Since women’s history as a sub-discipline was established, many spaces of learning previously believed to have been exclusively male have been successfully re-examined.² One fortress of male dominance remains to be structurally reviewed: the early modern university. Studies of individual cases, such as Anna Maria van Schurman in the Low Countries, have demonstrated that women could attain even the highest positions within the early modern university.³ However, the portrayal of these women as highly exceptional indirectly underlines the conception that early modern universities and academia were exclusively male domains. Despite statutes banning women from working at the colleges, an analysis of the institutional archives of the universities of Leuven reveals that women could be found throughout the entire university.⁴ Working women traversed college corridors, cleaning linen, selling wares, and repairing curtains. In doing so, they gained official titles such as maid, porter, concierge, or head of kitchen, while other women worked as academic printers or as head of the physics laboratory.⁵ The ivory tower did not succeed in keeping women away from the university.

Despite the evidence of their presence, these women remain left out of the history of the university because of a biased focus on official access to higher education, neglecting the possibility that there were other ways for women to act within the university’s walls. This case study of the University of Leuven reassesses these presumably closed-off spaces by paying close attention to action instead of official access. The female benefactors in this study demonstrate the ways in which women shaped the future of the early modern university.

After the University of Leuven was founded by papal bull in 1425, it soon established itself as a thriving institution. Across the entire period of the Old University, women comprised 13 percent of all the donors: a significant amount. Throughout the centuries, from the initial foundation of the university in the fifteenth century to its closure at the end of the eighteenth century, women were actively involved with academic education at one of Europe’s influential university cities. Not a decade passed without women setting up donations. There was a steep rise in contributions made by women in the sixteenth century, and a decline later in the eighteenth century. When comparing the female donations (fig. 1) with the overall donations made at the university (fig. 2), a strikingly similar trend can be observed. The number of scholarships set up by women reflects the ups and downs seen in the overall number of donations set up at the university. When it came to setting up scholarships, female benefactors thus played a straightforward role, not specifically distinct from that of men.

The impact of women did, however, intensify at certain moments. The number of female donors increased during the pivotal years towards the end of the sixteenth century, when women set up 19 percent of all new scholarships. In the 1670s and 1680s the involvement of women even topped 20 percent of the total number of donations. This means that during the years in which the university faced hardship – war, looting, and economic crises – one in five of all donations were made by women.

The donation made by Barbara Moerkens in 1578 offers a good illustration of how women played a vital role in the university’s survival at the most crucial moments of its history.⁶ Moerkens had wished to set up a donation at the Augustinian College. Yet, after her death, the payments from her endowment were temporarily suspended. In a letter written by the college president, the famous theology professor Michael Baius described the hardship he and his students were facing at the time: ‘The poverty is so great here that we must consider how we will obtain the bread necessary for our sustenance. For six years, besieged on all sides, we have received nothing. Everything is horribly expensive.’⁷ During the time in which Leuven was besieged by Habsburg soldiers, the living situation for the students and professors at the Augustinian college was grim. After all his efforts to consolidate Moerkens’s endowment, Baius would never see the day the donation was finally enacted. In 1589, six years after Baius’s letter, the new college president Jacobus Jansenius finally received Moerkens’s donation, which made it possible to rescue the worn-out college. Two controversial theologians with a struggling college, and it was a donation of a woman who finally saved it from succumbing to the depredations of war.

Like Barbara Moerkens, most donors, both men and women, left an endowment in the form of a scholarship at a specific college. Colleges were founded specifically with the goal of accommodating young students from less fortunate backgrounds at university.⁸ The first college in Leuven was set up by Judoca van Putte and her husband, Lodewijk de Rijke in 1445.⁹ A college typically consisted of a large building with sleeping quarters, a dining room, and a kitchen (fig. 3).¹⁰ Most colleges also gave access to a garden where the kitchen staff grew crops and the students could unwind. Some colleges had a small chapel for the residents to pray in. Setting up a college thus first required a building. But a college offered more than just a room and daily meal. Besides a place to sleep and eat, every college had its own library and a live-in president, often a professor who would provide extra lessons and lead debates at the college. Fixed rules and regulations governed the hallways of the college, and the opening of the daily meal was an important task for the presiding professor. This was thus a place of study, fully incorporated within the university. Because of these added benefits many wealthy families also chose to send their young sons to a college, a choice for which they had to pay admission. Nonetheless, the college system was, at its core, an institution offering less privileged students access to the university.

