While it is questionable whether Colvius’s identification of the scripts was correct, and whether he was able to differentiate accurately between written Arabic and Farsi (his term ‘Persian characters’ is peculiar) or between Japanese and Chinese, his letter illustrates clearly how Asian texts were admired as curiosities in the Low Countries. Undoubtedly, Chinese writing attracted the most attention. Learned Dutchmen such as Clusius, Golius, Heinsius, Scaliger, and many others, collected Chinese books, even though no one except the travelling missionaries and the occasional Chinese visitor could read them.⁹ Some scholars – and probably Van Schurman as well – were aware that Chinese characters were used in countries where different languages were spoken, such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, which seemed to demonstrate the possibility of a script that was symbolic rather than alphabetic. This was an object of speculation for the philologist Gerardus Vossius, who depended for his interpretation on the account of the Jesuit mission to China by Matteo Ricci, which had been published in 1615 (fig. 4).

In 1635 Vossius compared the Chinese characters to mathematical or astronomical symbols, but thought it most likely that they were pictograms:¹⁰

As Chinese characters express concepts without the medium of language, they are similar to paintings: ‘In the same sense, from the painting of a human figure, a horse, a tree or a house, all people obtain the same concept.’¹² Vossius’s idea was attractive to his fellow humanists as it seemed to allow for signs that corresponded directly to things and for a script that reflected the order of nature better than any alphabet. Was Chinese perhaps even older than the Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus an expression of the language in which God had spoken to Adam?¹³ On a less speculative level, the East Asian ‘culture of the brush’ that attached such a high social status to writing and the visual arts clearly resonated with the visual culture of the Low Countries. The Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten had reported in 1598 on the efforts of Chinese parents to teach their children the 120,000 characters necessary for full literacy, at school during the day and at home by night, to the point of damaging their eyesight.¹⁴ This practice might have appealed to learned luminaries such as Constantijn Huygens, whose interest in East Asia was evident when he went out of his way to have a Chinese inscription on a lacquer screen translated accurately.¹⁵ He was also a trained calligrapher and draftsman who ensured that his own children received the same education. For Van Schurman herself, who sent Huygens, as a ‘favour to an old friend’, some of her calligraphy in foreign scripts, her ambitions in literacy and art likewise reinforced each other.¹⁶ It is in this same friendly context that we probably have to understand Colvius’s encouragement of Van Schurman to copy the East Asian scripts.

On the basis of Colvius’s statement that samples of the Chinese script were ‘fairly common’ (assez commun) in the Netherlands, one might try to reconstruct what it was that he sent to Van Schurman. Printed pages with Chinese texts were sometimes included in alba amicorum, such as those of Bernardus Paludanus and Ernst Brinck (fig. 5).¹⁷ The latter’s collection and scholarly interests were very similar to those of Colvius.¹⁸ As Van Schurman contributed her own calligraphy in Arabic and Greek to Brinck’s album (on 6 October 1637), it is not impossible that the two Chinese printed texts, Japanese printed text, and Japanese calligraphy that were also pasted in it were somehow related to the batch that Colvius sent her one month later.¹⁹ Another page of printed Chinese script is kept and displayed alongside Colvius’s letter to Van Schurman in the Martena Museum in Franeker (fig. 6). It derives from an encyclopaedia published in Jianyang, an important centre of book production in late Ming China: Plucked Brocade from the Five Carriages of Books (Wuche bajin 五車拔錦, 1597). The page features six schematic renditions of meteorological phenomena, with second from right a human figure with claws and wings, the Daoist thunder god Leigong 雷公 playing his drums.²⁰ Together with Colvius’s letter, this was bequeathed by Van Schurman’s heirs to the university of Franeker in 1780.²¹ There is no earlier evidence, however, that connects the printed page to the letter, and none of the texts from Japan, Siam, and Persia that Colvius mentioned survive in the museum’s collection. In fact, it is quite possible that he sent along a rather different type of Chinese writing. Colvius’s suggestion that his learned friend might copy the various Asian texts in her own hand makes it unlikely that they included an extensive page from an encyclopaedia – the leaf from Wuche bajin contains some six hundred characters, plus the six drawings. From the letter, one might rather conclude that the paper that was included contained only a score of characters. It may also have been a handwritten rather than a printed text.

