"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Vanhaelen, Engeline Christine"@en . "2009-07-03T21:43:57Z"@en . "1999"@en . "Doctor of Philosophy - PhD"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "This thesis examines the remarkable range of farcical prints that were marketed for 1\r\nchildren in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Evoking controversial theatre plays, these\r\nprints picture slap-stick, sexually nuanced comic scenarios that do not seem in keeping with\r\ncontemporary' convictions that the up-bringing of children was a key means to secure the future\r\nof the state. Yet there is evidence to indicate that this printed imagery did play a role in the\r\neducation of middle-class children. Such contradictions open up significant questions about the\r\nreshaping of middle-class identity at a crucial moment in the emergence of the capitalist state.\r\nIndeed, the problem that this study investigates emerges from late seventeenth-century\r\ndebates about the didactic function of comic prints and plays. Defenders of these forms argued\r\nthat they effectively inculcated social norms-particularly mercantile ethics, gender roles, and\r\nclass distinctions\u00E2\u0080\u0094in young viewers. Those who attacked the social role of this material, on the\r\nother hand, stated that it provided viewing pleasures that actually subverted these pedagogical\r\nintentions.\r\nThrough an analysis of the prints themselves, I examine the ways in which the visual\r\npleasures of these forms lured viewers in order to trap them within moral meanings. While this\r\nmay have been their intended function, however, I also found much evidence that the\r\nenjoyment of farcical forms could, and did, overflow didactic restraints.\r\nIt was this subversive potential that made comic forms particularly threatening to civic\r\nand church leaders of the day. In fact, a number of children's prints were linked to a series of\r\nfarces that were banned from Amsterdam's theatre in the 1670's. With this, children's prints can\r\nbe situated in historically specific contests about the control of urban spaces and populations.\r\n\r\nThroughout this thesis, the function of children's prints is not discussed solely in terms\r\nof either discipline or subversion, however. Rather, I argue that it is precisely the unresolved\r\ntension between comic pleasure and didactic instruction that characterizes these prints and their\r\nuses."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/10127?expand=metadata"@en . "68617175 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "GUILTY PLEASURES: T H E USES OF FARCICAL PRINTS FOR CHILDREN IN E A R L Y MODERN A M S T E R D A M by ENGELTNE CHRISTINE V A N H A E L E N B.A., University of Western Ontario M . A., University of British Columbia A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE F A C U L T Y OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Fine Arts; Art History Program) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA August 1999 \u00C2\u00A9 Engeline Christine Vanhaelen, 1999 in presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date i m\u00C2\u00B0[. DE-6 (2/88) 11 Abstract This thesis examines the remarkable range of farcical prints that were marketed for 1 children in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Evoking controversial theatre plays, these prints picture slap-stick, sexually nuanced comic scenarios that do not seem in keeping with contemporary' convictions that the up-bringing of children was a key means to secure the future of the state. Yet there is evidence to indicate that this printed imagery did play a role in the education of middle-class children. Such contradictions open up significant questions about the reshaping of middle-class identity at a crucial moment in the emergence of the capitalist state. Indeed, the problem that this study investigates emerges from late seventeenth-century debates about the didactic function of comic prints and plays. Defenders of these forms argued that they effectively inculcated social norms-particularly mercantile ethics, gender roles, and class distinctions\u00E2\u0080\u0094in young viewers. Those who attacked the social role of this material, on the other hand, stated that it provided viewing pleasures that actually subverted these pedagogical intentions. Through an analysis of the prints themselves, I examine the ways in which the visual pleasures of these forms lured viewers in order to trap them within moral meanings. While this may have been their intended function, however, I also found much evidence that the enjoyment of farcical forms could, and did, overflow didactic restraints. It was this subversive potential that made comic forms particularly threatening to civic and church leaders of the day. In fact, a number of children's prints were linked to a series of farces that were banned from Amsterdam's theatre in the 1670's. With this, children's prints can be situated in historically specific contests about the control of urban spaces and populations. iii Throughout this thesis, the function of children's prints is not discussed solely in terms of either discipline or subversion, however. Rather, I argue that it is precisely the unresolved tension between comic pleasure and didactic instruction that characterizes these prints and their uses. iv T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S Abstract ii List of Illustrations v Acknowledgements x INTRODUCTION T h e C o n s e q u e n c e o f the T r i v i a l 1 The Audience for Farce 3 Consumption and/as Production 13 Spatial Stories 19 Pedagogical Processes 25 Notes 27 CHAPTER ONE T h e Uses o f C o m i c C h i l d r e n ' s P r i n t s i n P e d a g o g y 34 Small Saints in the Schoolroom: The Power of the Everyday 38 Farce as Weapon: Battling over the Public Theatre 50 Print and Private Life: Crossing the Threshold 74 Notes '. 86 CHAPTER TWO P l a y i n g the M a r k e t : T h e F o o l B e c o m e s a B u s i n e s s m a n 99 Merchants as Players 103 The Quack Who Deceives One and All 118 Madman or Rich man? The Deceiver Deceives Himself. 128 Notes 134 CHAPTER THREE H o m e T r u t h s : T h e B u s i n e s s m a n G e t s M a r r i e d 144 The Disciplinary Uses of Farcical Pleasure 147 Passion over Reason: Mercantile Marriage 163 Farce into Print: The Private Body 177 Notes 191 CHAPTER FOUR W h e r e D o B a b i e s C o m e F r o m ? T h e G a l l o w s F i e l d as a P l a c e o f O r i g i n s 203 Decomposing Boundaries: Mapping the City and Its Outside 208 Infant Bodies: The Other Within 222 The Genitals of the City: Maternal Excess 228 Conclusion: Children of Death ; 246 Notes 249 Bibliography 262 Illustrations 288 V List of Illustrations 1.1. Children. Here you See the Life of Jan and Griet. Catchpenny print published by J. Noman. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 288 1.2. Salomon Saverij. Schouwburg Auditorium. 1637. Amsterdam Theatre Museum ...289 1.1. Jan Steen. The Village Schoolroom, c.1670. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland 290 1.2. Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Ass at School. 1556. London, British Museum 291 1.3. Jan Miense Molenaer. Family Visiting a School. 1634. On loan to Staatliche Museen, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel 292 1.4. Jan Steen, The Village Schoolroom, detail 293 1.5. Jan Steen, The Village Schoolroom, detail 294 1.6. Salomon Saverij, Schouwburg Auditorium. 1637. Amsterdam Theatre Museum : 295 1.7. Salomon Saverij. Schouwburg Stage. 1637. Amsterdam Theatre Museum 296 1.8. Frontispiece, Petrus Wittewrongel, Oeconomia Christiana ofte Christelicke Huyshoudinghe (Amsterdam: Wed. M . Jansz Brant, 1661). Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit 297 1.9. Caspar Netscher, The Reading Lesson, c. 1675. London, National Gallery 298 1.10. Peter Paul Rubens, The Brazen Serpent, c. 1635-1639. London, National Gallery 299 1.11. Jacob Ochtervelt, Family Portrait. 1663. Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University 300 1.12. Jan Luiken, De Leiband. from Des Menschen Begin. Midden en de Einde. 1712. Houghton Library, Harvard University 301 VI 2.1. Advertising print of a tapir from the White Elephant Inn, 1704. From Jan Velten's Album, \"Wonderen der Natuur,\" c. 1700, p. 254. Universitiet van Amsterdam, Artis Bibliotheek 302 2.2. Jan Velten's sketch of a sea turtle, seen at the White Elephant Inn. \"Wonderen der Natuur,\" c. 1700, p. 174. Universitiet van Amsterdam-, Artis Bibliotheek 303 2.3. Jan Velten's sketch of a four-horned sheep from Arabia. \"Wonderen der Natuur,\" c. 1700, p. 155. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Artis Bibliotheek 304 2.4. Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, published by Jan en Jacobus Bouman, Amsterdam. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 305 2.5. Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, published by Ratelband and Bouwer, Amsterdam. Collection Boerma 307 2.6. Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, published by Kok-Van Kohn, Amsterdam. Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam 308 3.1. Here is the Career and Life. Of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. Catchpenny print published by Rood en Zoon of Amsterdam. Collection Van den Berg 310 3.2. Here Young People may View at Leisure the Career and Life of Jan de Wasser. Catchpenny print published by Ratelband and Bouwer of Amsterdam. Collection Boerma 312 3.3. Children. Here you See the Life of Jan and Griet. Catchpenny print published by J. Noman. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 314 3.4. The World Upside Down. Catchpenny print published by Ewout Muller of Amsterdam. Rijksprentenkabinet,Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 316 3.5. Title page, De Qua Grieten. Kluchtspel (Amsterdam: Erven J. Lescaillje, 1706). Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden .318 3.6. The Life and Career of Klaas and Griet. Catchpenny print published by Isaac van der Putte, Amsterdam. Collection Boerma 319 3.7. Title page, Cornelio de Bie, Jan Goedthals and Griet Syn Wyf. Klucht-spel (Antwerp: Wed. Thieullier, 1670). Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden 321 V l l 3.8. Frontispiece from Petrus Wittewrongel, Oeconomia Christiana ofte Christelicke Huyshoudinghe (Amsterdam: Wed. M . Jansz Brant, 1661). Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit 322 3.9 Jan Goedthals en Griet Syn Wyf. Image of Ratio and Voluntas, p. 3 323 3.10. Jan Goedthals en Griet Syn Wyf. Insert, woodblock print of a soldier, p. 10 324 3.11. Jan Goedhals en Griet Syn Wyf. Insert, watercolour painting, flyleaf 325 3.12. Title page, H. de Vrye, De Biegt der Getroude. zynde het Tweede Peel van de Tien Vermakelijkheden des Houwelijks (Amsterdam: H. Sweerts, 1679). Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden 326 3.13. Title page, P. Felicius, De Beurs der Vrouwen (Amsterdam: Sybrand Stepraed, 1690). Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden 327 3.14. Floraes Mallewagen. Crispijn van de Pas Younger, 1637. Kress Library, Harvard University 328 3.15. Catchpenny print of Spring in't Veld, published by the Heirs of Hendrik van der Putte, Amsterdam. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 329 3.16. Here you have the Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and his Wife. Catchpenny print published by J. Kannewet, Amsterdam. Rijksmuseum voor Volkskunde, Het Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, Arnhem .331 3.17. Children. Here You See Before You the Life of Our Klaas and Griet. Catchpenny print published by the Heirs of the Widow G. de Groot and A. Van Dam of Amsterdam. Collection Boerma .332 3.18. The New Jan de Wasscher. Catchpenny print published by H. van Munster and Son, Amsterdam. Collection Van den Berg 334 4.1. Detail from The Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. Catchpenny print published by H. van der Putte of Amsterdam. Collection Van den Berg 336 4.2. Volewijk. Pencil sketch by A. van Borssom. 1664. Rijksprentenkabinet. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 338 4.3. Map of Amsterdam. Panel painting by Cornelis Anthonisz, 1538. Amsterdams Historisch Museum 339 viii 4.4. Map of Amsterdam. Woodblock print by Cornelis Anthonisz, 1544. Amsterdams Historisch Museum 340 4.5. Amsterdam Harbour. Fold-out engraving found between pages 25 and 26 of O. Dapper. Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam. 1663 (Amsterdam: B.V. Buijten and Schipperheijn, 1975) ....341 4.6. Volewijk. Pencil sketch by R. Vinkeles, 1790. Atlas Dreesman, Gemeente Arehief Amsterdam 342 4.7. View of Amsterdam from the North. Print by Pieter Bast. 1599. Atlas Dreesman, Gemeente Arehief Amsterdam 343 4.8. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. Oil painting by Jan van Neck, 1683. Amsterdams Historisch Museum 344 4.9. Amsterdam. As it was before the year 1400. Engraving, between pages 31 and 32 of O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam 345 4.10. Amsterdam, with the enlargement of the year 1482. Engraving, between pages 37 and 38 of O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam 346 4.11. A Neat Mapping Out of the Old and New Order of the City of Amsterdam-Engraving, between pages 49 and 50 of O. Dapper. Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam 347 4.12. Amsterdam Maid. Engraved title print in Tobias van Domselaer, Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam van haar eerste beginselen. oudtheydt. vergrootingen. gebouwen en geschiedenissen tot op den Jare 1665 (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz Doornick, 1665) 348 4.13. Leviathan. Engraved title print in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 1651, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 349 4.14. The Seventh Pleasure of Marriage. Engraving illustrating chapter 7 of Hippolytus de Vrye, De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks. 1683, eds. E.K. Grootes and Rob Winkelman (Amsterdam: Querido, 1988) 350 4.15. The Ten Pleasures of Marriage. Engraved title print in Hippolytus de Vrye De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks 351 4.16. The Ten Delicacies of Marriage. Engraved title print in Petrus de Vernoegde, De Tien Delicatessen des Houwelicks of de Wederlegging van de Tien Vermakelijkheden des Houwelicks (Amsterdam: Thimotheus ten Hoorn, 1678). Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden 352 ix 4.17. The Ten Delicacies of Marriage. Engraving illustrating chapter 7 of De Tien Delicatessen des Houwelicks .....353 4.18. The Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. Catchpenny print published by H. van der Putte of Amsterdam. Collection Van den Berg 354 X Acknowledgements Thank you to my thesis committee\u00E2\u0080\u0094Rose Marie San Juan, Maureen Ryan, and Elizabeth Honig~for their invaluable comments and advice. This thesis was written with the aid of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Research in the Netherlands also was partly funded by an Art History Travel Research Scholarship, awarded by the University of British Columbia for the year 1995 -1996. In the Netherlands, my research was enhanced by the helpful suggestions of Rudolf Dekker, Arie van den Berg, and Nico Boerma. Thank you to staff members of the Universiteitsbibliotheek, R U Leiden, the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, the Arris Bibliotheek, U Amsterdam, the Theater Instituut Nederland, the Rijksprentenkabinet and the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam, the Museum het Princessehof, Leeuwarden, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, and the Rijksarchief Utrecht. I also thank my family in Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States for their encouragement and interest. The members of my critical theory reading group, Bronwen Wilson, Denise Oleksijczuk, and Silvia Musto read and offered incisive critiques of early drafts. Leslie Nordtvedt and Christine Kooi also were generous with suggestions and support. Most of all, I thank Ray Geurkink for his understanding and flexibility, his help with photography, formatting, and photocopying, and for the many sacrifices he has made in order for this project to get done. 1 Introduction The Consequence of the Trivial Although those who concern themselves with details are regarded as folk of limited intelligence, it seems to me that this part is essential, because it is the foundation...1 In the city of Amsterdam in the final decades of the seventeenth century, a number of publishers began to produce a new type of print. The title of one such print addresses the intended audience and introduces the subject matter: \"Children, With great pleasure you see before you / The Life of Jan and his Griet\" (fig. LI). The format is quite distinct: woodblock images are arranged in a gridded pattern, and beneath each image is a line or two of text printed from moveable type.2 This creates an effective vehicle for representing stories. In the first image, we see the protagonists, Jan and Griet, locked in an embrace (fig. 1.1-1). They are seated in what appears to be an inn. The table in front of them holds a large goblet and two plates; a violinist at the left of the scene is balanced by a large fireplace on the right. The accompanying text describes the image: \"Jan feels love for Griet, and fondles her bare breasts. Behind them is fiddler Piet, playing a love song, his very best\". While the explicitness of this may shock, it certainly works to draw the reader into the story. In the next image, the couple has moved from the pub to the church, where they exchange marriage vows in front of a minister in a pulpit. Theirs is not to be a harmonious union, however, for in the following scene an enraged Griet jumps up from her chair when Jan comes home late for dinner. This makes Jan furious; he tells her to shut up, and grabs the shovel and tongs in order to beat her into silence. Angry and obstinate, Griet manages to wrest the tongs from him. As she bludgeons him, she lets him know that he had better fear her. In 2 the next scene a victorious Griet holds up Jan's trousers, while the humiliated Jan wears her apron. Then he cares for the baby and spins while Griet threatens him with a cudgel. The final image is anything but a happy ending, for Griet beats Jan with a stick and pulls his hair because the cakes he is cooking have not risen. The bed behind them implies that Jan has been made impotent by his wife in more ways than one, and maybe it is not just his cakes that refuse to rise. This print provokes a number of questions about its production, distribution, and consumption. The title clearly targets children as potential buyers and readers. Initially, this appears to fit with the findings of studies arguing that early modern Protestants used print technology as an ideal pedagogical tool for shaping the morals and controlling the behaviour of children.3 Produced in multiples, inexpensive and portable, print allowed identical images and texts to be circulated to a large group. Thus the dissemination of prints for children seems connected with contemporary convictions that the rigorous upbringing of children was a crucial means to secure the future, not just of the individual, but also of the household, the city, and the Dutch Republic. The printed story of Jan and Griet explicitly disrupts such assumptions, however. With its confusion of gendered domestic roles, and graphic scenes of violence, sex, and cross-dressing, this print seems strangely out of keeping within the context of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, a city dominated by a primarily Calvinist middle class. Moreover, this print was no mere aberration. The holdings of Dutch print collections attest that prints of Jan and Griet were best sellers; numerous versions were issued by scores of publishers for well over two hundred years.4 These same printers also produced divers other prints which addressed children and portrayed similarly irreverent comic themes. Could such disturbingly captivating images really have been directed at children? Prompted by this body of 3 imagery, my project undertakes a rethinking of the connections between children, print, and education. For if to shape a child was to fashion the future of the Republic, what role might these widely-published comic children's prints have played in this process? Why did they first appear in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century? And what did children and their mentors make of this imagery? Such questions have not been asked of this material, and it is at the juncture, or disjuncture, between farcical prints and their intended audience that my study begins. The Audience for Farce Not surprisingly, scholarly literature has consistently linked the slap-stick, sex-tinged violence of these prints with the perceived immorality of their audience. Simon Schama's comments are representative of this trend. These types of woodcuts, he says, ...catered to the coarser end of the market-the same audience that still enjoyed the old-fashioned kluchtspel farces of domestic and peasant life when they could see them. And their contents were produced to formula, mixing recycled anecdotes with stock tales of gulled and cuckolded husbands, spendthrift wives who frittered away the family fortunes on whims and fashions.5 Some curious slippages occur in this brief description: prints for children become prints for the coarser end of the market, and the characters depicted in these farcical woodcuts could be confused with their buyers-gullible rubes who squandered money on whims. Indeed, \"catchpenny,\" a late eighteenth-century word most often used to classify these prints, is defined as \"something of little value, designed to attract purchasers; got up merely to sell\".6 To categorize a print as a \"catchpenny\" (or \"centsprent,\" in Dutch) thus seems to imply that canny printers directed cheap, frivolous material at an increasingly literate but unsophisticated audience with a few pennies to spend. 4 This argument is in keeping with approaches of the major works on these types of prints, such as Emile van Heurck and G. Boekenoogen's L'Imagerie Populaire des Pays-Bas: Belgique-Holland (Popular Imagery of the Low Countries: Belgium-Holland) of 1930; Maurits de Meyer's catalogue of this genre, De Volks en Kinderprenten in de Nederlanden fFolk and Children's Prints in the Netherlands) of 1962; and C F . van Veen's exhibition catalogue for the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, Catchpennyprints: Dutch Popular and Childrenprints of 1976.7 As even the titles imply, the folkloric approach of these studies locates Dutch children as a subgroup within a larger category: Dutch folk. Maurits de Meyer, to note one example, claims that it is difficult to distinguish between a folk print and a children's print because most of these inexpensive images were both for and about the masses, providing historians with a \"deep well\" of knowledge about seventeenth-century folk life.8 This conflation of folky children with childlike folk positions a somewhat uniformly \"popular\" group with their own cheap, crude and comic culture at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The efforts of these historical studies to establish exclusive relationships between distinctive cultural forms and specific social groups probably were influenced by seventeenth-century attempts to create a hierarchy of literary genres. While farcical children's prints do not emerge until the 1670's, it is important to consider earlier theorizations of genre, for throughout the seventeenth century, the division of comic kluchtspel farces from tragic drama was drawn along class lines. Cornells van der Plasse, who published the works of the comic playwright Bredero, mockingly laid out the following distinctions in 1638: Tragedies gave priority to dignity and stateliness, as was fitting for significant personages: kings, royalty, priests, magistrates, nobles, military commanders and such like; in castles, cities, palaces, town halls, armies and churches; and the language, like the characters, was also full of majesty and high-flown, the outcome bloody, terrible and important. 5 Comedies sprang lustily onto the stage, with lighthearted battles amongst the scum of the folk: shepherds, farmers, labourers, innkeepers, landladies, procuresses, prostitutes, midwives, sailors, spendthrifts, beggars and toadies; in fields, forests, huts, shops, inns, pubs, on the street, in alleys and slums, in the meat hall and at the fish market; the chatter that goes around there is true to life, and the outcome farcical and pleasant.9 According to van der Plasse, the contrast between the types of people, language and social spaces within each kind of play is clear: classical tragedy dealt with well-spoken upper-class people in remote and stately settings, while comedies about the everyday portrayed the rural and urban lower classes who inhabited a series of marginal sites associated with the vernacular. Intriguingly, the Republic's most dominant group, the urban middle classes, do not figure within this classification of people, genres, speech and space. This is not a mere oversight on the part of van der Plasse; indeed, this absence raises some questions about the consumption of these types of plays. For what was the precise location of the audience Schama describes: those at \"the coarser end of the market\" who enjoyed superficially attractive woodcuts and old-fashioned farces \"when they could see them\"? The implication is that this group was positioned somewhere outside of, or apart from, middle-class spaces of entertainment and education: perhaps in the bushes, huts, pubs and alleys described by van der Plasse. However, evidence about both theatre performances and print production in Amsterdam emphatically challenges the conclusion that farcical plays and comic prints were marginal forms for a distinctly lower-class audience. In fact, kluchtspel farces were anything but old-fashioned in the seventeenth century.10 To the contrary, these types of plays consistently drew large and diverse crowds into Amsterdam's public theatre, called the Schouwburg.\" Built on the Keizersgracht~one of the city's main canals-in 1637, the Amsterdam Schouwburg was constructed at a time of urban expansion, as the harbour city emerged as a prosperous 6 mercantile centre that increasingly dominated world trade. Along with other architectural monuments, the Schouwburg was proudly featured in a number of civic histories, published in the 1660's, that celebrated the city's accomplishments.12 Until the 1670's, the theatre was governed by a Board of Regents comprised of six prominent businessmen from the community. These men were appointed by magistrates of Amsterdam's city council, a group of patricians who were also mainly from the wealthy mercantile classes.13 Acting on behalf of Amsterdam's citizenry, and under the direction of the town council, it was the Regent's role to select which plays would appear on the Schouwburg stage. In a typical afternoon's performance, a tragedy about significant and dignified personages was followed by a shorter farce about the \"scum of the folk\". There is no evidence to support the notion that the Regents chose these comic plays only to appeal to the lower classes. While it is difficult to ascertain the precise make-up of the audiences who flocked to the public playhouse, given the low price of admission, it was undoubtedly a site where the consumption of plays was a practice shared by people from a range of socio-economic groups.14 Moreover, as I shall explore further in chapter one, official prints of the Schouwburg that were commissioned by the Regents in 1637 and republished throughout the century, pictured the theatre audience as a well-behaved, mainly middle-class group (see fig. 1.2). Farce, therefore, was anything but a peripheral form of entertainment that was for and about the folk. As I will argue, these types of plays were embedded in a mercantile middle-class context, where they certainly were directed at an audience beyond the lower classes. If farce performances reached a broad and diverse audience, so did inexpensive printed material. Almost all catchpenny prints display the name of the printer across the bottom 7 margin, together with landmarks that would help buyers to locate the print shop where they were sold.15 Loose-leaf printed images were displayed in print shop windows so that even the poor and non-literate could afford to stop and take a look. Peddlers were amongst the clientele; they bought inexpensive material from the printers and then resold these in the streets, and at markets and fairs.16 Repeated complaints by the bookseller's guild about itinerant hawkers who sold books, newspapers, songs, ballads, almanacs, prognostications, leaflets and folk tales in the public spaces of the city give some insight into the complicated distribution of inexpensive print.17 For example, in the mid-seventeenth century, the Amsterdam bookseller's guild protested: It is well known that more than ever complaints are heard among our guild brothers of the decline in the book trade...These complaints are legitimate, and can be redressed, namely, by STEMMING THE ILLEGAL BOOK TRADE. It is generally known that there are almost no bridges or canals without a table\u00E2\u0080\u0094in some places practically a shop-filled with books, where all can purchase books at a modest price, to their hearts' content.18 The fact that itinerant print sellers were perceived as unwelcome competition by the bookseller's guild implies that peddlers' wares were not restricted to the lower end of the market. Rather, the print peddler emerges as an urban figure who catered to and competed for the same clientele that patronized bookshops.19 Although the guild may have exaggerated the situation to argue their cause, their complaints indicate the extent of the print trade in Amsterdam, providing a glimpse of how the printing industry must have transformed urban spaces.20 Print was sold in the streets, on the bridges, and along the canals, posted on the walls of taverns, workshops and homes, carried on the person, passed from hand to hand and discussed in the markets and squares. Thus, printed material was visible and familiar to almost everyone who frequented the city.21 Like theatre 8 plays, print crossed social boundaries, making it impossible to link these forms exclusively with the \"folk\". Folkloric approaches that posit inexpensive woodcuts as repositories of folk beliefs and behaviour thus do not provide adequate methodology for considering this material and its audience. By constrast, I argue that the association of this material with a particular socio-economic group developed in response to an apparent dissimilarity between the prints and their audience. For imagery of the slap-stick sexual thrashing, deceit and disorder of controversial farces clearly does not fit with conventional notions of middle-class childhood. This disruptive discrepancy undoubtedly prompted studies that located the audience for farces and cheap prints in a group other than the middle classes. The notion of a separate and distinct \"folk\" serves this purpose well: stereotyped as hot-headed, wanton, lustful, deceptive, childlike and a-social, this group was often positioned as the \"Other\" of the middle classes, both in the seventeenth century, and in subsequent historical accounts.22 In this way, all of the characteristics that were repressed from \"burgherlijk\" cliches of modesty, frugality, cleanliness, honesty, and virtuous domesticity.could be projected onto a separate social group. The impulse to uphold notions of middle-class morality must account, at least in part, for the need to deflect these troubling images onto the Other. The definition of farce as both for and about the lower classes therefore works to preserve the integrity of the middle classes, who actually made up a large part of the market for this titillating material. Such an association also resonates with the widespread seventeenth-century notion that the ideal household was a model and molecule of the well-run Republic.23 At a time when norms of \"burgherlijk\" domesticity became central to the definition of national harmony, representations of the possible dissolution of the household abounded. The dangers of 9 exploring what must be repressed and avoided were mitigated somewhat by locating chaos, beatings and discord within the lower-class home. In this way, such images also worked to uphold stereotypes of a moral middle-class Republic. And yet, prints that graphically portrayed social disorder were given to middle-class children. To begin to understand this seeming incongruity, it is crucial to consider the peculiarity, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, of what has been described as a fixation on children.24 As Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, \"intense paternal observation of the young is by no means a universal practice. It is, rather, learned by certain social groups in particular cultures and ages.