Justine Constance Wirix-van Mansvelt (22 December 1876 – 18 August 1937) was a Dutch Protestant expert on the oeuvre of the Italian poet and writer Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Birth Justine Constance van Mansvelt was born in Schoonhoven as the second child of Rinse van Mansvelt, who retired with the rank of artillery major, and Augustina Maria Wilhelmina Slingeland. Their first child, Justine's brother George Louis, died very young. Justine's ancestors clearly had a vivid interest in literature. Her grandfather from mother's side, the magistrate Leendert Slingeland (husband of Geertruy Hoek), was a former literature student and worked on behalf of the Schoonhoven residents at the placing of the new statue of Laurens Janszoon Coster (ca. 1370–1440) at the Grote Markt in Haarlem. Dutchman Coster was at that time thought to be the inventor of the printing press. Two of Justine's great-grandfathers played a small role in the literary scene of the Netherlands: On her father's side this was the artistic Utrecht lawyer Anthony Jan van Mansvelt, who must have known the 18th century Dutch poet Jacobus Bellamy (1757–1786) personally. He painted the two Bellamy portraits, now in the collections of the Zeeuws Archief at Middelburg and the maritime museum MuZEEum at Vlissingen. On her mother's side this was Melchior Hoek, an ennobled infantry officer in Napoleon's Grande Armée, who wrote his memoirs about his experiences of the Russian and German campaigns. Parts of this document were published during his lifetime. Justine's paternal great-grandfather Rinse Koopmans, a Professor at the Mennonite Seminary in Amsterdam, played a more substantial role in the literary scene. This near ancestor published in the literary and cultural magazine Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen (1804) about the 17th century works of Dutch men of letters. Faith Justine had a Protestant background. Later in her life, she chose for the Walloon church, a Dutch Reformed denomination. In the way the relatives on her mother's side of the family believed, there was room for specific notions about the afterlife. It is very likely that grandfather Leendert Slingeland, during his Leiden study, had visited lectures of history teacher Willem Bilderdijk (1756–1831), in the Netherlands a celebrated poet and a contemporary of the English poet and mystic William Blake (1757–1827). Bilderdijk wrote a mourning poem on Julius Willem Bilderdijk, his twenty-year-old son who perished at sea, stretching his poetic text into the hereafter. His rhyming declamation De Geestenwareld (1811) mentions celestial beings looking after