This assumption is not as far-fetched as it may seem. In addition to the man mentioned by Colvius, there is evidence of two literate Chinese individuals who even performed their calligraphic skills for their hosts in the Netherlands. The first is the merchant Yppong, who arrived in Middelburg in 1600 and left six lines of Chinese writing about himself (fifty-four characters) in the album amicorum of a local lawyer, before returning to China (fig. 7).²² The second is Fichinpai, also known as Dominicus, the Chinese assistant of the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini who visited the Low Countries in 1654. A demonstration of his calligraphy in action was attended by the Leiden orientalist Jacob Golius (one of Van Schurman’s correspondents).²³ Twenty-eight characters by Fichinpai’s hand, relating to the Catholic Sign of the Cross, survive in the Royal Library in Brussels, pasted in a pharmacological album that was completed in Leuven in 1655 (fig. 8).²⁴ In addition, samples of Chinese handwriting sometimes arrived along with other goods on the ships of the East India Company. In 1628 the minister Justus Heurnius, based in Batavia, had a Chinese schoolteacher from Macao prepare a manuscript version of Confucius’s Analects and a relevant thesaurus, for which he himself furnished the translation, which was sent to his brother in Leiden (fig. 9).²⁵ Another example was a Chinese ‘book with fair-sized characters, not written with a quill but painted with a brush, on Chinese paper’, in the collection of the Haarlem humanist Hadrianus Junius.²⁶ Finally, a remarkably elegant and artistic Japanese calligraphic text (partly written in Chinese kanji) survives in Brinck’s aforementioned album: a tenth-century love poem by Minamoto no Shigeyuki 源重之 (fig. 10).²⁷

What is more, in collections of exotica in the Netherlands one could find the Four Treasures of the Study (wen fang si bao 文房四宝) according to Chinese and Japanese tradition: the brush, ink stick, paper, and inkstone required for calligraphy.²⁸ As early as 1592, Van Linschoten brought a few Chinese brushes, ink, and paper back from Asia for a scholarly friend; in 1665 Johan Nieuhof wrote that Chinese inkstones were now on sale with Dutch paint sellers (Verf-verkoopers), but one had to be wary of fakes.²⁹ Their application was described and illustrated in the 1668 Dutch edition of Athanasius Kircher’s famous book on China (fig. 11):

The engraving illustrates correctly how in East Asia, the calligraphic brush is held perfectly vertical by all five fingers, with an empty palm and the elbow lifted off the table – writing is done with the arm rather than just the hand. The monkey that sits on the floor examining a piece of paper is a symbolic reference to the European notion of the visual arts as the ‘ape of nature’, emphasizing Kircher’s understanding that in China, the status of calligraphy was not inferior to that of painting.

If Colvius did indeed send Van Schurman a piece of Chinese calligraphy rather than the printed text that is now in the Martena Museum, he – unwittingly or, perhaps, wittingly, as we shall see – acted in line with a practice of friendly exchange in late Ming China. In early modern Europe, calligraphy was one of the minor arts and therefore often seen as an activity in which women could excel, as Van Schurman’s own exchange with her scholarly contacts demonstrates.³¹ In China, by contrast, calligraphy stood at the top of the hierarchy of the arts and was seen as an indispensable skill for men, in particular those of great social and political stature. The early Westerners who had access to the country were, in fact, well aware of this. The Jesuits who had been flocking to the Middle Kingdom since 1582 had soon understood the importance of calligraphic gifts in building and fostering a network of trusted friends reaching up to the upper crust of society, the imperial court.

