In 1636, a woman of twenty-eight was admitted to the newly founded University of Utrecht. She was not enrolled, as the male students were, and she was not allowed to be seen. A separate cubicle was built for her inside the lecture hall, curtained off from the room, so that she could hear the lectures on theology and the languages of Asia without offending anyone by her presence.
By the time she died in 1678 she was fluent in fourteen languages, had published a collection of her own essays and letters in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, had written a two-volume grammar of a language for which no grammar existed, and had produced the most systematic argument of her century for women's right to an education. Everything she achieved, she achieved from inside a house, from behind a screen, or from a corridor outside a lecture room that men were sitting in.
Her name was Anna Maria van Schurman, and her life is the clearest case in European history of a self-education built on languages after every institution said no.
Cologne, 1607: A House Where the Daughters Were Taught Too
She was born on 5 November 1607 in Cologne, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, to Frederik van Schurman and Eva von Harff de Dreiborn. Unusually for the period, the house was one where a daughter's education was not considered wasted. She learned to read by the age of four. By six she was making intricate paper cut-outs; by ten she had reportedly mastered embroidery in three hours.
In 1615 the family settled in Utrecht, in the Dutch Republic, when Anna Maria was seven or eight. The move was political: her family were members of the Reformed Church and had been living under the imperial ban on Reformed services. Her official education there was domestic — reading, writing, arithmetic, music and French, taught at home by her father and a private tutor.
What makes the second half of her childhood useful to any learner is the detail that many biographers pass over. Around 1618, when she was eleven, her father noticed that she was helping her older brothers with their lessons. He began teaching her Latin, giving her works by Seneca to read as part of the course. Latin was the password to every library, university and scholarly correspondence in Europe, and until that moment she had no route to it at all.
Franeker, 1623: The University She Could Not Enter
In October 1623, shortly before her sixteenth birthday, the family moved to Franeker in Friesland, where a university had stood since 1585. On 30 October 1623, two people enrolled: her father Frederik, and her brother Johan Godschalk.
Anna Maria did not. Women could not matriculate at a Dutch university, and no letter of permission was forthcoming. Fifteen days later — ten days after her sixteenth birthday — her father died.
The family stayed in Franeker, and the arrangement that followed is the template for her whole later life. Her brother went to lectures; she studied through him. Through Johan Godschalk she met the scholars of the university, borrowed the books, and joined the conversation after the fact. She was, in a real sense, attending a university at one remove for years: the second-hand hearing of lectures, the borrowed text, the discussion afterwards with someone who had been allowed inside.
1634: The Poem That Bought Her a Seat
Sixteen years of that education produced something the authorities could not ignore. In 1634 she was invited — because of the reputation of her Latin — to write a poem for the opening of the new University of Utrecht.
She used the invitation as leverage. The poem celebrates the city and the university's founders, and then, in the middle of the celebration, turns:
But what cares disturb your heart (perhaps you ask)? Well, these holy precincts are inaccessible to Minerva's virgin chorus! — Anna Maria van Schurman, poem for the inauguration of the University of Utrecht, 1634-1636 (translated)
The complaint worked, at least partially. The university authorities allowed her to attend the lectures of Gisbertus Voetius, professor of theology and her former tutor in Greek and Hebrew. When she went, she sat behind a curtain, in a private booth, so that the male students could not see her. That curtained cubicle is the compromise that made her the first woman to study at a Dutch university — a privilege granted and simultaneously disguised.
Inside that booth she studied Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldee, Syriac and Ethiopic. By the 1640s she was writing in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, Arabic, Persian, Ethiopic, German and Dutch, and reading considerably more. The city's intellectuals gave her a name: the Star of Utrecht. Visiting scholars and aristocrats passing through the city were expected to see her, as one might see a monument.
The Grammar She Had to Write Herself
Her most instructive act as a learner is the least celebrated. For Ethiopic — Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, then almost entirely unstudied in northern Europe — she compiled her own grammar in two volumes: the first on reading the script, the second on nouns and verbs.
No teacher was going to teach her. Few people in Europe could. The way she made the language learnable was to rebuild it from the inside: to write out the rules until they held, and by doing so to convert an opaque mass of text into something she could use.
Learners do this far too rarely, which is why this detail is worth the paragraph. Writing a reference — a list of the hundred words you keep forgetting, a page of the six endings you keep confusing, a simplified grammar of the chapter you just read — is a form of study that produces an artefact. She had no textbook, so she became her own. Anyone studying a language with thin materials in it, from Ge'ez to a low-resource language today, is in exactly the position she was in.
The Letters Were the Seminar
Denied the classroom, she built a second institution out of correspondence. As she wrote in her preface to the collected works, and as the frontispiece of the 1648 Opuscula suggests by listing her languages in the title itself, her learning was published in pieces by post.
Her correspondents included Constantijn Huygens, the statesman and poet; André Rivet, the Leiden theologian whose exchange with her grew into two books; Pierre Gassendi; Bathsua Makin, the English educational reformer who had taught a household of children including the extraordinary Bathsua herself; Queen Christina of Sweden; and René Descartes, with whom she debated the nature of knowledge and reason. The Opuscula Hebraea Graeca Latina et Gallica, published by the Elzevirs in Leiden in 1648, collected over seventy of those letters in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French, together with her Latin treatises and twenty-five poems.
