L.H.B. Nissen (Lidewij) MA

Lidewij Nissen is a lecturer at the Department of History, Art History and Classics at Radboud University. She is interested in the history of European dynasties, noble families and princely courts in the early modern period. She focuses in particular on the roles of noblewomen, princesses and other high-ranking women.

Her PhD dissertation unravels the activities and responsibilities of the female consorts of the stadtholders in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. How did these women contribute to the survival of the dynasty? In what ways did they consolidate the precarious political position of their husband and children in the Republic? And how did the relations between them, the Nassau family and their natal dynasties develop in the course of their career as 'first ladies' in the Low Countries? This research project is funded by the Dutch Research Council (PhDs in the Humanities).

Lidewij studied History at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. In 2017, she completed her research master with a thesis on the construction of a dynastic identity in the funerary culture of the seventeenth-century Frisian Nassau family. During her master programme, she studied at the University of Durham for several months and specialised in early modern European history. Previously, she conducted research on the album amicorum a Dutch noblewoman kept during the Eighty Years' War and on a sixteenth-century trial against a noble couple that was suspected of adultery and murder by poisoning.

• Patterns of Political Interaction