Vrouwekerk

The Vrouwekerk ("Lady's Church") or Vrouwenkerk ("Ladies' Church"), originally known as the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk ("Church of Our Lady"), was a 14th-Century church in the Dutch city of Leiden. In the early 17th Century, the church was attended by the Pilgrims (who left Leiden to settle in Plymouth Colony) as well as by the first colonists to settle on Manhattan.

The ruined remains of this Gothic church are located on the Vrouwenkerkhof square opposite Museum Boerhaave, just north of the busy shopping street Haarlemmerstraat. The alley Vrouwenkerksteeg, which runs from the Haarlemmerstraat to the Vrouwenkerkhof, is also named after the Vrouwekerk church. The church remains have rijksmonument (national monument) status. In 2008-2009 the church underwent restoration.

Carolus Clusius and Joseph Justus Scaliger were buried in the Vrouwekerk.

Around the year 1300 a chapel devoted to the Virgin Mary was built to the northwest of Leiden, in the hamlet of Maredorp. In 1325 a bridge was built across the Rhine and Leiden expanded across the river to encompass Maredorp. As a result, in the mid-14th Century the chapel was enlarged into a stone church called Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk ("Church of Our Lady") and in 1365 the church, originally part of the parish of Oegstgeest, became a parish church. The church was further enlarged in 1406 and a walled churchyard was built.

The church contained chapels for various guilds. The chapel of the surgeons' guild, for instance, was devoted to Cosmas and Damian. A triptych painted by Cornelis Engebrechtsz., now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, probably served as altarpiece of this chapel.

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