Wendela Bicker

Archival research and material culture

In early 2025, I worked on Wendela Magazine, a collaborative research project (tutorial) centred on Wendela Bicker (1635–1668), best known as the wife of Johan de Witt. Developed within the MA Curating Art and Culture, specialisation: Arts of the Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam and brought together the work of Bente Tas, Kirsten van Tunen, and myself.

The project was supervised by Judith Noorman and developed in dialogue with her ongoing research for The Female Impact, a multi-year project that rethinks women’s roles in early modern art, culture, and knowledge production.

The project is built around Wendela Bicker’s handwritten ‘waardeboek‘, a document in which she recorded the value, ownership, and changes to her household possessions. Rather than treating this book as a purely administrative source, the project approaches it as an insight into Wendela’s daily world and her (material) relationships. Through transcription and close reading, the magazine brings together material culture, domestic administration, and women’s history.

My own contribution (Jewellery, Portraiture, and Possession: Reconstructing Wendela Bicker’s Seventeenth Century Jewellery Collection: page 40-48 + Transcription of Jewellery Inventory: page 49-51 + Appraisals, Value and Women: Financial Agency: page 64-66) focused on Wendela’s jewellery and the ways her descriptions in the ‘waardeboek‘ allow us to think about jewellery as changeable, movable, and meaningful objects. By combining archival descriptions with visual and material comparison, I explored how jewellery functioned within elite culture as part of gift-giving, inheritance, and self-presentation, rather than as static or purely decorative items.

Wendela Magazine brings together transcriptions, essays, and visual material in a format that is meant to be rigorous yet accessible. The project reflects my broader approach to historical research: starting from objects and documents, working closely with primary sources, and using material culture as a way to ask larger questions about women’s lives and agency in the early modern Dutch Republic