Early Modern Low Countries (EMLC) is a leading open access journal dedicated to the study of the early modern Low Countries. We publish multidisciplinary and state-of-the-art scholarship on any aspect of the turbulent history of this region between 1500 and 1830. The journal has its origins in a cooperation between two former journals on the Low Countries, De Zeventiende Eeuw and De Achttiende Eeuw. You may visit the archives of DZE here and those of DAE here.
This essay examines how growing numbers of displaced men and women in the early modern Low Countries were incorporated into contemporary visual culture. It argues that evolving representations of the refugee were built on biblical and classical tropes, and shaped by the interests of stakeholders, notably religious minorities. Mapping this visual landscape, it proposes a typology of five, partly overlapping refugee types. Each drew on pictorial models and confessional scripts aligned with the sensibilities of target audiences. The iconographic development of the early modern refugee would have dramatic consequences for displaced groups who did not fit into such categories.
Copyright (c) 2026 Geert Janssen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The aim of this article is to describe, for the first time, the general character and function of the town crier in the Dutch Republic, between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century. The stadsroeper belongs to a cast of early modern urban professionals that has been largely ignored as an object of study. This article seeks to reconstruct the world of the crier, based on extensive research in Dutch archives. Our analysis covers a discussion of the general distribution across the Republic of the town crier; a comparative examination of the services and duties of the crier; a reconstruction of the appearance and performance of the crier and their relation to the crier’s function; and a reflection on the remuneration, ancillary activities and general status of the crier in society. Overall, this article argues that the town crier was a figure central to civic society in the Dutch Republic, across villages, towns and cities, functioning as a vital communicative mediator of news and announcements of official, commercial, and private natures.
Copyright (c) 2026 Arthur der Weduwen, Demi van Breukelen, Tom Ottens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article analyses two thus far unstudied Latin poems by the prominent humanist scholar Caspar Barlaeus (1584-1648): Argo Batava (1629), which celebrates the Dutch capture of the Spanish treasure fleet in 1628; and Triumphus super capta Olinda (1630), on the conquest of the Portuguese settlement Olinda in Brazil in 1630. These two poems, we argue, give significant clues regarding the ambivalence that characterised Barlaeus’s views regarding the Dutch pursuit of empire. By discussing these poems together within the contexts of the early modern reception of the classics and the development of Dutch empire in the Atlantic world, we show how Barlaeus’s baroque poetry mixed triumphalism with pessimism and celebrated as well as criticised Dutch colonialism as a project of laudable yet dangerous ambition. In creatively appropriating the classical narratives of the Argonauts, Aeneas’s arrival on Italian soil, and the imperial contest between Rome and Carthage, Barlaeus hinted that the Dutch Republic could succeed in outdoing the Spanish monarchy and in establishing settlements overseas but, blinded by the lust for gold and profit, would not be able to escape the perils of living in an Iron Age.
Copyright (c) 2026 Arthur Weststeijn, Dinah Wouters https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This afterword reflects on the articles in this special issue, and places them within the context of other historiographic surveys of early modern women, including three from the 1990s and two more recent ones. It highlights similarities and differences in the scholarship on the Low Countries and that of other parts of Europe, and points particularly to common trends, including an emphasis on women’s actions and agency rather than representations of women or men’s ideas about women; a stress on specific spaces and routes, including the Atlantic World; the importance of material culture in examining many kinds of topics; a broadening of the notion of ‘literature’ and ‘art’ to include a wider range of genres and makers; attention to differences among women and the ways these intersected with gender; the growing use of digital technologies; and the importance of trans-disciplinary and sometimes transnational collaborations. Methods and theories developed in the Low Countries have provided models for other parts of Europe, and those developed elsewhere have sometimes been applied in the Netherlands, though more of this is possible.
