p. 56 Thomas Raynalde 1545 Womans Booke – had no truck with outdate’how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [liced ideas about women’s bodies. In his section on the womb, he says it’s utterly wrong to think that periods are the purding or cleansing of some waste matter a female body can’t process. He challenged the logic found it Elyot’s dictionary definition, resisting the idea that periods are “evacuations” or “purgations” of waste matter, however natural. This is blood, says Raynalde, as “pure and holsum” as any other blood. How could it not be, he argues, because in pregnancy it nurtures that most precious of things, a human life. Menstrual blood replenishes itself every cycle like a “natural source, spryng, fountayne, or wel.”… ever fresh and ready in case a baby is conceived. … won’t even countenance the ‘dreames and playne dotage’, the fantasies and stupidity, of those who claim that period blood is dangerous… he means the widely circulating superstitions that menstruating women could render mirrors cloudy or spotted, or wither flowers or blight fruit in an orchard… One Tudor ‘book of secrets” (a popular ‘how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [lilce] and other small beastes” you could simply get a menstruating woman to walk around it and “all the vermine will fall doune deade”.

p. 248-9 “William Gouge’s 1622 conduct book, Of Domesticall Duties, is famous for its neatly nested and very quotable summary of patriarchal order: “A familie is a little Church, and a little common-wealth,” eacg governed by paternal authority which guides, protects and disciplines. Yet in his third edition, Gouge had to row back quite some distance. He said he needed to make a “just apology” to those he’d offended by the first two editions. He didn’t want them to write him off as “an hater of women”, he said…. He had set out the ‘utter-most’… of a husband’s supreme authority and a wide’s duty to obey. Some readers had interpreted these theoretical extremes as representing how things sgould work in everyday life and thought him completely unreasonable and impractical. In the preface to his third edition, Gouge thus tried to introduce some nuance… A husband, though he had total dominance in theory, ought in practice to make his wide ‘a joint governor of the family with himself’.

p. 18 The beginning of vernacular literacy is not necessarily the same as the beginning of a vernacular literary language. Can we be confident that what we consider the earliest written texts in Occitan or Croatian actually are those languages, or are they in a demotic register of what should still be considered Latin or Church Slavonic? That conundrum leads on to the problem familiar to social scientists as the tension between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ categories: between the categories of the observers, on the one hand, and those of the people under observation on the other… can prompt us to consider other alliances and trajectories than the single-track one of nationally conceived literary history, which takes the existence of a language for granted.”

p. 19 printing “a transformation of the system of literature from one in which the basic unit is the material book to one in which literature is organised around the ideal concept of the authorial work. In a manuscript culture, where a new text of the ‘same’ work is created with each recopying, authors and scribes are co-producers of literature such that it is not obvious why the category of authorship should be restricted to the person who wrote it first.”

“Scandinavia,” Roberta Frank, pp. 12-22

p. 24 “Iceland was settled at some time in the late ninth century by colonists from Norway and the Viking diaspora of the Hebrides, Northern Isles and Ireland, some of whom had already been exposed to Christianity and letters. Throughout the medieval period, the island remained rural and thinly populated, with never more than 50,000 inhabitants. Iceland had no army, king, or town, and remained a more-or-less independent commonwealth until 1262-4. Yet by the end of the 12^th century, members of its clerical aristocracy were studying abroad, reading the same textbooks, law collections, and grammars as the rest of Europe. … There were two episcopal sees (with cathedral schools) and perhaps nine or ten monasteries (Benedictine and Augustinian, along with educational centres run by chieftain families. Latin works were soon translated into the vernacular, replicating a European-style textual culture in Norse and granting the mother tongue the official status that Latin held abroad. Forms of literary analysis began to be applied to vernacular compositions. When around 1220 Snorri Sturlison in his Hattatl (‘list of verse forms’) distinguished between the exuberant fornskald (early poet), and the later, metrically regular hofudskald (‘chief (or main) poet), his sensitivity to historical change suggests exposure to the interpretive frameworks of contemporary Latin grammatical and rhetorical treatises. By 1250, a volcanic island on the far edge of the inhabited world had a spacious stall to itself within the larger European literary theatre.”