The first European to access the Forbidden City was Matteo Ricci, known as the mission’s founding father, whose account of his experiences, first printed in Latin in 1615, was widely popular throughout Europe. By the 1630s, it was available in six languages and the Latin edition had enjoyed six print runs; it was the basis for Vossius’s above-quoted remarks and many other writings on China.³² The book explained in detail the steps Ricci had taken to build a network of contacts in the Middle Kingdom as the basis for his missionary activities, starting from the first text that he wrote and had printed in Chinese: Jiaoyou lun 交友論 (Treatise on Making Friends, 1595). This collection of aphorisms from the European classical authors, devoted to the theme of friendship, was itself intended as a gift to Ricci’s Chinese friends.³³

Ricci had clearly recognized that friendship was a complicated issue for literati of the late Ming period. According to the dominant ideology of Neo-Confucianism, men were expected to foster five cardinal human relationships, the ‘five bonds’ (wu lun 五伦): between husband and wife; with one’s parents; between brothers; between ruler and subject; and between friends. Of these five relationships friendship was unique; the others were overtly concerned with the maintenance of the imperial social order (or guojia 國家, literally the Chinese ‘state-family’). Friendship was the only bond that was freely chosen. It could transcend social hierarchies and, apparently, also bridge cultural distances.³⁴ It is therefore unsurprising that the central text of Confucianism, the Analects (c. 500 bce), begins with a statement on friendship:

This quotation follows a Dutch edition of 1675, the first printed translation of the Analects in any Western language; a manuscript of another translation also circulated in Van Schurman’s lifetime (fig. 9).³⁶

The bond of friendship could obviously be fostered by gifts, and in late Ming China calligraphy held an important position as a luxury and as a mark of status and literary taste.³⁷ Writing was the supreme form of visual art, more valued than painting and sculpture, and ranked alongside poetry as a means of self-expression and cultivation. It was essentially a performative art: the resulting work documented the writer’s life force or vital essence (氣 qi) in relation to the content of the words that were written. This explained its role to establish and mediate the problematic ‘fifth bond’ between friends.³⁸ Ricci therefore elaborated on the material and social aspects of Chinese calligraphy:

Calligraphic gifts to friends included not only pamphlets or scrolls but also chidu 尺牘 (letters) and bianmian 便面 (fans).⁴⁰ The latter acquired a special performative role as they were passed between friends: a fan ‘proclaimed its owner’s artistic taste and social network every time it was used in public, but in a discrete manner that avoided flaunting’.⁴¹ In Ricci’s own words, the Chinese ‘often write a beautiful sentence or poem on [fans], which is the most common gift that they send each other, to testify to their good will. We currently have a little chest full of these in our house, which our friends have given us to then pass on to others, as a similar assurance of friendship’.⁴² In 1599 the retired governor Li Zhi 李贄, famous for his arrogance and limited circle of friends, had apparently presented Ricci with two fans in return for his Treatise on Making Friends. Each was decorated with a calligraphic inscription ‘written by his own hands’, one of them titled ‘Zeng Li Xitai 贈利西泰 (Gift to Matteo Ricci)’.⁴³ Ricci, following the Jesuit strategy of accommodation to the foreign civilization, began to write his own Chinese calligraphy on fans, and he instructed two of his students, Manuel Diaz and João da Rocha, to do likewise.⁴⁴ His visual and cultural sensibilities made Ricci the mainstay of the Jesuit mission, and he soon complained he had become too successful: ‘I have friends everywhere, so many that they will not let me live, and I spend the whole day in living rooms answering different questions.’⁴⁵