Copyright (c) 2025 Merry Wiesner-Hanks https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Michaelina Wautier’s Flower Garland with Butterfly Investigated
While the field of technical art history has progressed tremendously over the last decades, there has been little technical research into paintings made by early modern women artists. As archival and documentary evidence on these women is often scarce, the objects made by them are our best sources for learning more about them as artists. This article explores the potential of this methodology: how can technical examinations of paintings provide us with more information on women artists, and more specifically their studio practice, training, and artistic and professional network? Michaelina Wautier’s Flower Garland with Butterfly serves as a case study. Technical research into this painting revealed a clear technical influence of Antwerp-based specialised flower painters on the materials and painting techniques employed by Wautier. The way Wautier used a lay-in to prepare the composition shows many similarities with a specific painting technique developed and employed by specialised flower painters from Antwerp. Moreover, Wautier’s use of the pigment orpiment shows more of this technical influence from flower painters.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kirsten Derks, Koen Janssens, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Geert Van der Snickt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Low Countries Women as Funders of Art and Architecture
From the late sixteenth century into the early eighteenth, the Southern Low Countries constituted one of the most important regions for artistic production and exchange in Europe. This essay reveals the understudied roles of women in the flourishing of that visual culture. I argue that this topic must be approached with a solid understanding of the gendered property laws and practices that shaped both how women used their wealth to finance art and architecture, and the sources through which we access that activity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sarah Joan Moran https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Women and Artistic Production in the Long Seventeenth Century in the Low Countries
The importance of the role of women as artists has been recognised and rightly continues to be researched. However, although there are exceptions, the scholarship that has been produced over the past two decades does not sufficiently challenge patriarchal, male-centric art historical research, with its focus on the so-called ‘creative genius’. The result, whether intentional or not, has been a continued emphasis on so-called stars, exceptional women, and trailblazers. Promising scholarship has focused on the role of women as artisan-makers or considered the gender-specific circumstances in which women operated. This scholarship, while of critical importance, unwittingly validates the assumption that the creation and production of (fine) art in the long seventeenth century in the Low Countries was primarily a man’s affair, with women relegated to more peripheral roles. If we are to truly write an inclusive art history, however, we must be willing to re-examine, expand, and even re-define traditional concepts in art history as they relate to the creation and production of art, pursue interdisciplinarity, and adopt the tools at our disposal, notably technical and object-based art history and the digital humanities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Catherine Powell-Warren https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article analyses the letter-writing practices of women, focusing on a single letter written at the turn of the eighteenth century by a woman in Paris to an opera director in The Hague. Our case study shows we have much to gain from letters written by women further down the social hierarchy, as most scholarship has focused on the elite. By reading between the lines and employing responsible speculation, historians can gain insight into the challenges and opportunities available to working women on the move, such as performers. Learning to read these letters differently – learning to truly listen to them – enables us to achieve new understanding of the ways in which women created and sustained relationships through correspondence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rebekah Ahrendt, David van der Linden https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Katharina Lescailje’s Ariadne and Public Femininity
Combining literary analysis with book history, this short essay examines how representations of women within a play may be complicated by considering the context of individual printed versions. Ariadne, by Katharina Lescailje, offers a translation of Thomas Corneille’s tragedy, with its complicated female protagonist, for the Dutch stage. In the 1693 single edition and the 1731 complete edition of Lescailje’s work, this ambivalent representation of femininity is accompanied by title pages, a frontispiece, and a dedicatory poem that present Ariadne as eroticised and victimised, conflating her with Lescailje herself. In addition, Lescailje appears on title pages as translator, author, and stationer. All of these representations together show how printed versions of plays can add to the depiction of women in drama to display a variety of female roles for the reader to contemplate and explore.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martine van Elk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Women and Authorship in the Low Countries
Netherlandish women writing literary texts in the period 1550-1830 are well-studied. The aim of this essay is to show how existing scholarship creates a tension between exceptionalism and marginalisation: scholarship primarily focuses on the challenges female authors faced because of their sex and does so by studying sources surrounding literary publications (such as journals, preliminaries, and portraits), with the notable exception of the works of some canonised women writers who are regarded as exceptions to the rule. As such, early modern Netherlandish women writers are primarily represented as a homogeneous group in scholarship. Yet, we argue, the diversity of literature (co-)authored by women, as well as the heterogeneous identities of these female authors themselves, invites us to destabilise the idea of ‘the female author’ in at least two interrelated ways: by linking their gender to other factors such as age, health, or race in women’s writing; and by approaching female-authored work as ‘collaborative’, i.e., reflecting different voices and hands, enabling scholars to view women in sometimes understudied roles and sources (such as translators and manuscripts, respectively). The future success of these proposed approaches depends on necessary infrastructural steps, as the digital availability and searchability of female-authored texts from the Low Countries is currently lagging behind that which is necessary.
