For centuries, Leiden has been home to a large and diverse group of international students. Even in the university’s early years, international students travelled long distances to join Leiden’s community of scholars. The evidence for this is vast. For example, in the first half of the seventeenth century, over half of the professors at the universities of Uppsala and of Åbo had studied at Leiden. It is estimated that by 1700, a third of Leiden students were from Great Britain (as discussed in Joby and Wilson’s work, listed below).

Over the centuries, international students at Leiden have enriched the community by contributing to, and participating in, a broad range of study areas, including science, medicine, philology, linguistics, and history. Their contributions to these fields include philosophical treatises, early anatomical discoveries, and the study of algebraic equations. This blog post, written by Leiden-staff and students and edited by K. A. Milne, is aimed at highlighting just a few of the diverse and talented international students and PhD candidates who have been an integral part of the Leiden community over the years.

René Descartes (1596–1650)

One Leiden student who rose to great fame was the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, best known for his statement “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). He first introduced this famous phrase in his 1637 work Discours de la méthode, which was originally published in Leiden. A central figure in the rationalist movement, Descartes saw human reason as a primary source of knowledge. In 1629, he briefly studied at the Dutch University of Franeker before enrolling as a mathematics student at Leiden in June 1630. Indeed, Descartes was deeply interested in applied mathematics and corresponded on the subject with the Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman. Descartes spent much of his life in the Dutch Republic and published many of his works there. In 1640, he lived on the Rapenburg in Leiden, and from 1642 to 1643, he resided at the Endegeest estate in Oegstgeest. Descartes’s case exemplifies how Leiden not only provides an inspiring academic environment across various disciplines but also benefits from the intellectual contributions of its international students, enriching the city’s vibrant scholarly and publishing culture.

Contributed by Alisa van de Haar

Friedrich Lindenbrog (1573–1648)

Friedrich Lindenbrog (born in Hamburg) is known as “the first non-English scholar to evince a more than rudimentary knowledge of Old English” (Rudolf & Pelle 2021: 618). In Leiden, Lindenbrog studied law and classical languages with Joseph Justus Scaliger and Bonaventura Vulcanius. Like other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century students of the ‘Leiden Philological School’ (including Francis Junius the Younger and Johannes de Laet), Friedrich Lindenbrog developed an interest in Old English: the language of early medieval England. Back then, studying Old English was difficult since there was no published dictionary and scholars had to rely on hand-written wordlists. Via Scaliger’s intellectual network, Lindenbrog got into contact with scholars in England, where he was eventually able to draw up his own list with more than 16,000 Old English words! These words were supplied with Latin translations: Old English leorning cnihtes (p. 180) translates to Latin discipuli ‘students’; OE utlændisc (p. 295) is Latin extraneus ‘foreign’; and OE gesælig (p. 120) equals Latin felix ‘happy’ (and resembles Dutch gezellig!). While Lindenbrog’s Glossarium Anglo-Saxonico-Latinum was never published, various German scholars used his word-list to make (and expand) their own copies (see Vollbrecht 2024); as such, Lindenbrog is regarded as one of the pioneers of Old English studies in Germany. To this day, Leiden remains a place where students from all over the world can gain their first taste of Old English; many of these utlændisce leorning cnihtes end up gesælig, indeed!

Contributed by Thijs Porck

Ernst Brinck (1582–1649)

Born in Germany, Ernst Brinck studied Arabic, Turkish and Persian in Leiden. He was passionate about collecting curiosa and contributions to his liber amicorum—a collection of notes by friends (including one by Galileo Galilei). He also collected languages, boasting 220 “language specimens”. As the secretary to the first Dutch consul to Istanbul, Brinck wrote down a list of 30 signs used by the sultans and their deaf servants, providing a unique window into the centuries-old Ottoman Sign Language. As the polyglot he was, Brinck wrote this list in a rich mixture of Dutch, German, Latin, Turkish, and Italian. He later became the mayor of Harderwijk, and the first librarian of its university.

Contributed by Victoria Nyst

Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678)

Anna Maria van Schurman was not, strictly speaking, an international student at Leiden, but she is nevertheless worth including on this list since she is considered a trailblazer and an intellectual force of her day. Born in Cologne, van Schurman started learning Latin in her youth and excelled at it. She acquired fluency in 14 languages and published poetry, prose, and treatises. She exchanged scholarly ideas in correspondence with several Leiden professors, including Andreas Rivet and Frederic Spanheim (Van Beek 2013: 271). Though women were not allowed to study at universities in The Netherlands at the time, van Schurman convinced officials at Utrecht University to let her attend lectures behind a screen (Maley 2022: 36). In his eulogy of van Schurman, Isaac Bullart claimed that she requested from Leiden’s Academy of Directors an elevated platform from which she could watch lectures at Leiden without anyone seeing her, although as Anne R. Larsen (the editor of this eulogy) notes, Bullart may have been thinking about van Schurman’s time at Utrecht. In The Learned Maid or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar, Schurman argued on moral and philosophical grounds that women deserved access to higher education.

Contributed by Krista A. Milne

Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702)

Born in Sweden, Olaus Rudbeck was an influential writer, historian, linguist, and doctor. Among his many contributions to medicine, Rudbeck conducted ground-breaking research into the lymphatic system. Thanks to his medical discoveries, Rudbeck received funding from the court of the Swedish Queen to travel to Leiden University to study anatomy. Rudbeck’s time at Leiden shaped some of his later pursuits. It was the anatomical theatre in Leiden, for example, that inspired Rudbeck in 1662-1663 to create an anatomical theatre for Uppsala University. Rudbeck also admired the botanical gardens at Leiden and later founded the first botanical garden at Uppsala University.