In so doing, Ricci had paved the way for the Jesuits’ close bond with different Chinese emperors in the seventeenth century.⁴⁶ To illuminate the overarching social importance of calligraphy, one might quote no one other than the Kangxi Emperor, who accepted the throne in 1661 as a budding connoisseur of this art: ‘I, the sovereign, took the throne at the age of eight and I already knew that I should be dedicated to study. […] Since my childhood I especially enjoyed calligraphy. […] My calligraphy is exceptional compared to others.’⁴⁷ Some Europeans expressed their amazement at this clear divergence from the Western hierarchy of the arts. In 1669, the Englishman John Webb – the only seventeenth-century architect whose designs were inspired by Chinese calligraphy – observed that the Chinese loved and respected their written characters so much that they valued them above other artworks:

It is not impossible that a similar insight inspired Dutch scholars – collectors of Chinese books, readers of Ricci, Vossius, Kircher, and perhaps Webb – when they pasted pages from Chinese texts in alba amicorum or included them in letters to their friends.

The role of Chinese calligraphy in fostering and maintaining friendship explains why Yppong and Fichinpai presented a sample of their handwriting to their hosts in the Netherlands. The text that Colvius sent Van Schurman to copy by hand may likewise have been produced by a Chinese visitor (perhaps even the man in Amsterdam ‘who knew how to read their writing’). It may be that the friendly exchange of East Asian writing between the two Dutch scholars reflected a basic recognition – an intuition or an insight based on the missionary accounts – of the value of calligraphy in relation to friendship in late Ming China.

Not unlike the Chinese situation, in seventeenth-century Europe scholarly friendships were cultivated through the exchange of letters and gifts.⁴⁹ Learned women could participate in this exchange even though their position in the Republic of Letters was different from that of men, especially in regard to formal education.⁵⁰ Calligraphy was seen as one of the literate activities in which women could actually excel (as could be seen in the work of Jacquemyne Hondius, Kornelia Kalf, Anna Roemers Visscher, Maria Strick, and the French-born Esther Inglis) and it is therefore not surprising that Van Schurman chose it as suitable genre from which she might select gifts for her friends, sometimes including samples of her writing in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Samaritan.⁵¹ Her unique exchange with Colvius of East Asian scripts intended for copying by hand illustrates, however, how their relationship mirrored the Chinese practice of literati friendship as a bond that transcended, rather than confirmed, traditional social hierarchies.⁵² Scholarly friendship between men and women was a fairly new phenomenon in the mercantile republic of the United Provinces. To some extent, this situation resembled contemporary China of the late Ming. Although in the Middle Kingdom women were excluded from the exchange, ‘friendship appears to have been celebrated with unprecedented enthusiasm. In general terms, the commercialisation of the Ming economy, and the resulting enhancement of social and geographical mobility, created both new needs and new possibilities for friendship: the blurring of traditional social boundaries […] tended to make Ming society less hierarchical, and thus more conducive to the cultivation of friendship among different social groups.’⁵³

When viewed in the light of the Dutch Republic’s intensive engagement with Chinese civilization that was unparallelled in Europe, both in regard to material culture as in regard to intellectual exchange, this intercultural symmetry may have been more than coincidence.⁵⁴ The many Asian luxuries and other imports available in Dutch cities were a source of amazement for, among others, the Danish physician Ole Borch. When he visited Colvius’s cabinet in 1662 he only mentioned acupuncture needles, but it may well have included other Chinese objects and books.⁵⁵ A sizeable collection of Chinese volumes was in the possession of another of Van Schurman’s supporters, the Leiden professor Jacobus Golius.⁵⁶ One more actor in this network was her professor at Utrecht, Johannes Hoornbeeck, whom she sent some of her non-Western calligraphy. Hoornbeeck owned a copy of the aforementioned manuscript translation of Confucius’s Analects and knew a lot about China. In his treatise De conversione Indorum et gentilium (On the Conversion of the Indians and Heathens, 1669), which borrowed liberally from Ricci, he even described the role of friendship among the five cardinal human bonds of Confucianism.⁵⁷ Finally, a formidable figure in early Dutch sinology figured amongst Colvius’s friends: Isaac Vossius, the most ardent Sinophile in seventeenth-century Europe, whose Variarum observationum liber (Various Observations, 1685) contained a notoriously over-enthusiastic paean to Chinese politics, scholarship, and material culture.⁵⁸