Copyright (c) 2025 Feike Dietz, Nina Geerdink https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This essay examines the defence strategies of women accused of witchcraft in early modern Ghent, focusing on their agency within restrictive societal frameworks. Cases like that of Adriaene Schepens illustrate how accused women refuted supernatural accusations through rational explanations that exploited societal and gendered expectations. Rather than relying solely on emotional pleas, these women employed logical arguments and constructed personas that undermined the charges against them. Analysing trial records reveals how gender stereotypes were strategically used to appear non-threatening, reflecting broader social and cultural dynamics. The findings challenge traditional legal and demonological perspectives, emphasising the resilience and agency of accused women. The article advocates for an accessible database of accused individuals to trace defence strategies across cases, enriching the historiography of witchcraft in the Southern Low Countries and advancing understanding of gendered interactions in early modern legal history.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jonas Roelens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Finding Women in the University Archives
This article explores the overlooked involvement of women in supporting the University of Leuven during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite gendered regulations against the presence of women in early modern universities, archival evidence reveals their significant roles in providing scholarships to students. Through detailed analysis of testamentary records, the study uncovers women’s deep engagement with the university’s activities. Spanning various social backgrounds, these women demonstrated a profound understanding of the university’s operations and influenced its development through financial support and by designing instructions for student conduct and academic focus. Despite often being sidelined in historical narratives, their contributions challenge traditional views of male-dominated academia and underscore the diverse roles women played in shaping early modern universities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Claire Morrison https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Science on Women and Women in Science in the Dutch Republic
This article brings together the main historiographical discussions that concentrate on women in science and science on women in the early modern Low Countries, with a focus on recent decades and the Dutch Republic. Modern scholarship on the early modern Dutch scholars, writers, and thinkers that discussed the female nature in this period is relatively limited. The first part of the article brings together publications on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in Dutch anatomy, studies that discuss the ideas of particular scholars, for example Johannes Swammerdam (1637-1680), Reinier de Graaf (1641-1673), and Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), and the recent work on the early modern debate on female education. In contrast, current scholarship that discusses the role of women in scientific and scholarly debates in the Dutch Republic is a broad and varied field, consisting of studies on the genres in which the debate about the (potential) position of learned women was conducted, of in-depth explorations of the lives and works of individual women, and, more recently, of projects that construct a more collective understanding of female participation in the intellectual domain. Building on recent insights, this contribution makes a plea for interdisciplinarity and a more integral perspective that moves beyond the disciplinary, the singular, and the exceptional.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lieke van Deinsen, Karen Hollewand https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Mystical Union Between Christ and His Brides
Hundreds of (semi-)religious women, so-called kloppen and Beguines, lived in early modern Amsterdam, many of them in a community at the Begijnhof in the city centre. This case study analyses, via an emblematically painted devotional print with a calligraphed poem on the verso, how they collectively visualised and experienced their communion with the bridegroom Christ. A significant proportion of the Dutch population remained Catholic throughout the seventeenth century. As monasteries were forbidden, many Catholic women turned to a religious life ‘in the world’, an act which was tolerated by the Reformed authorities. Such a life offered women the chance to develop independently, self-willed, and intellectually outside marriage, a path that was cut off for Protestant women after the Reformation. For their spiritual life, these Catholic women made intensive use of devotional prints, which they sometimes augmented with friendly poems or prayers on the reverse. Prayers were also exchanged for the salvation of deceased fellow sisters. Sometimes, texts and notes on the prints and drawings were inspired by songs that were included in their prayer books. These devotionalia thus provide an interesting, as yet unknown source for research into the daily life, practised spirituality, and agency of semi-religious women in the Low Countries.
