Anna Maria van Schurman, Star of Utrecht

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Frye. I think a lot of my
episodes lately have been really concentrated in the nineteenth and

(00:22):
twentieth centuries. Me too, and that's for a lot of reasons,
like one topic leading me to another related topic, and
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.

(00:42):
That is not a complaint at all. We love listener suggestions,
that's just an observation that a lot of them are
in the nineteenth and twentieth century range. A lot of
the episodes that I have worked on this year have
also been inspired by things that 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

(01:08):
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 nineteenth century, and I made it all the way
back to seventeenth century polymath Anna Maria von Sherman. She
would have been considered very well educated among people of

(01:30):
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 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

(01:54):
Dutch or German than they are in English. And I
found trying to adopt like a slightly different 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.

(02:16):
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 Anna Marie
von Sherman's life was deeply affected by the Protestant Reformation
and Catholic counter Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Her father, Frederick was from Antwerp, which is in Belgium

(02:39):
today but was part of the Spanish Netherlands at the time.
Frederick's family were Calvinists, and in fifteen sixty eight they
had to flee from Antwerp because of religious persecution and violence.
Philip the Second of Spain, who was staunchly Catholic, had
dispatched Fernando Alvarez de Toledo I, Pimental, Duke of Alba,

(02:59):
to put a us stopped to a growing Calvinist uprising
in the Spanish Netherlands. To that end, the Duke established
a special court called the Council of Troubles, which 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

(03:21):
Years War, which was both a religious war and a
fight for Dutch independence from Spain. Frederick von Shermann 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. In sixteen oh two, Frederick

(03:43):
married Eva von Haarf did Dryburn, and they had four
children together. Anna Maria was their only daughter. She was
born on November fifth, sixteen oh seven. Her older brothers
were Hendrik, Frederick and Johann Hadschalck. Sadly her younger brother
Willem at the age of about five when Anna Maria
was about eight years old. When Frederick front Sherman's family

(04:07):
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 sixteen fifteen,
the same year that Willem died, the family moved again,

(04:30):
this time to Utrect, 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 fifteen seventy nine, the Dutch Republic had declared its

(04:53):
independence from Spain. Two years after that, it was a
Protestant nation that also allowed more for other religions than
a lot of other parts of Europe did. Frederic von
Sherman's former home of Antwerp had also joined the Dutch Republic,
but it was besieged and recaptured by Spain five years later.

(05:15):
Frederic and Evo 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 murdered during the Protestant Reformation. Anna Maria was pulled

(05:37):
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. The children's
first languages were Dutch and German, and they were taught
other languages as well, starting with Latin for the boys

(05:57):
and French for Anna Maria. Day when Anna Maria was
about eleven, 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.

(06:18):
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

(06:40):
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. For the
most part, Latin was the default language of intellectual writing

(07:01):
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 two, specifically the classical Hebrew and coined Greek that
are found in the Old and New Testaments of the

(07:23):
Christian Bible. 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.

(07:44):
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. 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.

(08:05):
As she learned more languages, she translated works from one
into another. Over time, she compiled her own Greek dictionary.
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 pastime for women and girls,

(08:26):
and she probably learned these from her mother or other
women in their social circle. She was doing extremely intricate
papercuts from a very early age. 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 von Shermans were

(08:49):
not related to any painters, so she taught herself, starting
by copying the paintings that were hanging in the family home.
By her early teens, Anna Maria was thought of as
a child prodigy. In sixteen twenty, when she was thirteen,
she met Anna Rumors Fisher, who was a poet and
a glass engraver. She was in her thirties. Anna wrote

(09:11):
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. Anna Rumors Fisher and her sister Maria
Tesselschad Rumors Fisher had already established themselves as part of

(09:35):
the Mauden Circle or Marty Kring, 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

(09:57):
know herself. In sixteen to twenty, the Van Sherman family
moved to Frenicker, which was home to Fronicker University. Her
brother Johann Hodshock was going to study medicine there and
her father Frederick was planning to continue his education as well.
But on November fifteenth, sixteen twenty three, Frederic van Sherman

(10:18):
died at the age of fifty nine. 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. Anna Maria was sixteen

(10:40):
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

(11:03):
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, and in the case
of poet Constantine Hugens and polymath Casper Barlius, interpreting her

(11:28):
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 paused for a
sponsor break. Anna Maria's brother, Johann Hodschock, was about eighteen

(11:53):
when their father died. Johann Hodschok 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, Johann

(12:13):
Hodschack 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. 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,

(12:37):
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. The family went back to
Utrecht in sixteen twenty six and two of Anna Maria's aunts,