p. 25 “Codices, like people, have a tendency to burn, drown and wander off. The anonymous late 12^th-century Historia Morwegiae, possibly the first Latin historical text written in Norway, survives in a 16^th-century Scottish paper manuscript, discovered near Dundee and first published in 1850; a brief excerpt appears in two (late 14^th– and early 15^th-century) Swedish codices.”

p. 27 In 1263, the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonarson, on his way home from battle, took ill in Orkney. According to his saga, composed ca 1265 by Sturla Portarson, Hakon on his sick bed … asked to be read to from Latin books, but soon found them tiring; he then asked for books in the Norse language to be read to him night and day, first saints’ sagas; and when those ran out, tales of kings from Halfan swarti, and afterwards about all the Norwegian kings, one after another, ending with the saga of Sverrir, his grandfather, raised in the Faroes, a former priest and guerrilla fighter, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a former ruler. Near midnight, after the reading of Sverris saga had finished, Hakon died. His death may have been unexpected, but the presence of continuous prose texts in Latin and in Norse in a 13^th-century cathedral library in Orkney was taken for granted by the writer.”

Irish and Welsh, Barry Lewis,

p. 52 “The task of building a cohort of Latinists forced teachers to consider the facts of the indigenous language, as issues arose such as how to map its case system onto the Latin one or how to convey categories, like the infinitive, which Lirish lacks. If interpretations of Latin text were one gateway, others were religious instructions (eg the Cambrai homily) and the concern of the church for its property rights under the native legal system(cf. the Armagh records… Irish was doubtless for a time a language of the margin. The Armagh pieces conclude with an awkward justification for writing in Irish ‘not because I could not have penned them in the Roman language, but … because of the great number of Irish names. This suggests that the domain of written Irish was not yet clear in the late seventh century, even though quite ambitious texts in the vernacular were already circulating.”

p. 62 2The beginnings of Welsh vernacular language may lie in praise poetry sustained by revised British kingships after the end of Roman rule. But ait it is not conceded that we have textual witnesses to such early material, then our investigation refocuses on a handful of poems from the 9^th century onwards, all isolated and hard to contextualise. Either way, a continuous narrative is impossible – or perhaps we should say inadvisable – before ca 1100.”

English, Laura Ashe

p. 69 origins “The first of these, and precociously early, was ‘Englisc’, now known as ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the 5^th century and used (alongside Latin) in writings of various kinds as early as the 7^th century. The second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, occurred in the 12^th-century re-emergence of what we now call ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardised rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. … in the French poetry of royal and aristocratic courts and patrons; that francophone literature was the majority of England’s literature – of English literature – for at least two centuries to come. But English was everyone’s first language, from within a generation or two of the Conquest, and all those trained to read and write in Latin and French in England also spent much of their daily lives in English. Inevitability, the majority vernacular would come to play a part in the literary scene, and would have done so even had it not possessed the astonishing literaty precedents set by Old English.”

p. 71 “In the two earliest extant manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, perhaps copied from the autograph, the lines of what we now know as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ have been added to Bede’s text. So it is that ‘English literature’ as opposed to irretrievable oral poetry, begins, with a documented poem in English which is explicitly understood in context to be one example of a thiriving genre.”

p. 83 “Extensive religious prose works appeared in Early Middle English from the first decades of the 13^th century. The Ancrene Wisse: a Guide for Ancorites, was written at the request of three ‘sisters’ (whether blood relatives or spiritual siblings) who lived in the extreme self-imposed ascetism of the anchorhold. The author gives them a prescription for not only the ‘outer rule’ of their daily life but the ‘inner rule’ of the pure heart, in a work of complex and entirely current theology which shows its immersion in contemporary Latin and French works (including the romance), while expressing itself in fluent, lively and memorably English prose.”