Copyright (c) 2025 Evelyne Verheggen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Maria Ludovica Mortgat, a seventeenth-century Dominican sister, owned a Dutch Bible printed in Antwerp in 1556. On the flyleaf of this Bible, Mortgat made extensive annotations recalling how she entered the convent. She also collected some short prayers and meditations. This case study not only provides insight into textual practice in early modern female convents, but also shows how Bibles were used as paper spaces within which one might develop a sense of religious self. Like the annotations in medieval rapiaria or early modern family Bibles, Mortgat used the blank leaves in her Bible to create a personalised object. In addition, this Bible confirms the relevance of reading Scripture in early modern Catholic contexts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Renske Hoff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Women and Reformation in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries
The history of women and their experiences of Reformation in the sixteenth-century Low Countries remains largely unexplored territory, especially compared to the rest of Europe and to the seventeenth century. Why this is the case is something of a puzzle, though it may have to do with available source material. Since the 1980s a handful of works have been published on the subject, mostly falling along confessional lines, with Anabaptist women receiving by far the most scholarly attention. Reformed and Catholic women have received comparatively less attention. This article surveys the current historiography on women’s experience of religious change in the Habsburg Low Countries and offers some suggestions for future research.
Copyright (c) 2025 Christine Kooi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Roles of Ambassadresses in Early Modern Diplomacy
Despite a recent surge in scholarship recognising the vital role of women in early modern diplomacy, the role of women in Dutch seventeenth-century embassies has been completely overlooked. This significant blind spot in Dutch scholarship skews our view of how the Dutch Republic, a new player on the international stage, practiced its diplomacy. This essay focuses on the role of ambassadresses, the wives of ambassadors, who joined their husband on a diplomatic mission. More specifically, it explores the potential of using digitised seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers as a valuable resource for finding more material to research the role of diplomats’ wives in shaping Dutch and European diplomacy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nina Lamal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Women and Political Agency in the Early Modern Low Countries
Politically active women in the early modern period have often been seen as exceptional figures, notable primarily for their ability to influence decision-making despite societal constraints on female authority. Historians have traditionally focused on examples of women from noble, princely, or royal backgrounds, given the prominence and status that enabled their influence. This article argues that expanding the scope of research to include a broader array of social contexts will allow a clearer understanding of early modern women’s roles as legitimate political agents. We propose three approaches to achieve this, highlighting the potential of new digital tools and technologies. By adopting a more systematic analysis that inherently acknowledges women’s political agency, we can gain deeper insights into the dynamics of power in early modern society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lidewij Nissen, Dries Raeymaekers https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
When wealthy widow Judith Stuyvesant died in her seventh decade of life, she left a will passing down her possessions to her descendants. Judith Stuyvesant’s 1684 will exposes the fraught connections between family, race, property, and power in colonial New Netherland. Her life intersected with diverse women, and her legacy was shaped by their lives as well. Among them was Mayken van Angola, an African woman who petitioned for her freedom and later married in Judith’s chapel, and Judith’s granddaughter, Anna, whose inheritance was marked by loss and violence. This article examines how wills, court petitions, and depositions offer insight into the lives of women who shaped, and were shaped by, a colonial world defined by landownership, labour, and enslavement. Through an analysis of Judith’s bowery, the family vault, and the chapel, it considers how material spaces reflected both privilege and dispossession in early New York.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nicole Saffold Maskiell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Women in Early Modern Dutch Maritime and Colonial Worlds
In the past decades, historians have taken great strides in uncovering the central position of women in Dutch maritime and colonial contexts. Emphasis is shifting, however, from a focus on maritime women in the Dutch Republic and women who were part of the colonial elites towards marginalised African, Asian, and Indigenous women in Dutch colonies and the Dutch Republic itself. Large digitisation projects are increasing the possibilities of further extracting their underrepresented perspectives from written documents, although this leads to new methodological challenges. Great care needs to be taken to not amplify biases already existing in the sources, and an awareness newly created bias by selections made when digitising is crucial. Moreover, the limitations of the written documents emphasise the importance of employing other types of sources. The future of scholarship on women in Dutch maritime and colonial worlds needs to include more object-based approaches, and quantitative patterns must be more closely explored through qualitative, interdisciplinary analysis. Various topics can be further studied to centre women in early modern colonial and maritime scholarship, including (family) networks, cross-generational patterns in family histories, strategies of survival and resistance, emotions and sexuality in empire-building, and gendered divisions in global labour and production.