(13:01):
who were fleeing the Thirty Years' War, came from Cologne
to live with them. Anna Maria was nineteen and she
started expanding her study of art. She learned engraving through
self study and probably with the help of Magdalena Vonda Pass,
daughter of Crispaine Vondapass, who was an engraver and publisher

(13:21):
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. She produced a
lot of portraits and self portraits in an assortment of media,
including guash oils, engravings, pencils and pastels. She was the

(13:44):
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,
and there was a lot of academic study. She read

(14:06):
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 Gaiaz, Flemish English,

(14:28):
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. In her early teens, Anna Maria had started

(14:49):
writing letters to poets, artists, and scholars, primarily in the
Dutch Republic, but elsewhere as well. One of her correspondents
was diplomat and poet jakub Kat. Starting when she was
around fourteen, Cotts may have been the person who introduced
her to the visher sisters, and he was also one
of the people who really promoted her and her accomplishments.

(15:11):
As Johann Hodshot 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 Constantine Huggins
and painter Gerard von Hanhorst, who ran an art school
where she continued to study painting. Sometime around sixteen thirty two,
Anna Maria von Sherman became connected to Elizabeth, Princess Palatine

(15:36):
of Bohemia. Elizabeth was the daughter of Elizabeth Stewart and
Frederick the Fifth, who were nicknamed the Winter Queen and
Winter King. Because Frederick's reign lasted only from August of
sixteen nineteen to November of sixteen twenty, so only for
one winter. Elizabeth Stewart, the Winter Queen, is somebody who's
been on my list for a while. Frederick's reign had

(15:59):
ended with his death, and afterward Elizabeth Stewart in the
family had taken refuge at the Hague. When they first
became acquainted, Princess Elizabeth was fourteen and Anna Maria von
Sherman was twenty five. It is not completely clear how
they met. The most widely cited possibility is that French
theologian Andre Revet, professor of theology at the University of Leiden,

(16:23):
made the introduction. He was also at the Hague tutoring William,
the second Prince of Orange, and he may have given
some of Van Sherman's poems to the princess and likely
facilitated their correspondents. Van Sherman became something of a mentor
to the princess, including giving her advice about people to

(16:43):
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. As we've said, Anna Maria
was religiously a very devout Christian, and consequently a lot

(17:03):
of her interests were very grounded in Christian theology and
Aristotelian thought. Aristotle, of course, lived in the fourth century BCE,
before Christianity existed. But his works on subjects like logic, metaphysics,
and ethics had been a major part of the development

(17:23):
of Christian teachings, especially during the medieval period. But Princess
Elizabeth became focused on rationality in the work of Renee
des Cartes. She and Descarte had an ongoing correspondence, and
Descarte dedicated some of his works to her. Both women
were part of the international network of correspondents that came

(17:44):
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 treated and analytical works, sometimes very
lengthy and dense. These writings were passed around not just

(18:06):
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, advances in printing technology, and the
establishment of more schools, colleges and universities, this Republic of

(18:29):
Letters was part of what sustained intellectual and philosophical movements
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period that is
sometimes framed as the Age of Reason or the Age
of Enlightenment. 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

(18:52):
these letters. The thing 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

(19:14):
had access to some kind of education, as well as
enough money to be able to spend their time on
these kinds of pursuits. But while there were a lot
of relatively educated women in the upper classes, Anna Marie
van Sherman was seen as exceptional among them. She was
given a lot of nicknames that referenced this during her lifetime.

(19:36):
One of them that was in use by sixteen thirty
three was the Jewel of Learned Women. By the following year,
Dutch theologian Heisbertus Fusius 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

(19:57):
the Odyssey, became her favorite poet. 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, Futsius,
was one of the founders of Utrecht University, which had
originally been established as Utrek's Illustrious Gymnasium, gymnasium being a

(20:22):
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 sixteenth, sixteen thirty six, making it one of the
oldest universities in what's now the Netherlands. Anna Maria von
Sherman was invited to write a poem in honor of

(20:45):
the university, to be read at the opening ceremonies. She
wrote two poems, one of them a reflection on Footsius'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.

(21:09):
Van 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 Sapho.
The name Sapho 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

(21:32):
ran our episode on Sappho, which talks about the evolution
in the connotations around her name and identity as a
Saturday Classic. After the opening of the University of Utrecht,
Futsias continued to tutor von Sherman, including in the Semitic
languages of Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldean, and he made arrangements

(21:53):
for her to attend lectures at the university, seated in
a special compartment with its entry and exit by curtains
so that she would not distract the men. 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,

(22:17):
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. We'll talk about how her
work as a scholar evolved from here. After a sponsor
break in the sixteen thirties, Anna Maria von Sherman became

(22:44):
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 bohem followed
very different paths through the worlds of religion and philosophy,