\"25 While the obsessive attention paid to Dutch children often has been interpreted as a show of fondness, this type of affection was always intertwined with patriarchal concern to scrutinize, supervise and discipline. In fact, the doctrines of Calvinism, the Republic's dominant religious tradition, taught that all children were sinful from birth, and thus in need of continuous correction and rigorous reformation. This doctrine meshes well with the principles of merchant capitalism. As wealth and social position became less hereditary, the fortunes of the household increasingly banked on the preparation and training of the next generation. Significantly, part of that education was received in the public theatre.26 The Schouwburg often was described as a school, and defenders of the role of theatre in urban life characterized it as a site set apart for shaping the morals and influencing the behaviour of civic populations, particularly children and youth.27 The social functions of comic plays must be considered within this context. The pleasures of farce were multiple; tantalizingly sexual and unrelentingly brutal, farce certainly allowed the vicarious experience of taboo behaviour. On stage, the twists of plot turned on deception, disguise and mistaken identity. Men could play 10 female roles, women acted as men, and lower class actors transformed themselves into magistrates, doctors or preachers. Such flagrant flouting of gender norms and social boundaries opened up ways for audiences to explore the mutability of their own identities. Indeed, if the complaints of seventeenth-century detractors of farce are accepted at face value, then this was its only function: farce freed the folk to emulate immoral performances. Yet, as I shall argue throughout this study, the intense pleasures of farce always worked together with powerful constraints, forming a highly sophisticated disciplinary apparatus. The public performance and ridicule of private transgressions on the stage prompted spectators to examine their own guilty pleasures, including, ironically, the enjoyment of farce. The discipline of self-scrutiny was combined with other diversions\u00E2\u0080\u0094that of projecting immorality onto stock comic characters, who were often lower-class types, and that of associating the enjoyment of the genre mainly with lower-class spectators. Thus these comic plays allowed audience members to examine complex aspects of mercantile society, such as increasing social mobility. At the same time, spectators could deflect anxieties about social changes onto stock characters who were safely positioned outside of middle-class norms. If this rigorous pleasure was directed at the middle-class children in the audience as a means of initiating them into social hierarchies, it certainly was intended to reinforce social norms of behaviour for adults from diverse social groups as well.28 Flexible, ambiguous, and satirical, farce lacked didactic closure, making it a potentially threatening form. Not surprisingly, throughout the seventeenth-century, various powerful groups fought to control Amsterdam's public theatre, an important space of education within the city, and battles about the role of the theatre in civic life often converged on the functions of farce. The year 1677 marks a crucial turning point in these controversies about comic 11 performances. At this time, Amsterdam's civic magistrates appointed several members of a classicist literary society called \"Nil Volentibus Arduum,\" or, \"Nothing is Difficult for those who Will,\" to the Schouwburg's governing body. With the backing of the civic government, this new group of Schouwburg Regents attempted to radically redefine the role of the public theatre in civic life by changing the make-up of the theatre audience. In treatises published by Nil, the Schouwburg was explicitly redesignated as a school primarily for the children of Amsterdam's most powerful families\u00E2\u0080\u0094the sons and daughters of civic magistrates, regents, nobles and the wealthiest merchants.29 The growing social and economic divide between this mainly upper middle-class \"patrician\" group and the city's middle-class burghers was a source of great tension in the final decades of the seventeenth century.30 Contests between these groups were manifested in struggles over various social sites, and the demarcation of the theatre as a space dominated by the elite is clearly indicative of patrician distancing strategies. Until this time, the Schouwburg had been represented as a space of entertainment and education for a predominantly middle-class group\u00E2\u0080\u0094an important site within the city where burghers and their children could gather to discuss and explore issues of importance to mercantile society. As they forcefully redefined the Schouwburg as a school for the children of the elite, the new Regents undoubtedly sought to consolidate the monopoly of an increasingly powerful and prosperous patrician group within this important site of assembly. Intertwined with the demarcation of an exclusive new Schouwburg audience was the alteration of the traditional Schouwburg repertoire. Most notably, the new Regents censored vernacular farce performances. As a member of the classicist society put it, the Amsterdam theatre was no longer a place for \"boorish stuff, full of vulgar Dutch sayings.\"31 Instead, as part 12 of an effort to fashion an international courtly identity for themselves, the elite actively promoted works of French classicism as part of the repertoire. By abruptly banning Dutch farce, a well-loved, centuries-old form of burgher entertainment,32 the increasingly \"Frenchified\" patricians undoubtedly struck a blow at ideals of burgher morality. In fact, a new genre of comic play came to the stage during the decades of Nil's greatest influence over the Schouwburg repertoire in the 1670's and 1680's. The stock comic characters of these updated comedies were no longer from \"the scum of the folk\", instead, these new plays featured the adultery, fraud and deception of immoral burgher characters in dissolute middle-class households.33 These pointed alterations to comic plays served to further denigrate burgher identity. Late seventeenth-century conflicts about farce performances are central to understanding the functions of farcical children's prints. For comic prints depicting the familiar antics of degenerate lower-class types probably first were published in Amsterdam at the time that traditional farces were censored from the Schouwburg. As these plays were banned as unfit for the children of the increasingly distant and powerful elite, this \"boorish stuff began to circulate in inexpensive prints with titles that addressed \"children\". Thus it seems that the sudden and striking appearance of prints that reasserted the censored grotesque imagery of vernacular farce in a new form for children came as a deliberate rejoinder to the censorship of this well-loved form of burgher entertainment within the public theatre.34 For nineteenth-century folklorists, these explicit images seemed shockingly out-of-keeping with ideals of middle-class childhood. For late seventeenth-century audiences, however, comic children's prints reaffirmed the efficacy of the disciplinary pleasures of farce, so a long central means of shaping norms of behaviour in mercantile society. 13 Consumption and/as Production Although it is difficult to link farcical children's prints to the political aims of any particular individual or group, they certainly seem to play a role in the complicated social and political conflicts that converged on spaces such as the theatre in the final decades of the seventeenth century. Given this context, this study places more emphasis on the functions, uses and possible understandings of farcical children's prints than it does on the intentions of specific authors, artists or publishers. Such an approach is also prescribed by peculiarities of the prints' production. For although the exact origins of these prints remain uncertain, the bits and pieces that serve as possible sources certainly disrupt any notion of a single artist or print-maker impressing original ideas onto the blank receptive space of the page. Rather, the manner in which these stories were created has much in common with the process of seventeenth-century paper-making. Paper was produced from the residues of disparate pieces of cloth.35 Bits of bedding stained with the intimacies of people's lives and rags of clothing that survived the bodies that wore them were gathered and combined together to produce the thick greyish sheets onto which these stories were imprinted. A fictional rag collector in a seventeenth-century comedy graphically describes the procedure: \"I find dirty old cloths, tattered rags soaked with puss and blood, that I wash and bleach in the canal, in my own way,\" he tehs the audience, \"And I sell them to Ysbrangt, who makes fine and rough paper out of them.\"36 In a similar manner, scraps of ephemeral oral stories, proverbs and sayings, theatre performances, and civic and social rituals were patched together to create something new: a printed picture story. Although it has been argued that oral culture is fluid, alive and ever-changing, while print culture is dead and fixed upon the page,37 the process of producing prints certainly calls 14 such distinctions into question. For printers continuously amended and updated these prints according to their perceptions of the changing interests of the print-buying public. Therefore, these types of prints can be understood as repositories for a complex of collective memories, which, like oral traditions, were oriented to the concerns of the present and were constantly adapted and transformed. The complicated production of these prints poses a series of difficulties for a study that attempts to locate particular images within specific socio-political conflicts. Although publishers' names were almost always printed along the bottom margin, the prints were never dated. Approximate dates can be established if printed material such as books survive bearing publishers' names in combination with a date.38 Even so, many of the prints produced by printers known to be active in the eighteenth century appear to be pulled from seventeenth-century blocks. It was not unusual for printers to borrow and lend successful woodblocks. Blocks were also bought up and sold off with other stock if a firm liquidated. And, in the absence of clear copyright laws, prints that sold well were frequently duplicated by competitors, who would carve their own copies of the woodblocks.39 Each small scene in a children's print was pulled from a single block, while the text below was printed from movable type. Thus printers could change the order of the blocks and combine old blocks with new text, or new blocks with old text, to alter or update the meaning of a print. All of these practices make it extremely difficult to name original producers or to assign precise dates to specific images.40 In fact, very few seventeenth-century prints of this type actually survive. To give a pertinent example, there is only one extant catchpenny print published by Jan and Jacobus Bouman, who were active in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century.41 Considering the number of images that could be pulled from a single woodblock, this indicates how extremely 15 ephemeral these forms must have been.42 It was an insult of the time to tell a printer that he or she worked for the \"kruidenier\"~sellers of spices who wrapped their wares in cone-shaped packets made from old prints.43 Treated as throw-away objects, inexpensive prints found many such reuses. Catchpenny prints specifically were associated with certain children's games in which users cut them apart and played with the pieces.44 The ephemerality of the objects combined with the persistence of the imagery results in a very partial picture of the range of prints that actually circulated in the seventeenth century. Because the visual conventions of these prints continued for centuries, addressed different audiences, had no named artists or patrons, and were copied by printmakers in varying social and political contexts, these objects do not fit neatly into existing modes of art historical analysis. In fact, they resist explanation in terms of pre-existing methodologies that focus on artist, oeuvre, style, movement, monument, or socio-political context. Pressing against these categories of investigation, the visual evidence of the prints themselves provokes questions that shift the focus of analysis to the ways that objects take on meaning as they circulate and become sites of social exchange. Therefore, this study examines audience interactions, uses and understandings of this printed imagery in order to determine the larger social and political interests at stake in forms that were inexpensive and ephemeral, yet tenaciously persistent. The uses of these prints were as ephemeral as the forms themselves, however. As Michel de Certeau has argued, reading is a practice that leaves few traces, and the same can certainly be said about viewing practices.45 Actual evidence of how people used inexpensive prints, or of how they interpreted the social functions of such objects, is extremely rare. There do not seem to be any seventeenth-century textual references to children's prints. There are, however, two oil paintings, Jan Steen's The Village Schoolroom, and Caspar Netscher's The 16 Reading Lesson, that picture children interacting with prints. These images, which will be explored further in chapter one, are both dated to the 1670's, and provide crucial commentary about the functions of children's prints. Significantly, both paintings register anxieties about this new genre and new audience, and emphatically demonstrate that an understanding of the consumption of print cannot be limited to the intentions of producers nor to the aims of those who used print to educate children. Given the few surviving seventeenth-century prints, the paucity of seventeenth-century commentary about them, and the fact that the same woodblocks could be reused for hundreds of years, this study also draws on evidence from a longer time span. There are two autobiographical references, both published in the nineteenth century, in which the authors actually describe their own childhood memories of comic catchpenny prints.46 A nineteenth-century social reformer, reflecting on his childhood, writes that scatological passages from children's prints would always be impressed in his mind where they could not be disentangled from his religious memory work. Deploring this jumble of comic and didactic images and ideas, he calls for the censorship of these prints.47 Here, evidence from a wider field sheds light on what surely would have been a central concern in the seventeenth century: what place did the sensual pleasures of farce have in Protestant education? When a nineteenm-century schoolmaster defends the uniquely Dutch character of these vernacular prints as \"worthy and respectable material to keep into old age\",48 we begin to get a sense of some of the possible merits of these prints for those who advocated their use in education. For the schoolmaster describes them as a preserve of authentic Dutch vernacular-significantly, one that was untainted by foreign French influences. These comments provide clues to how these prints might have been positioned in seventeenth-century contests between vernacular farce and 17 French classicism. Moreover, both references give insights into the historiography of the prints, indicating why they were taken up in nineteenth and early twentieth-century folkloric histories, which sought to describe what was considered a genuine national culture of seventeenth-century Dutch folk.49 Late seventeenth-century dissension about the influence of comic theatre performances on young spectators provides another key source of evidence about the perceived social functions of farcical children's prints. Although these prints are not mentioned in the theatre disputes, many commentators published their opinions on the uses of Dutch comic tradition in the up-bringing of children, and these controversies serve to illuminate some of the issues at stake in comic children's prints. Moreover, not only did these battles converge on the ambiguous uses of farce, but the satirical potential of this genre also was mobilized by its supporters to attack opposing groups, which may have been part of the initial impetus behind the circulation of these prints. Each chapter takes up the debates about the effects of comic theatre play on children, which were wide-ranging and complex, to investigate how comic prints directed at a young audience may have interacted in these contests. Exploration of the links between comic theatre and comic prints also serves to focus this study. Produced by hundreds of printers for almost three hundred years, the genre of catchpenny prints for children was extremely prolific.50 The format allows a range of subjects to be presented-different types of animals, soldiers, ships, trades and careers, street scenes, stories, proverbs, fairy tales, games-all could be inserted into the grid. However, a consideration of the subject matter of the earliest prints published specifically for children indicates the prevalence of themes from the theatre.51 The predominance of these themes at a time when vernacular farce was being censored from the Schouwburg points to 18 interconnections between the emergence of farcical children's prints and historically specific contestations about theatre play. Print provides a very different vehicle for farce than does theatre performance, however. Throughout this study it has been important to examine the various constraints that these printed forms imposed on their consumption. For the most crucial sources of evidence about both intended and unintended functions are the prints themselves.52 Prescribed meanings can often be deduced from the way that centuries-old characters and themes were altered and adapted into print in order to address the interpretive conventions and concerns of communities of readers. In conjunction with this, the titles, images, captions and format address a particular readership, implicitly and explicitly encouraging specific reading practices and understandings. The reaction of audiences to these strategies is more difficult to ascertain. Here, the proliferation of up-dated versions of certain printed stories provides important evidence to deduce both the preferences and interpretations of readers. Versions of the strange story of Jan and Griet, for example, were extremely successful; they were staples in the repertoire of almost every publisher of children's prints, and thus must have been well-liked by buyers of print. New versions of particular prints were often altered: printers combined old woodblock images with new texts, or had new blocks carved to up-date a familiar story. Other changes could be quite minute; alterations to the framing of a scene, the order of the blocks, or the wording of a title might seem insignificant, but even apparently trivial adjustments can often offer important glimpses into how readers may have defined their relationship with this material. For many of the ways in which the prints were edited worked to close off practices and understandings that were not in keeping with intended meanings. In this complex process of exchange between readers, prints and printers, readjustments to the forms, images and texts seem to answer to 19 rebel readings and uses. Here, eighteenth and nineteenth-century editing choices should not be discounted, for alterations made to later versions can reveal much about how seventeenth-century readers might have responded to certain images. For if pleasure and discipline converge in these forms, at times they also diverge, opening up a space for practices that differed from those imposed. The consumption of print thus cannot be opposed to the production of print.53 In the course of this study, reading and viewing practices emerge as creative acts that influenced both what was printed and how it was reprinted. Spatial Stories Finally, the stories themselves provide many insights into the social functions of these prints. For publishers never simply reproduced narratives from the stage in printed form. Editing choices were made about which themes, characters and settings were adapted into print. Moreover, familiar elements from theatre plays were combined with subject matter borrowed from festive traditions, social rituals, proverbs, oral tales, and visual representations. These traditional motifs were not just haphazardly cobbled together, but they were injected with new issues and characters, and the resultant forms were invested with new meanings and possibilities of understanding.54 Of particular importance are the ways that these printed pictorial narratives converge on specific social spaces. Controversies about the redefinition of the theatre, the home, the market, the harbour, and the city as an entity were extremely heated in the final decades of the seventeenth-century. As I argued above, this new genre of print first was produced around the time that the patrician elite took over the playhouse and censored farce performances, long a middle-class form of entertainment. With the closing off of these \"symbolic outlets and 20 expectations of spaces,\"55 to borrow the terms of Michel de Certeau, the proliferation of farcical prints appears as a move that both challenges the redefinition of this site, and keeps banned or threatened practices in circulation.56 In the final decades of the seventeenth century, the mercantile groups who once had commanded crucial social sites such as the theatre, the market, the harbour, and the city itself perceived that they were being squeezed out of them by an increasingly dominant patrician class. As economic historians have argued, the larger forces behind this shift, often termed \"the decline of the Dutch golden age\", were the new constraints of an international economy organized around state formation.57 Global forces were certainly a factor in the eclipse of Amsterdam as the world's largest trading centre. In a local context, however, economic decline was blamed on the new entrepreneurial practices of the elite, who were accused of preferring the easy money of speculative trading, often described as an effete activity, over the toil and hazards of sea-faring trade.58 As burgher identity became less central to the definition of Amsterdam's harbour and markets, many businessmen asserted that moral decay\u00E2\u0080\u0094specifically the abandonment of traditional burgher values\u00E2\u0080\u0094was the root cause of economic decay.59 As part of their attempts to redress a dramatic loss of power, it seems that this beleaguered group mobilized print, which is not constrained by boundaries of place or class, to keep traditional burgher forms of social critique\u00E2\u0080\u0094such as farce\u00E2\u0080\u0094in circulation. Each chapter of this study considers how interactions between these comic prints and their audience worked to define a series of social spaces and relations. Chapter One explores the functions of children's prints in connection to three sites of education: the public theatre, the schoolroom and the middle-class home. While there are few remnants revealing contemporary attitudes about the educational role of these prints, the evidence that does exist is characterized 21 by anxiety about the various pleasures they allowed. For if these forms were used to instruct children and thus fashion the future of a burgher-dominated society, they also offered ways for children to shape identities and futures that were not in keeping with the goals of mercantile Protestant instruction. Of particular concern was the ability of print to cross boundaries of space, gender and class, carrying the ambiguous imagery of farce beyond the theatre walls into places where its apprehension by a range of readers was not closely supervised and controlled. Chapter two takes up a specific series of catchpenny prints depicting an unscrupulous itinerant quack doctor who sells phoney wares in the market square. His huckster's stall doubling as a theatre booth, this trickster is also an actor. While the association of theatre play with marketing skills would have been familiar to a late seventeenth-century audience, these prints play on these connections. Exploring market practices at a moment when mercantilism was threatened by the increasingly place-less and time-less market of finance capitalism, they link theatrical artifice to the perceived duplicity of both itinerant market sellers and unscrupulous financial speculators. By mocking the extremes of unregulated entrepreneurial practices, these prints work to shape readers\u00E2\u0080\u0094addressed as \"boys\"-into critical and disinterested judges of mercantile ethics. At the same time, they also employ certain visual and textual devices that encourage readers to identify with the self-interested charlatan, covertly suggesting that deceptive ruses could be worthwhile tricks to learn. This certainly undermines ideals of a purely dispassionate moral merchant, and later versions of this print were edited to discourage this process of identification. However, the range of contradictory subject positions provided in the late seventeenth-century prints certainly works to hone the skills that young boys would need to prepare for their futures in an increasingly competitive market situation. 22 Rising tensions in the marketplace intertwined with anxiety about domestic life. Chapter three examines a number of catchpenny prints about married life that were addressed to both boys and girls. Like the trickster, the hen-pecked husband and domineering wife of these types of prints were adapted from centuries-old festive carnival figures and stock farcical characters from contemporary theatre plays. This chapter locates these children's prints within a peculiar historical phenomenon: the noticeable increase of satirical misogynist printed imagery in the late seventeenth century.60 It seems as if, when many misogynist farces were censored or banned from the public theatre in the 1670's and 1680's, their themes and characters were taken up in printed form. Adjusting familiar scenarios of a marriage-turned-upside-down to a new situation, this series of misogynist prints picture a market driven by the \"female principals\" of passion, greed and desire, and a home in which the effeminate merchant is dominated by his incorrigible wife. Such imagery seems to satirize the effete money-making practices of the elite. Moreover, as the uncontrollable forces driving the market were embodied as disorderly housewives, these images served to deflect anxieties about the changing power relations of public life into the private sphere. Directing imagery of violence and ridicule primarily at women, it is as if they seek to shore up a loss of middle-class control in the public spaces of the city by reasserting masculine authority in the home. Catchpenny prints of mismatched marriages that emerged at this time were continuously edited, adjusted, and republished for centuries. Thus it is also important to examine how this extremely persistent series of prints worked to socialize children by imposing the gendered division of public and private spaces and practices. Here, imagery that mockingly turns gender roles upside-down in order to regulate social practices actually betrays that gender 23 norms were not timeless and natural, but were continuously in flux and thus had to be repeatedly reexamined, revised, and reinforced. Not only this, but the gradual censoring of this print series can be understood as a response to readings and uses of the prints that were not in keeping with social norms. Thus, although the prints work to shape children into moral adults, this process does not follow a top-down model of power; rather, the prints themselves reveal that the education of children was a complex series of exchanges between the forms, their producers and their audience. A single scene from one of these prints of a marriage-turned-upside-down provides a departure point for an analysis of late seventeenth-century conflicts concerning shifts in the way civic space was defined through the workings of justice and commerce. Chapter four takes up imagery that is connected to an extremely strange folk tale about the origins of Amsterdam's children. These images picture the unruly housewife and hen-pecked husband sailing into the city with a baby they have just plucked from a special baby-bearing tree that grows on Volewijk, an island at the marine entrance to the city. Largely suppressed from interpretations of this story is the fact that Volewijk was actually Amsterdam's gallows field, used to display the gibbeted decaying corpses of executed criminals. Indeed, when looked at closely, the babies dangling on the \"baby tree\" clearly resemble corpses hanging on the gallows. Could it be that the residents of Amsterdam told their children that they originated, not just from the gallows field, but from the rotting cadavers of criminals? This chapter does not attempt to find the symbolic origins of this bizarre, almost unspeakable, story. Rather, it examines cases in which the satirical force of images and anecdotes that linked decaying criminal corpses, burgeoning maternal bodies, and the maritime borders of the city were appropriated in specific conflicts about civic, group, and individual 24 identity. Imagery of these rebel bodies at the city's edge was commandeered to disrupt the closed boundaries of new classical representations of the state city and to reassert the threatened identity of Amsterdam as a mercantile centre open to the flow of trade. In each case, official imagery responded to such attacks by repressing these bodies or replacing them with other types of bodies in order to deny the extremely disturbing problems that this strange story raised about the identity of Amsterdam and its citizens. Each chapter therefore examines the potential functions of these inexpensive comic prints for children. Emerging in the midst of complicated social, political and economic contests, these prints seem to snatch a moment in time in order to intervene in conflicts about space. Thus the resistance that these printed stories offer arises in battles between society's most powerful groups. If this was their intended function, then it is necessary to rethink Michel de Certeau's definition of everyday spatial stories as tactics used by the powerless against the powerful.61 For one of the ways in which these types of prints sought to rectify a loss of middle-class hegemony across a range of social sites was by viciously deriding some of society's weakest members. We have already begun to see how this material played upon and reinforced stereotypes of lower-class behaviour. A number of these prints-those of Jan and Griet, for instance\u00E2\u0080\u0094also were embedded in Netherlandish misogynist traditions. In this way, this imagery carefully guarded the boundaries of the social spaces depicted: their satirical appropriation of the marginal bodies of lower-class folk, itinerants, unruly housewives, effeminate men, and even pregnant mothers and decomposing corpses worked to maintain the social hierarchies of burgher society. For this was their primary purpose-by initiating burgher children into changing social spaces and practices, they attempt to seize control of the future of 25 the social order. The interventions of groups who were excluded from these power struggles were more fleeting and difficult to trace, and tend to occur in the ephemeral uses of print. Pedagogical Processes Central to understanding the operation of catchpenny prints in initiating children into the complex social and political issues of the day is Michel Foucault's argument about the consequence of the trivial in disciplinary strategies. In his analysis of the mechanisms for training docile subjects, the segregation of bodies in space is coupled with rigorous supervision of activity that defines every minute relation between subjects and objects within that space. As Foucault puts it, \"...no detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning it conceals within it as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it.