Calligraphy is an understudied aspect of the reception of Chinese art in early modern Europe. Chinese visitors to Middelburg (1601) and Amsterdam (1654) first demonstrated it as a cultural practice. Other written samples circulated in the Dutch Republic, an emporium for Chinese goods. This article focuses on a previously unknown participant in this exchange: Anna Maria van Schurman, Europe’s first female university student, who had mastered various Asian scripts and was expected to try her hand at Chinese and Japanese. In 1637 Andreas Colvius sent her samples of East Asian writing to copy ‘by her own hand’. This exchange makes possible a transcultural study of the calligraphic gift. Via the popular writings of Matteo Ricci, Van Schurman’s correspondents may have learned about the role of calligraphy in fostering social relationships in late Ming China. Some of the visual and material qualities of East Asian writing must have made it look like a fitting tribute to a female European scholar of high profile and, in being exchanged as a gift, calligraphy acquired new meanings even while remaining illegible. In seventeenth-century China and Europe, the friendly exchange of calligraphy expressed new forms of sociability.

Dutch Golden Age scholar Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded throughout the seventeenth century as the most learned woman of her age. She was 'The Star of Utrecht', 'The Dutch Minerva', 'The Tenth Muse', 'a miracle of her sex', 'the incomparable Virgin', and 'the oracle of Utrecht'. As the first woman ever to attend a university, she was also the first to advocate, boldly, that women should be admitted into universities. A brilliant linguist, she mastered some fifteen languages. She was the first Dutch woman to seek publication of her correspondence. Her letters in several languages Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French – to the intellectual men and women of her time reveal the breadth of her interests in theology, philosophy, medicine, literature, numismatics, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and instrumental music. This study addresses Van Schurman's transformative contribution to the seventeenth-century debate on women's education. It analyses, first, her educational philosophy; and, second, the transnational reception of her writings on women's education, particularly in France. Anne Larsen explores how, in advocating advanced learning for women, Van Schurman challenged the educational establishment of her day to allow women to study all the arts and the sciences. Her letters offer fascinating insights into the challenges that scholarly women faced in the early modern period when they sought to define themselves as intellectuals, writers, and thoughtful contributors to the social good.

In een brief probeert Anna Maria van Schurman in 1669 de Utrechtse predikant Petrus Montanus over te halen ook naar het kamp van Jean de Labadie over te komen. De uitwerking is averechts. Voetius begint zelfs een hetze tegen zijn voormalige pupil.

Ze wordt de Utrechtse Minerva genoemd, een 'miraculum naturae', de 'geleerde maagd'. Als eerste vrouw in Nederland woonde talenwonder Anna van Schurman (1607-1678) vanachter een schotje in de aula van het Academiegebouw universitaire disputen bij. Roem verwierf ze met haar dissertatio 'Een verhandeling over de geschiktheid van de vrouwelijke geest voor de wetenschap en de letteren'. Deze verschijnt binnenkort in het Nederlands

Who was the first female university student in the Netherlands? Pose this question to anyone in the Netherlands and the incorrect answer Aletta Jacobs will probably come your way. But more than two centuries earlier, in 1636, Anna Maria van Schurman had become the first female university student in Utrecht, and thereby the first in the Netherlands and even in the whole of Europe. Anna Maria van Schurman attended not only private lectures at the University of Utrecht, but also public disputations and “listening” lectures in the fields of languages and medicine, but especially in theology. She wrote poetry in many languages and published a dissertation on women’s rights to academic study. Her book Opuscula Hebraea Graeca Latina et Gallica was reprinted several times and was noted internationally. Her knowledge of languages was astounding. She was proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian, Samaritan, Arabic and Ethiopian, to name but a few. Van Schurman was well-known internationally and became a key figure within a European network of learned women which included Birgitte Thott, Christina of Sweden, Marie le Jars de Gournay, Bathsua Makin and Dorothea Moore. But in 1669 Anna Maria van Schurman, watched by many in disbelief, left the city, church and university of Utrecht to join the Labadists, a radical Protestant group. She attempted to explain the reasons for this turnabout in her Latin autobiography, the Eukleria. The first female university student: Anna Maria van Schurman (1636) provides a detailed picture of the life and times of Anna Maria van Schurman: her position in the academic world of the seventeenth century, her role within the Republic of Letters, and the content and influence of her publications in the Netherlands and Europe