Students who could not afford to pay for their admission could apply for a scholarship in order to gain access to one of the numerous colleges in Leuven.¹¹ Many scholarships included instructions on how only the most diligent or studious could apply for their grant. To ensure this, a notice about the scholarships would be sent to local priests and school headmasters. These men selected specific students and encouraged them to apply for the grant. The students would then send a short letter of motivation to the college announcing their candidacy. Once selected, they would receive all-inclusive access into higher education.

With the advent of the earliest version of the newspaper, it became common to print recruitment notices of the available scholarships, thus spreading the call for applicants as widely as possible. Demonstrating the long effect a scholarship could have, one listing in the official bulletin of the Belgian state from 1947 shows a scholarship set up by Barbara Moerkens in 1577.¹² The investment of her initial donation was still yielding profits in the mid-twentieth century. Four hundred years after setting it up, students could still apply to her scholarship to gain free access to university.

What do these scholarships tell us about the role of women in early modern academia? The testament of Elisabeth de Borghgraeff demonstrates the level of involvement female donors showed towards the academic pursuits of the students applying to their scholarships.¹³ In her testament written in 1615, Elisabeth instructs that priority should be given to her relatives, as was common for early modern scholarships. De Borghgraeff was part of the Frisian nobility, in the northern part of the Low Countries. When her husband passed away in 1601, she was left with a considerable inheritance, as the couple had remained childless. They had moved from Frisia to the Southern Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century because the Dutch Revolt had made it impossible for them to live their lives according to their Catholic faith. Despite being in exile for the rest of her life, de Borghgraeff remained loyal to the region of her birth. She had, for instance, ordered a gravestone erected for herself and her husband in Terkaple in Frisia, even though she would be buried (following Catholic rites) in Mechelen.¹⁴ Her loyalty is furthermore indicated in her scholarship, as students from Frisia would be specifically considered for the grant. If family members from other regions applied, they would still, however, gain preference. Blood ties thus trumped geographical ones.

Along with her testament, the university archives have kept numerous small letters written by students applying for de Borggraeff’s scholarship. Many of these letters were written before her death, suggesting that she might have been involved in the selection process of the students. This process was also detailed in her testament, as the selected students were to live in accordance with the statutes of the pedagogy of Het Varken, the college where de Borggraeff had set up her scholarship. She continues by stating that the scholarship should only be used by students following courses in logic and rhetoric or for their promotion in theology.¹⁵ This shows that de Borggraeff wanted to make sure these students applied themselves to specific academic, political, and religious pursuits.

The testament proves de Borggraeff had knowledge of the college statutes and what they proclaimed. She must also have had particular ties to this college that led to her selecting it from the numerous other colleges active at that time in Leuven.¹⁶ From specific household objects to guidelines as to how to live a proper life, de Borggraeff had pinpointed exactly how she wanted her scholarship to be set up and which type of students she wanted to support. Her level of engagement is further exemplified in the testament, which notes that she reserved the right to inspect the college and see if the bursary students were living up to their promises. De Borggraeff lived in Mechelen, so she must have made the short journey to Leuven to check up on her pupils, again showing her significant and continued involvement with these young students. She cared for them and wished them to have a comfortable place to live, but more than this, she felt responsible for their academic pursuits. To cement her lasting mark on this college, she directed her name be inscribed on a plaque and hung above the door of the college house. This way, de Borggraeff reminded the students walking the halls of one of the largest colleges of Leuven that she was the one who had made it all possible for them.

The scholarship left by Elisabeth de Borggraeff was not exceptional; her donation is exemplary for the hundreds of funds set up by women at the University of Leuven during the early modern period. These women, who hailed from all walks of life, interacted closely with the university’s activities and directly shaped its future. Over a hundred women had set up funds at the University of Leuven by the eighteenth century. This number includes many affluent women and women of nobility such as Empress Maria Theresia, Marchioness Maria van Hamale, and Countess Margareta de Croÿ.¹⁷ Besides their multiple and generous endowments to the university, these women included many other institutions in their testament, as was expected of women from this social class. Yet, women from different social positions also feature in the university archives.