\"62 In the course of this study, it became evident that there were several junctions within this process of manipulating small things that worked to complicate the operations of pedagogy. The first centres on the inability of powerful forces such as capitalism and Calvinism to set aside and control spaces of initiation. The theatre, the school, and the home were all contested spaces in the late seventeenth century, as different groups struggled to regulate the bodies within them. These conflicts betray a lack of consensus among those in power, and often point, not just to differences between the goals of the church, the state, and the market, but also to schisms within each. Social commentary about these concerns also converged on the aptitude of those appointed to supervise the up bringing of children. The abilities and motivations of schoolteachers, preachers, parents, and theatre regents to train the children in their care were constantly questioned and debated, indicating awareness of possible discrepancies between the mandates of institutions and the actions of actual authorities. 26 Another difficulty in these initiatory processes is the refusal or inability of the body to conform to disciplinary norms. Images and texts of this time repeatedly returned to diverse bodies within the category \"children\". Prints directed at middle-class boys, for example, betray that they were not a uniformly compliant group. Intense scrutiny also was focused on girls, orphans, peasants, lower class and very young children, defining them as particularly prone to disobedience and in need of rigorous correction. Anxiety about bodies that refused to become objects of power intertwined with concern about the potential power of objects. Catchpenny prints had their own social lives, which sometimes conflicted with or exceeded their prescribed role as inexpensive commodities with educational use-value. This points to the ability of printed material, particularly comic prints, to generate meanings and uses that potentially differed from their intended pedagogical functions. Thus this investigation of the uses of these trivial printed stories in the up bringing of children opens up considerations of the conflicting capacities of print in the forging of social order. 27 Notes 1. Marshal de Saxe, quoted in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 139. 2. This print is approximately 41 cm x 33 cm. 3. See, for example, Carmen Luke, Pedagogy. Printing and Protestantism. The Discourse on Childhood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 4. All surviving prints on this theme have been catalogued, both by subject matter and publisher, in Maurits de Meyer, De Volks- en Kinderprent in the Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e Eeuw (Antwerp: Uitgevers Standard-Boekhandel, 1962) 495-500, 514. The largest collection of catchpenny prints is housed in the print cabinet of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. 5. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987) 447. Schama discusses children's prints of Jan and Griet together with a series of inexpensive illustrated books that played on the same themes of married woe. 6. Oxford English Dictionary, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933) 178. The first english reference to the term-\"a mere catchpenny\"~appears in London Magazine in 1760. It seems likely that the nmeteenth-century folklorists who first took a scholarly interest in these prints coined the term \"centsprent\" as a Dutch translation of \"catchpenny\". In this way, the scholarship on these prints is intertwined with their denigration. These prints most definitely would not have been called \"centsprenteri\" in the late seventeenth century, since the \"cent\" did not yet exist as a unit of currency. 7. De Meyer; E.M. van Heurck and G.J. Boekenoogen, L'Imagerie Populaire des Pays-Bas: Belgique-Holland (Paris: Editions Duchartre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1930); C F . van Veen, Catchpennyprints: Dutch Popular and Childrenprints (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976). All of these authors published more than one work on this genre. See Maurits de Meyer, Volksprenten in de Nederlanden. 1400-1900 (Amsterdam: Scheltema en Holkema, 1970); Van Heurck and Boekenoogen, Histoire de l'lmagerie Populaire Flamande et de ses Rapports avec les Imageries Etrangeres (Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1910); and C F . Van Veen Dutch Catchpenny Prints: Three Centuries of Pictorial Broadsides for Children (The Hague: W. Van Hoeve, 1971). Print collectors Arie van den Berg and Nico Boerma are in the process of planning a new catalogue that will update the standard work by de Meyer. 8. Meyer 9-13. 9. De treurspelen hadden de voortocht om hun deftigheid en statigheid, als bestaande uit aanzienlijke personagien: koningen, vorsten, priesters, ambtluiden, edelen, krijgsoversten en diergelijken; op sloten, in steden, paleizen, raadshuizen, legers en kerken; en gelijk de personen waren de redenen vol majesteit en hoogdravende, d'uitkomst bloedig, schrikkelijk en van belang. 28 De blijspelen sprongen lustig op het toneel, met de lichtsten slag en het schuim des volks: harders, boeren, werkluiden, waarden, waardinen, koppelaarsters, snollen, vroedwijven, bootsgezellen, opsnappers, schooisters en panlikkers; op akkers, in bossen, in hutten, in winkels, herbergen, kroegen, op straat, in steegjes en slopjes, in vleeshuis en op vismarkt; de praatjes die daar omgingen, na den man, d'uitkomstem kluchtig en genoegelijk. Quoted in E.K. Grootes, Het Literaire Leven in de Zeventiende Eeuw (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) 64. As theatre historians have pointed out, the actual divisions between genres of plays were not always that rigid. Grootes 63-64. The differences and overlaps between comedy and farce have been analyzed by W.A. Ornee, \"Gezichtspunten bij de Beoordeling van het Zeventiende- en Achttiende Eeuwse Klucht- en Blijspel,\" Handelingen van het Tweeendertigste Nederlands Filologencongres 32 (1972): 132-140. 10. Ornee argues that the height of klucht production was from 1650 to 1750. \"Gezichtspunten\" 134. 11. \"Schouwburg\" was a new word, coined by playwright Joost van Vondel. It designated a place where burghers could come together to \"aanschouw\" (behold), and \"beschouw\" (contemplate). Ben Albach, Langs Kermissen en Hoven: Ontstaan en Kroniek van een Nederlands Tooneelgezelschap in de 17de Eeuw (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1977) 19. 12. See, for example, Tobias van Domselaer, Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam van haar eerste beginselen. oudtheydt. vergrootingen. gebouwen en geschiedenissen tot op den Jare 1665 (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz Doornick, 1665) 204-208. 13. Alfred Golding, Classicist Acting. Two Centuries of a Performance Tradition at the Amsterdam Schouwburg (Lantham, MD: University Press of America, 1984) 2-3. The standard works on the history of the Schouwburg are still C. Wybrands, Het Amsterdamsche Tooneel. 1617-1772 (Utrecht: J.L. Beijers, 1873); and J.A. Worp, Geschiedenis van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg 1496-1772 (Amsterdam: S.L. van Looy, 1920). 14. Archival records often indicate the presence of notable people\u00E2\u0080\u0094such as royalty or foreign dignitaries\u00E2\u0080\u0094at the farces. As for the poor, E.K. Grootes argues that the low price of admission was probably still enough to hinder paupers, who made up a large part of Amsterdam's population, from entering the Schouwburg. He argues that it was mainly middle-class groups who filled the theatre. Grootes 57-59. It is also important to note that the Schouwburg players became a travelling troupe in the summer months, performing favourites from the repertoire at markets, fairs and town squares where society's poorest groups may have been able to see them. On the fluidity of cultural forms usually classified as \"popular,\" see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) 3-12. 15. The roles of publisher, printer and seller where not strictly separate in the seventeenth century. In smaller printing firms especially, one person might do all three jobs. The 29 convention of including the printer's name and address is also prevalent in book publishing. Grootes51. 16. Craig Harline, Pamphlets. Printing and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987) 87-88. 17. A number of these complaints are quoted in A.C. Kruseman, Aanteekeningen Betreffende den Boekhandel van Noord-Nederland in de 17de en 18de Eeuw (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen, 1893) 468-474. 18. Quoted in Harline 88. 19. Roger Chartier discusses the role of the peddlar in \"Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France,\" Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. S. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984) 231. 20. The Dutch printing industry was concentrated in Amsterdam. At mid-century there were over two hundred known publishers and booksellers in the city. J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success. Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy. 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 316-318. 21. Roger Chartier's argument that printed matter was prolific and visible in seventeenth-century urban settings certainly applies to Amsterdam. See Chartier, \"Culture as Appropriation\" 251. 22. For an example of such stereotyping in an influential study of Dutch popular culture, see A.Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture. Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially chapter 7, \"The Natural Life.\" 23. Evidence for this view has been compiled and interpreted by Simon Schama in chapter six, \"Housewives and Hussies: Homeliness and Worldliness\" of The Embarrassment of Riches 375-480. Intriguingly, much of Sehama's evidence for the Dutch obsession with domestic cleanliness comes from late seventeenth and eighteenth-century sources. The question of how Dutch attitudes about domesticity may have changed at this time is currently being examined in a dissertation by Heidi de Mare. 24. Schama 486. 25. Stephen Greenblatt, \"The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and his Heirs,\" Learning to Curse. Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990) 86. 26. The observations of Henri Lefebvre are useful in thinking about the constitution of this site: ...all 'subjects' are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose themselves, a space which they may both enjoy and modify. In order to accede to this 30 space, individuals (children, adolescents) who are, paradoxically, already within it, must pass tests. This has the effect of setting up reserved spaces, such as places of initiation, within social space. Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 35. 27. There was some overlap between the terms children and youth, or \"kinderen\" and \"jeugd\". \"Jeugd\", however, was usually used to' designate children who had reached sexual maturity, but were not yet married. Theatre debates single out both as groups that required rigorous preparation for adulthood. Recent scholarship on issues of childhood is examined in Rudolf Dekker, Uit de Schaduw in't Grote Licht. Kinderen in Egodocumenten van de Gouden Eeuw tot de Romantiek (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1995) 11-21. 28. While the Schouwburg was described as a school for shaping the morals of Dutch children and youth, as noted above, the actual audience was probably comprised of a broad cross-section of the population. As I argue in chapter three, evidence of commonly-repeated proverbs and insults indicates that lower class people probably did not internalize the denigrating stereotypes of these plays, but did mockingly direct them at neighbours in efforts to impose norms of social behaviour. 29. Here it is important to distinguish between the intended and the actual theatre audience. There is no evidence to indicate that after 1677, the Schouwburg performances were only attended by the children of the elite. By defining the public theatre as a place dedicated to patrician education, the new Regents, many of whom were from this upper-class group, signalled the increasing power of their class in the city's social spheres. 30. While there was a degree of overlap between these groups, the social classes of the Netherlands have been divided as follows. The \"patriciate\" was made up nobles, regent families and wealthy merchants. The \"grote burgherij,\" or eminent burghers, included merchants, master craftsmen, high officials, doctors, lawyers and professors, while the \"brede burgherij,\" or broad burgher class, was comprised of groups such as small employers who owned their own house or business, wealthy farmers, skippers, specialized craftsmen, schoolmasters and preachers. The \"gemeene,\" or common folk, designated servants, employees, soldiers, sailors. At the bottom of the social hierarchy were itinerant groups such as beggars, vagrants, hawkers and peddlers. Bert van Selm, Inzichten en Vergezichten (Amsterdam: De Buitenkant, 1992) 65-66. Two works that deal with the increasing social distance of the patricians are J.C. van Dillen, Van Rijkdon en Regenten. Handboek tot de Economische en Sociale Geschiedenis van Nederland Tijdens de Republiek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) 461-480; and P. Spierenburg, Elites and Etiquette: Mentality and Social Structure in the Early Modern Northern Netherlands (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit, 1981). 31. \"...boertige stoffe, vol platte Hollandsche spreekwoorden.\" Quoted in A.G. van Hamel, Zeventiende-Eeuwsche Opvattingen en Theorieen over Litterature in Nederland ('s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918) 92. L 31 32. The importance of fifteenth and sixteenth-century farces to burgher identity has been explored by Herman Pleij, Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit. Literatuur. Volksfeest en Burgermoraal in de late Middeleeuwen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1979); and \"The Function of Literature in Urban Societies in the later Middle Ages,\" Dutch Crossing 29 (1986): 3-22. A crucial study of middle-class understandings of comic imagery from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century is Paul Vandenbroek, Over Wilden en Narren. Boeren en Bedelaars. Beeld van de Andere. Vertoog over het Zelf (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1987). 33. The late seventeenth-century changes in farces about immoral households are explored by Maria-Theresia Leuker in, De last van 't huys. de wil des mans...' Frauenbilder und Ehekonzepte im Niederlandischen Lustspiel des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munster: Verlag Regensberg, 1992). 34. Indeed, the playhouse and print shop were interconnected sites: both were centred on literary production, and a number of playwrights and actors also worked as printers and booksellers. Therefore it is not surprising that controversies centred on changes in theatre play would find their way into printed form. Links between the theatre and the print shop are explored in Grootes 17-19; and G. Kalff, Literatuur en Tooneel te Amsterdam in de 17de Eeuw (Haarlem: de Erven S. Bohn, 1895) 23. 35. On the paper-making industry, see J.W. Enschede, \"Papier en Papierhandel in Noord-Nederland Gedurende de Zeventiende Eeuw.\" Tijdschrift voor Boek- en Bibliotheekwezen 7 (1909): 97-111, 173-188, 205-231. Links between theatre, print and paper production in England, are explored in Peter Stallybrass, \"Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,\" Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. M . de Grazia et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 306-307. 36. \"Vijndt ich dan ouwe feylen, etterighe of bloedighe doecken, Die wasch ick en blieck ick op de Cingel, op mijn benier, En ick ventse aen Ysbrangt, die maackter van fijn en gros papier.\" Quoted in Enschede 102, from Bredero's Spaansche Brabanter of 1617. 37. W. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982) especially 33-77. 38. While it was common practice to use the same woodblocks for single sheet prints and for book illustrations, I have not found any evidence of the blocks from children's prints being reused in this way. Two sources that have compiled approximate dates of activity for printers are J.A. Grays and C. de Wolf, Thesaurus 1473-1800 Nederlandse Boekdrukkers en Boekverkoopers. Met Plaatsen en Jaaren van Werkzaamheid (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1989); and A . M . Ledeboer, De Boekdrukkers. Boekverkoopers en Uitgevers in Noord-Nederland (Deventer: A. Ter Gunne, 1872). 32 39. Printers usually hired artisans to carve blocks for them. The uses of woodblocks are described in Selm 15, and in E. de Bock, Beknopte Geschiedenis van de Boekhandel in de Nederlanden (Antwerp: N.V. de Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1943) 130-131. 40. Recent work by Nadine Orenstein on Dutch prints tends to locate printed forms within the familiar art historical framework of artistic oeuvre. I argue, by contrast, that prints actually disrupt categories such as artist, oeuvre or stylistic innovation. N. M . Orenstein, \"Marketing Prints to the Dutch Republic: Novelty and the Print Publisher,\" Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 28. 1 (Winter 1998): 141-166. 41. Meyer 81. 42. The woodcut process is described in L. Febvre and H.J. Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing. 1450-1800. ed. G. Novell-Smith et al., trans. D. Gerard (London: NLB, 1976) 92. 43. These were called \"puntzaken,\" pointy bags, or \"peperhuisjes,\" pepper houses. Grootes 7. 44. Meyer 19; Heurck and Boekenoogen 13-14. 45. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 169. 46. These are W.H. Warnsinck, \"Herinneringen uit mijne Kinderjaren,\" Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 2 (1849): 206-223, 383-396; and B.L. van Albada, Uit de oude en nieuwe doos. Herinneringen uit den school en het leven van een 80-jarige oud-hoofdonderwijzer. Ernst en Luim (Groningen: W. Versluys, 1875). Thank you to Rudolf Dekker for directing me to both of these references. 47. Warnsinck 210-211. 48. Albada 8-9. 49. Two nineteenth-century works that describe the national character of these prints are M . Kalff, Amsterdam in Plaatjes en Praatjes (Amsterdam: Scheltema en Holkema, 1878) 49-51; and G.D.J. Schotel, Vaderlandsche Volksboeken en Volkssprookjes van de Vroegste Tijden tot het einde der 18de Eeuw (Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1873) 294. Nineteenth-century interest in folklore is discussed by Peter Burke, \"In Search of Popular Culture,\" Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978) 3-87. 50. The numbers are staggering. Maurits de Meyer estimates that most printers of this genre owned the blocks to make at least one hundred different prints. Each woodblock could be reused thousands of times. Therefore, millions of catchpenny prints were produced. Meyer 10. 33 51. There are several series of children's prints that deal with similar theatre themes, but seem to have emerged quite a bit later. The history of Urbanus and Isabel, Jan Klaassen and Saartje Jans, and Kloris and Roosje, for example, were all late seventeenth-century plays. The earliest children's prints depicting these characters can be dated to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, perhaps as part of an effort to revive these plays as authentic folk tradition at that time. Meyer 514-515, 525. 52. On the critical intersection of works, their circulation, and their meanings and interpretations, see Roger Chartier, \"The Powers and Limits of Representation,\" On the Edge of the Cliff. History. Language and Practices, trans. L. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 90-103. 53. This important point has been argued in Roger Chartier's many works on early modern print culture. See his discussion of reading practices in The Cultural Uses 183-239. 54. For example, some the prints of Jan and Griet focus on issues of house-cleaning, which were new to the age-old theme of a marriage-turned-upside down; and although the quack doctor was a stock comic type, the character Tetjeroen seems to be an invention of print-makers. Roger Chartier describes this process of print production as a mixing of \"forms and themes, invention and tradition, literate culture and folklore.\" See R. Chartier, \"Texts, Printing, Readings,\" The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Chartier, trans. L. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 169. ' 55. DeCerteau 130. 56. Everyday stories, according to Michel de Certeau, are \"spatial stories\": they work to regulate changes in social space. Each re-telling of a particular story is formulated for a specific audience and its circumstances, and the insertion of even a small detail can change the function. As De Certeau argues, stories seize a crucial moment in time to strike a blow in contests about space. See de Certeau, especially chapter 6, \"Story Time\" and chapter 9, \"Spatial Stories\". 57. A recent summary of these issues can be found in J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success. Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy. 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 147-158. 58. De Vries and Van der Woude 156. As I shall argue in chapter three, distinctions between the ease of speculation and the hardships of trade also were gendered. 59. De Vries and Van der Woude 156. 60. Schama 668. 61. \"In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.\" De Certeau 37. 62. Foucault 140. 34 Chapter One T h e Uses o f C o m i c C h i l d r e n ' s P r i n t s i n P e d a g o g y To bring up a child is to shape the future of society. Beginning with this axiom, which may have been as widely repeated in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam as it is today, this chapter seeks to explore the role of catchpenny prints in the up-bringing of children. Comic prints with titles addressing children as both buyers and readers began to circulate in this city at the end of the seventeenth century. No sooner did this new genre and new public for print emerge, however, than they were censored, mocked, and trivialized. In fact, an analysis of diverse visual and textual commentary about the educational function of both farcical prints and the comic theatre plays that they evoked reveals that this material provoked a recurrent reaction of both pleasure and anxiety. What does this response of nervous enjoyment reveal about attitudes towards the conflicting potential of print and theatre? The purpose of this chapter is to investigate these attitudes as they were mobilized in political and religious contests to regulate social spaces set apart for the education of children, and thus to secure the future of the social order. I begin, however, not with the opinions of seventeenth-century commentators, but with a passage from the autobiographical writings of a nineteenth-century educational reformer. In 1849, Willem Hendrik Warnsinck, a retired sugar refiner, published his Memoirs of My Childhood, recalling his school years in Amsterdam in the late eighteenth century. In keeping with the agenda of the nineteenth-century Maatschappij tot Nut van't Algemeen. or Society for Public Welfare, of which he was a member, Warnsinck's narrative is a thinly-veiled call for reform of the Dutch education system. 35 Surprisingly, Warnsinck's recollections of his own, somewhat haphazard, schooling in an eighteenth-century Calvinist classroom draw attention to the uses\u00E2\u0080\u0094or, more accurately, misuses-of farcical catchpenny prints. And Warnsinck certainly does not remember these prints for their moral messages: In school we also had to learn to repeat good and useful things from our heads! The little books that we memorized were the questions of Borsius, and the Heidelberg Catechism. As reward for reciting the correct answers we were given prints. I can still see: the John the Washer and his wife; the history of Urban and Isabel; the history of Tetje Roen, and similar 'first-rate' prints. Jan here on his haunches sits, As he lets his child go shit, and Tetje Roen makes medicines from The cooking down of horses' dung These verses often came more quickly to childish minds than the sometimes very long answers of the Heidelberger. How curious, this jumble of ideas and images, as those rude prints mingled with the learned Catechism lessons! I don't really believe that the schoolmistress ever for a moment thought of this.1 As Warnsinck narrates, comic prints were given out in schools as prizes for correctly reciting the lessons of the Heidelberg Catechism and the work of Borsius, books which laid out the basic doctrines of Calvinism in easily memorizable question and answer format. Awarding memory work was a practice which undoubtedly functioned to encourage self-discipline by demonstrating that hard work promised material rewards. However, Warnsinck's memories of these prints are characterized by a push and pull between enjoyment and disgust. These prints, he says, are rude and need to be revised. At the same time, he can still see them clearly and quote scatological passages with ease, while remembering the laughter of replacing doctrinal memory work with these ludicrous verses. Warnsinck deals with this guilty pleasure by pointing to an irresponsible schoolmistress; due to her negligence, the farcical excesses of rude prints remained inextricably jumbled in the old man's mind with the didactic messages of good and useful books. It seems 36 as if Warnsinck's anxiety about the effects of this contradictory mishmash on his own sense of self prompts his call for educational reform: \"The earliest imprints of childhood work powerfully on our feelings and imaginations,\" he moralizes, \"and the traces they leave are not so quickly erased.\"2 If it was too late for Warnsinck to become a consistent and virtuous citizen, however, he still believed that with the rigorous censoring of school prints, the morals of future generations could be secured. And this is exactly what the Society for Public Welfare set out to do. Obviously, the aims of this nineteenth-century reform movement cannot be conflated with late seventeenth-century attitudes about education. I begin with Warnsinck, however, because his memoirs are an unusual source, articulating concerns about forms that are usually dismissed as both marginal and commonplace. Here, evidence from a longer time span may help to elucidate some of the specifics of these types of prints. First, Warnsinck's recollections of his childhood years reveal that although catchpenny prints may have been inexpensive, ephemeral forms, they also endured for a remarkably long time. Almost two hundred years after they first were published, comic prints were still being distributed to school children. The persistence of these forms in Dutch society is striking; apparently, they were known and well-loved by generations of children. And not only did these prints have exceptional social longevity, but, as Warnsinck's recollections attest, they also persisted in the minds of readers. Moreover, Warnsinck's impressions raise some interesting questions about the usage of comic prints in Protestant pedagogy. What was the appeal of these woodblock prints, still published and given out in schools long after they first were produced in Amsterdam's print shops? If these prints were so crude, why were they given to school children in the first place? 