ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in the preceding chapter of this book. This book addresses Van Schurman's transformative contribution to the seventeenth-century debate on women's education. It analyses, first, her educational philosophy; and, second, the transnational reception of her writings on women's education, particularly in France. Van Schurman appears alongside other famous seventeenth-century savantes such as the novelists Mme de Lafayette and Madeleine de Scudry, and the poets Antoinette Deshoulires and Henriette de Coligny de La Suze. But Van Schurman had admirers throughout the eighteenth century. Literary women and men valued her intellect and educational vision. Van Schurman powerfully argued that they are capable of studying all the liberal arts and the sciences, and that her contemporaries needed a new mindset' to allow them into higher learning for the betterment of their lives and of society, no matter the sacrifices and difficulties.
