Katharina Lescailje: another Sappho

Abstract
Katharina Lescailje (1649-1711) was, in her days, one of the most famous women writers in Amsterdam. She translated plays and wrote a large number of (occasional) poetry. Many male and female writers belonged to her network, as well as important people related to the city’s theatre. They were all extremely positive about Lescailje and her work.
As she has been mainly neglected in literary history up until the last decennia of the twentieth century, the reception of Katharina Lescailje is in large parts representative of the general reception of seventeenth-century Dutch women writers in later era’s. However, an important difference with other women writers is in her position in seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the broad (artistic) network she lived and worked in, and her apparent popularity within it.
In my paper I will present an overview of the reception of Lescailje by literary historians and by her contemporaries. My main focus will be on the representation of Lescailje in her political poetry. The case of Katharina Lescailje shows how in different discourses, different “authors” were created out of one and the same woman writer.

Nina Geerdink, November 2007

Nina Geerdink is a PhD-student at the Free University Amsterdam since March 2007. In August 2006 she graduated from the Research Master Dutch Language and Literature at Utrecht University, specialized in early-modern literature. Her current research is about authorial representation in the occasional poetry of Jan Vos (1610-1667) and Katharina Lescailje (1649-1711). Both Amsterdam poets obtained a central position in the literary field, in spite of their not being classically educated, as they were respectively a catholic artisan and a woman. The role of their poetry in obtaining a central position in Amsterdam is the main focus of the research project.

The writing side > “What is a female author?” > Lescailje