37 In whose interest was it to circulate these prints? If they were inconsequential, why were they a locus of reform: what was the threat of these prints for those who wished to shape children into the future of society? And how did children use this genre of print? While evidence of late seventeenth-century responses to these types of comic children's prints is scant, there is visual and textual commentary which allows an examination of attitudes and debates about the role of farcical prints and comic theatre plays in the up-bringing of children. These converge on three important spaces of education: the elementary school, the public theatre, and the middle-class home. As in Warnsinck's memoirs, these seventeenth-century sources also describe comic prints and plays as forms that were apprehended with pleasure. At the same time, and often within the same source, however, this material was repudiated as crude, disruptive, immoral, and even superstitious. This overlap between the seemingly contradictory responses of enjoyment and condemnation can be explored in terms of two methodological models that cultural historian Roger Chartier proposes in his studies of the uses of print in the early modern period.3 The first of these he describes as a tension between the constraint of freedom and the subversion of discipline. As the studies in this chapter demonstrate, both print and theatre were manipulated by authorities who wished to shape the identities and discipline the bodies of children. However, such attempts were continuously met with diverting tactics that worked to evade control. Late seventeenth-century commentary reveals an uneasy awareness that although print and theatre were effective means to regulate audiences, both also had the potential to disrupt relations of dominance, and could open up powerful possibilities for readers and viewers to shape themselves in a manner analogous to the role-play of actors. 38 A second related tension is characterized by Chartier as a push and pull between dissemination and distinction. Both theatre and print were forms that crossed socio-economic boundaries, reaching a broad and diverse audience. While a variety of social groups may have interacted with the same forms, however, this cannot be understood as a process of homogenization, for they often apprehended and appropriated them in different ways. As we shall see, in some cases the same groups who identified with comic tradition concurrently sought to distance themselves from it, associating farce solely with subordinate social groups in efforts to gain social distinction. Such contests between the imposition and evasion of discipline and between consensus and differentiation seem to evoke the peculiar anxious pleasure that recurs in responses to this material. If to bring up a child was to fashion the future, these interlinked tensions open up a consideration of the complicated, even contradictory, workings of comic prints and plays in pedagogical processes. Small Saints in the Schoolroom: The Power of the Everyday Jan Steen's The Village Schoolroom of c. 1670 (fig. 1.1), is a rare representation of children's prints in a specific seventeenth-century social setting, and provides a rich starting point for a consideration of these issues. Admittedly, it is somewhat unusual to use the analysis of a large oil painting to elucidate the specificities of print culture. Traditionally, historians of Dutch art have taken up prints as primary evidence, in some way closer to the life of the people, and used them to decipher the hidden meanings of genre paintings.4 I am interested in Steen's painting, however, not for its connections to authentic folk beliefs, but because it provides incisive commentary about pleasures and misgivings surrounding the conflicting capacities of print in the education of children and the forging of a moral social order. 39 For this complex image registers concern similar to Warnsinck's about the use and abuse of godly books and woodblock prints in the Calvinist classroom. The painting portrays the centrality of printed material in education, and indicates the increased importance of literacy and learning for peasant children in search of self-improvement. At the same time, Steen subtly mocks the efficacy of Protestant pedagogy by drawing attention to some highly improper uses of printed material within this rural schoolroom. In a notable departure from previous conventions of low-life painting, The Village Schoolroom thus takes account of the fact that although print may have been an effective means to shape morals and behaviour, it also potentially opened up ways for children to fashion identities and futures that were not in keeping with the dictates of a Calvinist upbringing. The Village Schoolroom is usually interpreted as a continuation of the satirical tradition of the sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and compared specifically to a 1556 print of Bruegel's The Ass at School (fig. 1.2).5 This image of a turbulent peasant school illustrates the proverb: \"Though an ass goes to school in order to learn, he'll still be an ass, not a horse when he returns.\"6 At the right of the print, a donkey bends over his papers, ignoring the candle and glasses on either side of him. As the verse by his head reads, \"What good is candle or glasses, If the ass refuses to see.\"7 Evidently, these aids will not help the donkey in his futile endeavour, as no amount of education could ever change him. This message is implicitly extended to the peasant children, whose grotesque misshapen bodies are grouped together in an unindividuated mass. Although most of them hold books and prints, the image implies that increased literacy would no more ennoble peasant bodies than it would change an ass into a horse. Those born peasants were destined to remain peasants, and, as this print indicates, to think otherwise was clearly ridiculous. 40 Although Jan Steen's painting is definitely in dialogue with the Bruegel print, it also pointedly departs from this tradition. Most notably, in Steen's barn of a classroom, the asinine are not those who labour in vain. Rather, the painting mocks those who waste time sleeping, fighting, and revelling. At the right of the painting a boy holds a pair of spectacles up to an owl perched next to a lantern, possibly in reference to the proverb: \"What good are a candle and glasses if the owl simply refuses to see?\"8 While this is clearly connected to Bruegel's proverb of the donkey, in Steen's school, the imagery of the unwise owl is not directed at those who foolishly attempt to learn. Instead, it is the unwilling pupils and their unobservant teacher who are ridiculed. By playing on the tradition of Bruegel, therefore, Steen indicates to the viewer that the fools in this context are those who do not grasp the important opportunities provided by education. The asses in Steen's school are the ones who neglect to learn the skills needed to propel them out of the rural classroom and into the increasingly competitive world outside. For in Steen's time, rural groups were moving in great numbers to the Dutch cities.9 While increased geographical mobility did not guarantee the social mobility of migrants, betterment was certainly an impetus behind the influx of rural peoples into urban settings.10 And although amove to the city could result in downward social mobility, the motivation of seeking a better life exerted a strong pull.11 To play on a proverb of the time-as Steen's painting does\u00E2\u0080\u0094for an ass to become a horse could no longer be dismissed as completely absurd. Steen's painting refers not only to sixteenth-century peasant imagery, but also to the \"low-life\" painting tradition of his contemporaries, especially the peasant schoolroom scenes of Jan Miense Molenaer, Adriaen and Isack van Ostade and Gerrit Dou. 1 2 Molenaer's Family Visiting a School (fig. 1.3) serves as an example that foregrounds some of the pictorial strategies of this genre. In Molenaer's depiction, the middle-class buyers of low-life paintings 41 are portrayed within the rural classroom, where their noble bearing, elegant costumes and well-defined facial features are in marked contrast with the ragged clothing, distorted faces, and misshapen bodies of the peasant children.13 As in Bruegel's and Steen's images, the social status of rural children as outsiders is manifested corporeally. Marketed for urban buyers, and hung mainly in middle-class homes, low-life paintings perpetuated stereotypes that constructed peasant identity as innately different, inferior and a-social.14 In light of the influx of rural groups into the cities, such images may have worked to mediate the infiltration of the mobile, aspiring lower classes, and the concurrent threat of blurred social boundaries. By emphasizing and ridiculing the subordinate social status of these groups, they attempt to keep them in their place~a place usually depicted as a separate, disorderly, rural setting. Yet The Village Schoolroom also plays with the conventional assumptions of these low-life paintings, possibly in response to the changing social relations of the time. For, unlike Molenaer, Steen emphasizes the connections between education and the social mobility of the lower classes. At the centre of his composition, a group of rural students carries books and slates to gather around the schoolmistress for instruction in reading and writing. If looked at closely, these industrious children seem to be metamorphosing. Although they wear the tattered clothes of the rural poor, their postures and facial features distinguish them from the unruly group around them. This difference is strdcing when, for example, the grimacing face and contorted body of the boy who stands singing on the table in the background is compared with the more refined stance and countenance of the boy below him who approaches the schoolmistress. When contrasted with the disorderly children around them, the industrious children at the centre of the image appear to grasp the potential of education to fashion futures and identities beyond determinations of class. 42 With this comparison, we see that two different politics of the body are brought into play in this painting. One strategy, which draws on previous visual traditions, projects negative stereotypes onto peasants, constructing them as a naturally subordinate group who dwell outside of middle-class milieus. Alongside this, however, Steen demonstrates how, with rigorous training, unruly rural children could be converted into submissive and productive citizens.15 Significantly, The Village Schoolroom indicates the centrality of printed material and literacy in this process of transformation. As the obedient children look on, the attentive schoolmistress teaches a child to read from a small book. While in Bruegel's image, identity is determined by birth (once an ass, always an ass), Steen's painting implies that only those who refused to work diligently to better themselves would remain peasants. Of course, within this construct, success is equated with the perceived middle-class values of industry, reason, and ambition. This repositions stereotypes of lower-class rural identity as the result rather than the cause of negative cultural traits. In this way, while this painting may acknowledge the new fluidity of class relations, it concurrently places limits on social mobility. The Village Schoolroom therefore marks a break with the past\u00E2\u0080\u0094a moment of rupture when received wisdom no longer holds true. Moreover, the specific inclusion of children's prints in this painting works to further emphasize this moment of discontinuity. Looking closely at The Village Schoolroom (fig. 1.4), we see that the loose printed sheets are largely clustered around a group of six children in the left corner of the picture.16 Here, a wide-eyed girl watches a group of three children in the foreground, and tugs at the coat of the boy next to her. He seems to ignore her, however, and rolls his eyes up to the teachers' desk. Another boy in a large hat crouches below them, holding a print in one hand while sliding the lid of his school box with the other. In front of him, a child in a black hat leans forward, intently 43 watching a girl who kneels holding a small book up to a very young child. This infant appears to poke something into the corner of the book. The kneeling child looks up with furled brow and her gaze leads back to the absent authority at the centre of the painting, the preoccupied schoolmaster. While the two oldest children in this group appear to stare somewhat anxiously towards the master, the three younger ones seem fascinated by the mysterious activity with the book. The directions of these five gazes create a network of enjoyment, apprehension, and suspense. What exactly is going on here? A seemingly trivial bit of evidence serves to explain this scene. Handwritten in the margins, or on the reverse side of a number of surviving catchpenny prints are phrases such as, \"This is my sanctje.\" or \"Here is Abe Ruurd's heilig.\"17 This is curious, for sanctje and heilige can be translated as \"small saint,\" or \"little holy thing,\" a label that does not seem to fit particularly well with the often irreverent subject matter of comic prints. The explanation usually given is that although sixteenth-century woodblock prints frequently depicted saints, in post-Reformation Amsterdam, such imagery shifted, not surprisingly, to encompass more secular subject matter, while the no-longer-descriptive name \"small saint\" endured for three centuries longer.18 What this explanation overlooks are the implications of thinking of these inexpensive prints as \"small saints\"; as personified objects in some way holy or sacred to their users. A variation on this name, also scribbled on the edges of these types of prints, was steek sanctje. Steek means to poke or to stab, and the term steek sanctje refers specifically to a game played with catchpenny prints. In this game, prints were cut into pieces and tucked between the leaves of a book. While one person held the book, other players poked randomly with a key or pin attempting to dislodge hidden fragments. Such games were played to divine the future, or 44 discover the secrets of the past. They also were used to predict the future careers of young children.19 How, then, does the depiction of this game signify in the context of Jan Steen's chaotic classroom? If, through reference to Bruegel and the conventions of low-life paintings, Steen departs from axioms of the past, this foregrounded portrayal of a game of chance could be pointing to the future. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues in his influential work on early modern festive practices, the imagery of games often was used to signal changes in history and time, and thus was linked to destiny and to power.20 Jan Steen's multiple connections to Netherlandish comic traditions are well-documented,21 and possibly this painting draws on the imagery of fortune-telling to complicate the axiom that to educate a child is to shape the future of society. For in contrast to the pupils at the centre of the painting, whose disciplined use of print prepares them for middle-class milieus, these children at the margins subversively use printed material to divine their own futures. This practice resonates with the chaos of this rural space. We have the sense that a gesture from the schoolmaster would have the power to bring the turmoil of the schoolroom to order. The girl holding the book and the boy behind her look apprehensively in his direction; although the master's power to dictate morals and behaviour is suspended, their unabated reverence for his control ensures the continuation of authority. At the same time, these children surreptitiously usurp his role. In the noticeable abeyance of the schoolmaster's command, this child's game turns to the laws of chance to determine meaning, and to bring order out of the chaos of the classroom. Picturing a break with the past, Steen's image remains enigmatic, for the precise instant when one thing ends and another begins is virtually unrepresentable. The game of divination 45 that attracts the gazes of the schoolchildren and the viewer also eludes scrutiny: we see only the small gesture made before the future is revealed. In disrupting the linear progress of time, this image pictures a moment of uncertainty when social identities are not already determined by pre-given cultural traits but are being produced performatively.22 By moving backwards to draw upon and transform past traditions, this painting concurrently moves forward in an attempt to make sense of the present and future. In the moment depicted, past, present, and future collide as the traditional practice of divination intervenes in the present creating a moment of suspense about prospects which were not preordained, fixed and already in place. This reading of The Village Schoolroom prompts a reconsideration of the question posed above: what does it mean to call an inexpensive woodblock print a small saint? This term seems to endow these objects with a power in excess of the subjects who owned and used them. As the children take advantage of the schoolmaster's inattentiveness, the prints take on a life of their own. The kneeling child looks anxiously towards the master who has abdicated his power over the subordinate children in his charge: will he notice the objects that have appropriated his role? Paradoxically, the divining gesture that attempts to found order is precisely that which is excluded from the future, for, throughout the seventeenth century, beliefs granting the animating force of prophesy to material objects increasingly were repressed. This becomes apparent as early as 1602, in an unusual reference to children's games found in the travel account of the Dutch Protestant merchant, Pieter de Marees.23 Confronted with the beliefs of the Akan peoples of West Africa, Marees draws certain comparisons to make their traditions of fetish worship understandable to his Dutch readers. The fetish objects, or \"fetissos,\" of this 46 indigenous population, he states, are like Roman Catholic saints; they are no more than child's toys, trifles sold by Dutch pedlars.24 In an abrupt encounter with a radically different culture, the Calvinist trader thus concurrently recognizes and disavows difference as he pejoratively likens African fetish worship to Roman Catholic religious practices and, surprisingly, to games played by Dutch children. The logic behind this conflation of African peoples, Roman Catholics, and Dutch youngsters, is that all are accused of wrongfully believing that mundane objects had worth and power in excess of their commercial exchange value. For Protestant traders such as Marees, the personification of material objects to embody religious and social values was profoundly contrary to the ethics of merchant capitalism, which depended on the demystification of objects for their circulation in economic as opposed to religious activity.25 Thus, as Pieter de Marees recognizes the dangers of fetish worship as a rite that endowed objects with deceptive value, he concurrently repudiates this practice by associating it with a childish, primitive past. Confronted with alterity, this trader therefore reassures his middle-class Dutch readers of their own advancement by engaging in a process of separating self from other, reason from superstition, Protestant from Catholic, masterful European from slavish African, adult from child, present from past, and real value from false value. Fetisso (or saint), therefore, was a term used by Dutch merchants in a process of understanding and rejecting the different social values and religious beliefs of non-capitalist African societies in order to secure the dominance of Protestant individuals and the smooth functioning of trade.26 A similar renunciation of irrational behaviour takes place in The Village Schoolroom. In Steen's classroom, it is peasant children-notably little girls~who are depicted foolishly turning to the power of objects and the laws of chance as a basis for social order. The few 47 children who realize that it is in their own best interest to work diligently and use print in rational ways stand out as successful individuals who will move beyond this school of fools. The Village Schoolroom thus equates games that rely on the caprice of contingency with the break-down of social order. These practices and beliefs are pushed into an infantile, feminine, chaotic, rural past. Like Marees, Steen's painting draws on the binary opposition of rational and irrational to reassert distinctions between such categories as middle class and peasant, urban and rural, masculine and feminine. Such a process of separation is more than just the disavowal of alien beliefs, however. For as the trader Pieter de Marees engages in the repudiation of fetish worship, this procedure simultaneously prompts him to personally identify with these values.27 The fetish objects of the West Africans, he claims, are \"apenspel, guychelspel en kinderspel\": they are foolish, superstitious children's games.28 In the process of likening fetish worship to games played by Dutch children, however, Marees seems to imply that his understanding of these practices lies in his own childhood experiences. Indeed, games of chance in which trifling objects were used to tell the future were widespread in the Netherlands in the early modern period.29 Thus, the faulty definition of objects that inhibits the functioning of trade returns, as familiar as his own boyhood, to trouble Marees' identity. In the very act of rejecting the irrational, the merchant betrays that his own origins were not rooted in reason and objectivity, but were a mix of often antagonistic practices and beliefs. Like Marees' writings, Steen's painting also exposes the impossibility of neatly dividing people and objects along lines of reason and superstition. For with The Village Schoolroom. Steen, himself a Roman Catholic, satirizes the inability of the Calvinist church to turn all children into reformed adults. 48 By the late seventeenth century, Calvinist elementary schools that taught the basics of religion, reading, and math to both boys and girls were established throughout the Dutch Republic.30 In principle, these schools were open to all Christian children, regardless of denomination or social class. However, it has been argued that the elementary schools were geared mainly to the needs of Calvinist children from the broad middle class, providing moral and practical training to equip boys for commercial and vocational careers and girls for their futures as wives and mothers.31 To ensure the quality of this education, schoolmasters were required to be respectable members of the Reformed church.32 The hourglass and collection bag behind the master in The Village Schoolroom link the school to the church, and remind viewers that teachers often also served as church custodians.33 As we have noted however, Steen portrays a rural schoolmaster who is anything but a moral exemplar for the children in his care. In this way, the painting pointedly draws attention to discrepancies between the dictates of Calvinism and discordant pedagogical practices. The inclusion of children's prints in Steen's painting also serves to emphasize these contradictions. Not only are prints being used to divine the future, but in the foreground at the far right of the painting lies a small discarded print of a bearded man who resembles John Calvin (fig. 1.5).34 Calvin, of course, was one of the most outspoken reformers to counter Catholic claims for the sacred status of objects such as bread, crosses, rings, and religious images.35 Integral to Calvinist doctrine, therefore, was the repudiation of the divine power of any material object. To enforce these precepts, the Reformed church actually forbade Roman Catholic children from bringing \"Popish\" books, images, crucifixes, and prints into the schools.36 What then would it mean to name a printed image of Calvin himself a \"small saint\" 49 and, furthermore, to use such an object in divination practices? The inclusion of a small print of Calvin thus seems to accentuate the fact that the magical uses of school prints were profoundly antagonistic to Calvinist doctrines. Calvinist schools can be understood as sites of passage, set apart for youth undergoing the important transition into adulthood. Recent studies have demonstrated, however, that the Reformed schools did not always uphold orthodoxy.37 Jan Steen's painting satirizes a schoolroom where recalcitrant bodies and the strange powers of printed images spring into the gap between imposed precepts and the schoolmaster's lack of command. As in the memoirs of the nineteenth-century reformer Willem Warnsinck, in this painting, the Calvinist classroom emerges as a heterogeneous space where inimical practices and beliefs intersect to make a mockery of the efficacy of the uses of print in Protestant pedagogy. The hybrid mix of Calvinist doctrine, merchant ethics, magical practices, and comic conventions, and the vacillation between attraction and disavowal that it seemed to evoke, are central to my understanding of the workings of these prints in the education of children. Children's prints were not simply objects that permitted youth to rebel against the strict codes of a Calvinist upbringing, nor were they images of deviance allowed by authorities in order to reinforce norms. The process of denigrating these prints as trivial, and associating them exclusively with subordinate social groups served as a means to enforce hierarchies of class, race, religion, gender, and age. This can be understood as a defensive reaction against the power of these prints to call into question the coherence, of identity, which is always forged out of heterogeneous elements. Memorized in childhood, mingled with Reformed doctrine, permeated with the magic of the everyday, these prints produced subjects who were divided against themselves. This is 50 what Warnsinck betrays with the confession that, \"The earliest imprints of childhood work powerfully...and the traces that they leave are not so quickly erased.\" Comic prints, he seems to say, were vital, almost animate objects with the capacity to indelibly imprint themselves on their readers. Readers in turn reacted to the prints in various ways; the reformation of Warnsinck, repudiation of Marees, and the divination of Steen's children being but a few examples that reveal the threat of such seemingly innocuous everyday objects. Farce as Weapon: Battling over the Public Theatre The specific prints that Willem Warnsinck condemned in his Memoirs of My Childhood were connected to farcical plays, or kluchten. which were staples in the repertoire of the Amsterdam theatre in the late seventeenth century. \"I can still see: the John the Washer and his wife; the history of Urban and Isabel, the history of Tetje Roen and similar 'first-rate' prints.... How curious, this jumble of ideas and images, as those rude prints mingled with the learned Catechism lessons!\"38 As a member of the Society for Public Welfare, Warnsinck argued that the common good depended upon the censorship of these rude prints. This attempt to secure the future hinged on repudiations of the past: Warnsinck evaluates Amsterdam's comic tradition and judges it uncivilized. The writing of history is never a disinterested practice, however, and in 1875, about thirty years after the publication of Warnsinck's memoirs, a retired schoolmaster, Bruno Lieuwes van Albada, issued his autobiographical Memories of the School and Life of an Eighty-Year-Old Headmaster. Significantly, these memoirs directly contradict Warnsinck's interpretation of comic tradition. Albada's description of how school prints impressed 51 themselves in his memory is remarkably similar to Warnsinck's narrative. The moral conclusions he draws about this process are notably different however: In the summer months I played outside. And when I tired of playing, then I studied my 'heiligen' (school prints): Jan de Wasscher, Tetje Roen...and similar ones.... My mother sought to encourage this studiousness, and allowed me to buy a couple of 'Heiligen' every day at Iedema's bookshop. Then I memorized them, with Mother playing the role of prompter. These rhymes and captions became so fixed in my memory that at the age of eighty, I can still recite them; the impressions engraved in early youth are so tenacious; how important therefore, that they are from respectable alloy and worthy to keep into old age.39 While Warnsinck lamented that \"rude prints\" of Jan de Wasser and Tetje Roen were engraved in his mind where they muddied his doctrinal memory work, here Albada lauds the very same prints as \"heiligen\", \"small saints\": respectable and worthy material to study and remember into old age. In subsequent pages of his memoir, Albada further explains the merit of these inexpensive prints. Lamenting that the purity of Dutch culture was contaminated by the influence of French classicism, and the mother tongue tainted by foreign words, he exclaims: \"Even our 'heiligen,' or school prints, were given French captions!