June 4, 2025
Symposium: From margin to centre stage
Early modern women: a thing of the past? Not at all! From stadtholder wives such as Amalia van Solms, prominent scholars such as Anna Maria van Schurman and innovative authors such as Betje Wolff to the stories of anonymous women from archives. In recent decades, the study of women from the period between 1500 and 1800 has flourished as never before. They are also finding their way to a wider audience through exhibitions, popular books and podcasts.
Early Modern Low Countries
To mark the publication of a substantial special issue of the journal Early Modern Low Countries, we take a look at a range of early modern women. We look back at the development of women’s history, discuss where we are now, and look to the future. The editors of the special issue, prominent voices from the museum and heritage sector, and inspiring researchers who are trying to predict the future of these historical women will speak.
For more information and to register, visit the Spui25 website.
About the speakers
Nina Lamal works as a researcher at NL-Lab and the Huygens Institute. Her research focuses on diplomacy, the transnational circulation of information, and the book trade in the early modern Netherlands, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire. In 2023, her monograph Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries was published by Brill, and she is the editor of the digital edition of the correspondence of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy to the Dutch Republic.
Lieke van Deinsen is a research professor of Dutch literature at KU Leuven. Her research focuses on the representation of intellectual and literary scholarship in the early modern period, canon formation, and female authorship. In 2025, she will hold the Queen Wilhelmina professorship at Columbia University (New York).
Feike Dietz is professor of Global Dynamics of Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the relationship between literature, knowledge and literacy, particularly with regard to youth and women in the early modern period. In 2021, her monograph Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment: Literacy, Agency and Progress in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Books was published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Femke Valkhoff is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. With her research project How do Cities Make Women? Empowerment, Self-Development, and Learned Identities in the Early Modern Dutch City, she explores the possibilities for early modern women to develop intellectually in the fields of literature, art and science within the cultural infrastructure of Utrecht, Middelburg and Deventer.
Antonia Weiss is a historian and architect. Her research explores the intersections between our urban past and future, with a focus on sustainability and justice. She obtained her PhD in 2025 with a thesis entitled The City of Nature, in which she highlights the role of early modern women in the creation of urban green spaces. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University & Research and as a Research Fellow at the AMS Institute, where she focuses on food history and migration.
Bob Pierik works as a postdoctoral researcher at VU Amsterdam in the NWO project ‘Dealing with Drought’ and as Dr Ernst Crone Fellow at the Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD in 2022 at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis entitled Urban Life on the Move. In 2023, he published his book Zo veel leven voor de deur. Een geschiedenis van alledaags Amsterdam in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (So much life on your doorstep. A history of everyday Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).
Maria Holtrop is curator of History at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She studied History, European Studies and Journalism at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht. She has been working at the museum since 2013, where she was involved in the exhibitions ‘Good Hope’ and ‘Slavery’, and last summer she created ‘Point of View’. That exhibition explored the Rijksmuseum’s collection from a gender perspective.
Fleur Speet is a reviewer and photographer. She has worked for Het Financieele Dagblad, NRC and De Morgen, among others. She is the initiator of the writers’ collective Fixdit and is currently researching the life of Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher.
Suze Zijlstra is a historian and author of De voormoeders. Een verborgen Nederlands-Indische familiegeschiedenis (The foremothers: A hidden Dutch-Indonesian family history), in which she searched for the Asian and European-Asian women in her family from the time of the Dutch East India Company. She speaks and publishes on family history, the history of slavery and the Dutch approach to its colonial past.