterward Elizabeth Stuart and the family had taken refuge at the Hague.
22:19 Holly Frey? When they first became acquainted, Princess Elizabeth was 14, and Anna Maria von Sherman was 25. It is not completely clear how they met. The most widely cited possibility is that French theologian André Rive, professor of theology at the University of Leiden, made the introduction. He was also at the Hague tutoring William II, Prince of Orange, and he may have given some of von Sherman's poems to the princess and likely facilitated their correspondence.
22:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Von Sherman became something of a mentor to the princess, including giving her advice about people to read and subjects to study. They were friends for the rest of their lives, writing to one another and meeting in person, but they went in very different directions in terms of religion and philosophy.
23:11 Tracy V. Wilson? As we've said, Anna Maria was religiously a very devout Christian, and consequently, a lot of her interests were very grounded in Christian theology and Aristotelian thought. Aristotle, of course, lived in the 4th century BCE, before Christianity existed, but his works on subjects like logic, metaphysics, and ethics had been a major part of the development of Christian teachings, especially during the medieval period. But Princess Elizabeth became focused on rationality in the work of Rene Descartes. She and Descartes had an ongoing correspondence, and Descartes dedicated some of his works to her.
23:54 Holly Frey? Both women were part of the international network of correspondence that came to be known as the Republic of Letters. These letters, written primarily in Latin, connected poets, scholars, philosophers, and intellectuals, primarily across Europe and the Americas. And these weren't simply personal letters. They were treatises and analytical works, sometimes very lengthy and dense. These writings were passed around not just through postal services, but also by friends and family who were traveling, merchants, and students taking their grand tour of the European continent, who might be given a stack of letters and treatises to deliver along the way. Combined with things like literary salons,
24:36 Holly Frey? advances in printing technology, and the establishment of more schools, colleges, and universities, this Republic of Letters was part of what sustained intellectual and philosophical movements in the 17th and 18th centuries, the period that is sometimes framed as the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment.
24:55 Tracy V. Wilson? While many of Anna Maria von Sherman's letters were shorter or contained works of poetry, she was deeply connected to the world of European scholarship and philosophy through these letters. The same was true of other women, too. She was not at all the only one. This included, of course, Princess Elizabeth. A lot of the other women who were participating in this correspondence were royals, or nobles, or they came from other wealthy and well-connected families, since these were almost entirely the only women who likely had access to some kind of education, as well as enough money to be able to spend their time on these kinds of pursuits.
25:36 Holly Frey? But while there were a lot of relatively educated women in the upper classes, Anna Maria von Sherman was seen as exceptional among them. She was given a lot of nicknames that referenced this during her lifetime. One of them that was in use by 1633 was "The Jewel of Learned Women." By the following year, Dutch theologian Heisbertus Fuzius had become her teacher, and she expanded her knowledge of Greek and the New Testament. She also made a deeper study of Greek literature and poetry, and Homer, credited with the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, became her favorite poet.
26:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Von Sherman was also unique in that she was able to access a university education, something that women were almost entirely excluded from. Her teacher, Fuzius, was one of the founders of Utrecht University, which had originally been established as Utrecht's illustrious gymnasium. Gymnasium being a term for a secondary school, not a gym with weights and jump ropes and stuff that we might think of in the United States. Utrecht University was formally inaugurated on March 16, 1636, making it one of the oldest universities in what's now the Netherlands. Anna Maria von Sherman was invited to write a poem
26:57 Tracy V. Wilson? in honor of the university to be read at the opening ceremonies.
27:02 Holly Frey? She wrote two poems, one of them a reflection on Fuzius's inaugural sermon, and the other a praise poem about the university. Both of these poems were in Latin, and both are described as very beautiful. And the praise poem pointedly noted that the sacred halls being opened were not accessible to women. Von Sherman also composed a poem in French extemporaneously and delivered it during the festivities. She became the unofficial poet laureate of Utrecht, and she was nicknamed "The Dutch Sappho." The name "Sappho" was not as closely connected to lesbianism as it is in a lot of places today. This was a reference to her skill in poetry. We just ran our episode on Sappho,
27:47 Holly Frey? which talks about the evolution in the connotations around her name and identity as a Saturday classic.