\"40 This is the last straw, for Albada describes children's prints as a preserve of authentic Dutch language and culture. The opinions of this retired schoolmaster are revealing, therefore, for they indicate that not every authority who sought to secure the future well-being of society through education thought of comic print as a corrupting influence. Like Warnsinck's memoirs, Albada's writings draw attention to the remarkable persistence of these ephemeral prints, both in Dutch society, and in the memories of readers. Unlike Warnsinck, however, Albada praises the educational purpose of the prints, indicating why they may have been republished for such an exceptionally long time. 52 With this, I return to the questions posed by Warnsinck's writings: Why were these prints given to children, and whose interests did this serve? Here, it is important to recognize that Albada's strategy of opposing vernacular comic prints to French classicism is strikingly similar to late seventeenth-century debates about the role of farce in Dutch society. Children's prints conveying farcical scenarios about stock theatre types\u00E2\u0080\u0094the battling married couple, the deceptive quack doctor\u00E2\u0080\u0094were first published at a time when controversy about the role of comic plays in the make-up of a moral middle-class public was particularly heated.41 Two different groups attempted to prohibit farce. Throughout the seventeenth century, Calvinist churchmen argued that public opinion on moral issues should be shaped, not in the theatre, but in the church. In the 1670's and 1680's, these debates shifted as a classicist society took over the governance of the public theatre, and censored farce in an attempt to refine this space into an exclusive site of assembly for Amsterdam's increasingly French-speaking elite. Farcical plays had long been an integral part of Netherlandish cultural traditions.42 In the manner of Jan Steen's painting, farce allowed the urban middle classes the pleasure of exploring uncertainties about the social relations of merchant capitalist society through the actions of stock comic characters. Thus, it is not surprising that the classicist's efforts to ban farce were opposed by groups who supported Amsterdam's middle-class theatre traditions.43 In the late 1670's, at about the time that the performance of Dutch farces was restricted in favour of French theatre traditions, the themes and characters of these well-loved plays began to circulate in prints directed at children. Thus, it is plausible that these prints first were published in efforts to keep vernacular traditions in circulation. I now turn to a closer examination of the role of late seventeenth-century debates about children and comic farce in conflicts about the public theatre. Representatives of three 53 powerful groups\u00E2\u0080\u0094the merchant middle classes, the Calvinist church, and the governing elite\u00E2\u0080\u0094all had different interests at stake in controlling the municipal theatre, and each used farce as a weapon in battles about the education of children, the make up of the civic community, and the definition of the common good. Indeed, Amsterdam's theatre was often described as a \"school\" for shaping the morals of the children in the audience, and disagreements about the role of farce in this process converged around the question of how best to shape children into society's future. As in Jan Steen's painting, I found that patriarchal interest in manipulating the young intensifies around the bodies of children who were perceived as different. The presence of lower-class children, young girls, and orphans within the theatre audience was met with two overlapping politics of the body: one that attempted to ostracise these groups on the basis of their corporeal specificity; another that tried to transform diverse bodies into uniformly docile bodies. Just as Steen's painting registered anxiety about the contradictory capacities of print, however, social commentary about the theatre reveals that awareness of the power of theatre play to discipline diverse theatre-goers into conformity coexisted and conflicted with apprehension about the subversive potential of these plays, particularly the farces. While these transgressive possibilities were mobilized in struggles to keep this public sphere open to some, this coexisted with strategies in which the censorship of farce and its denigration as material for and about the uncivilized can be understood as moves to exclude certain groups from political power. Intriguingly, very few visual images of Amsterdam's civic theatre circulated at a time when it was one of the city's most contentious sites.44 Perhaps because there was so much dissension about the place of the theatre in civic life, any representation of this space would be seen to be fraught with difficulties. Indeed, as we shall see, even the most controlled images of 54 the public theatre contained ambiguities, hinting at the impossibility of controlling the consumption of plays. At the inauguration of the public theatre, or Schouwburg, in 1637, its regents\u00E2\u0080\u0094a group of prominent businessmen and literary figures-commissioned two large engravings of the building's interior (figs. 1.6 & 1.7).45 These official images, engraved by Salomon Saverij, continued to circulate in various forms throughout the seventeenth century, shaping the meaning of this space even after the Schouwburg was renovated in 1664.46 One of Saverij's engravings is a view of the audience (fig. 1.6). This image offers an entry into debates about the role of theatre in the formation of a civic community, as it seems to mount a defence of this space as a refined middle-class sphere of public opinion. At first glance, the beholder takes in balanced architecture containing a well-behaved audience. Looking more closely, the static harmony of this scene is only slightly disrupted by a movement in the bottom right-hand corner of the image. Cutting through the darkest shadows of the pit, a diagonal shaft of light widens as a small figure opens the door leading into the theatre. This movement of light across shadow introduces a moment of time and suspense into the otherwise static closure of this determined space. For here comes the subject of so much debate\u00E2\u0080\u0094a child is about to enter the theatre. This is what Stephen Greenblatt-would describe as a \"kairotic moment\": a critical point in child rearing \"upon which a whole train of subsequent events depends, [a] moment whose enabling conditions may be irrecoverable and whose consequences may be irreversible.\"47 Such a moment must be seized by those wishing to shape the well-being of children and thus secure the future of the community. We have already seen how the schoolmistress in The Village Schoolroom grasped a similar opportunity, while the 55 neglect of the schoolmaster had chaotic consequences for the morals of the peasant children and the order of the school. The moment depicted here is equally fraught. For, like the peasant children in Steen's painting, the boy on the threshold of the theatre is positioned outside of middle-class norms. Diagonal lines of light and shadow connect him to another boy at the bottom margin of the engraving, who is also placed both within and outside of the theatre. This child rests one arm on a cartouche containing the emblem of the Schouwburg: an image of bees storing honey in a hive. Leaning up against the other side of this symbol is a bent old man. A seventeenth-century viewer would have identified these figures as inhabitants of two of the city's charitable institutions, the Orphanage and the Old People's Home. And this orphan and homeless old man are represented here, underneath the theatre audience, because revenues from the stage went to support these two charities. Although the child who opens the door to the audience hall cannot be immediately identified, he bears striking similarities to the orphan boy at the bottom of the print. Both are the same size, and wear similar tunics, breeches and hats. Both also are linked to the theatre emblem, for a large bee hovers on the lintel above the boy who enters the theatre. Is this child also an orphan? If he is, then he is probably a specific class of orphan, for the theatre had particular connections with the Burgerweeshuis, or Civic Orphanage. This institution provided care for burgher orphans-children whose parents or grandparents had been citizens of the city of Amsterdam.48 As children of citizens who had contributed to civic charity during their lifetimes, the inmates of the Civic Orphanage were classed as deserving poor.49 Indeed, the verse carved above the portal of the Orphanage reminded passers-by: Here the little orphan patiently languishes, He is not to blame for his own destitution, 56 And will perish in poverty If men refuse to stand by him: So, you who call yourselves Godly, Solace us with the surplus of your wealth.50 The Orphanage building itself attested that the godly had responded generously with the surplus of their wealth. For, like the theatre, Amsterdam's civic charities stood as architectural monuments to the munificence of the city.51 These were lavishly built institutions; their histories and management were detailed in civic histories, and they were much admired by foreign visitors to Amsterdam.52 At the same time, the civic charities functioned to enclose groups who were difficult to classify in the social structure: the ill, the aged, the homeless and parentless children, all of whom were not contained by family or home. The distinctive two-toned uniform of the Burgerweeshuis made visible its inhabitants' paradoxical insider/outsider status. This conspicuous costume seemed to brand burgher orphans as citizens without residence who both belonged and yet did not quite belong in the civic community. Significantly, this is also the position of the burgher orphan in the engraving of the theatre interior: neither in nor out, he pauses on the threshold, light from behind throwing his shadow onto the door jamb. What is his place in this refined middle-class sphere? The structure of the theatre interior that the orphan boy enters dictates the distribution of bodies within it, for the architecture forms a rigid hierarchical grid, organizing audience members according to income and status. The most elegantly dressed citizens take their place in the expensive private boxes. A scattering of respectable commoners perches precariously on the long benches in the less costly gallery. Except for the small boy, the inexpensive standing room in the pit in front of the stage is curiously empty, however.53 This is especially noticeable, given the fact that those who advocated for the theatre's closure consistently complained of the rowdy behaviour of the mainly lower-class crowds who routinely filled this space. Indeed, this 57 representation of an orderly theatre audience is markedly different from contemporary descriptions of crowds who smoked, ate, screamed, pushed, crowded, and threw things at each other.54 In the conspicuous evacuation of the pit, the aims of this representation to particularize the Schouwburg audience therefore become clear. With the exception of the small figure in the doorway, there is no place in this orderly representation of a refined public theatre for those who could only afford to stand in the pit. Restrained by the balanced grid of the architecture, the depicted members of a complacent audience are also hemmed in by moralizing texts that run along the lintel separating the boxes from the gallery, and across the lower margin of the print. For according to this engraving, and to descriptions in the civic histories, the theatre was a textual space.55 The architectural interstices of the playhouse\u00E2\u0080\u0094its lintels, mantels, entablatures, thresholds and beams\u00E2\u0080\u0094all were inscribed with verses that spelled out partisan justifications for the role of theatre in Dutch society. This textual fiirnishing functioned emblematically: like the printed emblems that circulated at the time, these were moral messages to be decoded by theatre-goers. In this way, the whole building was inscribed with meaning, and even those audience members who were not fluent readers must have been able to repeat these much-cited verses. Thus the power of rhetoric, a crucial element in theatre, was strategically deployed by the space itself in order to present an argument in defence of its purpose.56 At the same time, the deciphering of these devices was itself a kind of play, which allowed audience members to establish and debate their own positions on the theatre. The place of the orphan within the theatre is explained by a didactic text written in the rafters of the playhouse. Craning their necks upwards, theatre-goers would have been able to read the following verse: 58 The bees deposit here the finest of what they gather, To feed and guide the old man and parentless orphans.57 This rhyme connects the beehive emblem of the theatre with the recipients of charity. It constructs the theatre as a storehouse of knowledge that was needed to direct the passages of the orphan into society, and the old man into death. The theatre's generous contribution to their material sustenance is also implied. While the charities actually founded the theatre, and paid huge sums for its renovation in 1664, here the dynamic of dependence between the two institutions flows in one direction only: the material and cultural wealth of the theatre goes out to the least fortunate in Dutch society. This logic forms a powerful argument for the place of the stage in civic society; not only does the theatre support charity, but it coheres the community by reforming and guiding dubious groups such as orphans and impoverished old people. The inclusion of these figures in the engraving thus serves to visualize and publicize the moral, charitable role of the theatre in urban life. The redundancy of the phrase \"parentless orphans\" seems to register contemporary misgivings about this group. Without parents to supervise their up-bringing, orphans were thought to be in great danger of going astray, and the function of the Burgerweeshuis was to protect against their downward social mobility.58 Thus these civic institutions~the theatre and the orphanage\u00E2\u0080\u0094positioned themselves as surrogate parents, who would wisely guide orphaned burgher children.59 Indeed, in the engraving, as the, orphan steps over the threshold of the playhouse, he seems to step into his rehabilitation as a virtuous burgher.60 The mechanisms of his improvement were two-fold: the moral lessons of the plays combined with the influence of a well-behaved audience to teach conformity to social norms. The verses surrounding the orphan 59 boy and old man in the bottom margin emphasize this message. This poem by Jan Vos, who was both a theatre regent and a playwright, didactically lays out the purpose of the theatre: The theatre was founded for the folk's eye and ear, Through the plays, they learn useful, clever things here. Burgher duty praised, unfaithfulness revenged, Rhetoric has power to knead the heart like wax, And thus impress the brain with virtue and wisdom, Slander may pour poison to violate the playhouse, But it reveals earthly deceit and its uncertainty, As theatre play teaches the folk to know their own vanity.61 Vos' poem resonates with another text, inscribed across the frieze below the gallery, which is also reproduced in the engraving. These verses assert that theatre play came to light as an instructive pastime, which, in mimicking the world, displays human idleness for moral improvement.62 The placement of the orphan boy and the old man in the midst of Jan Vos' verses certainly seems to extend this message to them. The implication is that the plays performed in the Schouwburg would provide these recipients of charity with a moral foundation, teaching them to recognize and turn away from their own faults. Significantly, although the engraving pictures an audience made up mainly of middle-class burghers, the didactic verse concentrates on the effects of theatre on the folk, or ordinary people. The educational importance of theatre, according to this poem, was that it paired praise of the morals of burghers with condemnation of the faults of the folk, teaching all audience members to separate virtue from vice. Not coincidentally, this moral division follows class lines. Indeed, as we shall see, many of the plays, especially the farces, associated social ills with groups outside the burgher class, as stock lower-class comic characters acted out scenarios of dissolution within the market and the home. By projecting such concerns onto lower-class groups, these plays allowed viewers the pleasure of working through contemporary anxieties about the morals of merchant behaviour while maintaining social hierarchies. Indeed, Jan Vos' 60 poem does the same work, implying that theatre play provided negative examples from the everyday life of the lower classes in order to teach them to turn from their own immoral behaviour and espouse middle-class virtues. The engraving's visual arrangement of bodies in the playhouse indicates that contact with middle-class theatre goers also would work to civilize the folk. We have already noted how this image constructs a deferential, receptive, and hierarchically ordered audience located in a public sphere of refinement and taste. Anyone entering this space, by implication, would be taught to obey these rules of bodily decorum. In fact, the boy who comes into the theatre would have just encountered this poetic warning, printed in gold letters next to the playhouse entrance: No child in the Schouwburg must ever be rowdy, No pipes of tobacco, no mugs of beer, and certainly no candy, But especially refrain from unruly bouts, For if you do not, you will be sent out.63 This prominently placed admonition to censor disruptive behaviour in the theatre is directed at children, singling them out as an especially undisciplined group within the audience. Of course, tobacco smoking and beer drinking were not associated solely with children, and the implication is that anyone engaging in these activities would be treated like an undisciplined child, and put out of the theatre. Clearly the message of this text is that those who did not conform to certain standards of conduct would be excluded from this public meeting place. In a similar manner, the commissioned engraving of the Schouwburg interior represents the theatre as a space that cohered diverse urban populations by either disciplining or excluding those who did not comply with its codes of behaviour. However, even this controlled representation of the theatre hints that the procedure of regulating bodies and identities within the playhouse could never be entirely straightforward 61 and successful. Looking deep into the darkest theatre boxes above the orphan boy on the threshold, the viewer can just detect the outlines of a few shadowy figures, dressed in comic theatrical costumes. The intimation of these costumed figures introduces a slight, almost imperceptible ambiguity into this otherwise orderly image. Who are these shady figures? If they are players, why are they among the audience? And if they are disguised audience members, why are they play-acting? Who is acting a role and who is not? Who is looking and who is being looked at? The inclusion of these costumed characters in the theatre boxes may have called up early alterations to the architecture. When the Schouwburg first opened, each box was hung with curtains or shutters. By 1639, however, a poem by Mattheus Tengnagel indicates that these screens had afforded too much privacy, especially to courting couples, and thus had been removed.64 The poem laments that because of the loss of these impromptu sideshows, many no longer attended the theatre. The implication is that each private box, hung with its own curtain, functioned as a small stage, where spectators willingly or unwittingly performed for each other. Such ambiguity between stage and audience hall, and between players and spectators, jeopardized the spatial and social hierarchies that the architecture works to construct. This is clearly a case where the burghers in the private boxes could not have been held up as moral exemplars for the folk in the pit and gallery. If sexually improper behaviour occurred within the theatre boxes, then this distraction was blamed mainly on women who attended the theatre. Such concerns focused on young women, who were no longer children, but not yet constrained by marriage.65 As one male theatre-goer, recommending a trip to the Schouwburg, commented: \"There men see the maiden chorus.... Primped and delighted to attend such plays, they come to see and to be seen.\"66 Such 62 a scene is depicted in the upper theatre box to the left of the orphan boy, next to one of the boxes containing the costumed characters. In this compartment, a well-dressed man turns his back on the stage to face the woman next to him. This elegant figure holds up an object that is either a mask, mirror, or fan between herself and her admirer. Ignoring her companion, she appears to be looking out at the stage. Her coy gesture associates her with the professional actresses whose performances in the Schouwburg drew crowds who admired their attractions as much as they disparaged their morals.67 Indeed, the opinion that young women should not attend the theatre because of its dangerous influences was expressed even by men who otherwise promoted the Schouwburg. As playwright Thomas Roodenburg noted, \"Upstanding men forbid their daughters to attend certain plays, because of the lecherous examples that they saw in them.\"68 Thus, young women were singled out as another group whose presence in the theatre caused a double concern: the fear that they would distract the audience intertwined with anxiety that certain plays encouraged such disruptive behaviour. Unlike the rowdy noise making of children and folk, however, young women in the theatre threatened the visual disruption of this space. Entering this public site of assembly, women who came to \"see and be seen\" were not only vulnerable to the sexual gazes and judgements of men, but they also were empowered to actively look at both the stage and the audience, and judge for themselves.69 Indeed, almost all of the women in the Saverij engraving of the audience are accompanied by men, as if to imply the necessity of male chaperons to mitigate some of the dangerous freedoms of the playhouse. The inclusion of the woman who rebuffs her male companion as she looks elsewhere thus may hint at some of the transgressive pleasures that the theatre provided. 63 In this way, the inclusion of a few barely discernable costumed and masked figures around the orphan boy in the doorway complicates the \"kairotic moment\" of this parentless child's entry into the theatre. For the ambiguous theatrical figures inserted within the theatre boxes around the entrance intrude upon the moral middle-class politeness of the depicted audience by introducing uncertainties about the effects of theatre on audience members. These shadowy figures hint that Amsterdam's municipal theatre was anything but a stable architectural monument that ordered civic populations according to clear standards of rank, gender, and status. In fact, they reveal that true and false identities could be difficult to decipher within the playhouse. Theatre play, after all, was a medium that explored human identity in terms of the fluid processes of role-play, which blurred social categories. Thus, rather than being kneaded like wax and impressed with virtue and wisdom, the orphan boy is in a position to learn the tricks of theatre to shape and manipulate his own identity. Saverij's somewhat ambiguous engraving of the theatre audience was commissioned together with a view towards the empty stage (fig. 1.7). Significantly, this image of an unpeopled playhouse was chosen to illustrate the civic theatre in guidebooks to Amsterdam, which celebrated the city's many municipal institutions. Therefore, the image of the audience hall, with its extremely subtle allusions to the ambivalent status of the playhouse, was not circulated as widely as the paired image of the empty stage. One of these civic histories was written by theatre regent Tobias van Domselaer, and in his Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam, this view has been cropped slightly so that the audience members on either side of the unoccupied stage have been completely excised from the image.70 It is as if any representation of bodies within this social space-even decorous middle-class bodies-would indicate the flux of performance and audience participation in a theatre which was never a stable architectural 64 monument, but an ever-changing ephemeral experience. In this way, the image of an unpeopled stage in a vacant auditorium constructs the theatre as fixed and controlled by denying that this space was produced moment by moment through the appropriations of the people who used it.71 Only through the repudiation of the very practice of theatre could its contradictory possibilities be managed. * Saverij's official representations of the theatre construct it as a source of charity and a monument worthy of civic pride. They picture the Schouwburg as a meeting place where Amsterdam's middle classes could debate ideas, and where groups such as orphans, children, young women, and lower-class folk could learn refined manners. Undoubtedly, the engravings that the theatre regents commissioned functioned to defend the theatre in response to a powerful anti-theatre discourse. For throughout the seventeenth century, Calvinist churchmen denounced theatre play as dissident practice, and made it their mission, not only to close down the Schouwburg, but also to ban all theatre from Dutch society.72 The frontispiece of The Christian Household73 (fig. 1.8) of 1661, a treatise on righteous living by Amsterdam preacher Petrus Wittewrongel, pictures the public playhouse literally as a stopping place on the road to hell. The difference between this Calvinist image of the theatre and those commissioned by the regents is striking. Here, the theatre is pictured, not as an ordered sphere of middle-class decorum, but as a dark cavern where an unruly audience gathers to watch two half-dressed actors cavort on the stage. Obviously, church leaders such as Wittewrongel had a very different ideal of the make-up of the civic community than did the governors of the Schouwburg. The title print of The Christian Household visually presents this model by eschatologically categorizing a number of 65 social spaces and the activities in each. Flanking the book's title and author are two Old Testament patriarchs: Moses holds the ten commandments, and David his lyre, reminding viewers of their roles in writing the law and the psalms. Directly beneath the author's name, in the centre of the earthly realm, is the Christian household. The head of this household-the father, husband, and master\u00E2\u0080\u0094sits at a table and reads from a large book, probably the Bible.74 Standing respectfully around him are his children and servants. The mother breast feeds a baby before the hearth, while at the right of the scene, a maid sweeps away a clutter of morally threatening objects such as playing cards, dice, and prints. Clearly this represents an ideal Protestant household, presided over by a patriarch who teaches Christian values to his wife, children, and servants. The maps hanging in the background of this scene imply that such a household was the foundation of a godly nation. The smaller scenes on either side of the domestic interior emphasize this message. At right, a family does devotions before bed, while at left, a preacher sermonizes from a pulpit to an attentive congregation below. Central to this nexus of social relations is the Book. Authority flows from God, to Moses and David, to the Bible, to the preacher, to the male head of the household, to his dependants. The crucial role of the preacher in this chain of influence is emphasized by the title page's description of the author Wittewrongel as a \"servant of the Holy Scripture\". In this way, everyone in the home, even the patriarch, is made subservient to the biblical teachings of the minister. From here, we begin to see the threat of the civic theatre for Amsterdam's church leaders. In an ideal Reformed society, the only places of public assembly where moral issues would be shaped and discussed were the Calvinist churches and schools. The municipal theatre therefore stood as an alternate public meeting place where the people of Amsterdam could 66 gather to debate political and ethical issues of the day apart from the pastor's interpretation. At mid-century, Reformed preachers of a movement called the \"Further Reformation\" intensified attacks on the theatre, calling it a school of the Devil which incited the spiritual and moral backsliding which they saw everywhere in Dutch society.75 Leaders of the Further Reformation, as the name suggests, believed that the Protestant Reformation had not gone far enough and that reform, and further reform of manners, morals, and family life was desperately needed. While they conveyed these views to church-goers through sermons and theological publications, their arguments would have reached a broader segment of the population by way of the elementary schools.76 Children were singled out as a group especially endangered by theatre, for key to Calvinist doctrine is the belief that all children are born into sin and naturally inclined to do evil. The Christian Household advises schoolmasters of their duty to teach children to avoid the playhouse, and pastors such as Cornelius Poudroyen and Petrus de Witte wrote catechisms specifically for elementary school children, instructing them to commit condemnations of theatre to memory.77 Taking issue with the notion that \"theatre play teaches the folk to know their own vanity,\" these Calvinists asserted that the theatre was quite simply a \"school of vanity.\" Thus it was the role of Christian teachers and parents to protect \"the tender ears and eyes of young children\" from the sights and sounds of the playhouse.78 Through reiteration of the term vanity, they implied that theatre was insubstantial, empty show: playing was nothing but fraudulent surface appearance. In keeping with these views, these church fathers repeatedly condemned vernacular farces\u00E2\u0080\u0094which often played on the deceptive behaviour of husbands, wives, children, and servants within dissolute households\u00E2\u0080\u0094as especially corrupting to malleable young sensibilities. 67 Indeed, theatre audiences were likened to impressionable children, engaged in \"childish wasteful vanity\"79 that would lead them, not to repudiate, but to emulate the irnmorai behaviour enacted on the stage. As preacher Casparus Streso asserted, the young, who had not yet reached an \"age of discretion\", especially had to fight against vain insincerity. If, on their journey to adulthood, they once missed the narrow path of wisdom and chose folly's way, they would remain vain and foolish for the rest of their lives. For this reason, God had set aside the church and the school\u00E2\u0080\u0094but not the theatre\u00E2\u0080\u0094as places to educate children.80 In these Reformed guides to right living, attending the theatre was catalogued as a sin that broke the seventh commandment, \"Thou shalt not commit adultery.\" Collapsing theatre-going with fornication, these treatises argued that the sexual passions acted on the stage had the power to mutate from feigned emotion to real emotion, causing both actors and beholders to burn with lust and commit sins of the flesh in their own lives. More broadly, theatre performance itself was conceived of as a sin of the flesh. To put on a new persona as easily as a costume was described as a sort of bodily betrayal, a fleshly vanity which no Christian should take pleasure in. The threat of disguise seemed to be that it confused social hierarchies, especially those of class and gender. Almost every Calvinist condemnation of theatre used the same two examples to argue that theatre went against the laws of God: it was unnatural for a lower-class player to act as a king, and for a male actor to play a female role.81 Within this anti-theatre discourse, young girls were singled out as a group particularly susceptible to the lure of the stage. And Calvinist preachers were not above using some of the conventions of theatre to get this message across. A booklet suggestively entitled The Persuasion of Dina resembles a printed comedy at first glance, but actually presents a dialogue between a young girl and a preacher, in which the minister convinces the girl that her 68 enjoyment of farce is sinful behaviour.82 The pastor is especially censorious of the confusion of gendered identity in stock comic scenarios where male actors played female parts and female actors took on male roles. Quoting biblical passages, he argues that women had no place in the public theatre, either as actors or audience members: \"...it goes directly against the word of the Holy Apostle, who wills that women be silent in public, because it is unseemly, he said, for women to speak in public.