Marijke Spies (1934–2013)

Marijke Spies was born in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and attended the Lorentz Lyceum. After graduating in 1951 she went to Brussels for a year to learn French. She then studied architecture at Delft University of Technology, but dropped out before finishing her degree and went on a world tour. When she returned home, she enrolled at Utrecht University, from which she graduated in 1961.

The following year, she joined the faculty of the university's Dutch Studies Department, specializing in older literature. She published her first book, De krisis in dehistoric Neerlandistiek, on the methodology of literary history, in 1973. In 1979, she obtained her doctorate and began to publish many scholarly articles that were considered groundbreaking within historical Dutch studies. She focused on Renaissance rhetoric and poetics and many authors from the 16th and 17th centuries.

She was a strong supporter of an interdisciplinary research culture. In 1985, she co-founded the Seventeenth Century Working Group, an interdisciplinary collaboration that also published the magazine De Zeventiende Eeuw. From 1985 to 1991, she was secretary of the magazine. In 1992, she was appointed professor of the History of Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam and in 1994 became professor of Old Dutch Literature at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University). In 1999, together with historian Willem Frijhoff, she published 1650: Conquered Unity, about cultural relations between the Netherlands and other European countries. When she retired in the same year, her English studies were collected in a volume called Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics.

She remained professionally active and served president of the Association of Literary Scholars from 2001 to 2004. She also contributed to part two of The History of Amsterdam, published by Frijhoff in 2004.

In 2004, Prof. Spies made her debut as a fiction writer with a successful novel, An Innocent Family.
Although she had objections to Russian Communism, she became a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN). She remained a member when the party merged with three other left-wing parties into GroenLinks.