(23:05):
with von Sherman following Aristotelian and Christian thinking, while the
princess became a student of Renee de Carte. Very broadly speaking,
Aristotle had been focused on understanding the world through sensory experience,
while Descartes focused on rationality and reason. Aristotelian versus Cartesian

(23:26):
philosophy became a huge debate at Utrecht University and between
Fusius and Descartes personally. It was a big feud. After
Descartes was banned from the university, he wrote a letter
to philosopher and physician on Reichus Reggius, who taught medicine there,
saying that if he wanted to attend Reggius's lectures, he

(23:48):
would have to stay in Van Sherman's compartment behind a screen. Two.
Van 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

(24:10):
really quickly. Meanwhile, Descartes thought her work with Futsius 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, vn Sherman also met
with Descartes when he was on his way to become
Christina of Sweden's tutor, and he criticized her for reading

(24:31):
the Bible in Hebrew. We talked about Descartes's relationship with
Christina of Sweden in our episode on her, which we
ran as a Saturday Classic on December eighteenth, twenty twenty one.
It was around this time that other scholars started wanting
to dedicate their books to Von Sherman, especially their books

(24:51):
on women. One was Dutch author and physician Johann von Bevervik,
author of De Excellencia anti Sexist or The Excellency of
the Female Sex. Von Sherman wrote him a letter quote
heartily beseeching him not to do this. It felt like vanity,

(25:12):
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 to pursue higher studies, that that
would be enough. Von Beayvervik dedicated this work to her. Anyway,

(25:36):
he was not the only man to dedicate work to
her after specifically being asked not to because I know better, uh.
Von 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

(25:58):
visited her at least once, and with Polish Queen Ludvika Maria.
Other female correspondents included artist Margaret Gojuwick, who was a
scholar of Hebrew, and singer Utricia Ogel, and of course
Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate. This pressure to publish was
not just because people found von Sherman's insights and analysis

(26:21):
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 querrel de farm or the
woman question. Most, but not all, of the people writing

(26:46):
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 catalog of
learned women, listing out these women's biographies and their accomplishments.

(27:06):
These catalogs were not unique to the early modern period,
but they were particularly trendy in the seventeenth 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

(27:28):
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. More than once, when von
Sherman refused to publish her letters, men did it for

(27:48):
her without asking. The first was Charles Duchane, who printed
an unauthorized collection of her correspondence with French theologian Andre
Revey in sixteen thirty eight. He did not have reveal
permission either, and in addition to being printed without their permission,
this collection was full of errors. After this, Van Sherman

(28:09):
decided to expand what she had written to Revel 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 sixteen forty one. Translations of this
work into Dutch and French followed, and it was published

(28:30):
in English as The Learned Maid or Whether a Maid
May be a Scholar? A logic exercise written in Latin
by that incomparable vision Anna Maria A Sherman of Utrecht
in sixteen fifty nine. So that title includes a question
whether a maid may be a scholar, and at the
very beginning the text answers it quote we hold the

(28:52):
affirmative and will endeavor to make it good. This dissertation
contains fourteen 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

(29:14):
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 comprehendeth the arts and sciences, the miner

(29:34):
hath no need of proof for virtue, as Seneca Saith
chooseth her servant, neither by their state nor sex. 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

(29:55):
the capacity for study, and study could lead them toward
a deeper love reverence for God. Von 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

(30:18):
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. Anna Maria's mother, Eva died

(30:42):
in sixteen thirty seven. 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 correspondent started to slow down as she had

(31:04):
so many other responsibilities. Meanwhile, professor and theologian Frederick Spenheim
was trying to convince her to publish her letters, which
she repeatedly declined to do. Then, in sixteen forty eight,
when he asked once again, she gave him a response
that made it sound like she might be open to it,

(31:24):
so he went ahead and published a collection of letters
and poems known as Opuscula. Spndheim died a year later,
and in sixteen fifty two 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.
In sixteen fifty three, Von Sherman left Utrecht for a while,

(31:46):
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 mad 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 Futsius.

(32:11):
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. In
sixteen sixty Anna Maria, her brother Johann Hodschok, and their
aunts moved to Lexman, south of Utrecht, taking a couple
of servants with them. Both ants died in sixteen sixty one,

(32:35):
at which point Anna Maria and her brother returned to Utrecht,
and around that time they met Jean de la Badie,
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,

(32:56):
the Labbadists community became like a commune, including shared property
and common meals. Jean de Labadie and his teachings and
communities were controversial. By the time he met the von Shermans,
the Labbadists had been forced to move several times. In
sixteen sixty nine, Anna Maria ultimately abandoned her life as

(33:17):
a scholar. She left the Dutch Reformed Church and she
became a Labbyist. 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 Labbydists, and
a lot of the people who admired Von shermans scholarship,
poetry and art were just baffled at this shift in

