Elisabeth of Bohemia

Elisabeth of Bohemia was a princess of the exiled Palatine court at The Hague, daughter of the Winter King and granddaughter of James I, who read Descartes’s Meditations and in 1643 wrote to ask him how an immaterial soul could move a material body. The Correspondence that followed, over seven years, is the sharpest examination Descartes’s dualism ever received, and he dedicated the Principles to her and wrote The Passions of the Soul at her prompting. She became abbess of the Lutheran convent at Herford, where she sheltered Quakers and Labadists, and was visited by Penn.