Spain, Marina S Browlee

p. 90 “The exclusionary model (that the Middle Ages are different) and the mentality that subtends it is at least as old as the Renaissance – which promoted itself as the new age of classical rebirth. The effect … had long-term distorting effects on medieval studies and their perception in the academy – a situation which is finally being rectified”

p. 91 Enrest Robert Curtius with his “infamous characterization of Spain’s ‘cultural belatedness’. “Curtius assumes a uniform ‘Spanish’ vernacular, but this is an unfounded assumption since Arabic entered the peninsula from 711 CE and Hebrew had existed there since Roman times. Iberia was a linguistic crucible that included Latin, Occitan, Catalan, Aragonese, Galician-Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew – as well as Castilian.”

French, David F Hult

P.112 “French “earliest surviving written text” “That honour (and a literary one at that) goes to the Sequence of Saint Eulalia… of slight length (29 verses) it is also distinctive in its being apparently complete in its narrative of the saint’s martyrdom, ending with a brief prayer to God.”

Greek Panagotis A Agapitos

p. 259 “The hundred years covering the reign of the Komnenian dynasty (1081-1185) represents an important period in Byzantine textual production, with a quantitative rise in public oratory and poetry, the reappearance of fictional texts; the rise in the study of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, with the production of very different forms of historiographical writings, and experimentation with new and complex performative genres. At a rough guess, about twio-thirds of this textual production is related to the imperial family or to the high officials of state and church.”

Afterword

p. 309 “The Igor Tales features the only personalised female lyric voice of early Rus literature, as Igor’s wife, Iaronslavna, ‘sings her lament on the battlements, addressing the wind, the river Dieper, and the sun”. The poem evokes a semi-sacralised, animistic landscale, alive to the touch and dense with ancient allusiveness; it also maps on to the territory of Kursk, site in 1943 of the greatest and bloodiest tank battle in the history of warfare.”

p. 8 The resistance to certain feminine nouns (a resistance that was only officially overcome in 2019 when the Academie francaise gave approval to the use of feminine terms for most metiers and functions) is to be placed in the linguistic context of the 17th-century – a period credited not only with being a transitional moment because of the standardisation and codification of the French language, but also with ushering in the masculinisation of French, evident from the shift towards the preferred use of the universal masculine pronoun and agreement. As Eliane Viennot and others remind us, grammar is never a neutral or objective phenomenon, and there were exclusionary strategies at play in its development… the term ‘autrice’. This is a term Marie de Gournay used liberally in her oeuvre, both as a scholar of Latin (it has its roots in the Latin feminine noun auctrix, meaning a female creator or originator)… and as a (proto-)feminist intellectual, trying to find a name, and thus a place, for herself.”

p. 10 author’s approach “resists the tug of collectivity that can sometimes shape scholarship on ‘women’s writing’, including the work of historians in the 1990s. Instead, I … wary of the category of ‘woman writer’, either because this appears, if left unpacked, to have essentialising connotations, and/or because it assumes a common orientation towards feminised genres or women’s causes… sees gender as one category alongside others, such as class, education and faith; and allows s to avoid essentialising notions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”

p. 14 “significant work by Jane Stevenson and Laurie Churchill has focused on women Latinist; and the important and chronologically wide-ranging Women Classical Scholars, which examines women’s classical reception from the Renaissance to the 20th century, defines a female classicist as a ‘philologist’, foregrounding linguistic knowledge. This would (and does) include Anne Dacier, but exclude Madeleine de Scudery. … early modern genres have been a site of implicit or explicit judgement according to their degree of learning, with traditional forms of reception (translation, imitation, commentary) in the hands of ‘savantes’, valued more highly than new genres that took the ancient world as their subjects (historical novels or romances, imagined lives, incidental verse, epistolary novels) and were products of a female-orientated salon culture, by so-called salonnieres.

