Anna Maria van Schurman: Self-Portraiture, Female Scholarly Identity, and the Republic of Letters

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.