Epistolary Power: the Correspondence of the Dutch and Frisian Stadtholders’ Wives, 1605–1725

This corpus of letters focuses on the correspondences of six leading women of the Republic of the United Netherlands from the Orange and Stuart courts in The Hague: Amalia von Solms-Braunfels (1602–1675), Mary Stuart, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (1631–1661), and Mary II Stuart, future Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1662–1694); and from their regional counterpart, the Frisian court in Leeuwarden: Sophia Hedwig von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1592–1642), Albertine Agnes van Oranje-Nassau (1634–1696), and Henriette Amalia von Anhalt Dessau (1666–1726). Hitherto the significant collections of letters of these six princesses have been neither published nor digitized and here in EMLO users will find they are able to consult the calendars either individually or together in their entirety. As a result of the first-ever access to images of the manuscripts of many of these letters via the portal of the Royal Collections The Netherlands, and with the assistance of tools to visualize networks that have been made available by partners at both the Huygens ING and Oxford University’s Cultures of Knowledge project, these digital calendars make it possible to conduct fresh academic research on the influence of these women in the political, cultural, and social spheres and processes both within and beyond the Republic of the United Netherlands. At present these six catalogues in EMLO contain metadata of c. 3,600 letters, most of which are conserved in the Royal Collections at The Hague, with smaller portions at the National Library in The Hague and Landeshauptarchiv Dessau. The letters were written in English, French, German, Latin, or Dutch and they date between 1605 and 1726. Almost all of the letter records in EMLO provide links to digitized copies of the scanned letters, marked as ‘manuscript image’, and links to the digitized editions of Archives ou correspondance inédite de la maison d’Orange-Nassau (ed. G. Groen van Prinsterer); Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck (ed. N. Japikse); Briefwisseling van Anthonie Heinsius 1702–1720 (ed. A.J. Veenendaal jr.); and Lettres et Mémoires de Marie Reine d’Angleterre, Épouse de Guillaume III (ed. M. Bentinck) have been added as well. In the near future further letters from a number of other archives, such as Tresoar in Leeuwarden, will supplement these catalogues, and metadata for the correspondences of the wives of the 16th- and the 18th-century stadtholders will be prepared for publication