Is it possible that my sister […] has had a baby?: The Early Years of Marriage as a Transition from Girlhood to Womanhood in the Letters of Three Generations of Orange-Nassau Women

‘Is it possible that my sister […] has had a baby?’¹ This was the reaction of Charlotte-Brabantine of Orange-Nassau (aged sixteen) when she heard that her sister Elisabeth (aged nineteen) had given birth to her first child. Elisabeth had married Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Duke of Bouillon, in February 1595 in his sovereign principality of Sedan. Charlotte-Brabantine and their stepmother Louise de Coligny, who had accompanied Elisabeth to Sedan, were back at home in The Hague. Charlotte-Brabantine’s apparently spontaneous exclamation comes to us indirectly, passed on to Elisabeth by her husband, who had been in The Hague in October