27:54 Tracy V. Wilson? After the opening of the University of Utrecht, Fuzius continued to tutor van Sherman, including in the Semitic languages of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldean. And he made arrangements for her to attend lectures at the university, seated in a special compartment with its entry and exit covered by curtains so that she would not distract the men.
28:18 Holly Frey? This made her the first woman in the Netherlands known to attend a university. She completed the equivalent of the Faculty of Letters, which was the basic liberal arts coursework required for all students, most of which she had already mastered before attending these lectures. And she continued to attend both public and private lectures at the university for years.
28:40 Tracy V. Wilson? We'll talk about how her work as a scholar evolved from here after a sponsor break.
28:49 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more,
29:34 Holly Frey? but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
29:52 Speaker 04 Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
30:34 Speaker 04 This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.
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32:34 Tracy V. Wilson? In the 1630s, Anna Maria von Sherman became famous in Northern Europe. Scholars and intellectuals wrote to each other about this woman attending university in Utrecht, and they shared her poetry and her letters. Earlier, we mentioned how Anna Maria von Sherman and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia followed very different paths through the worlds of religion and philosophy, with von Sherman following Aristotelian and Christian thinking, while the princess became a student of Rene Descartes. Very broadly speaking, Aristotle had been focused on understanding the world through sensory experience, while Descartes
33:12 Tracy V. Wilson? focused on rationality and reason. Aristotelian versus Cartesian philosophy became a huge debate at Utrecht University and between Fuzius and Descartes personally. It was a big feud. After Descartes was banned from the university, he wrote a letter to philosopher and physician Anricus Regius, who taught medicine there, saying that if he wanted to attend Regius's lectures, he would have to stay in von Sherman's compartment behind a screen, too.
33:46 Holly Frey? Von Sherman visited Descartes during this dispute. He was already aware of her as a poet and a painter, and he appreciated her work in both. She clearly didn't agree with his viewpoints, describing them as not contributing anything new to science other than a way to fail at it really quickly. Meanwhile, Descartes thought her work with Fuzius was leading her to a kind of pedantic focus on religion, rather than the poetry and painting that he thought she was better suited to. Later on, Van Sherman also met with Descartes when he was on his way to become Christina of Sweden's tutor, and he criticized her for reading the Bible in Hebrew. We talked about Descartes' relationship with Christina of Sweden in our episode on "Her," which
34:31 Holly Frey? we ran as a Saturday classic on December 18, 2021.
34:36 Tracy V. Wilson? It was around this time that other scholars started wanting to dedicate their books to Van Sherman, especially their books on women. One was Dutch author and physician Johan van Beverveek, author of "Die Excellentia Fomentis Sexus," or "The Excellency of the Female Sex." Van Sherman wrote him a letter, quote, "heartily beseeching him not to do this." It felt like vanity, but she also thought that most men, not just the low-ranking men who were not worth her attention, but men of great esteem, would interpret his work as saying that as long as women were able to get some kind of special permission
35:21 Tracy V. Wilson? to pursue higher studies, that that would be enough. Van Beverveek dedicated this work to her anyway. He was not the only man to dedicate work to her after specifically being asked not to.
35:36 Holly Frey? Because I know better. Van Sherman also faced continual pressure to publish her correspondence with philosophers, scientists, and scholars all over northern Europe. She also corresponded with people like Queen Christina of Sweden, who visited her at least once, and with Polish Queen Ludwika Maria. Other female correspondents included artist Margaret Gotowick, who was a scholar of Hebrew, and singer Utrecht Ogul, and of course, Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate.