\"83 A woman's proper place, as depicted on the title print of The Christian Household, was at her own hearth. In contrasting the home to the theatre, this image draws boundaries between moral private space and sinful public space, defining not only the types of people and objects proper to each, but also their eternal destinies. Across the top of the title page are three godly women: one prays, one reads the Bible, while the central figure cares for children. The wings of angels faintly visible behind them imply that these domestic women are in heaven. They are opposed to the figures at the bottom of the page, tormented by devils within the gaping mouth of hell. The implication is that the damned have spent their everyday lives congregating in the tavern and the playhouse, while the elect have stayed close to home and church. These pure spaces, positioned nearest heaven, are centred on the Bible. All other printed material\u00E2\u0080\u0094the playing cards and prints\u00E2\u0080\u0094are being pushed out of the domestic sphere. They belong to the pub and playhouse pictured below, and the maid seems to be sweeping these prints and games straight into the fires of hell. Not only is such a distinction drawn between moral private space and degenerate public space, but, in contrasting pub and theatre to the church interior, this image also works to oppose different sites of communal assembly. In an attempt to close off sites of public opinion not controlled by church leaders, the tavern and theatre are pictured as places frequented by the 69 damned. Calvinist preachers often drew attention to contests between the church and the public playhouse, complaining that many people seemed to choose plays over sermons on Sunday mornings. However, in picturing these two spaces together, this title print inadvertently draws attention to similarities between church and theatre and between preachers and actors. For both the pastor and the players are depicted standing above a crowd of people, employing the power of rhetoric and gesture to sway their audiences. Conceivably, this was part of the threat of the theatre for Calvinist polemicists: in the playhouse, dramatic interpretations of biblical stories and of everyday life within Amsterdam's homes were pleasurably apprehended by audiences without the explication of the church. In the same vein, these churchmen took issue with the connection between the Schouwburg and the civic charities, arguing that the theatre was anything but a wise guardian for urban populations. Asserting that Amsterdam's poor would be better looked after if the theatre was closed, they advocated that money wasted on ungodly entertainment should instead be donated to the church, which would take over control of charity work in the city.84 Again, this reveals that the practices of church and theatre were not as separate and opposite as the Wittewrongel title print would indicate. Indeed, the areas of overlap between the two may have caused the most anxiety to those who had much at stake in defining these boundaries. At the same time, the Calvinists' detailed condemnations of theatre practices, which sometimes drew on conventions of theatre itself, betray a deep familiarity with all aspects of theatre. Certainly this indicates that even the most vocal enemies of all things theatrical were not immune to the lure of the stage. The heatedness of these debates suggests that the status of the theatre in Amsterdam may have had more in common with the position of recipients of charity than it did with the situation of philanthropic middle-class citizens. Founded in part out of society's need to 70 accommodate dispossessed burghers, the Amsterdam Schouwburg seems to share the equivocal status of a citizen who does not really belong. For the theatre was described as both a manifestation of civic pride and a threat to social hierarchies. This peculiar insider-outsider status made it a troubling presence within civic identity. Like the burgher orphan caught on the theshold of Saverij's engraving, the Schouwburg's place within the social structure was difficult to classify.85 * Battles between the public theatre and the church were on going and acrimonious, for the church never had the power to abolish the playhouse.86 Thus when Amsterdam's civic magistrates closed the Schouwburg in 1672, there must have been much rejoicing among Calvinists of the Further Reformation. While this was certainly a victory for the churchmen, the sudden banning of theatre cannot be interpreted in terms of a rise in religious sentiment. For the impetus behind the governors' decision to shut down the theatre was not so much to appease church leaders, as it was an attempt to mediate the political upheavals of 1672, the infamous rampjaar. or year of disaster.87 In the panic following the invasion of the Dutch Republic by France, England, and their allies, an angry mob murdered the leaders of the regent oligarchy, Grand Pensionary Johann de Witt and his brother Cornells. To stabilize the situation, William JJI was brought to power as the traditional Stadholder, the quasi-monarch and military leader of the Netherlands. This position, which counterbalanced the powers of Amsterdam's magistrates, had been vacant from the time of the death of William's father, William II in 1650. As the tide of public opinion turned against Amsterdam's oligarchs, they reacted by closing the civic theatre, a place where crowds could gather to discuss divisive political controversies of the day. 71 The Schouwburg was not reopened until 1677, and at that time, the civic governors chose a new group of men to oversee the running of the theatre.88 A number of these new regents were members of a classicist society called \"Nil Volentibus Arduum,\" \"Nothing is Difficult for Those who Will.\" The views of this society were put forth by Andries Pels, a leading member of Nil, in his Use and Abuse of Theatre89: written during the Schouwburg's closure. From their establishment in 1668, this group had criticized the aims of the theatre's middle-class regents, and this pamphlet called for a new theatre in which politically and religiously sensitive issues were neither performed nor discussed.90 Although the model they proposed was not centred on the Bible, but based on adherence to the formal rules of French classicism, in many ways, Nil's mandate resembles that of the Calvinists. Notably, attempts to clean up performances intertwined with efforts to refine audiences. And, like the church, Nil singled out the kluchtspel farces as especially depraved, while the audience members perceived as particularly susceptible to corruption were children. However, unlike the church, Nil did have the power to ban the performance of Dutch farce. And so, from the late 1670's into the 1680's, these vernacular plays, which had been an integral part of the culture of the Netherlandish merchant classes for centuries, were censored within the Amsterdam Schouwburg.91 To account for this sudden turning away from Dutch comic tradition, historians have tended to accept the views of Nil and the Calvinists at face value.92 For example, Pieter Geyl writes: [Nil's] chief ambition was to reform the theatre, and it must be admitted that the theatre urgently needed reform.... The farces and comedies for their part were, with all their amusing lifelike quality, unbelievably coarse, even foul. The urgency with which the ministers kept admonishing the Burgomasters to close down the theatre becomes understandable in the light of such outrageous licence.93 72' However, this does not explain why plays that were staples in the Schouwburg's repertoire were pointedly redefined as unfit for consumption. Archival records of theatre revenues and audience attendance at mid-century indicate that farce performances consistently drew large crowds into the playhouse.94 How did the pleasurable suddenly mutate into the vulgar? The answer to this lies\u00E2\u0080\u0094not so much in an abrupt discovery of the true nature of the plays\u00E2\u0080\u0094as it does with a crucial shift in theatre audiences. For under Nil's administration, the definition of the civic theatre changed from a public sphere of merchant middle-class opinion to a preserve of the elite. As Nil replaced farce performances with classical French plays, new distinctions were made among audience members. Within this construct, those that preferred the formal aesthetics of French classical theatre were defined as connoisseurs, or \"kenneren\", in opposition to ignorant \"onkundigen\" who enjoyed the vernacular farces.95 In this way, Nil's aesthetic theories were very much allied to the political aims of Amsterdam's governors. For in spurning traditional Dutch plays in favour of French language and culture, the members of Nil participated in a larger social movement that sought to establish a cultural cleavage between an elite, quasi-aristocratic, French-speaking upper middle-class group and the merchant middle classes.96 The underlying impetus behind the classical theatre, therefore, was to create and reinforce new distinctions within the middle classes through the formation of a public sphere presided over by a social elite. Or, in the words of Andries Pels, the primary purpose of the civic theatre would be to teach good morals, proper bodily decorum, and refined language to \"the noblest, most distinguished burgher children\"97\u00E2\u0080\u0094to shape the offspring of Amsterdam's governing families. Efforts to teach the children of the elite to distance themselves from plays traditionally associated with the merchant classes were linked with attempts to secure the future economic 73 and political dominance of this group. While many of Amsterdam's governing families had made their fortunes in trade, in the late seventeenth century, these prosperous merchants withdrew capital from active buying and selling of goods in order to reinvest in finance, stock market, and banking interests.98 Among the wealthiest members of this new elite merchant-financier group was Andries Pels.99 With this important shift from merchant capitalism to finance capitalism, members of Amsterdam's merchant and trader class increasingly complained that the policies of the governors favoured international investment over mercantile activity. Not only this, but the elite were accused of closing off political offices, reserving these positions as birthrights for their own children. While in the early seventeenth century, civic officials were mainly elected from the merchant class, by the end of the century, a small social elite had begun to monopolize these positions of power.100 As political chronicler Lieuwe van Aitzema observed: Decent people now don't mind indulging in reflections like the following: 'I must help my children into offices while I live. Here I haven't much opportunity for advancing my children. There are few vacancies...'. Just as if it had been written that none but these or those families should govern!... And if they were only content with one office! As a rule they get too much, but think it too little. This must in course of time create an impatient citizenry.101 The closure of public offices did indeed create an impatient citizenry.102 And one of the ways that members of the merchant classes fought back was by mobilizing the satirical power of farce, so long a vehicle of protest, to attack the increasing financial, political, and cultural monopoly of Amsterdam's oligarchy.103 Significantly, at about the time that farces were censored as unfit material for children of the elite, the contents of these controversial plays began to circulate in new forms~as catchpenny prints. We can now begin to see the role that this new genre of print may have played in struggles over the definition of the public sphere. Keeping censored middle-class 74 traditions in circulation, comic children's prints also may have mobilized the derisive laughter of farce to attack the increasingly inflexible boundaries that governed participation in public life. However, such a strategy was an uncertain process at best. As the following chapters demonstrate, the depiction of trickery in the market and chads in the home could also be read as critiques of merchant behaviour. And while these prints may have attempted to break down barriers between the middle classes and the elite, they conversely worked to shore up boundaries between the middle classes and subordinate social groups. Like the plays, the farcical scenarios in these prints often associate disruptive social behaviour with female, lower class, or itinerant comic types. This strategy, I will argue, worked to maintain the exclusion of these groups from public life. Once again there seems to be a complicated push and pull between pleasure and repudiation in response to the functions of these prints. The impetus behind the initial circulation of this new genre of print may have been to fight against the exclusion of merchant interests from public life. However, members of this group concurrently distanced themselves from comic tradition in efforts to gain new distinctions within a rapidly changing social, cultural, and economic situation. Print and Private Life: Crossing the Threshold Late seventeenth-century battles about the position of comic theatre traditions in the civic community reveal that farce, so often dismissed as boorish lower-class entertainment, was integral to the identity of the urban middle classes. Not only this, but controversies about how farce would prepare children to take up future social roles indicate multiple divisions of religion, politics, wealth, gender, and age within the broad middle class. The dissemination of farce material in printed forms marketed specifically for children undoubtedly played a part 75 within these struggles. Moreover, with the circulation of the new genre of children's prints came new anxieties about how diverse children would interpret this material. We have already seen how Jan Steen's The Village Schoolroom of c. 1670 (fig. 1.1) negotiates these concerns by associating the misuse of catchpenny prints with rural outsiders. There is another oil painting, Caspar Netscher's The Reading Lesson of c. 1675 (fig. 1.9), which also pictures interactions between children, educators, and printed material in a specific social setting. Like Steen's painting, Netscher's image similarly .connects children's prints with the negative moral traits of their users. By marking out \"low\" art\u00E2\u0080\u0094inexpensive prints-and associating them with groups that do not adhere to middle-class codes of morality, both oil paintings thus situate themselves as \"high\" art, which encourages thoughtful debate on social issues. In marked contrast with The Village Schoolroom, however, The Reading Lesson depicts the uneasy place of children's prints within a stereotypical middle-class milieu, the domestic interior. This complicates the assumption that genre paintings were for middle-class audiences, while catchpenny prints were for outsiders. Providing visual commentary about the role of education within the middle-class home, Netscher's image focuses concerns about children's consumption of print around the gendered division of public and private space. In this painting, the medium of circulating print, so instrumental in establishing boundaries between public and private life, also appears as a threat. It is pictured as a form that brings the public debates of church, theatre, and school into the private sphere, where they could be consumed without the supervision of authorities such as preachers, teachers, and theatre regents. 76 Painted at about the same time as The Village Schoolroom, at first glance Netscher's depiction of children's uses of print seems strikingly different from Steen's. For The Reading Lesson moves us from Jan Steen's boisterous rural schoolroom into the tranquillity of a middle-class home that appears to fulfil the injunction of seventeenth-century moralists that an ideal household should function as a small school where parents, especially mothers, worked to educate their children.104 The three figures in this painting, a woman and her two daughters,105 are arranged in a triangular composition. Light from the window at the left of the composition illuminates the mother's head at the apex of the triangle. Her face, turned towards the viewer, is positioned just above the head of her older daughter, who, with her mother's help, reads intently from a small book. The mother's left arm leads the eye down the slope of the triangle to her younger daughter who kneels behind them and plays with a puppy. Like her mother, she too meets the viewer's gaze. The puppy's dangling leash, the chair leg, and the child's skirt are arranged in a series of verticals; a visual device that draws attention to a cluster of objects scattered in a pool of light on the floor below them. Here, in the foreground of the painting, closest to the picture plane, we see a gridded children's print together with two children's games, a top and a knuckle bone. The base of the triangle runs from these toys back to the table where the reading lesson takes place. The painting's careful arrangement of bodies and objects in space employs various visual strategies that encourage the viewer to speculate about the uses of print in education. One of these is a device often used by Dutch genre painters: the depiction of a painting-within-a-painting. The image hanging above the mother and her studious daughter in the background of this scene can be recognized as Peter Paul Rubens' The Brazen Serpent (fig. 1.10). This painting represents a Biblical Old Testament story of discipline and redemption in which God 77 punishes the rebellious Israelites with a plague of venomous snakes.106 On the wall beside this image, above the playing child, hangs a map of the Dutch Republic. The contrast between The Reading Lesson's domestic scene and the portentous background images interacts with the distinction between the obedient industrious girl who receives moral instruction from her mother, and her idle disobedient sister who turns her back on this lesson. In this play of divergent motifs, the viewer can begin to make out a didactic message: if children were not disciplined when going astray, consequences for the future of both the household and the Republic would be serious.107 But surely Rubens' image of violent retribution appears excessive in contrast with the quiet domestic scene of a mother teaching her children to read. In the Rubens' painting, disobedient bodies become suffering bodies: God's punishment is corporeal, and the writhing figures of the dying Israelites can be made out in the foreground. This image of brutal physical chastisement seems oddly juxtaposed with The Reading Lesson's main theme of the education of middle-class children, pictured as a gentle disciplining of the mind. Here it is useful to consider Michel Foucault's work on late seventeenth-century disciplinary strategies. Foucault points out that at this time, discipline appears to shift its locus from spectacles of physical suffering to subtle manipulations of the soul. While this new model of training may seem less corporeal, however, he argues that it is nothing other than a new politics of the body.108 We see this type of corporeal discipline depicted in both The Reading Lesson and in Jan Steen's The Village Schoolroom. Steen's schoolmistress and Netscher's mother are similarly positioned bending over a child while pointing to the pages of a small book.109 As Foucault notes about such pedagogical procedures: \"Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another\".110 The obedient children 78 in both paintings follow printed texts with their fingers, a small gesture indicating the physical control needed to master this task. Their bodies follow the text. In each scene, the job of helping children with the hard work of learning to read is analogous to the process of shaping norms of moral behaviour. In this disciplinary procedure, docile bodies are produced through the control of minds.111 The corporeal nature of this type of training becomes more explicit when we consider how in Netscher's painting, the compliant child is contrasted to the idle child with the puppy. Simon Schama has argued that the motif of a little girl with a puppy appears repeatedly in Dutch visual culture to signify the importance of correct training.112 In Jacob Ochtervelt's Family Portrait of 1663 (fig. 1.11), to note one example, the viewer's eye is led through the painting, connecting the patriarch at centre, to the Bible, to the wife and mother, who gestures to their kneeling daughter and her docile dog. \"Leerzugtigheid,\" or Christian aptitude, is founded on obedience to the Word, and the motif of the well-trained puppy seems to denote that this training is as physical as it is spiritual.113 In contrast, the puppy in The Reading Lesson is not being trained: its leash dangles from the chair, echoing the leading bands which hang limply down the little girl's back. These leading bands were used to teach young children to walk. We see them being wielded in Jan Luiken's emblem De Lieband (fig. 1.12) by a mother who holds the straps of a toddling child.114 Just behind the woman and child runs an unleashed dog\u00E2\u0080\u0094a motif that provides a foil for the depiction of correct training. In Luiken's image, as in Netscher's and Ochtervelt's, a comparison is drawn between the physical and moral disciplining of small children, especially girls, and the training of unruly animals. In this way, the leading band seems to work as a pictorial motif that draws attention to the widespread belief that the natural wilfulness of children had to be 79 harnessed at an early age.115 Certainly this is the message oflhe Reading Lesson: the little girl and the dog both resist obedience training, and their neglected moral instruction is represented by their untethered bodies. Within the moral contrast that Netscher sets up, the colourful catchpenny print lies near the rebellious child and her puppy, in opposition to the small book, possibly a catechism, which the submissive older sister reads. As in Steen's Village Schoolroom. Netscher also draws the viewer's attention to a conflict between proper and improper uses of printed material. In both paintings, print functions as an effective tool to manipulate the attitudes and deportment of children. However each painting also demonstrates that print could work in ways that contradicted behavioural norms. We already have examined how in Steen's painting, the small gestures of playing the superstitious game of steek sanctjes was used to satirize the pedagogical intentions of the Calvinist school. The Reading Lesson similarly associates catchpenny prints with toys and games, and with a young child who avoids moral instruction and uses her time unwisely. Both paintings picture disobedient little girls turning their backs on the authority of educators and godly books to play with prints. There is one crucial difference between these two images, however. As I argued about The Village Schoolroom, the manner in which this image projected irrational, chaotic practices onto lower-class groups in a rural setting served to secure the middle-class identity of the painting's intended audience, and to define the spaces they inhabited. In the case of The Reading Lesson, by contrast, both the intended audience and the subjects depicted are middle class, and the idle practice of playing with prints is positioned as an activity that threatens domestic identity from within. 80 That such a seemingly trivial practice was viewed as an extremely weighty matter is affirmed by the picture of divine retribution that overhangs Netscher's ostensibly tranquil domestic scene. This is reminiscent of the frontispiece of Petrus Wittewrongel's The Christian Household (fig. 1.8), another image where a scene of judgement and a map of the Republic interact with a middle-class domestic interior. As I argued above, the title print of Wittewrongel's book works to delimit clear eschatological frontiers between moral and immoral spaces: the home and church are nearest to heaven, while tavern and theatre are in proximity to hell. There was much at stake in fixing the meanings of these spaces and the identities of the people within them in such a way. As the map hanging above the Christian interior indicates, a righteous, smooth-functioning patriarchal household was a microcosm for the Republic as a whole. As in Ochterveld's portrait (fig. 1.11), such a Christian home is centred on the male head who instructs his household from the Bible,1 1 6 Moreover, in the Wittewrongel title print, biblical teaching conflicts with the prints and games that are being swept into the nether regions of tavern and playhouse by an obedient servant. The manner in which these objects disrupt the home can be understood in terms of de Certeau's argument about the impossibility of controlling and securing social space: Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order.... The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.117 In The Reading Lesson, the moral boundaries of the home are not depicted as impermeable, and prints and toys remain scattered on the floor, where they distract from godly instruction. While being in contrast with Wittewrongel's image, The Reading Lesson also resonates with the themes of contemporary Dutch genre imagery, which repeatedly depicted scenes of housewives caring for home and family in the absence of male householders.118 Specifically, 81 Netscher's image takes up the issue of women's authority over the education of young children within the private sphere. And, as we are beginning to see, the specific visual strategies which the artist employs to describe the moral order as sieve-order turn on misgivings about the possible consequences of unsupervised interactions between women, children, and printed material. The representational device of imaging a painting-within-a-painting disrupts the serene surface of this depiction of maternal instruction within the home to register uneasiness about the repercussions of undisciplined behaviour. For in the absence of the male head of the household, the blame for spiritual and physical insurrection is hung, in the form of the Rubens' painting, squarely over the head of the mother. Imaged as a parent, an educator, and a consumer of print, this woman does not seem to use her powers wisely, for she neglects one of the children left in her care. Anxiety about her inattentiveness is heightened by another pictorial strategy commonly deployed in Dutch genre paintings. For Netscher creates a sense of intrigue by situating beholders as if they have just intruded on a private moment. In The Reading Lesson, this positioning of viewer-as-voyeur not only enhances the on-looker's enjoyment of the painting, by it also sets up a complicated series of exchanges between the viewer and the image, drawing attention to the manner in which the observer both enters, and is barred from the scene. Momentarily distracted from their activities, the mother and younger daughter glance out of the painted scene to meet the interloper's eye. In this way, their gazes break across the surface of the painting to include the onlooker. The older daughter, by contrast, refuses to be disturbed. Reading attentively from the small book, she does not look up, and her very absorption in her task seems to protect her from interference from the outside world. Her 82 activity\u00E2\u0080\u0094private, docile reading-is in fact a practice that functions to constitute, not only an interiorized subject, but also a sphere of private life.119 In this way, the inner concentration of the older daughter does not allow the onlooker to intrude on the scene. This acts as a foil for the actions of the mother and younger child, who, in meeting the viewer's gaze, invite the exterior world into the private interior. In this push and pull between gazes that attract and rebuff lies the paradoxical message of The Reading Lesson. Painted for display within a middle-class home like the one depicted, this painting both functions to define the domestic interior as an enclosed feminine space, while concurrently raising doubts about the very boundaries of the private. Within this paradox, we can begin to comprehend the place of print in private life. For while the solitary consumption of print works to regulate behaviour within the home, the medium of print can also act as an intruder. Bringing the outside world into the household, print mediates between the exterior and the interior, the public and the private, the community and the individual. Netscher painted The Reading Lesson during the 1670's, at a time when comic children's prints were beginning to circulate in Amsterdam. Although one cannot read the catchpenny print in the foreground of this painting, it is tempting to view it as an example of the best-selling prints that represented theatrical farce material in just such a gridded format. For the 1670's was also a decade of controversy about the effects of theatre play, especially farce, on Dutch children.120 While these plays were increasingly censored within the civic theatre, Netscher's image of a catchpenny print indicates how the process of printing provided a means to disseminate the themes of these comic plays, often described as hostile to moral family life, to children. In this way, material that excited much public controversy found its 83 way into private life. Like the viewer who trespasses on this private scene, these prints have the power to disturb the virtuous interiority of the home and the subjects within it. . The tension between pleasure and anxiety evoked by this image is connected to the painting's visual strategies. Both convey, not only the power of print to impose disciplines, but also the ways in which print could mitigate such controls. The device of including an image of divine retribution within a representation of a middle-class home interacts with the positioning of the viewer as intruder. Surprising the inhabitants of the domestic sphere, the beholder apprehends a contrast between cloistered, virtuous, and passive consumption of print, which secures domestic interiority; and idle, negligent, undisciplined uses of print, which interferes with the shaping of private morality. The intruder thus apprehends guilty behaviour that must be punished. This situates the viewer, not just as a disruptive interference, but also as a somewhat God-like figure, in a position that resonates with Calvinist beliefs that an omniscient God apprehends and demands retribution even for small and secret sins.121 In this way, The Reading Lesson registers profound uneasiness about the dissemination of printed material into a space largely defined in terms of feminine activities. Clearly the moral message of this painting was intended to instil internal discipline within private life, thus supporting patterns of domination even in the absence of patriarchal authorities. While the painting certainly works to secure and constrain domestic activities, however, it also points to powers and freedoms, which existed within these restraints. Indicating the extent of women's and children's participation in print culture, The Reading Lesson depicts the home as a space of reading, education, and subject formation.122 It concurrently demonstrates that the dissemination and consumption of print were activities that could never be completely regulated by those who wished to impose behavioural norms. Thus, Netscher's Reading Lesson 84 both imposes constraints, and concurrently hints at the limitations of control, and the pleasures that print could introduce, even within subservient social positions. * Thus far, I have argued that comic catchpenny prints played a central role in the up-bringing of children. Printed material, mass produced and disseminated to a wide audience, was seized upon as an ideal tool for shaping the young into virtuous and hard-working citizens, a process thought to be crucial in the fashioning of a prosperous future for the Dutch Republic. However, commentary about this new genre of children's print indicates that it also was perceived as a medium that opened up new ways for readers to shape their own identities. The interactions between children and printed material initiated new concerns about audiences and practices, especially when the users of these prints were lower-class or female children. Emphasis on the strict supervision of education by authority figures such as parents and teachers can thus be seen as a response to these concerns. For in the absence of control, children are shown using prints in idle and superstitious ways that subvert some of the most basic teachings of mercantile Protestantism. Connected to the pleasures of both theatre play and games of chance, these prints could infuse the home and the school with activities that were commonly associated with the theatre or the tavern. Such practices often were described as antagonistic to a moral Republic: theatre play because it distorted genuine identity, and could confuse categories of rank and gender; and games of chance because they endowed cheap prints with values in excess of their commercial worth. To be able to distinguish between the true and false identities of people and objects was a crucial operation within a mercantile society based on exchange. In this way, commentary about the contradictory functions of catchpenny prints often intersected with larger debates 85 about the difficulty of deterrnining authentic identity within the rapidly changing social and economic situation of the late seventeenth century. In the following chapter, we shall see how tensions between the persuasive power of representation and its potential failure are heightened in a series of children's prints that connect theatrical duplicity with the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly placeless and timeless market. Making connections between the deceptive strategies employed by printed representations, theatre performances, and market practices, these farcical prints draw attention to gaps between artifice and its exposure, and to conflicts between the tricks of persuasion and the canniness of beholders. 