Kasteel Endegeest

Kasteel Endegeest is situated in South Holland, in the commune of Oegstgeest, near the city of Leiden, on the road from that city to Haarlem.

The earliest mention of a castle at this place dates from 1307. René Descartes lived there from 31 March 1641 to May 1643. He was able to afford the rent thanks to the estate of his father, who died on 17 October 1640. The owners at the time were a family of Catholic nobles, the van Foreest. It was during this period that he published the Meditations on First Philosophy (1st edition in Paris on 28 August 1641; 2nd in Amsterdam in 1642) and worked on the Principles of Philosophy (published in Amsterdam in 1644). He received several friends there (notably Claude Picot, the abbé de Touchelaye, the libertine poet Jacques Vallée Des Barreaux, Samuel Sorbière, Henricus Regius, etc.), and various notable figures, among them Comenius.

According to a hypothesis of Charles Adam, the unfinished dialogue The Search for Truth by the Natural Light was written at Endegeest during the summer of 1641; the "country house" referred to in the prologue is the castle, the two visitors Epistemon and Polyander are Picot and Des Barreaux, and Eudoxus is Descartes himself. In May 1643 the philosopher left Endegeest to settle at Egmond aan den Hoef.

The present building is slightly later: it was built between 1647 and 1651. It was bought by the municipality of Leiden in 1896, and a psychiatric hospital was established there.

Machine-translated from “Château d'Endegeest” on the French Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Kasteel Endegeest ranks #6,020 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #84 of the 201 mapped in Netherlands. Founded c. 1400, it is older than 53% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 604 atlas entries founded in the 14th century. 18 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is The Hague, 15 km away. See how Netherlands compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in French) ↗