p. 15 “Particularly important is the tension between the professionalisation of the writer, and the related necessity to earn a living by one’s pen, and what Viala calls “le tropisme nobilitaire”, that is the aristocratic vaunting of amateurism over money-making. Most of the authors in my corpus shared the need to navigate this tension because of financial difficulties… Scudery, as[piring to aristocracy, and dependent on favours and patronage, played down the professionalism of her literary activity and the labour of her learning (and thus her Latinity) even though she did also (and did need to) profit from it financially. Cournay, on the other hand, needed to prove her worth, though her knowledge of classical culture, in order to court her own patrons, whereas Villedieu, with her publisher, Claude Barbin, developed her own lucrative and influential conception of ancient historical fiction that was geared to public and commercial success.”
p. 16 “Underlying some of these different positions was the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and its debates about ideologies of learning, classical reception, especially vulgarisation and adaptation and literary value. … Classical languages and culture, particularly Latin, were (still) the epitome of what constituted learning within the literary field in 17th-century France, and whereas men had the cultural privilege to deny the importance of Latinity and Greco-Roman culture (the Modernist position), the path to legitimacy for women was more complicated.”
p. 244 “We witness across this corpus some clear examples of solidarity between women intellectuals and writers. … whereby French literature is linked to a feminine troubadour history, the cours d’amour, and to a line of significant women from Lizan to Scudery, whose alter-ego Damophile is a figure of ridicule. Funning through the work analysed are anxieties about the social space of the salon (we see this in Gournay’s reprimands of contemporary readers, in Scudery’s Sapho, hounded by persistent hangers-on, in Antoinette Deshouliere’s representation of flatterers who are a nuisance), even as we also encounter a celebration of these spaces, whether fictional or historical, physical, or, in the case of Mare-Jeanne L’Hertier’ periodical, virtual. “

p. 245 “For the immediate successor of the figure of the “femme savante” we need to look to mid-18th century England at the ‘Bluestocking Circle ‘ of Elizabeth Montagu…p. 246 “also fed back into French culture in the late 18th and into the 19th century by way of its calque “Les Bas=Blues,”… connotes all that was pejorative about the 17th-century femme savante, particularly unwomanliness”… That connotation of manliness is evident in the well=known series of 40 plates “Les Bas-Blues” by Honore Daumier printed in August 1844 in Le Charivari magazine, in which women are ridiculed for neglecting their wifely or motherly duties while studying or are presented as haggard or unattractive in their pursuit of knowledge”.
p. 249 Next in line of negative or contested figures for the female intellectual might be the late 19th-century/early 20th century phenomenon of the ‘Girton Girl’… literally to women who studied at Girton College in Cambridge, the first college for women founded by Emily Davies in 1869, but the term came to stand more broadly for a certain type of female intellectual… could have positive or negative force, but its charged meaning derived essentially from a distrust of learned women.”

p. 20 Sophie was the youngest child of William Gomm Jr and Marie Jeanne Poggenpohl. Gomm’s father was a prosperous cabinetmaker in London whose rococo designs remain of interest to art historians to this day. William Jr however was the second son and stood to inherit little. In 1750 he left for Russia where, due to changes in custom fee payments, British businesses enjoyed significant commercial advantages. Gomm quickly rose to prominence in St Petersburg, but risky ventures like the export of Ukrainian tobacco kept him constantly only a step away from insolvency. Luckily the merchant came under the patronage of the wealthy and well-connected Count Peter Shuvalov, and in 1754 obtained from him the timber export monopply over the vast region around Archangelsk… Gomm married Marie Jeanne, the daughter of his fellow contractor at the Russian court, Friedrich Wilhelm Poggenpohl.”

“In 1780s, Gomm was hired as a member of the British embassy in St Peterburg and later moved to be a secretary at the embassy in The Hague. .. his oldest son, also named William, served as a lieutenant colonel in Great Britain’s 55th Regiment during the French Revolutionary Wars and in the West Indies. He eventually became a baronet. Marie’s first cousin, the celebrated British field marshall Sir William Maynard, married the granddaughter of Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn. Jane, the oldest Gomm sister, served as governess to King George III’s daughters.