86 Notes 1. \"Moesten wij in de school ook wat goeds en huttigs, uit het hoofd, leeren opzeggen! De Heidelbergschen Catchismus. De belooning, voor het goed vragen opzeggen, bestond in het uitreiken van prenten. Nog zie ik: den Jan de Wasser en zijn wijf; de geschiedenis van Urbanus en Isabel; de historie van Tetje Roen, en dergelijke uitmuntende prentwerken. Het Jan die zit hier op zijn hakken, Enhij laatzijnkindjek....n. en Tetj e Roen kookt paardevij gen, Om daar drankjes van te krijgen. kwam veel spoediger in het geheugen van het kleine goedje, dan de soms lange antwoorden uit den Heidelberger; maar hoe wonderlijk haspelden zich de denkbeelden, aan die onkiesche uitdrukkingen verbonden, dooreen met de geleerde Catechismusles! Ik geloof echter niet, dat de goede Antjemeu ooit daarover, een oogenblik, heeft nagedacht.\" W. H. Warnsinck, \"Herinneringen uit mijne Kinderjaren,\" Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1849) II, 210-211. Thank you to Rudolf Dekker for drawing my attention to this reference. On Warnsinck, see Rudolf Dekker, Uit de Schaduw in 't Grote Licht. Kinderen in Egodocumenten van de Gouden Eeuw tot de Romantiek (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1995) 170-174, 276. 2. \"De vroegste mdrukken ons, in de dagen der ldndschhied, gegeven, werken krachtig op gevoel en verbeelding, en de sporen, die zij trekken worden niet zoo ras uitgewischt.\" Warnsinck 211. 3. Models contrasting dissemination and distinction, and discipline and invention in cultural forms and practices have been developed in Roger Chartier's important works on early modern print culture. These theories are summarized in Roger Chattier, \"Introduction,\" The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) 3-12. 4. This approach was pioneered by Dutch art historian Eddy de Jongh. See his essay in the exhibition catalogue, Tot Leering en Vermaak: Betekenissen van Hollandse Genrevoorstelling uit de Zeventiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976) 14-28. 5. Christopher Brown, Dutch Painting (London: Phaidon, 1993) 64-65; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987) 558-559. Bruegel's image circulated as a print by Pieter van der Heyden. Reproduced in Brown 64. 6. \"Al reyst den esel ter scholen om leeren, Is't eenen esel, en sal geen peert wederkeeren.\" This verse is written in Latin and Dutch along the bottom of the print. Translated in Brown 64. 7. \"Wat baet keers oft bril, Als den esel niet sien en wil.\" 8. Perry Chapman et al., Jan Steen: Painter and Story Teller (exh. cat.; Washington D . C : National Gallery of Art and Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1996) 233. 87 9. Indeed, the populations of seventeenth-century Dutch cities reached their peak in the 1670's. This urbanization process in Holland is discussed in J.L. van Zanden, The Rise and Decline of Holland's Economy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) 35-46. 10. To quote Jan de Vries, \"The flows of migration sustaining Europe's cities and allowing them to grow were an integral part of a larger process of geographical mobility, and geographical mobility of all types was intimately related to the achievement, or imposition, of occupational and social mobility.\" Jan de Vries, European Urbanization. 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 213. 11. De Vries 218-219. The new possibilities of seventeenth-century social mobility also are discussed in A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture. Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 78; and Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise. Greatness and Fall. 1477-1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 330-339. 12. Connections between the work of these artists are explored in Chapman 231. 13. See Mariet Westermann's discussion of this painting, The Art of the Dutch Republic. 1585-1718 (London: Orion. 1996) 129. 14. The social distance between the urban consumers of comic representations of peasants and the \"city sins clothed in country dress\" depicted in low-life imagery has been discussed by Svetlana Alpers, \"Realism as Comic Mode: Low-life Painting seen through Bredero's Eyes,\" Simiolus 8. 3 (1975-76): 115-144. 15. The workings of these disciplinary procedures are discussed in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), particularly in Part Three, \"Docile Bodies,\" 135-169. 16. These prints are clearly depicted. Most of them are of images of animals with texts across the bottoms. These types of prints are often classified as \"Kermis\" prints, as they were given to children at fairs. The major catalogue of children's prints is Maurits de Meyer, De Volks- en Kinderprent in the Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e Eeuw (Antwerp: Uitgevers Standard-Boekhandel, 1962). 17. These are quoted in Meyer 20. The catchpenny print collection of the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam contains examples of these sorts of inscriptions as well (although, unfortunately, one cannot examine the verso of any of the prints). A print of the quack doctor Tetjeroen, published by J. Thompson, no. 52, in Waller 9, for example, has the following lines written in the left margin: \"Vierentwentig Prentjes. Ao. 1812. Klaas de Geus, zijn Hilliggie.\" As late as 1812, buyers of catchpenny prints continued to call them small saints. 88 18. Meyer 19-20. E. M . Van Heurck and G. J. Boekenoogen, Histoire de l'lmagerie Populaire Flamande et de ses Rapports avec les Imageries Etrangeres (Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1910)13-14. 19. Meyer 19. On similar games of chance played in England, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin Books, 1971) 254-255. According to Thomas, often psalters or Bibles were used in divination practices because they were believed to have more power. 20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968) 234-5. 21. See the essays in Chapman. 22. On performative identity, see Homi Bhabha, \"Introduction,\" The Location of Culture (Routledge: London, 1994) 1-18. 23. Pieter de Marees, Beschryvinghe ende Historische Verhael van het Gout Koninckrijck van Gunea ('s Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1912). This text was first published in Dutch in 1602, and translated into English in 1625. The English version has been republished as: Pieter de Marees, \"A description and historical declaration of the Golden Kingdom of Guinea,\" in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus. or Purchas His Pilgrims, vol. VI (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905) 289-297. My understanding of Marees' writings on fetish worship is indebted to the interpretations of William Pietz, \"The Problem of the Fetish,\" Res 9 (1985) 5-17; 13 (1987) 23-45; 16 (1988) 105-23. 24. Marees repeats such comparisons throughout his account. See Purchas 271,294,296. 25. Pietz 40. On the shift from religious fetishism to commodity fetishism in seventeenth-century Dutch art and society, see Hal Foster, \"The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life,\" Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, eds. E. Apter and W. Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)251-265. 26. Of course, this process was also crucial to justifying the slave trading activities of Dutch traders on the coast of West Africa. 27. See Pietz 7-8, 12. ' 28. See pages 72-73 of the Dutch version. Marees also calls fetish objects \"cramerye\" and \"beuzeling\": pedlar's trifles. 29. The major catalogue of Netherlandish children's games is A. de Cock and I. Teirlinck, Kinderspel en Kinderlust in Zuid-Nederland (Gent: A. Siffer, 1902) 9 vols. The game of \"steeksanctjes\" is described in vol. IV, 91-93. The fortune-telling and magic practices which pervaded Amsterdam's neighbourhoods, and the attempts of church consistories to censure 89 these are detailed in Herman Roodenburg, Onder Censuur. De Kerkelijk Tucht in de Gereformeerde Gemeente van Amsterdam 1578-1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990) 205-228. 30. The history of the Reformed schools is explored in E.P. de Booy and P. Boekholt, Geschiedenis van de School in Nederland vanaf de Middeleeuwen tot aan de Huidige Tijd (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1987). A more general work on the importance of education and print in Protestant efforts to reform is Carmen Luke, Pedagogy. Printing and Protestantism. The Discourse on Childhood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 31. The poorest groups in society probably could not afford tuition payments, while young boys from elite families usually attended the more prestigious Latin schools in preparation for university. E.P. de Booy, \"Naar School: Schoolgande Kinderen in de Noordelijke Nederlanden in de Zeventiende en Achtiende Eeuw,\" Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 94 (1981) 427-428. While Roman Catholic and Anabaptist children also attended these schools, Amsterdam's Jewish community had separate educational institutions. Deursen 117; Schama 587-596. 32. Repeated complaints to the church Synod reveals that these laws were not strictly enforced, and that a number of Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Remonstrant schoolteachers continued to work in the elementary schools. H. van Gelder, Getemperde Vrijheid (Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff, 1972) 198-199. 33. The hourglass was hung across from the pulpit, so that the preacher could time his sermon, making sure it was the required length. The bag on the end of a long stick was held in front of everyone in the congregation to collect their tithe. 34. The entry on The Village Schoolroom in the recent Jan Steen catalogue describes this as a print of Erasmus. Chapman 233. Erasmus is not usually portrayed as a bearded man, however. Working from a reproduction of the painting, I can only tentatively suggest that it may be Calvin. 35. An interesting essay that examines Calvin's views on the value of objects in transubstantiation debates is Stephen Greenblatt, \"Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,\" in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds. M . de Grazia et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 340-345. 36. Decisions regarding the schools were made at the annual church synods. Gelder 201. 37. E.P. de Booy and P. Boekholt, Geschiedenis van de School in Nederland vanaf de Middeleeuwen tot aan de Huidige Tijd (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1987) 25-21. 38. Warnsinck 210. 39. \"Kwam ik daarno tot rust, dan bestudeerde ik mijn heiligen (schoolprenten): Jan de Wasscher, Tetje Roen...en dergelijk....Dien leerlust zocht Moeder te bevredigen en liet mij elken dag een paar \"Heiligen\" koopen bij Iedema. Deze leerde ik van buiten, waarbij moeder de rol van souffleur speelde. Die rijmpjes en onderschriften kwamen mij zoo vast in 't 90 geheugen dat ik ze nog op mijn 80 jarigen leeftijd reciteeren kan; zoo vasthoudend zijn de indrukken, die der vroege jeugd worden ingegrift; hoe belangrijk derhalve, dat ze van degelijk allooi zijn en waardig, om tot op hoogen ouderdom te blijven bewaard.\" B.L. van Albada, Uit de oude en nieuwe doos. Herinneringen uit den school en het leven van een 80-jarige oud-hoofdonderwijzer. Ernst en Luim (Groningen: W. Versluys, 1875) 8-9. Albada's memoirs are discussed in Dekker, Uit de Schaduw 170-173. 40. Albada 18. 41. A theoretical study, which considers the role of theatre in the formation of a bourgeois public sphere, is Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Maria-Theresia Leuker draws on Habermas' theories to analyse Dutch theatre as the expression of an urban middle-class value system in 'De last van't huys. de wil des mans...' Frauenbilder und Ehekonzepte im Niederlandischen Lustspiel des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munster, 1992). My analysis of the role of the Amsterdam theatre indicates a lack of consensus and homogeneity among the middle classes, thus departing from Habermas' and Leuker's reassertion of this category. An influential study of similar issues in England at this time is Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially chapter two. 42. A key work on earlier Netherlandish comic tradition and its urban burgher audience is Herman Pleij, Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit. Literatuur. Volksfeest en Burgermoraal in de late Middeleeuwen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. 1979). 43. On the opposition to these theatre reforms, see Maria Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt. Themes and Ideas (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1991) 16-25. 44. For an overview of images of the theatre from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, see Bamber Gascoigne, \"On Stage: Dutch Theatrical Prints,\" Delta vol. 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1969): 4-20. 45. The regents were chosen by the civic government. Their job included financial management, the purchase of costumes and sets, and also the allotment of roles and the selection of plays. All plays performed in the Schouwburg were first read by the regents, whose duty it was to ensure that they contained no criticisms of the state, the city, or the church, nor anything immoral that would harm the \"tender ears\" of children and other susceptible groups. Tobias van Domselaer, Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam van haar eerste beginselen. oudtheydt. vergrootingen. gebouwen en geschiedenissen tot op deh Jare 1665 (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz Doornick, 1665) 204-205. 46. These two prints are of Jacob van Campen's 1637 theatre, and were published together with a ground plan of the Schouwburg. Large engraved versions of these views (approx. 51 x 72 cm) were probably directed at wealthier theatre patrons, while smaller, less expensive 91 versions (12 x 14 cm) would have reached a broader audience. A number of these prints were published by the printing house of the Lescaille family (for example, T L 66-14 in the collection of the Amsterdam Theatre Museum, and F M 1779 in the Rijksprentenkabinet), to whom the regents had granted the privilege to print plays performed in the Schouwburg. Possibly, like the printed plays, these prints of the theatre were sold within the building during performances. See J. A. Worp, Geschiedenis van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg 1496-1772 (Amsterdam: S.L. yan Looy, 1920) 127. The Saverij engravings are discussed in Gascoigne 9-11; and in F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings. Engravings and Woodcuts. 1450-1700. 43 vols. (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1949- ) vol. 24, no. 15 and no. 16. 47. Stephen Greenblatt, \"The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and his Heirs,\" Learning to Curse. Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990) 87. 48. Sheila Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic: Pictures of Rich and Poor for Charitable Institutions (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985) 229. The importance of poorterschap, or citizenship, in urban communities is discussed in Schama 386, 582. For a correction of Schama's definition of poorterschap which takes issues of gender into account, see Els Kloek et al., Women of the Golden Age: An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-century Holland. England and Italy (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994) 32. An interesting exploration of the links between poorterschap and notions of honour and shame can be found in Lotte van de Pol, \"Prostitutie en de Amsterdamse Burgerij: Eerbegrippen in een vroegmoderne stedelijke samenleving,\" Cultuur en Maatschappij in Nederland. 1500-1800. eds. P. te Boekhorst et al. (Amsterdam: Boom, 1992): 179-218. 49. According to Anne McCants, the civic orphanage had a dual function: it acted as social insurance against the downward mobility of middle-class children, and it promoted notions of public harmony, in order to placate society's middling groups. Anne McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age. Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997) 1-17,102-104. 50. Hier treurt het Weesken met gedult, Dat arm is zonder zijnen schult, En in sijn armoedt sou vergaen, Indien men't weygerd bij te staen: Zoo ghij gesegend zyt van Godt, Vertroost ons met U overschot. Quoted in M . Fokkens, Beschryvinge der Wijdt-vermaarde Koop-Stadt Amstelredam (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz. Doornik, 1662) 265.n 51. Poor relief was provided for orphans who did not have poorter parents by other, far less lavish institutions, such as the Aalmoezeniersweeshuis. McCants 23-25. 52. Schama 572-579; Muller 7-10. 92 53. In 1678, the least expensive places cost 6 stuivers, about the price of a loaf of bread\u00E2\u0080\u0094a price that was still prohibitive to Amsterdam's many poor. Worp 123-124. 54. Complaints about this type of behaviour persisted throughout the seventeenth century. In 1687, printed posters were hung in the Schouwburg warning: \"That no one in the Schouwburg shall raise a ruckus, swear or engage in an kind of rowdiness either with actions or words or they will pay a fine of three guilders...\" \"Dat niemand eenig geraas getier of eenige andere baldadigheid het zy met actien of woorden in de Schouwburg sal mogen maken op een boete van drie guldens...\" Familiearchief Huydecoper. no. 314, Rijksarchief te Utrecht. The rowdiness of crowds is also discussed in Worp 85-88; and G. Kalff, Literatuur en Tooneel te Amsterdam in de 17de Eeuw (Haarlem: de Erven S. Bohn, 1895)305. 55. Domselaer's detailed account of the theatre describes the architecture and also reproduces these texts, pp. 203-206. Similar descriptions can be found in Fokkens 249-251; and O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1663)442. 56. I am drawing on Michel de Certeau's definition of a strategy: \"...every 'strategic' rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its 'own' place, that is, the place of its own power and will...\" The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 36. 57. \"De byen storten heir het eelste datse lesen, Om d'oude stock te voen, en ouderloose Wesen.\" The poem can't be seen in the engraving, but is described in the civic histories.. See Domselaer 206; Fokkens 249. This is a difficult verse to translate, for, like many emblems, it plays on the multiple meanings of words. For example, \"lesen\" can mean either gather or read; \"voen\", feed or guide; and \"stock\", in seventeenth-century Dutch could refer to a stick, an old man, or a hive. My thanks to Christine Kooi for her help with the translation. 58. McCants 25-26. 59. McCants 31-33. 60. I have not been able to find evidence of the actual attendance of orphans in the Schouwburg, although Ben Albach tentatively speculates that they may have appeared on the stage, performing in children's roles or in crowd scenes. The children of the Schouwburg's actors and actresses also filled these roles. Ben Albach, Langs Kermissen en Hoven: Ontstaan en Kroniek van een Nederlands Tooneelgezelschap in de 17de Eeuw (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1977) 76. J.A. Worp claims that residents from the Old Men's Home also were used as extras. Worp 117. 61. \"De Schouwburg is voor't oor en oog van't Volk gesticht, Men leert hen door het spel huisnutte schranderheeden. \ 93 Zij wraakt de trouwloosheidt en roemt de burgerplicht, Welsspreekentheidt heeft macht om't hart als was te kneederi. Zo wordt het brein doorzult in deught en wijsbeseit, De Laster bruit vergeefs om't schoutooneel te schennen, 't Ondekt het aardtsch Bedrogh en haar onzeekerheidt, Tooneelspel leert het volk hun ydelheeden kennen.\" The poem is by regent playwright Jan Vos, whose works were often disparaged as vulgar spectacle by detractors of Amsterdam's theatre tradition. 62. The poem, depicted across the frieze of the audience hall in the engraving, is by playwright Joost van Vondel: \"Play acting came to light to be an instructive art, Which beats all other kinds of sport, a very royal invention, It mimics every worldly thing, it tickles soul and heart, And sweetly goads and wounds us\u00E2\u0080\u0094to advantage, I should mention! It reveals in brief, in human life, all vanity entailed, At which Greek Democritus laughed and Heraclitus railed.\" Translated in Alfred Golding, Classicist Acting. Two Centuries of a Performance Tradition at the Amsterdam Schouwburg (Lantham, MD: University Press of America, 1984) 20. 63. The verse is also by Joost van Vondel: \"Geen kint den Schouwburg lastigh zy, Tobackpijp, bierkan, snoeperij, Noch geenerlei baldadigheit, Wie anders doet, wordt uitgeleyt.\" Domselaer 205. 64. As Tengnagel mockingly pointed out, \"If people wanted to have a bit of a romp, they would snap the shutters closed.\" \"Had men lust om wat te stoejen, Met een snap de vensters toe.\" Quoted in Worp 126-127. 65. \"Youth,\" or \"jeugd,\" was the term most often used to categorize children (\"kinderen\") who had reached sexual maturity, but were not yet married. As E.K. Grootes points out, there was much variety in the use of this term, as it designated a broad group that was divided by differences of gender, social status, religion, region, morals, etc. E.K. Grootes, \"Literatuur, Historic en Cats visie op de Jeugd,\" Spektator 9.6 (1979-1980): 477-493. 66. \"Soo siet men't Maeghde-rey.... Gepronckt en op-getoyt na sulcke spelen treden, sy komen om te sien en om gesien te zyn.\" Quoted in Kalff 304. 67. The first actress to perform in the civic theatre was Adriana van den Bergh-Noozeman in 1655. On attitudes towards actresses, see J.A. Worp, Geschiedenis van het Drama en van het Tooneel in Nederland. vol. 2. (Rotterdam: Langerfeld, 1908) 32-38; Worp, Amsterdamschen Schouwburg 116-117,157-159; and Kalff 302-304. 94 68. \"Treffelycke mannen hunnen dochters het bezoek van sommige tooneelen verboden, wegens de ontuchtige voorbeelden die zij daar gezieri hadden.\" Quoted in Kalff 265. 69. Jean Howard's insights into the tensions surrounding the presence of women in England's playhouses seem to apply to Amsterdam as well. Jean Howard, \"Scripts and/versus Playhouses,\" Renaissance Drama, ed. M.B. Rose (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989): 33-47; and \"Women as Spectators, Spectacles and Paying Customers,\" Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds. D. Kastan and P. Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991): 68-74. 70. Domselaer's account of the Schouwburg is found on pages 203-206. 71. For the difference between \"place,\" which is defined as fixed, dead and controlled, and \"space,\" produced by the practices of users, see de Certeau 117. 72. Chapter three, \"De Tooneelspelers en de Geestelijkheid,\" of G.D.J. Schotel's Tilburgsche Avondstonden (Amsterdam: J. Stemvers, 1850) is still an excellent overview of the Calvinist anti-theatre discourse. 73. Petrus Wittewrongel, Het Tweede Boek van de Oeconomia Christiana ofte Christelicke Huys-Houdinghe (Amsterdam: Weduwe van Marten Jansz. Brant, 1661). The frontispiece is from the third enlarged edition of this work, published by Abraham van den Burgh in 1661. On Wittewrongel's theology, see L.F. Groenendijk, De Nadere Reformatie van het Gezin. De Visie van Petrus Wittewrongel op de Christelijke Huishouding (Dordrecht: Uitgeverij J.P. van den Tol, 1984). 74. On the significance of family devotions, see Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue-Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 141-160. 75. See L.F. Groenendijk, \"De Nadere Reformatie en het Toneel,\" De Zeventiende Eeuw 5, no. 1 (1989): 141-153. 76. The Further Reformation has had a lasting impact, for the texts of these seventeenth-century church leaders formed much of the basis for the doctrines of the Gereformeerde Kerk in the Netherlands and the Christian Reformed Church in North America. 77. Wittewrongel 1191; Cornelius Poudroyen, Catechisatie. dat is. een grondige ende eenvoudige Onderwijsinge over de Leere de Christelicken... (Amsterdam: Weduwe van Joost Broersz, 1659) 898-905; and Petrus de Witte, Catechizatie over den Heydelbergschen Catechismus der Gereformeerde Christelicke Religie (Enkhuisen: Rieuwert Jansz. Landtman, 1656) 877-881. 78. Wittewrongel 1167,1186. 95 79. In the words of Casparus Streso, \"kintse verquistige ydelheyt,\" Christelyck en Bescheyden Oordeel. over Dansseryen. en Schou-spelen. Die onder de Litmaten vande Gereformeered Kercke gepleegt werden ('s Gravenhage: Jasper Doll, 1680) 16. 80. Streso 15-18,40. 81. See Wittewrongel 1178-1180. 82. Antoninus Sleidanus, D'Overtuyghde Dina of Korte en Nodige Waerschouwing tegen't besien vande hedens-daegsche Schouw-Spelen so in't ghemeen. als wel bysonderlijk in dese Bloedighe Oorloghs-Tijden (Amsterdam: Willem van Havert, n.d.). 83. Sleidanus 45: \"...regelrecht tegen't woort van den Heyligen Apostel, die wil, dat de Vrouwen inde Gemeynte swijgen sullen, want et staet lelijk, seyd hij, voor de Vrouwen, datse in de Gemeynte spreeken.\" The popularity of female actresses only increased during the 1660's, and certainly, many women did attend the theatre. As Thomas Roodenburg's comments, quoted above, imply, young women brought up in orthodox households probably were forbidden to attend the theatre. Kalff. Literatuur 265-268. 302-304. 84. Sleidanus 57-59; C.N. Wybrands, Het Amsterdamsche Tooneel. 1617-1772 (Utrecht: J.L. Beijers, 1873) 121-123. 85. This interpretation is influenced by Steven Mullaney's insights about the function of London's Elizabethan playhouses in The Place of the Stage: Licence. Play and Power in Elizabethan England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 7-9. 86. Gelder 183-185. 87. The Schouwburg was also closed in 1665, during conflicts with the British. Wybrands 104. 88'. Mieke Smits-Veldt, Het Nederlandse Renaissance Toneel (Utrecht: Hess Literatuur, 1991) 118-120. 89. Andries Pels, Gebruik en Misbruik des Tooneels. 1677, ed. M . Schenkeveld-van der Dussen (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink, 1978). 90. On Nil's influence in the theatre, see Wybrands, chapter 3; and J. te Winkel, Geschiedenis de Nederlandsche Letterkunde van\" de Republiek der Vereenigde Nederlanden (Haarlem: de Erven F. Bohn, 1924) vol. IV, 412-513. 91. This does not necessarily mean that these plays were no longer performed. During the governance of Nil, a number of the Schouwburg's actors left the theatre to join itinerant troupes that travelled to various Dutch and European cities. In this way, although the farces were banned, they may still have been performed outside of the Schouwburg walls. A detailed study 4 96 of the successful travelling company of actor Jan Baptist van Fornenburgh, which includes important information on its links to the Amsterdam theatre, is Ben Albach's Langs Kermissen en Hoven. On the situation during the Nil years, see pp. 114-124. , 92. Indeed, the historiography of Dutch theatre is imbued with a Calvinist bias. The first major work on the Amsterdam theatre was written in 1873 by C.N. Wybrands, a theology student at Leiden's Calvinist university. Wybrands' book makes many Calvinist judgements, particularly about the immorality of farces and their audiences (91,118). Numerous subsequent studies of Dutch theatre unquestioningly reiterate this interpretation. Although Wybrand's ground breaking study won a prestigious award, his theology professors insisted that an examination of theatre was incompatible with Calvinist doctrines. Wybrands thus gave up his work on theatre, but impeded the work of other theatre historians by monopolizing important archival sources until his death. Wybrand's control of the orphanage archive is discussed in Ben Albach, \"De Amsterdamse geschreven Bronnen van de Nederlandse Toneelgeschiedenis,\" Scenarium 1 (1977): 92-113; and in Worp 1-2. 93. Pieter Geyl, The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century. Part Two. 1648-1715 (London: Ernest Benn, 1964) 246. 94. Most of the records of the civic theatre were lost when the Schouwburg was destroyed by fire (seen by some as an act of God) in 1772. Theatre finances were recorded in the books of the civic orphanage, however, which are housed in Amsterdam's municipal archive as Burgerweeshuis oud-archief 425. Many stopped attending the theatre during the governance of Nil, resulting in a significant drop in revenues, which led to conflicts with the regents of the charities. M . Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, preface, Gebruik en Misbruik des Tooneels by Andries Pels (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink, 1978) 21. 95. G. Kalff, Geschiedenis der Nederlansche Letterkunde. Boek V. (Groningen: J.B. Wolters, 1910) 285-286. Significantly, similar distinctions were made about the uses of language at this time. As the upper-class Dutchman Pieter de Groote noted in 1673, \"Enfin Monsieur, vous verres s'il est besoing qu'on s'en server dans le francois, qui est fait pour les intelligents, aussy bien que dans le Flament, qui n'est que pour les ignorants...\" \"In short, Sir, you will see that it's necessary that one uses French, which is for intelligent people, as much as Flemish, which is for ignoramuses...\" Quoted in Price 224. 