Nadine N.W. Akkerman

Winner Dissertation Prize 2009

Dissertation
The Letters of A Stuart Princess: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine of the Rhine, and the Queen of Bohemia

Supervisor: Prof. dr R.J. Lyall
Nomination: VU Amsterdam, Faculty of Arts

Report by the selection committee

Nadine Akkerman corrects in her thesis the prevailing picture of the protestant English royal princess Elizabeth Stuart.  In the historiography she is presented as a powerless, spendthrift and attractive woman, who lived in the Dutch Republic for a long time supported by the stadholders Maurits and Frederik Hendrik. The author also investigated the culture of letter writing in the early modern period. She studied an enormous amount of partly unknown sources. The result is a new view on the political relations in Europe at that time. The book is published by Oxford University Press.