Twice ToldGuicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567): the sea-woman of Haarlem
- Language
- Italian
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 10 October 2026
A Florentine merchant in Antwerp, Guicciardini wrote a description of the Low Countries that was reprinted and translated for decades. In the entry for Haarlem, after the claim that printing was invented there, he gives the sea-woman, citing “il Meier” (Jacob Meyer of Flanders), the annals of Holland and common report. The Dutch translation printed in Amsterdam in 1612 (p. 202, right column) gives the same passage as “een Meerminne oft Zeewijf” and notes Meyer, book 14, in the margin.
In questa terra (secondo che narra il Meier, & che affermano gli annali d’Hollanda, & la publica voce) fu condotta l’anno M.CCCC.III. una donna marina nuda, & mutola, stata presa in un lago d’Hollanda, doue dal Mare per tempesta fu sbattuta. La qual’ donna uestirono, & auuezzarono a mangiar’ pane, latte & altro: apprese poi a filare, & a fare altri seruigi, faceua honore, & riuerenza alla croce, & altre cirimonie, che ella alla padrona uedeua fare, & uisse molti anni sempre mutola.
Translation
In this town (as Meyer tells it, and as the annals of Holland and common report affirm) a sea-woman, naked and mute, was brought in the year 1403, taken in a lake of Holland where the sea had driven her in a storm. They dressed her and accustomed her to eating bread, milk and other food; she then learned to spin and to do other chores, and she honoured and revered the cross and performed other ceremonies that she saw her mistress perform, and she lived many years, always mute.
Notes
“Mutola” is the new word here: the Latin chronicle and the Divisiekroniek say only that nobody understood her. “La padrona” is not called a widow on this page of the Italian; the Dutch of 1612 adds “welcke een weduwe was” (who was a widow). The year is printed M.CCCC.III. Guicciardini goes on to a “huomo marino” caught in the Frisian sea about forty years earlier, and to a marine bishop of 1531. Meyer’s own text was not found.