Copyright (c) 2025 Suze Zijlstra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Occupational Matrilineages in the Printing House
The application dossiers for printer’s licences and privileges from the Privy Council in Brussels are a well-known source for book historians. To increase their chances of success, printers used a range of different arguments in their requests, including a family tradition in the trade. Using the application dossiers of the Boscard and Serrurier families in seventeenth-century Saint-Omer and Douai, I show that women frequently appeared in the applicants’ occupational lineage histories and that women printers also used family history as an argument in their own applications. These sources help us to rewrite the patrilinear narratives about the early modern printing business.
Copyright (c) 2025 Heleen Wyffels https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Historiography on women and work focused for long on whether and how large-scale transformations – such as urbanisation, commercialisation, the rise of capitalism, the consumer revolution, industrialisation, and the ideal of domesticity – changed women’s socio-economic position and work opportunities. More recent research also turns the question around and looks at the impact of women’s socio-economic position and gender relations on economic change. This essay discusses what these approaches have contributed to our knowledge and understanding of women and work in the Low Countries (with a specific focus on the Dutch Republic), identifies gaps in historiography, and argues that further diversification is necessary in order to better understand women’s economic contribution and the impact of gender relations on economic development.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ariadne Schmidt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Introduction to the special issue 'Towards a Multifaceted History of Early Modern Women in the Low Countries'
Copyright (c) 2025 Nina Lamal, Lieke van Deinsen, Feike Dietz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article presents a computational approach to the relationship between gender and character speech in early modern Dutch drama. It evaluates the possibility of automatically classifying gender based on the speeches of 1141 characters and character groups from 98 early modern Dutch plays (1613-1786). The experiment combines three approaches to gender classification: lexical, semantic, and stylistic. The results show that each approach fails to reliably capture distinctions between male and female speech in early modern Dutch drama, in contrast to similar studies of gender distinctions in other literary corpora. The inability to measure a gender binary in Dutch dramatic discourse indicates that gender generally was not performed through the vocabularies of Dutch male and female characters. The absence of clear gender distinctions in character speech is read as a product of the persistent tradition of cross-dressing in the Dutch Republic, creating fictional realities in which gender became fluid and complex.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas van der Deijl, Alie Lassche https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Charles H. Parker, Global Calvinism. Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800
Copyright (c) 2024 Deborah Hamer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Genji Yasuhira, Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic. Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672
Copyright (c) 2024 Christine Kooi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Jaap de Haan, De eerste minister van de Republiek. De Hollandse raadpensionaris in de zeventiende eeuw
Copyright (c) 2024 Helmer Helmers https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
David de Boer, The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution. The Making of Humanitarianism
Copyright (c) 2024 Erica Heinsen-Roach https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Cross-Border Printing Privileges in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries
Based on the assumption that printing privileges were meant to protect printer-publishers from market competition locally, scholars have primarily studied such privileges in individual states. This article is the first attempt to study printing privileges transnationally, by focusing on the phenomenon of cross-border printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Habsburg Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. I examine both the foreign printers requesting a privilege in the Low Countries and local printers requesting a privilege from a foreign authority. In doing so, this essay analyses why printers were requesting privileges for their books from more than one authority across political borders. Rather than seeing these cross-border privileges solely as a way for printers to expand the reach and commercial viability of their published works, this article demonstrates that, by securing privileges from multiple authorities, printers showed they were able to navigate the market for institutions and complex networks of power. By analysing diplomatic correspondence alongside privilege requests, I demonstrate the crucial role of ambassadors in favouring certain printers and their project. Throughout the seventeenth century, the state and its representatives became involved in securing such privileges from other authorities. This hitherto hidden role of diplomatic agents alerts us both to the fierce competition in a certain segment of the international book market and the importance of managing a state’s international reputation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nina Lamal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article examines the political dimensions of printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, analysing their impact on the dissemination of information, the development of the printing industry, and the nature of published works. While Dutch printing privileges are often seen as legal tools primarily important for the local market, this essay shows that the ‘local’ cannot be isolated from intra- and pan-European connections. By selectively granting privileges, the authorities sought not only to control the flow of information, but also to actively shape it. Privileges thus served as instruments of power and as a means of transmitting cultural values and setting the political agenda. Analysing Dutch privileges from this perspective provides a more nuanced understanding of their application and purpose, illustrating their role as mechanisms of soft power that reinforced existing power structures and facilitated cultural hegemony.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marius Buning https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0