(33:39):
her life. They unfriended her on proto Facebook. The Labbadists
continued to move around as they faced persecution and harassment.
In sixteen seventy Anna Maria sought help from Princess Elizabeth,
who was abbess at the abbey at Herford in Westphalia.
Elizabeth had to describe the labb This community as a

(34:01):
convent that was being led by von Sherman was Jean
de Labadie acting as its minister, in order to get
Elector Friedrich William of Brandenburg to give his permission for
them to live there. They continue to face persecution, though,
including from people who found Jean de Labedie's teachings to
be heretical and from people who suspected him of secretly

(34:24):
still being Catholic. The Labbyists moved on from Herford around
sixteen seventy two, 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 in Altona, von Sherman

(34:45):
published a religious autobiography called Euclearia. It was largely focused
on her decision to leave a life of scholarship and
join the Labbadists. While she continued to create some artwork,
mainly in sculpted wood and wack, she largely retired from
the world at that point. In her last years, Anna

(35:06):
Maria von Sherman was disabled with some kind of arthritic condition,
and she used a wheelchair. Jonda Labadee died in sixteen
seventy four, and from that point she was seen as
the leader of the Labbydists. Afterward, they moved again from
Altona to Weeward in the Dutch province of Friesland. Anna

(35:26):
Maria von Sherman died there on May fourteenth, sixteen seventy eight.
She had already sold much of her property and what
was left went to the Labbadists. According to her wishes,
she was buried in Weeward without a ceremony. The Labbydist
community continued at Weeward for a while. Maria, Sebulia, Marion

(35:46):
and several of her family joined the Labbydists there in
sixteen eighty six. We ran our episode on Maria Sibula
Merion as a Saturday Classic on April second, twenty twenty two.
The labbydist community at we Were was dissolved in seventeen
thirty two. Before she died, Anna Maria von Sherman destroyed

(36:07):
a lot of her letters and poems, and there's a
lot of speculation about her reasons why the Labbadists were
very focused on piety in 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

(36:30):
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. 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.

(36:52):
After her death, almost two hundred years passed between Anna
Maria v On Sherman's death and another woman being enrolled
at a university in the Netherlands. That is generally recognized
as Alita Yakubs, who started at the University of Groningen
in eighteen seventy one and also became the first woman
physician in the Netherlands in eighteen seventy nine. Anna Marie

(37:17):
von Sherman is not forgotten. Today Utrecht University is building
a new teaching complex which is to be named after her.
Do have listener mail? I do have listener mail. This
is from Caitlin. Caitlyn 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

(37:40):
like a time machine. I was instantly transported back to
my senior year of high school when I was in
academic to Cathalon and the subject was World War One.
The way Academic to Cathlon works is that there are
ten subjects that Decca 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,

(38:02):
as well as poems and poets of the war. It
seemed like every name you mentioned in the episode brought
full force memories of studying with my teammates, coming up
with mnemonics for Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and
their poems, committing dulcee decorumis to memory and trying to
keep track of which bits of biographical detail went with

(38:24):
which poem. At sixteen, 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

(38:46):
I was and still am, deeply moved by Owen's life
and how abruptly it was cut short. 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,

(39:07):
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, doctor Saul Krugman worked at the Willowbrook School,
an institution for disabled children, in researching viral hepatitis. He

(39:29):
deliberately infected disabled children with the disease in order to
test his theory about its transmission and then to test
vaccine 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

(39:50):
and my academic research. I work in history of education
and presented a paper comparing the Willibrook 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,

(40:11):
some books on the subject, some of which are broader
in scope than just this case Against their 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

(40:35):
secret government programs by Francis R. Frankenberg. I've included a
few photos for pet tax. My orange boy false Dmitri
four has learned to climb on to 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 torty is shark depus
who is scared of heights, and this does not commit

(40:57):
shelf crimes. All the best, Caitlin. Thank you so much
Caitlin for this email. I loved it so much. Uh.
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

(41:21):
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. I was a
little bit different situation because there was a measles outbreak happening,
and they were trying to save kids' lives. The hepatitis

(41:42):
studies were deliberately spreading hepatitis and then testing a vaccine.
So like a slightly different situation going on there, but
it did come up very briefly in that prior episode. Also,
Oh my goodness, these kittycats. I've scrolled through the pictures

(42:04):
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. 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. Also,

(42:27):
thank you again so much for this email, Caitlin. I
especially found the part about your reading of these poets
at the age of sixteen to be really moving. If
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast where at History podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can also subscribe to our show

(42:49):
on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to
get your podcasts. 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.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Fudd Around And Find Out

Crime Junkie

24/7 News: The Latest

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Anna Maria van Schurman, Star of Utrecht