Publication in EMLO of the correspondences of the wives of six seventeenth-century stadtholders provides access for the very first time to a corpus of c. 3,600 letters which offers an unprecedented opportunity to analyze female power and influence in the political circles of the Dutch Republic at the Orange and Stuart courts in The Hague and their regional counterpart the Frisian court in Leeuwarden.

This section of the exhibition sets out biographical information for these six influential women, each of whom played a significant role in a number of different spheres.

Amalia von Solms-Braunfels and Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik van Oranje-Nassau with their three youngest daughters Albertina Agnes, Henrietta Catharina and Maria, by Gerard van Honthorst, 1647