Anne de Rohan (poétesse)

Rohan and her mother Catherine de Parthenay were principal figures at the famous Siege of La Rochelle.

[4] Rohan and the multi-lingual van Schurman conversed in French,[5] including Rohan honoring van Shurman's request to resolve the origin of a request —the queen (Anne of Austria) or Charles du Chesne — to translate Dissertatio (1641) in 1643, avoid offending the queen.

[6] Van Schurman and Rohan chose to remain unmarried, as did others — René Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and John Locke — who pursued scholarly vocations.

Anne and Catherine de Parthenay were lauded as "indomitable heroines of the ruthless 16-month Siege of La Rochelle".

The Catholic army imprisoned them at the medieval castle Donjon de Niort[3][13] and razed Parthenay's residences in Josselin and Blain in Brittany.

[14] Anne R. Larsen, author of Anna Maria van Schurman, 'the star of Utrecht' : the educational vision and reception of a savante says of Rohan, Anne de Rohan is a striking example of both a Calvinist femme forte and a savante, who not only performed in the political arena but also developed a textual voice through her numerous published writings.

[15]Larsen further commented about Anne and 16th-century Huguenot writers, Catherine Randall theorizes that Calvinist women writers circumvented the intense resistance to female expression in Huguenot culture through two strategies of legitimation: they identified themselves with their household performative roles to the point of “hyper-domestication’; and they fashioned in their writings a female textual ‘community of discussants’ in which they modelled themselves as exemplars, drawing on the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of believers.’° These strategies of household identification and textual exchange with other women, present as well in the writings of women of other religious traditions — Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Puritan — are helpful when considering the epistolary exchange between [Anne de] Rohan and [Anna Maria] van Schurman.