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Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf asked ‘If Shakespeare Had a Sister’ in A Room of One’s Own Woolf imagined Shakespeare’s sister who was equally gifted, ‘as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was’ but denied access to school, books, and the opportunities for intellectual work. Talent with no room to develop would spell only grief for Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Woolf concluded. The cause of ‘Judith Shakespeare’s’ tragedy, however, was not on her shoulders alone but rather on the patriarchal society that limited all women’s access to education, shackled them to unending domestic and reproductive duties, and prevented their civic, financial, and personal independence.Historians and legal scholars are still writing about the ways in which women struggled against societal, legal, religious, scientific, and educational limits to seek lives of meaning and satisfaction according to their own potential. In Portraits of Women in International Law, edited by Immi Tallgren, we have legal history’s corollary: what of Hugo Grotius’s wife, Maria van Reigersberch? Her current place in history is that of a wife loyal in service to her husband. But in Tallgren’s volume we meet an intrepid, intelligent woman who was resourceful and knowledgeable about finances, spoke boldly to court officials, sought contracts with printers, and travelled independently. Readers are encouraged to ask: did Grotius’s wife also make contributions to legal thought beyond saving the life of her husband, the man whose writings laid the foundations for international law as recognised today?
To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here.
DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580105
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