Contributed by Anonymous

Benjamin Waterhouse (1754–1846)

After an apprenticeship in medicine in Rhode Island, Benjamin Waterhouse traveled to Europe to study medicine at Leiden University, submitting his thesis in 1780. Upon his return to the United States, he joined two other doctors in founding the medical school at Harvard University, where he would serve as professor until 1814. He is best known for bringing the smallpox vaccine to the United States, testing it first on his own family and then in trials at Harvard. He would go on to tirelessly promote the use of vaccines in the United States, a battle that is still ongoing.

Contributed by Jessie Morgan-Owens

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848)

While at Leiden, Waterhouse offered to share a room with John Quincy and Charles Adams, the young sons of John Adams (the second president of the United States), who was in Europe to raise support for a peace treaty that would secure American independence from Great Britain. John Quincy Adams matriculated to Leiden University in 1780 at the age of thirteen to study classics and the law. He withdrew from Leiden without a degree, as he was called upon to be the U.S. envoy to Russia in 1781 when only 14 years of age. Adams completed his degree in law at Harvard in 1787. After a long and storied career in diplomacy, Adams served the United States as Senator, Secretary of State, as the sixth U.S. President, from 1825-1829, and as a congressman in the House of Representatives, the only former president to seek election to this office. Adams held a complicated political stance that transcended party affiliation. He followed his mother Abigail Adams’s political beliefs in the abolition of slavery, Indigenous rights, and the rights of women; however, his most lasting contribution as a politician was his advocacy of American expansionism.

“Johnny”, as he was known in school, wrote to his mother of his time in Leiden that “I am now at the most celebrated university in Europe…” Both Adams and Waterhouse would take note of their educational experiences at Leiden to support the development of Harvard University and Brown University in the United States, where both men held appointments in Logic and Medicine, respectively.

Contributed by Jessie Morgan-Owens

Molara Ogundipe (1940-2019)

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Molara Ogundipe is considered one of the foremost writers of African feminism and literary criticism. As well as a writer, she was a social critic and educator, teaching English Studies, Writing, Comparative Literature and Gender at universities across the world, eventually becoming Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State Nigeria. During her time at Leiden, she completed a doctoral dissertation in narratology, or the theory of how stories are told. This allowed Ogundipe to develop her thinking on the powerful role of writing in transforming cultural prejudices, emancipatory movements, and social change, leading to her assertion that the primary commitment of the feminist writer should be the correction of the false images of the woman in Africa. Her push for an African-centred feminism, or “Stiwanism”, is outlined in her book Recreating Ourselves (1994).

Contributed by Ruth A. Clemens

Elisa Loncón Antileo (1963-)

Born in Chile, Elisa Loncón Antileo is a linguist and indigenous rights activist, who received her PhD in Linguistics at Leiden University. She belongs to the Mapuche group, an indigenous population of Chile and Argentina. In 2021, Loncón was elected president of Chile’s Constitutional Convention. She is a strong advocate for the Mapuche people and the Mapudungún language. Over the years, Loncón studied linguistics and literature at various institutions, including the University of la Frontera and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. At Leiden, Loncón contributed to a broader community of scholars working on descriptive linguistics and indigenous languages while she worked on her PhD. In 2017, Loncón defended her thesis entitled, The Creative Ability of the Mapudungun and the Origin of Neologisms in Leiden University’s academy building.

Contributed by Vuslat Topal

© Krista A. Milne, all individual contributors and Leiden Arts in Society Blog, 2025. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Krista A. Milne, individual contributors and Leiden Arts in Society Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Sources and Further Reading

Beek, Pieta van. “Alpha Virginum: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678).” In Early Modern Women Writing Latin, edited by Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey (New York: Routledge, 2013), 271-293.

Dijkhuis, Hans. Descartes: Zijn Nederlandse jaren. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & van Gennep, 2022.

“Elisa Loncon: The decolonization of language” interview by Revista Universitaria, UC Chile News, 30 July 2021.

“Ernst Brinck - Canon van Nederland” (Webpage in Dutch), accessed 2 April 2025.

Joby, Christopher. The Dutch Language in Britain (1550-1702): A Social History of the Use of Dutch in Early Modern Britain. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Larsen, Anne R. Anna Maria van Schurman, “The Star of Utrecht”: The Educational Vision and Reception of a Savante. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.

Maley, Willy. “Knowledge Exchange in the Seventeenth Century: From the Third University to the Royal Society.” In Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900, edited by Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 24-43.

Neville, Kristoffer. "History and Architecture in Pursuit of a Gothic Heritage." In The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture, edited by Karl A.E. Enenkel and Konrad Adriaan Ottenheym. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Rudolf, Winfried, and Stephen Pelle. “Friedrich Lindenbrog’s Old English Glossaries Rediscovered.” Anglia 139, no. 4 (t2021): 617–672.

Swan, Claudia. "Memory’s Garden and other Wondrous Excerpts: Ernst Brinck (1582–1649), Collector." Kritische berichte-Zeitschrift für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften 40, no. 3 (2012): 5-19.

Vollbrecht, Melanie. “Early Modern Manuscripts Containing Old English Dictionaries in England and Northern Germany: From John Joscelyn to Dietrich von Stade.” In Keys to the History of English: Diachronic Linguistic Change, Morpho-Syntax and Lexicography, edited by Thijs Porck, Moragh S. Gordon and Luisella Caon. John Benjamins, 2024.

Wilson, Charles. Holland and Britain. London: Collins, 1946.