A substantial group of women were from those who had chosen a distinguishingly modest and pious lifestyle. They lived, for instance, in one of the many Beguinages of the Low Countries. While most were mentioned simply as begijn (Beguine) in their testaments, two were furthermore described as being headmistress of a Beguinage.¹⁸ To become a headmistress one needed to enjoy a certain level of social prestige; it is surprising, therefore, that only two headmistresses feature in the list of female benefactors to the university. Many women lived in a Beguinage in Leuven, but other Beguines who donated to the university lived in Mechelen, Brussels, Diest, or even farther afield in Utrecht.

Their devoted way of life might offer us clues as to their intentions in setting up a scholarship at a notable Catholic university. Yet, much is left unsaid about, for instance, Johanna-Theresia and Lucia Barbara Peeters, two sisters living in the Beguinage in Leuven in the eighteenth century, who set up a scholarship at the Breugel College.¹⁹ The Beguinages offered women a social position distinct from that of cloistered women, as women living in Beguinages were still able to participate in many worldly dealings within wider society (fig. 4). In their testament the sisters indicated their funds were derived through their beer-brewing business. Beguinages offered women a competitive position in the local market. Their pious way of life banned them from making a profit, which is why they often sold their wares under the standard market price, much to the dismay of the other tradespeople. Despite religious disdain for amassing personal riches, it was not uncommon for women living in Beguinages to become successful businesswomen, largely because they offered exceptionally low prices. Johanna-Theresia and Lucia still left a significant endowment at the end of their lives, possibly also motivated by a desire to donate their dubious worldly possessions to a worthy cause. However, their motivations for setting up a scholarship at a specific college for medical students remain unclear.

The motivations behind the funding of a scholarship by Oda Mangelaers, the maid we saw at the beginning of this chapter, leave more to the imagination than the several other maids, who left donations for the college at which they had formally worked. Johanna Hans, for instance, established a scholarship at her former workplace, the St. Ivo College.²⁰ For these women, it is easier to understand why they would want to set up a donation at the university.

Only a quarter of the women who made donations were married when they set up their testament.²¹ Most of the married women set up their donation together with their husbands, while 23 percent did so without the signature of any male counterpart. These donations demonstrate – once again – that married women in the early modern Low Countries were able to set up contracts and dispose of their personal wealth in any way they deemed fit, without their husband’s approval.²² Furthermore, roughly a quarter of these female donors were widows, all of whom set up their donations on their own, without a male relative to co-sign the contract. The biggest group of women, however, comprised single women. Most of them set up their donations alone, while a few did so together with a sibling, like the beer-brewing sisters at the Beguinage. Together, the female benefactors of the university reflect the wide range of lifestyles open to women in early modern society. Despite differences in social background, the largest group of women who decided to set up a donation were those who did so on their own (70 percent of all women). Why did they decide to do so?

The fact that most of these women remained childless throughout their lives might have had a big impact on their decision. This trend is also seen in the donations made by couples, as well as by men donating on their own to the university. Furthermore, donating to charitable organisations was prevalent among all social classes in early modern society.²³ One study on early modern Amsterdam has found that women left more money for philanthropic purposes than did men.²⁴ As another historian has argued, ‘generosity may well have been the major characteristic by which women could distinguish themselves in a positive way and express their own personality’.²⁵ It is thus possible that the women donating to the university did so as a distinguishing act of self-representation.

For now, we are left speculating on how these women became involved with the well-being of young college students at the University of Leuven. Their engagement does, however, showcase just how porous the walls of the early modern university could be, while demonstrating the ways women traversed spaces ones believed to be exclusively male. Through their testaments, these women offer us insights into the many facets of early modern womanhood, and show how they all had their own different ambitions and intentions.

The role of women setting up donations at the university was more straightforward than first believed. As knowledge agents, they supported students through their education, and thereby shaped the future direction of the university. They gave priority to specific subjects, often according to their political and religious aims. Moreover, these scholarships show that the university had a significant place in the lived experience of early modern women. These women possessed not only an intricate understanding of the university’s inner workings and well-considered visions and strategies for shaping its future, but they were also personally invested in its existence. Despite statutes ordering the ban of women working in colleges, it did not keep them from taking at least partial ownership of the institution. These women considered the university as a part of the world for which they felt personally responsible, to such an extent that they utilised it in shaping their own sense of self. Women were thereby thoroughly engaged with early modern academia. Instead of continuing the silencing of women in the university archives because of a lack of official access, focusing on the actions of women in the early modern period has the potential to enrich our understanding of the multifaceted ways in which women from a multitude of different backgrounds, created, negotiated, transformed, and disrupted fixed ideas about the place of women in early modern universities.