Anna Maria van Schurman

She was allowed to study on condition that she stayed invisible.

The university opened here in 1636, and Anna Maria van Schurman enrolled as the first female student in the country. This was not a favour simply handed to her. During lectures she sat behind a curtain, so that the male students would not be distracted by her presence.

She was already famous by then. As a child she could read at four and embroider at ten, and after that came Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and a handful of other languages. She painted, carved in wood, cut portraits out of paper and engraved on glass. Scholars from all over Europe wrote to her, and anyone passing through Utrecht came by to speak with her.

She also wrote a treatise arguing that women are suited to scholarship. The professor who helped her in was her neighbour, a few doors along.

And then she let it all go. Later in life she joined a religious movement around a preacher who rejected everything she had become famous for, gave away her books and travelled with him. Her European correspondents could make no sense of it.

She died convinced that she had chased the wrong things. Four hundred years on, the university that put her behind a curtain carries her name on buildings and scholarships.

We now walk up to the Pausdam, towards the Kromme Nieuwegracht.