| This dissertation analyzes the seventeenth-century community of ideas, and documents a surprisingly inclusive and heterogeneous Republic of Letters: a community that included women as well as men. The focus of this study is a multinational network of female scholars, who worked together with their male colleagues for the advancement of learning. In documenting their public life of scholarship, this case study argues that the evidence calls for a reassessment of early modern cultures of learning.; Following the humanist Laura Cereta, I refer to this community as the "Republic of Women." However, their community was not isolated by their sex. This network was in fact an integral component of a much larger intellectual commonwealth, known as the Republic of Letters. And while it has been thought that female scholars were excluded from that larger communal enterprise, the evidence of this network's scholarly activity demonstrates that this was not the case.; For more than four decades, a very real and supportive intellectual women's network centered around the erudite Anna Maria van Schurman of Utrecht. The other core members of the group were the English educator Bathsua Makin, the Anglo-Irish reformers Dorothy Moore and Lady Ranelagh, the French scholars Marie de Gournay and Marie du Moulin, and the learned Palatine Princess Elisabeth. Although scholars have begun to discuss several of the women involved in this network, no one as yet has analyzed them as a group constituting a distinct yet integral part of the early modern intellectual landscape. By using learned correspondence to reconstruct the practices and personnel of the Republic of Letters, the present study attempts to fill this analytical gap.; The dissertation tells the story of this network of intellectual women as both a biography of their moment---a brief and influential moment in intellectual history---and as a case study arguing for a new and more inclusive vision of the Republic of Letters. I argue that despite the limitations imposed on their gender, female scholars were indeed participating in the system of exchanges that fuelled the seventeenth-century intellectual enterprise---and without the learned women, the picture is incomplete. |
