Friends, Lovers, and Rivals: Katharina Lescailje, Cornelia van der Veer, and Katherine Philips

Abstract

This chapter considers how women in England and the Low Countries used friendship poems to construct a new language of private emotion and to intervene in civic, and thus public, discourse hitherto reserved for men. The poetry of Cornelia van der Veer and Katharina Lescailje addressed to each other and the famous friendship poems of Katherine Philips are at the heart of this chapter. These three writers reveal a desire to elevate the female friend to an absolutist position of power. They also depict a corrupting male-dominated public sphere and treat retirement from public life not as a withdrawal into a private sphere, but as another way to present oneself to a larger public. These shared aspects of female friendship poetry in royalist and non-royalist poetry from different countries suggest that they are not (or not only) the product of the specific political environment in England after the Civil Wars, but instead a genre through which women could imagine a place in the public eye in countries with different political structures. They also suggest that women were not yet able to forge a new type of public presence for themselves, but instead relied on older, absolutist forms of publicity to imagine female agency.