Letters form the Dutch and Frisian Stadtholders’ wives 1605 – 1725

This project is dedicated to letters from six prominent women from the Republic of the United Netherlands: those of the Orange and Stuart courts in The Hague: Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (1602-1675), Mary Stuart (1631-1640) and Mary II Stuart (1662-1694), and those of the Frisian Court in Leeuwarden: Sophia Hedwig von Braunschweig-Wolffenbüttel (1592-1642), Albertine Agnes of Orange-Nassau (1634-1696) and Henriëtte Amalia von Anhalt Dessau (1666-1726). Most letters from those six sovereigns have not been accessible or digitised in the past. This digital edition makes it possible to perform new scientific research into the influence of these women on the political, cultural and social processes, both within and outside the seventeenth-century Republic of the United Netherlands.

In collaboration with Koninklijke Verzamelingen Den Haag and Oxford University’s (Women) Early Modern Letters Online, (W)EMLO, the Huygens ING processed over 4.000 letters and made them accessible via EMLO’s portal. Not only is the metadata of the entire corpus fully searchable, but there is a separate catalogue for every stadtholder’s wife, in which her correspondence can be accessed separately.

The addition of the correspondences of Anna van Egmond, Anna van Saksen, Charlotte de Bourbon, Louise de Coligny, Marie-Louise van Hessen-Kassel, Anna van Hannover and Wilhelmina van Pruisen is currently being worked on.