36:07 Tracy V. Wilson? This pressure to publish was not just because people found von Sherman's insights and analysis interesting and worthwhile, and her poetry to be beautiful, and so they thought all of that should be shared. This was happening during a period of ongoing debate about women and their role in society and their capability for intellect and learning, described as the Querele de Farme or the Woman Question. Most, but not all, of the people writing about this subject were men who wrote essays about women's nature and their abilities. People who supported the idea of women having a capacity to learn also assembled catalogs
36:52 Tracy V. Wilson? of learned women, listing out these women's biographies and their accomplishments. These catalogs were not unique to the early modern period, but they were particularly trendy in the 17th century, and Anna Maria von Sherman was featured in a number of them. So in this context, people who supported the idea of education for women, and of women having a place in academia and society, and just the capacity for thought and learning, they thought that von Sherman's letters could serve as direct evidence of the arguments that they were making and as an inspiration for other women.
37:35 Holly Frey? More than once, when von Sherman refused to publish her letters, men did it for her without asking. The first was Charles Duchenne, who printed an unauthorized collection of her correspondence with French theologian André Rivey in 1638. He did not have Rivey's permission either. And in addition to being printed without their permission, this collection was full of errors.
38:00 Tracy V. Wilson? After this, Van Sherman decided to expand what she had written to Rivet into a standalone work, which was published in Latin with a title that translates to "A Dissertation on the Capacity of Women for Education in 1641." Translations of this work into Dutch and French followed, and it was published in English as "The Learned Maid," or "Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar: A Logic Exercise Written in Latin by that incomparable Virgin Anna Maria Asherman of Utrecht in 1659." So that title includes a question, "Whether a maid may be a scholar?" And at the very
38:42 Tracy V. Wilson? beginning, the text answers it, quote, "We hold the affirmative, and will endeavor to make it good."
38:49 Holly Frey? This dissertation contains 14 syllogisms, or structured logical arguments, with a major premise supported by a minor premise leading to a conclusion. As an example, here is number eight, "Argument from the genus of the predicate or of learning." Quote, "Arts and sciences are convenient for those to whom all virtue in general is convenient, but all virtue in general is convenient for a maid. Therefore, the major is evident from the division of virtue into intellectual and moral. Under the former whereof, the philosopher comprehended the arts and sciences. The minor hath no need
39:28 Holly Frey? of proof, for virtue, as Seneca saith, chooseth her servant neither by their state nor sex."
39:35 Tracy V. Wilson? This dissertation was both a treatise on women's education and a work of philosophy, arguing that study was an appropriate pursuit for Christian women and a benefit to them. Women had the capacity for study, and study could lead them toward a deeper love and reverence for God.
39:54 Holly Frey? Van Sherman ended with refutations of the arguments she expected would be made against her. For example, someone could argue that a person of weak wit could not study letters, and women are of weak wit, therefore, women could not study. She acknowledged that some women were of weak wit, but that the ones who were not could be admitted to studies, and that studies would also help alleviate their weakness. She wrote in part, quote, "No man can rightly judge of our inclinations to studies before he hath encouraged us by the best reasons and means to set upon them, and withal hath given us some taste of their sweetness."
40:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Anna Maria's mother Eva died in 1637. After this, Anna Maria took over running the household, including her late mother's work caring for her elderly aunts. Eva had also done a lot of philanthropic work, like visiting the poor and the sick, and Anna Maria picked up this work as well. Her philosophical and intellectual correspondence started to slow down as she had so many other responsibilities.
40:59 Holly Frey? Meanwhile, professor and theologian Frederick Spahnheim was trying to convince her to publish her letters, which she repeatedly declined to do. Then, in 1648, when he asked once again, she gave him a response that made it sound like she might be open to it. So he went ahead and published a collection of letters and poems known as opuscula. Spahnheim died a year later, and in 1652, she published her own version of this collection. That was extremely well received, leading to nicknames like the Tenth Muse and the Star of Utrecht.
41:36 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1653, Van Sherman left Utrecht for a while, going to Cologne with her aunts. The Thirty Years' War had ended by this point, and they were trying to reclaim some property they had lost. This took the family more than a year to settle, and while Anna Maria made some connections to the university in Cologne, this was the first time she had really been away from her academic circle in Utrecht, and in particular, her teacher Fuzius. She started to question some of what she had been learning and she became progressively more focused on religious and spiritual matters and less on things like science and philosophy.