Sophie Gomm was the youngest child, well educated and attractive, so when the 36yo Charles von Bruhl appeared in St Peterburg he quickly fell in love, despite her being two decades his junior.. Their first child, Marie, was born on June 3 the following year in Warsaw, where the family had stopped on their way to Saxony.”

p. 36

“Marwitz bore witness that both Bruhl girls excelled in their studies of history. Marie indeed remained a passionate scholar of the past, to the point that later in her life friends like August Neidhardt von Gneisenau would acquire history books as presents for her. She had artistic talent and knowledge in the visual arts… the Bruhl’s family actively supported Maries’ proximity to important and educated ladies in Berlin. Where others keenly attempted to limit theitr daughters or young wives’ interactions with literary women – the most notorious case being Freidrich Wilhelm II’s disapproval of his wife Louise’s friendship with Caroline von Berg, the Bruhls encouraged Marie’s interaction with Madam von Berg and her daughter Louise.”

p. 45 “Thanks to the previous generation of socially and intellectually ambitious women, Berlin now boasted its own popular salons. With their emphasis on emotions, intuition, and fantasy, all traits perceived as primarily female, the literary movements Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism women a chance to grow into an active and integral part of the literary society. Marcus Herz, the husband of the first Berlin salon hostess Henriette Herz, famously said once when asked about a poem from Goethe, “Go to my wife; she knows the art of how to explain nonsense.” … in their early 1800s version, the literary gatherings contrasted so sharlpy with convention that they had an almost revolutionary character and thus attracted significant attention.”

p. 101 “Clausewitz’s conclusion about what constituted an exceptional human being ran in the opposite direction of the romanticist notion of Kraftmensch: “Therefore we would argue that a strong character is one that will not be unbalanced by the most powerful emotions.”

p. 222

“The official obituary in Berlin’s Statszeitung on November 22, anonymously published but in all probability written by their close friend Groben, presented a long account of Clausewitz’s achievements as the soldier’s soldier, fighting since boyhood and then participating “in that colossal battle at the gates of Moscow” [Borodino}; as a talented staff officer “at the side of the greatest commanders”; and as an influential instructor in military theory for young officers. Marie must have been intimately involved in the creation of this text not only because of her close relationship with Groben but also because the last passage hinted towards the manusceript of On War and her intention to publish it soon… bringing forward his achievements and then emphasising the groundbreaking characters of his general theory on war, would be Marie’s way of dealing with the challenges ahead.”

p. 224 “Despite relying on her brother Fritz in the beginning, and later involving in the process two close friends, Franz August O’Etzel and Carl von Groben, Marie Kept … tight control over the manuscript of On War. … ultimately presided over and carried out the editing process.”

p. 226 Facing just the beginning of such controveries in 1834 [over the relative power of military and political decisionmaking] Marie indeed encourgaed critical examination of the text, but she emphasized that such endeavours should not aim at a plain rejection but should search through vidorous debate to “convey the truth,,, that was the author’s goal above all… Just like the man she loved and supported for three decades, she embraced and upheld the descriptive character of his theory. But in doing so, Marie actually went one step further than Carl. He argued that the treatise should help understand war but not prescribe how to win one. … Marie suggested that particularly the unfinished character of the work, with all its deficiencies and conflicting ideas, should provoke debate through which an understanding of the complex phenomenon of war would emerge.”

p. 227 In early 1832, Maries assumed the new position … chief lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta, the king’s daughter-in-law. The new post guaranteed her financial security, enormous social visibility, and tasks she enjoyed but which also put great strain on her time and energy … p. 228 In the “Preface” of On War Marie actually due attention to her position by describing the “new and valued task” of caring for and educating the little Prince Freidrich Wilhelm, Augusta’s son and later Emperor Fredirich III…. enjoyed her own independent rank at the court that was higher than all other ladies (ranked after the titles of either their husbands or fathers) and it put Marie right after the members of the princely family she served.”

p. 229 “Augusta was a well-educated, energgetic and open-minded woman, interested in fine arts and most of all politics (during the tumultuous days of 1848, the liberal faction actually considered the possibility of installing her on the throne as her son’s regent.)”

p. 232 From the beginning, Marie envisaged On War as a text to be read and debated well beyond the professional military audience… sent copies to members of the royal family … the poet and sloniere Sophie von Schwerin received one and praised Clausewitz’s clear language and ideas illuminating the complexities of war and politics.”