Obviously, the Dutch understanding of the Chinese tradition of the calligraphic gift was limited. The exchange of writing samples between Colvius and Schurman, however, was meaningful even while the characters remained illegible (if one follows the sociological analysis of the gift, as spearheaded by Marcel Mauss). The Chinese and Japanese papers had accrued value merely through their distant origins; perhaps they had originated as friendly gifts, and their being re-gifted in the Dutch context confirms Mauss’s insight that in pre-modern societies, gifts partook of the giver’s ‘spirit’, they could not be owned but were always passed on.⁵⁹ In Van Schurman’s case, they even carried an obligation: that she sent her friend copies in her handwriting, thereby demonstrating that she was worthy of her reputation as a prodigy.

We do not know how much Van Schurman knew about Chinese ideals and practices of friendship and gift-giving. What is more, it remains unclear whether she eventually copied the East Asian characters, or reached out to the Chinese man in Amsterdam. But Colvius’s calligraphic gift certainly tells us something about her reputation as a literate woman. Among her many correspondents, Colvius held a particular position: he was one of the three editors of her treatise, Dissertatio de ingenii muliebris ad doctrinam et meliores litteras aptitudine (On the Intellectual Aptitude of Women for the Sciences and the Humanities, 1641), which has been called ‘the first Dutch feminist tract’.⁶⁰ In 1659 it was translated into English as The Learned Maid; or, whether a Maid may be a Scholar?⁶¹ The book included, as an appendix, her appreciation for another of Colvius’s letters, written in the same year that he sent the Asian texts. When he, provocatively, suggested to Van Schurman that too much study was unhealthy for a woman (or anyone), he provided her with the occasion for an elaborate refutation larded with quotations in Arabic and Hebrew, which was also attached in print to the treatise. Colvius’s actual esteem for his friend’s unmatched combination of linguistic and artistic skills was likewise evident in his gift of the Chinese and Japanese texts and his certainty that she would be able to copy them by hand.

His assumption is all the more noteworthy in relation to ideas about women’s literacy that were current in the first half of the seventeenth century. Some doubted whether women should learn to write at all, let alone be able to rival the abilities of men. As John Davies wrote in The Writing Schoolemaster (1631), women ‘naturally lack strength in their hand to perform those full strokes, and (as it were) to bruise a letter as men do’.⁶² At the same time, calligraphy was seen in the Dutch Republic as an upper-class pastime that aligned with embroidery and paper cutting as feminine activities, designed primarily to avoid idleness and flaunt one’s elegance, rather than subvert expectations. The disciplining of the hand was expected to discipline the heart.⁶³ Against this background, Colvius’s expectation that Van Schurman could master the writing of East Asian logographic characters, which were a source of so much scholarly and philosophical speculation among her male peers, was in fact a radical challenge to the traditional notions of femininity. As late as 1772, a French scholar marvelled at Van Schurman’s ability, ‘admired in the entire universe’, to write ‘so well that it was difficult to believe that it was possible for a woman to draft such beautiful characters’.⁶⁴

When Jan Lievens portrayed this ‘learned maid,’ he presented her as if just interrupted in the act of reading, with two fingers as a page holder (fig. 3). In the foreground are an inkpot and quill at hand – not dissimilar to how a painter’s palette and brush might be included in an artist’s portrait or self-portrait, as references to his or her virtuosity. When Colvius sent Van Schurman his gift of foreign scripts, both as a challenge to her linguistic and artistic prowess and as an endorsement of it, he conveyed an even more lofty sentiment about ‘Natures master-piece amongst women, excelling the very Muses’: he suggested that her talents extended beyond the world of the Western classics, to East Asia.