Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Floris Verhaart is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter. Within the Cultures of Philosophy project, Floris focuses on the Dutch Republic. Before joining Exeter, he completed a DPhil in history at the University of Oxford and held postdoctoral fellowships at Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, and the University of Warwick. His research interests include neo-Latin studies and the intellectual and religious culture of the Low Countries, France, and the British Isles. He is the author and (co-)editor of four books, including Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750: Beyond the Ancients and the Moderns (Oxford: OUP, 2020) and Protestant Politics beyond Calvin: Reformed Theologians on War in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022; edited with Ian Campbell). A fifth book, an edition in three volumes of the correspondence of Dominicus Baudius (edited with Paul Botley), was published by Droz in 2025.
As part of the CultPhil project, Floris is currently preparing a monograph on women as objects and subjects in early modern processes of textual transmission. The working title is Editing Her Out: Gender and the Early Modern Intellectual Tradition in the Low Countries (1600-1750). Texts written by or referring to women were often selectively edited. Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678), the first female university student in the Dutch Republic and was known during her lifetime as an artist, poet, and philosopher. Yet during the first decades of the eighteenth century, a series of rather selective editions of her work meant that her image was transformed into an exemplar of religious virtue. Similarly, in early modern editions of scholarly correspondences, for example, references to women were often left out in the printed text of letters, as such references were deemed irrelevant for the history of learning and undermined the conception of leading intellectuals as individual geniuses who seemingly operated in isolation. There were also many ways, however, in which women could play an active role in how texts written by others were preserved for posterity and made accessible to new audiences. The Dutch widow Johanna Dorothea Lindenaer (1664-1737?, nom de plume: Mme Zoutelande), for example, constructed a written oeuvre with a surprisingly coherent intellectual agenda out of translations and texts that built heavily on the writings of others. He is also working on the team’s edited volume, Women Writing Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, and preparing discrete publications on Lindenaer and Schurman.