Jewish merchant woman in Hamburg, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
p. 19 Glikl began to write the book of her life “with an aching heart” after the death of her husnand Haim “to help against the melancholy thoughts which came … during many sleepless nights.”… Hers is the first autobiography from a Jewish woman that we know of … But Glikl never described herself as doing something odd or new, and, indeed, recent scholarship is showing that autobiographies – full or in fragment – were composed by early modern Jews more often than has previously been believed.”

p. 20 Jewish life history was fostered expecially by the centuries-old “ethical will”, an exposition of moral lessons and personal wisdom passed on to one’s children along with instructions for one’s burial and the disposal of ones goods.”

p. 21 “For the Christians, the major model was still Augustine’s confession with a definitive conversion. We see it in the widely read Latin autobiography of Anna Maria van Schurman, Eukleria, published in 1673 in Altona… tells how Schurman renounced worldly fame and the scholarship in languages and secualr literature that she had begun in her native Utrechy and how she embraced a life of humility and religious fellowship with the Labadist sectaries, just then inhabiting Altona. (They were changing their money with the Jews; Glikl and Anna Maria may have passed each other on the street.) A variation on the model is the Leben of the Pietist visionary Johanna Eleonora von Merlau Peterson, published in 1719 when she was 75… describes not a single conversion experience but rather a set of tests, all of which she passed with God’s help”.

Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation
p. 64 “one of the two women who hounded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America p. 65 “femme forte, a classical and biblical image used by both the literary feminists of 17th-century France, and by the religious, “a femme forte such as Solomon depicted,” her Ursuline sisters said of her after she died.”

p. 65 “born in 1599 in Tours … came from a modest family … father was at best only a ‘merchant baker,’ and it was a step up when he arranged to marry one daughter to a schoolteacher, another to a busy wagoner, and Marie to a silkmaker – a member of the city’s most important industry. … as a teenager she had thought wistfully of the local Benedictine nunnery of Beaumont, where one of her mother’s distant kin was abbess. In fact, that ancient and noble convent would have been unlikely to receive a baker’s daugher as a novice, even if her parents had agreed to a religious vocation”.

p. 128 “As women in Europe, like Maries, expanded their religious voice … so it may be that women in the American woodlands were expanding their voice in religious culture while the men were expanding their political oratory. Conceivably, the role of Amerindian women in dream analysis and soothsaying was not a timeless one, but a response to political changes that began in the 15th-century and were intensified by the arrival of Europeans. Then the women converts that people MArie’s letters, the Hospital records, and the Jesuit Relations – women praying, preaching and teaching – would be an energetic Christian variant on a process also at work in the religion of the okis and the Manitou.

Maria Sibylla Merian

p. 154 “Merian’s … subject was a set of events ,,, and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classiciation, her sequence was not “tumultuous”. Emerging, from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader’s eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The “method” of the Raupen – highly particular pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link – had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature’s connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.”

p. 155 “Merian was a pioneer, crossing boundaries of education and gender to aquire learning on insects and nurturing daughters as she observed, painted and wrote. Her focus on breeding, habitat and metamorphosis fits nicely with the domestic practice of a 17th-century mother and housewife. We have here not a female mind uneasy with amnalysis or timelessly connected to the organic … but a woman perched for scientific enterpirse on a creative margin – for her a buzzing ecosystem – between domestic workshop and learned academy.”

p. 186 In the Metamorphosis, the Amerindian women themselves identify the abortifacient to Maria Sibylla Meriam: the peacock flower, whose seeds can also speed delivery. Here is a public sharing of the ‘secrets of women’ reported with some symoathy by a Eruopean in whose world abortions were illegal and sinful… (Merian may well have spaced her own children, born in 1668 and 1678, by some form of birth control such as coitus interruptus, but probably not by anortion.) As for her statement that the African slave women did not have children, it is hyperbole, buty it lends support to those historians who explain the low fertility among the slaces as being, in at least small party, a matter of the women’s choice.”

p. 198 “She is 62 years old, but still very lively … and hardworking, a very courteous woman.” Thus Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a learned young scholar from Merian’s birthplace, recorded in his notes in 1711 after visiting the artist-naturalist and buying her books and watercolors. She was now one of the international figures of Amsterdam, a person one had to meet, the way one had to attend Frederick Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, see Nicolas Witsen’s collection, and view the great maps in the Town Hall.”