42:16 Holly Frey? In 1660, Anna Maria, her brother Johan Hodgshock, and their aunts moved to Lexman, south of Utrecht, taking a couple of servants with them. Both aunts died in 1661, at which point Anna Maria and her brother returned to Utrecht. And around that time, they met Jean de Labadie, former Jesuit priest and religious reformer. He had left the Catholic Church and founded a series of small, pietistic communities. That's a religious movement focused on piety and godliness. Over time, the Labadists' community became like a commune, including shared property and common meals. Jean de Labadie and his teachings and communities were controversial.
42:58 Holly Frey? By the time he met the Von Shermans, the Labadists had been forced to move several times.
43:04 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1669, Anna Maria ultimately abandoned her life as a scholar. She left the Dutch Reformed Church and she became a Labadist. This was shocking to a lot of people. The Dutch Reformed Church had been advocating for the government to take some kind of action against the Labadists and a lot of the people who admired Von Sherman's scholarship, poetry, and art were just baffled at this shift in her life.
43:33 Holly Frey? They unfriend her on proto-Facebook.
43:37 Holly Frey? The Labadists continued to move around as they faced persecution and harassment. In 1670, Anna Maria sought help from Princess Elizabeth, who was abbess at the abbey at Hereford in Westphalia. Elizabeth had to describe the Labadist community as a convent that was being led by Von Sherman, with Jean de Labadie acting as its minister in order to get a lecturer, Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, to give his permission for them to live there.
44:06 Tracy V. Wilson? They continued to face persecution, though, including from people who found Jean de Labadie's teachings to be heretical and from people who suspected him of secretly still being Catholic. The Labadists moved on from Hereford around 1672, with the princess helping them relocate to Altona, which was part of Denmark at the time, but is now in Germany. This move was probably the last time that Anna Maria saw Princess Elizabeth.
44:36 Holly Frey? In Altona, Van Sherman published a religious autobiography called Eucloria. It was largely focused on her decision to leave a life of scholarship and join the Labadists. While she continued to create some artwork, mainly in sculpted wood and wax, she largely retired from the world at that point.
44:57 Tracy V. Wilson? In her last years, Anna Maria Van Sherman was disabled with some kind of arthritic condition and she used a wheelchair. Jeanne de Labade died in 1674, and from that point, she was seen as the leader of the Labadists. Afterward, they moved again from Altona to Weewoud in the Dutch province of Friesland.
45:19 Holly Frey? Anna Maria Van Sherman died there on May 14, 1678. She had already sold much of her property, and what was left went to the Labadists. According to her wishes, she was buried in Weewoud without a ceremony. The Labadist community continued at Weewoud for a while. Maria Sebulia Merian and several of her family joined the Labadists there in 1686. We ran our episode on Maria Sebulia Merian as a Saturday classic on April 2, 2022. The Labadist community at Weewoud was dissolved in 1732.
45:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Before she died, Anna Maria Van Sherman destroyed a lot of her letters and poems, and there's a lot of speculation about her reasons why. The Labadists were very focused on piety and renouncing worldliness, and she might have seen her past writing as contrary to that. One of the things that she criticized herself for in her biography was pride that had come along with her accomplishments and her fame. She had come to see that as sinful and improper. She might have felt that after her shift away from university study, these earlier writings didn't represent her anymore.
46:37 Tracy V. Wilson? She might have also been afraid that if she did not destroy her work, other people would use it to turn her into some kind of cult figure after her death. Almost 200 years passed between Anna Maria von Sherman's death and another woman being enrolled at a university in the Netherlands. That is generally recognized as Alida Jacobs, who started at the University of Groningen in 1871 and also became the first woman physician in the Netherlands in 1879. Anna Maria von Sherman is not forgotten today. Utrecht University is building a new teaching complex, which is to be named after her.