This is the part that transfers to a modern learner most directly. She had no class, no exam, no correction except what she asked for in writing — and she kept asking. A letter to a better speaker is a language exchange with a long history, and her output kept pace with her input because somebody real was going to read it and answer.
Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar
In 1638, her correspondence with Rivet was published in Paris as Amica Dissertatio, a friendly disputation on women's capacity for scholarship. In 1641 the Elzevir press in Leiden published her own systematic treatment of the question: Dissertatio de ingenii muliebris ad doctrinam, et meliores litteras aptitudine — on the aptitude of the female mind for learning and letters.
Her answer was yes, and she argued it from evidence rather than sentiment: women had already been accomplished scholars, and she named them, including Lady Jane Grey. She argued that education encouraged virtue and made women's lives more useful and happier, and she proposed a wide course of study spanning languages, history, philosophy and the sciences, with theology at the centre. An English version, translated by the clergyman Clement Barksdale, was published in London in 1659 as The Learned Maid; or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar?
Her argument had limits she accepted. She advocated advanced study for Christian women with the ability and leisure to undertake it — in practice, women of means — not universal education for girls, and she conceded restrictions on how women could use their learning in public. It is the argument of someone negotiating with the room she was in, which is exactly what she had been doing since Franeker.
The Self-Portraits with the Hands Hidden
She was not only a linguist. She painted, drew, carved wood and wax, did calligraphy fine enough to engrave on glass with a diamond point, and studied engraving with Magdalena van de Passe in the 1630s. By 1643 the Utrecht Guild of Saint Luke had given her honorary membership for her art.
Two of her surviving self-portrait engravings, from 1633 and 1640, show her with her hands deliberately concealed behind a cartouche. Constantijn Huygens wrote poems asking why she hid them, and her answer to the question sits under her own portrait in Latin: Cernitis hic picta nostros in imagine vultus: si negat ars formam, gratia vestra dabit — see my likeness here depicted; where art is lacking, let your goodwill supply it.
It is a small detail with a large echo. A woman praised as a prodigy in an age that had no category for a female scholar had to be careful about what she claimed. Even her own face was presented with an apology.
The Better Part: Why She Gave It All Up
Nothing in this story ends the way a modern reader expects. In her fifties, van Schurman became disillusioned with the established Reformed Church and with what she saw as the vanity of the learned life. Her brother brought news of Jean de Labadie, a defrocked French priest preaching moral separation from the world. In 1669 she sold her house and much of her library and joined his community, publishing a short pamphlet on the reformation she believed the church required.
The break cost her everything she had built. Her old intellectual friends, Huygens and Voetius among them, turned on her in public. The community moved to Herford Abbey in Westphalia under the protection of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, then to Altona, then to Wieuwerd in Friesland, where some four hundred Labadists shared all property and practised detachment from worldly values. In 1673 she published Eukleria — "choosing the better part", from the Gospel of Luke — a partly autobiographical defence of the choice, and a critique of the scholarly and artistic life for which she had been famous. Leibniz admired it.
She died in Wieuwerd on 4 May 1678, aged seventy, housebound in her last years by severe rheumatism. Seven years later the community she had helped make famous was joined by another woman who was painting insects no one had described — Maria Sibylla Merian, arriving at Waltha Castle with her daughters in 1685. The two women never met. They were the same kind of learner: they looked closely at what nobody had bothered to document properly and wrote it down.
What a Learner Can Take from van Schurman
- Learn the language your best sources are written in. Latin was not a hobby for her; it was the doorway to every book, lecture and argument she cared about. The modern equivalent is deciding which language unlocks the material you actually want, and treating it as infrastructure rather than decoration.
- Study at one remove if that is the only door open. She attended a university through her brother's ears and lecture notes for years. Borrowed notes, after-class summaries from a friend, recorded lectures you are not enrolled to attend — access has degrees, and partial access still works.
- Write the reference material you cannot find. Two volumes of Ethiopic grammar, made for one student: herself. Nothing forces you to understand morphology, syntax and sound rules the way explaining them in writing does. If the textbook your language needs does not exist, writing it is the method, not a distraction from it.
- Make correspondence your classroom. Her Latin letters to Rivet became a published disputation; her collected letters, in four languages, were published with her poems. The letter is the cheapest correction mechanism ever invented, and its modern form — a written exchange with a stronger speaker — is still the fastest way to make output compulsory.
- Argue with the wall, politely, in the language they respect. She got into lectures by writing a poem in Latin good enough to make exclusion embarrassing. Whatever your field, demonstrating the skill in public is often the only argument a gatekeeper accepts.
- Fourteen languages is a lifetime's arithmetic, not a talent. She had no curriculum, no travel, no immersion and no exam. She had a father who taught her one language, a brother who carried books, a booth behind a curtain, a quill, and forty years.
Two things were true of her at once. She was a woman whose portrait had to apologise for her own hands, and she was, by the judgement of the scholars who wrote to her from four countries, the most learned woman in Europe. The curtain did not determine which of those was the fact — only how the fact was allowed to be seen. Any learner fighting an institution, a schedule or a household that does not expect them to be studying will recognise the arrangement: given the choice between the front row and the back room, take whichever one you can hear the lecture from, and keep writing.