ABSTRACT
This chapter sheds light on the debate between them over allowing a woman to become a savante. Van Schurman's treatise, the Dissertatio logica, and her letters to Rivet show her adept use of the adversarial contentio, a staple of judicial rhetoric. she used this polemical discourse not in a court or public setting, as contentio requires, but in an epistolary exchange founded on sermo; sermo, unlike contentio, is related to a semi-public, non-official form of discourse, such as one finds in letter-writing. Van Schurman's thesis is that all honourable disciplines are entirely fitting for a Christian woman'. Van Schurman's advocacy is therefore an effective form of political and social critique. Mr. Andr Rivet was influential in the Leiden Circle of the Walloon expatriates, who included the renowned scholars Claudius Salmasius, Hendrik Reneri, Samuel Desmarets, Polyander Kerkhoven, Andreas Colvius, and Frederik Spanheim. Rivet was born in 1572 in Saint-Maixent, southwest of Poitiers.
