Born: 5 November 1607, Germany
Died: 4 May 1678
Country most active: Netherlands
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
She was called the wonder of her century. Born in Cologne she had a happy youth under the wings of parents that loved their children devotedly. She had no playmates. At the age of three she already read the Bible. When she came to Holland early in life, she excited so much admiration that the best known poet of the time asked the fourteen year old girl to become his wife.
But she refused to form what in her eyes, seemed a “worldly and wicked marriage.” In the many arts she cultivated she had no teacher. She was a talented painter; that her pictures did not attract more notice was due to the fact that she lived at the time of Holland’s greatest painters, Rembrandt and Boy. She modeled cleverly — among other things a statue of herself. A countess of Nassau could not believe that it was not the artist herself until it was pricked with a needle. She also cultivated the more feminine arts; embroidering and painting on glass, and she sang beautifully. But what was most astonishing was her command of languages. She spoke fluently French, German, and English; she learned Latin by being present at the lessons of her brothers.
After learning Greek and Hebrew in order to read the Old Testament in the original, she was induced by her love of linguistic studies to acquire other Oriental languages — Arabic, Persian and Ethiopian. As to learning this last named language, she had no predecessor in her country and she even wrote a grammar. Woman’s inferiority was a matter of debate in those days. She took part in the controversy and proved with a mathematician’s logic that a Christian might shine in the highest knowledge, as shown by her own example. At the age of thirty she had left no field of knowledge uncultivated. She even wrote about the cure of blindness. And this woman who was in touch with the whole learned world gave up everything in order to devote herself to the nursing of her mother’s two aged sisters, also to the care of other invalids. She disavowed all her former culture as idolatry and joined Jean de Labadie, a preacher of penitence, who wished to improve the condition of the church; and when he founded a community of his own in Germany, she followed him and was a most faithful member. After Labadie’s death she returned to Holland with a small number of faithful adherents and remained until she died. She presents an ideal of fervent, almost fanatical piety.
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