47:18 Holly Frey? Do you have listener mail?
47:20 Tracy V. Wilson? I do have listener mail. This is from Caitlin. Caitlin has written us a number of letters and they're always really lovely. And Caitlin wrote, "Hi Tracy and Holly, your recent episode on Wilfred Owen was like a time machine. I was instantly transported back to my senior year of high school when I was in academic decathlon and the subject was World War I. The way academic decathlon works is that there are 10 subjects, the deca of the name, and most of them are tailored to the yearly theme. So for language and literature, we studied Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, as well as poems and poets of the war. It seemed like every name you mentioned in the episode brought full force memories
48:02 Tracy V. Wilson? of studying with my teammates, coming up with mnemonics for Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and their poems, committing dulcie at decorumess to memory and trying to keep track of which bits of biographical detail went with which poem. At 16, I knew I was queer but was out to very few people and generally didn't speak about queer things out of fear that someone would register how passionate I was and put together the pieces. Reading about Owen and Sassoon and realizing that there was more to their lives than our packets contained was transformative, and I was and still am deeply moved by Owen's life and how abruptly it was cut short.
48:45 Tracy V. Wilson? I had forgotten how much these poets meant to me and how much the lost generation moved me. So thank you for bringing that back to mind." On a different subject, I know you have a recent episode on measles and its history, so I won't request an episode on that, but have you considered an episode on viral hepatitis and the ethical controversy around the development of its vaccine? I may have written about this before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but in short, Dr. Saul Krugman worked at the Willowbrook School, an institution for disabled children. In researching viral hepatitis, he deliberately infected disabled children with the disease in order to test his theory about its transmission and then to test vaccine
49:29 Tracy V. Wilson? efficacy. This horrific ethical abuse is not a secret, but Krugman never faced real repercussions and until his death, he maintained that he was in the right because he was acting in service of the greater good. This is a subject that is very close to both my heart and my academic research. I work in history of education and presented a paper comparing the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in public memory. Why is one common knowledge while the other is an obscure footnote? That's obviously quite outside the scope of this podcast, but important nonetheless. Some books on the subject, some of which are broader in scope than just this case. Against Their
50:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America by Alan M. Hornblum, Judy L. Newman, and Gregory J. Dober. The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong by John A. Lynch. Human Medical Experimentation: From Smallpox Vaccines to Secret Government Programs by Frances R. Frankenberg. I've included a few photos for pet tax. My orange boy, False Dimitri IV, has learned to climb onto display shelves that are strictly no cat zones. I'm grateful he doesn't have thumbs for the crossbow, or else working at my desk would be a risky endeavor. The tortoise is a shark to puss who is scared of heights. And this does not commit shelf crimes. All the best, Caitlin.
50:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Thank you so much, Caitlin, for this email. I loved it so much.
50:59 Tracy V. Wilson? They and I had a brief email exchange after this. I am fairly certain that we have read a previous email from Caitlin specifically about the Willowbrook experiments. We did mention Willowbrook very briefly in our episode on measles and the measles vaccine, because Willowbrook is also one of the places that the measles vaccine was tested. That was a little bit different situation because there was a measles outbreak happening and they were trying to save kids' lives. The hepatitis studies were deliberately spreading hepatitis. Right. And then testing a vaccine.
51:41 Tracy V. Wilson? So like a slightly different situation going on there, but it did come up very briefly in that prior episode.
51:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, oh my goodness, these kitty cats.
51:55 Tracy V. Wilson? I scrolled through the pictures this morning without having reread the email. And when I saw this orange kitty cat on the shelves, I was like, this cat is about to do some crime.
52:09 Tracy V. Wilson? And when I then read the email, I was like, oh, and they also said that this cat is about to do some shelf crimes. These cats are precious. I love them.
52:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, thank you again so much for this email, Caitlin. I especially found the part about your reading of these poets at the age of 16 to be really moving.
52:32 Tracy V. Wilson? If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at [email protected] . And you can also subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
52:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
53:05 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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