96. On this movement, see Geyl 195-202, 246-253; P. Spierenburg, Elites and Etiquette: Mentality and Social Structure in the Early Modern Northern Netherlands (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit, 1981). While the upper middle classes had begun to emulate the courtly manners of the French aristocracy before the 1670's, the social tensions surrounding this distancing strategy were certainly heightened after the French invasion in 1672. 97. \"De edelste en voornaamste burgr'en kind'ren,\" Pels 22. 98. This important social, economic and political shift is discussed in J.C. van Dillen, Van Rijkdon en Regenten. Handboek tot de Economische en Sociale Geschiedenis van Nederland 97 Tijdens de Republiek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) 461-480. See also, Charles Wilson, The Dutch Republic and the Civilisation of the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1968) 236-243; and J.L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd., 1974) 213-217. 99. Dillen 456-457. 100. Dillen 467-468. 101. Quoted in Geyl 202. 102. Schenkeveld 16-25. 103. As I shall argue in chapters three and four, satirical works such as Hippolytus de Vrye's De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks (Amsterdam: H. Sweats, 1683) participated in these conflicts. 104. On the importance of home as school, see Franits 111-160; Schama 559-561. 105. Although art historians have claimed that the younger child in the painting is a boy, the gender of this child seems ambiguous at best. Christopher Brown, Images of a Golden Past: Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984) 49-50; Mary Frances Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983) 114. 106. The biblical story is found in the book of Numbers 21: 4-9, and is discussed by Brown 49-50, and Durantini 114-116. 107. This is in keeping with Simon Schama's argument that the Dutch often defined themselves as God's chosen people, the children of Israel, rewarded when following God's ways, and chastised when going astray. See Schama 93-125. 108. Foucault 103. 109. Both of these figures could be based on traditional depictions of Grammar, often personified as a maternal and threatening figure who teaches the young to read. See Durantini 97. 110. Foucault 153. 111. Foucault 102. 112. Schama 547-550. Wayne Franits also takes up this type of imagery in Paragons of Virtue 154-160. 113. Schama 547. 98 114. From Jan Luiken. De Menschen Begin. Midden en de Einde. 1712. Schama 547-9. 115. The unwhipped top, which lies idle in the foreground of The Reading Lesson, could convey the same moral message about the importance of discipline. Durantini 114. 116. As Richard Helgerson points out, the male householder appears most often in family portraits; he is noticeably absent from most late seventeenth-century genre imagery of Dutch homes. Richard Helgerson, \"Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650-1672,\" Representations 58 (Spring 1997): 55. 117. De Certeau 107. 118. Schama's chapter, \"Housewives and Hussies: Homeliness and Worldliness,\" 375-429 in The Embarrassment of Riches addresses this body of imagery, as does Franits' book, Paragons of Virtue. Both works make an overly straightforward distinction between images of female virtue and vice,1 when, in fact, many of the images display ambiguity about women's domestic. roles. See Angela Vanhaelen, \"Dutch Culture and the Politics of Difference. Review of Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, and Els Kloek et al., eds, Women of the Golden Age: An international Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland. England and Italy.\" RacjrXXI, 1-2(1994): 137-143. 119. See Roger Chattier, ed., Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, gen. eds. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 1-11 and 111-59. 120. It is difficult to make direct connections between this painting and the theatre. However, it is intriguing to note a possible connection to a proverb that was written upon the fireplace mantel of the regent's chamber of the civic theatre: \"A curse shall light upon that land, In which a child can scorn its mother.\" Domselaer 206. 121. Such connections between Calvinism and the definition of private life are discussed in Barker 8-10. 122. See T. Lovell, \"Subjective Powers? Consumption, the Reading Public and Domestic Women in early 18th-century England,\" The Consumption of Culture. 1600-1800. Image-Object. Text, ed. A. Bermingham. (London: Routledge, 1995) 23-41-99 Chapter Two P l a y i n g the M a r k e t : T h e F o o l B e c o m e s a B u s i n e s s m a n Nineteenth-century folklorists recount that when Czar Peter the Great of Russia went to Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century, he took great pleasure in visiting the weekly Butter market. One could purchase much more than butter at this Monday market, described in Tobias Van Domselaer's guidebook to Amsterdam as \"a Noah's ark, where one sees well nigh everything for sale that is imaginable\".1 A Noah's ark, for at the edge of the market square was the inn the White Elephant, where exotic animals, like the tapir pictured on a seventeenth-century advertising poster, were for sale (fig. 2.1). Here the sailor Jan Velten recorded wonders such as a large sea turtle and a four-horned sheep in his sketchbook of curiosities seen in Amsterdam (figs. 2.2 & 2.3).2 And possibly this is where Rembrandt, who lived not far away, encountered the elephant that he drew in 1637.3 But, Czar Peter, an avid collector of all things strange and wonderful, did not come to the Butter market to amass a Noah's ark of tapirs, turtles, elephants, or even four-horned sheep. Rather, it was an Amsterdam-born street performer that attracted his attention. As the story goes, the Czar was so taken by the antics of the market player Tetjeroen, that he offered the comedian a small fortune to accompany him back to Russia and serve as a court jester there. With all of the cunning of a fool, however, Tetjeroen refused this princely offer, and carried on selling quack medicines in the market square. From there, we are told, he went on to make his own fortune, not in the Butter market, but in the Stock market; for mastering the tricks of speculative trading came easily to one with such long experience of playing the market. 100 Tetjeroen lived happily ever after in Amsterdam. He married, bought a house, had two children, and then retired as content and as wealthy as any successful Amsterdam businessman.4 Numerous historical sources from the nineteenth century to the present reiterate versions of the life and success of the street player Tetjeroen.5 However, fruitless searching in the archives of Amsterdam led me to wonder about the truth Of these tales.6 In the responses of various archivists I thought I detected what Foucault has termed \"the laughter of the fool,\" directed at the inability to separate reality from illusion, or history from fiction.7 In a circular movement, my research led me from catchpenny prints of \"the life and career of Tetjeroen\", to detailed accounts of his experiences in folkloric histories of Amsterdam, to the municipal archives, where the dearth of information suggested that perhaps the folklorists had used the prints themselves as the primary source of their accounts. These prints do not picture Tetjeroen's encounter with the Czar, his stock market activities, or his married and family life. It seems that, in keeping with traditions of oral story telling, historians had patched together bits and pieces from various folk tales, anecdotes, farces, and prints to make up the historical details of Tetjeroen's life.8 This chapter, which examines the story of Tetjeroen as it was shaped by catchpenny prints, is structured by questions raised in the convoluted process of researching the history of this character. What is it that makes these prints of Tetjeroen seem \"true?\" In other words, what types of traps do these prints lay for their readers? The truth of the tale of Tetjeroen, I shall argue, does not lie in the historically verifiable details of his life (archival facts such as the date of his marriage, the birth dates of his children, the purchase transactions and address of his home on the Raamsgracht). As Michel de Certeau points out, stories do not merely describe practices, they make them, for stories themselves are practices and each re-telling is designed 101 for a specific audience and its circumstances. In de Certeau's view, there is always something at stake in the re-telling of a story, for they work to regulate changes in social spaces.9 Drawing on the work of de Certeau in his studies of early modern print culture, Roger Chattier emphasizes that it is important to be attentive to the form that conveys a story, for it both shapes and constrains meaning as it defines an audience. The strategies of printed material, Chartier argues, are tailored to the rebel inventiveness that the reader is presumed to possess.10 Thus, an exploration of the functions of these particular prints begins by asking who these forms were meant for. What specific historical and spatial changes did they address? And how did the skills and cultural habits of the intended interpretive community allow them to respond to the tricks these catchpenny prints play? The prints themselves offer some clues about their intended audience. Various printers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century published about ten different catchpenny prints of the life of Tetjeroen.11 The oldest surviving version of this type of print was produced by Jacobus and Jan Bouman (fig. 2.4), printers active in the city of Amsterdam in the last few decades of the seventeenth century. Diverse prints of Tetjeroen are fairly consistent: in most, twenty-four woodblock images, each accompanied by a rhyming couplet, are arranged in a grid format. The use of simple wording, rhymes, and images implies that these prints were aimed at an audience of rudimentary readers. Indeed, the titles of the prints address just such a group. With the voice of a vendor, they cry: \"Boys, if you want to increase your Pleasure, study this print, Because it is Tetjeroen, Who can persuade one and all\"12 (figs. 2.4 and 2.5). Promising pleasure, these rubrics urge boys to study the print of Tetjeroen, who, it enigmatically states, \"can persuade one and all\". How Tetjeroen manages to convince everyone is revealed in the prints: he concocts phoney medicines, and then entertains market-goers from 102, his stall, using the skills of theatre play to coax on-lookers into giving him money for worthless wares. The enjoyment these prints promise, therefore, seems to be the pleasure of examining the slippery identities of both objects and people in market practices: by horning horse turds into tooth-powder, a clown is able to transform himself into a doctor and then a rich man. And in naming a gendered audience, the titles imply that such explorations of the intricacies of entrepreneurial transactions were especially worthwhile for boys, particularly boys whose future interests were located in the market.13 These catchpenny prints, therefore, do not simply reflect the reality of the life of an actual street performer, but act as sites where young viewers could work out the possibilities as well as the potential dangers of their futures within the rapidly changing marketplace of the late seventeenth century. This chapter explores these issues by examining the multiple identities of the mercurial Tetjeroen, who theatrically shifts between the roles of player, merchant, doctor, rich boss, and madman. Section one considers the ways in which Tetjeroen's roles as seller and entertainer interlink market exchanges with the practices of theatre. While such comparisons would have been familiar to a seventeenth-century audience, this new genre of print takes up the trope of merchant-as-actor for a specific community of readers at a time when contestations about changes in both market and theatre practice were particularly heated. The forms of the prints themselves, and the manner in which they address their audience seem to intervene in these debates as they work together with the comic story to encourage readers to make critical judgements about the theatrical and immoral excesses of unregulated commercial transactions. Section two examines contemporary fears about uncontrolled market practices by turning to Tetjeroen's role as a quack doctor who uses artifice and illusion to deceive child-like customers in the market square. His self-interested desires threaten public well-being, and also \" 103 implicate viewers, who are covertly persuaded to identify both with the trickster and with his victims. This draws attention to the visual and rhetorical tricks that the prints themselves play on their audience. The final section goes on to explore the possible consequences of risks taken in the market. Tetjeroen's identity as a successful rich boss, who rides about town in a horse-drawn carriage may well be the fantastic imagining of a madman who falls victim to his own deceptions. The confusion between the roles of rich man and madman reveals misgivings about merchant identity. Demonstrating the body's power of self-transformation, these prints both point to the importance of mobility within merchant identity, and express enormous anxiety about the fluid artifice integral to the devices and desires that drive the market. Indeed, the changing performances of Tetjeroen are interconnected with the various roles that the prints play, as they shift between objective reflections of actual practices, persuasive vendors, and attractive commodities. The conflicting identities of the prints in turn construct various subject positions for viewers, ranging from disinterested critics of mercantile ethics, to self-interested or exploited buyers and sellers in a competitive marketplace. In this way, the actual consumption of these prints indicates the often-contradictory subject positions necessary to negotiate the changing social relations of Amsterdam's mercantile society in the final decades of the seventeenth century. Merchants as Players If Tetjeroen was not an actual historical figure, then how was he devised? And if he was not real, why was he mistaken for a genuine person? Printers who first published these catchpenny prints probably did not invent this character. Tetjeroen's distinctive motley costume 104 and pointed hat with dangling bell visually call up the tradition of the Fool (see fig. 2.4).14 As the personification of Folly in the static emblematic tableaus of the rederijker theatre, sailing with the mad crew in images of the Ship of Fools, and cavorting as the Lord of Misrule in carnival festivities, the Fool was long familiar in Netherlandish theatrical, festive, visual, and oral traditions.15 As Herman Pleij has argued, in the sixteenth century, an increasingly dominant middle class appropriated the medieval tradition of folly. It was the role of the Fool to mock socially threatening behaviour; thus this comic figure served as a vehicle for moral instruction, and played an important role in the formation of a middle-class system of values.16 However, the Fool often derided immorality by praising it, and his message could never be taken seriously because he embodied folly and sinfulness. Thus the tradition of folly was inherently ironic. Using entertainment to admonish, the Fool was a paradoxical figure, who elicited a contradictory response of both laughter and censure.17 Prints of Tetjeroen present new variations on this flexible and familiar theme. Notably, the distinctive gridded format of these prints facilitates the transformation of a stock comic character into a named individual who moves through the space and time of a narrative.18 Allowing different moments to be represented on one sheet, the grid works to reproduce the flow of narrative as it introduces notions of time, movement, and change. In this way, the characteristic comic strip composition of these prints permits a presentation of the self as a series of successive performances; as Tetjeroen, the Fool takes on a life of his own, with a performative identity that changes in each scene. This introduces the twists of theatre plot into printed form: disguised identity, deception, misplaced trust, suspense, betrayal, and reversals of fortune can all be represented in sequence. Thus the very structure of the prints imitates 105 seventeenth-century notions of identity, allowing an exploration of possible discrepencies between the external appearances and internal intentions of an individual.19 Not only this, but prints of Tetjeroen make specific comparisons between theatrical, ever-changing identity, and the identity of merchants. Using the huckster's stall as a theatre booth, Tetjeroen combines commerce with comedy as he amuses audiences to sell his wares. By mixing the roles of seller and player in a theatre in and of the marketplace, the character of Tetjeroen demonstrates complex connections between the social relations of commercial capitalism and those of theatre play. Visually, the prints portray both mercantile and rhetorical exchanges through the gestures of the figures. As Joseph Roach argues in his study of seventeenth-century theories of the passions and their links to theatre performance, dramatic gestures were understood as physical expressions of desire: The passions of the mind were generally thought to be of two types, concupiscible or irascible, caused either by the desire to attain or to avoid some object or entity: the former draws the body and spirits toward the exciting object, as in love or joy; the latter repels them, as in fear, or churns them up, as in hate.20 Prints of Tetjeroen demonstrate that passion and desire were driving forces, not just on the stage, but in every mercantile exchange. In scenes where agreements are forged between people, as money, goods, or promises are exchanged, the contract is signified by characters extending their arms towards each other, their hands meeting in gestures of transaction. This theatrical gesture is repeated throughout the prints. We see it, for example, when Tetjeroen is hired as an assistant by a doctor (fig. 2.4-10), as he sells medicines to the sick (fig. 2.4-6), and again when he brings money to his master. Performing farces from the stage, he reaches out to the audience, and a hand stretches toward his from the cluster of spectators below (fig. 2.4-18). In all of these scenes, two hands meet in dramatic gestures of give and take, and in this way, the body draws toward its desire. 106 These physical gestures forge strong visual links between performer and audience, merchant and buyer, master and hireling, as they come together in mutual expressions of need. When contracts break down, this is signified by the repelling gestures of irascible passion: when Tetje is fired for swindling his master, for example, we see the comedian run away from his employer's outstretched arm (fig. 2.4-15). Thus, all social relationships seem to take on a transactional quality in these prints. Moreover, these gestures of desire and interchange are rhetorical, and stand in for the persuasive words that are uttered in order to win over the other party. Whether Tetjeroen sells himself to his boss or hawks his nostrums to his customers, the compelling use of gesture indicates the command of language necessary for effective marketing. Such mastery of gesture and rhetoric is, of course, the actor's art. But, as these prints demonstrate, a silver tongue and a convincing manner are also the tools of the successful salesman. While the idea that skilful marketers use rhetoric and gesture to sell themselves as well as their products is commonplace today, to draw such parallels between the merchant and the player would have caused some contention in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Indeed, to readers of these prints, images of Tetjeroen's theatrical marketing ploys probably would have called up specific contests about the changing spaces of the market and the theatre. For while the figure of the comic fool was widespread throughout Western Europe, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, this character was adapted to address the particular concerns of this mercantile city. In order to understand the ways in which prints of Tetjeroen confronted the cultural habits and expectations of a particular cornmunity of readers, it is important to examine how perceived links between theatrical performance and mercantile identity had previously 107 been the grounds of dissention between groups who disagreed about the identity of the city itself. Early in the seventeenth century, the harbour city began to emerge as the hub of a powerful trading empire, and comparisons between business skills and the arts of comedy were drawn by groups who sought to define Amsterdam as a vital centre of both commerce and learning. Notably, such connections were made at the inauguration ceremonies for Amsterdam's new university. There were strong connections between the university and the theatre. Before this, courses in sciences and arts were offered at the \"Nederduytsche Academie\", founded in 1617 through the merging of Amsterdam's two main theatre companies. In 1632, this academy split: the Amsterdam University or \"Athenaeum Illustre\" was dedicated to the study of the sciences, while the Amsterdam Schouwburg, or public theatre, was built as a centre for literary activities.21 In his inaugural speech, founding professor Caspar van Baerle lectured \"on the wise merchant\". He made the following connections: \"Merchants require wisdom and eloquence, the former to distinguish honest from dishonest gain, the latter in order to use the enticements of language to praise the wares which they so eagerly endeavour to sell.\" The art of winning over by words, he continued, which would-be preachers and barristers also had to master, was traditionally used in markets and fairs by quacks, charlatans and players.22 A comparison of the player's manipulative eloquence with the skills of the businessman was not new in 1632, for the notion of merchant-as-actor was long familiar in the Low Countries.23 It is a somewhat startling analogy, however, given the fact that the career of strolling. player was considered one of the most dishonourable occupations of the time. Harassed by church authorities, players were refused church membership and denied Christian burial.24 It often was difficult for travelling troupes to obtain permission to play in Dutch cities, 108 and Amsterdam's magistrates pointedly discouraged itinerant companies from entering the city by granting a monopoly to the Schouwburg's professional actors.25 Eking out a precarious living on the outskirts of Dutch cities and towns, the strolling player came to symbolize social and cultural marginality.26 As playwright Jan Vos put it, \"A travelling player has much in common with the wind; one sees him everywhere: but nowhere is his home.\"27 This must have been part of the appeal of this figure for the burgher classes. Repeatedly represented in plays, prints, paintings and poems, itinerant players, quacks and charlatans were described as homeless figures who were perpetually in motion. The strolling comedian was thus a figure that the middle classes both identified with and distinguished themselves from. In pointing out similarities between merchants and players, for instance, Caspar van Baerle could not help but draw attention to the fact that middle-class merchants did not share the social status of travelling market performers. Burghers thus could project anxieties about the ethics of merchant behaviour\u00E2\u0080\u0094such as using theatrical enticements both to sell their wares and to disguise dishonest gain\u00E2\u0080\u0094onto these marginal itinerant comic types.28 This allowed an exploration of dubious mercantile practices without jeopardizing the perceived moral and social superiority of the middle classes. By emphasizing the theatrical nature of mercantile identity, Barlaeus' speech also may have been a defence of the role of Amsterdam's theatre traditions. For struggles between the powerful Calvinist church and the newly empowered burgher class converged on the playhouse as a site within the city where issues pertinent to Amsterdam's commercial society were performed, explored, and discussed. Not long before he made this speech, Barlaeus had been dismissed from his chair at Leiden's orthodox Calvinist university because of his Remonstrant beliefs.29 A schism within Dutch Calvinism pitted Remonstrants, who believed that people had been given free will to 109 choose the faith that led to salvation, against the dominant Counter-Remonstrants, who upheld the doctrine of predestination, which taught that God had divided the elect from the damned before creation. The new university in Amsterdam was established to rival the Leiden university,30 and Barlaeus' appointment as professor in Amsterdam was considered a triumph for the Remonstrants. In light of these controversies, Barlaeus' comparison of would-be preachers to quacks, charlatans and players would have been a highly charged insult.31 For, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Amsterdam's church leaders fought tirelessly to ban theatre play from the city. Theatre was threatening to the power of the church in civic life, as it provided an alternative site where public opinion on political and religious issues was influenced. Indeed, the church was most threatened by overlaps between the activities of pulpit and stage: from both, the power of rhetoric was deployed to sway large audiences through the manipulation of their emotions. Not only this, but theatre play itself contradicted the doctrine of predestination, for to watch an actor fashion new identities upon the stage was a powerful indicator of human agency in the rest of life. Engraved above the entrance to Amsterdam's municipal theatre, where it served to define and obscure the boundary between the city and the playhouse, was the motto: \"The world is a theatre play. Each plays his role and receives his part.\"32 Barlaeus' statement seems to elaborate on this maxim, as it points to the theatricality that imbued the particular social relations of Amsterdam's urban consumer culture. Such comparisons would have been anathema to Amsterdam's church leaders. Thus when Barlaeus drew attention to the drama of everyday life upon the worldly stage that was Amsterdam, he challenged the precepts of orthodox Calvinism. Moreover, such a comparison linked Amsterdam's university, theatre, and 110 markets as social spaces that were more allied to Remonstrant beliefs, thus striking a blow at the authority and influence of orthodox Calvinism within civic life.33 The Calvinist church continually attempted to eradicate theatre practice throughout the seventeenth century, while supporters of the theatre reiterated the importance of connections between theatre play and burgher identity.34 Children's prints of the market player Tetjeroen thus would have called upon readers' previous knowledge of these debates. However, the question still remains: why were issues of theatre and market practice taken up in catchpenny prints and directed at a new audience of middle-class boys in the late seventeenth century? Before returning to the prints, it is important to examine how the interests at stake in battles about theatricality and merchant identity changed dramatically in the final decades of the seventeenth century, as a powerful new group entered the fray. In the 1670's and 1680's, the definition of the theatre was irrevocably altered, not by church leaders, who failed to prevent the reopening of the playhouse in 1677, but by the city magistrates, who appointed a newly formed classicist society to govern the civic theatre. As I argued in the previous chapter, radical changes in the way the theatre was run were linked to contestations about the redefinition of the market. The financial policies of Amsterdam's wealthy upper middle-class regents increasingly overlooked the trading and shipping of goods generated by the harbour in favour of international banking, investment and speculative trading opportunities provided by the city's exchange bank and stock market.35 As they reinvested their capital in international finance, Amsterdam's elite also actively promoted international culture, especially the classical traditions fostered in the French court of Louis XTV. 3 6 By annexing the civic theatre and designating it as a refined sphere for the classical education of their own Ill children, this group increasingly espoused courtly identity in order to distinguish themselves from Amsterdam's merchant classes. A booklet on the stock market entitled Confusion de Confusiones.37 was written by Joseph de la Vega, and published in 1688. This work serves as an introduction to the manner in which the metaphor of merchant-as-player was appropriated and transformed in order to mock finance trading as a practice that threatened traditional ways of doing business at this time.38 For Vega's satirical descriptions of the abstractions of speculative market processes provoke troubling questions about the mutability of personal identity, the formlessness of capital, and the very nature of reality within a transformed marketplace. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was the nerve centre of international trading in company shares, government bonds, and commodities.39 Comparing these activities to theatre play, Vega writes: Amongst the plays which men perform in taking different parts in this magnificent world theatre, the greatest comedy is played at the [Amsterdam Stock] Exchange. There, in an immitable fashion, speculators excel in tricks, they do business and find excuses wherein hiding places, concealment of facts, quarrels, provocations, mockery, idle talk, violent desires, collusion, artful deceptions, betrayals, cheatings, and even the tragic end are to be found.40 Speculators, in other words, were dipping into the actor's bag of tricks, for as capital became more mobile, so, it seems, did human identity, imbuing all of life with a sense of risk. Connected to this anxiety about the duplicity of stock traders was bewilderment about the reality of capital. As a Dutch merchant, seemingly puzzled by speculative trading, pondered in 1699, \"The seller, so to speak, sells nothing but wind and the buyer receives only wind.\"41 As goods were replaced by promises, the very definition of reality came into question. This same merchant also expressed concern about the intangibility of currency. Summarizing a description of methods of establishing credit, he wrote: 112 Up to this point, one sees that there is as much reality in this as there could well be, nothing being more real than ingots of gold, bars of silver, paistres, ducats, ducatons, and suchlike, but the method of payment in bank, as it is called, has not the same reality. One could, on the contrary, call it a veritable illusion; since for the gold and silver taken to the bank it gives only a line of writing in a book. This line may be transferred to another, and this second transfers it to a third...and this can go on, so to speak, to infinity.42 In a complicated sleight of hand, the bank appears to exchange money for words, as it both keeps the bullion in its vaults and pays it out again. As the merchant notes, this makes for a strange reality, as cold hard currency is transformed into a line of writing in a book. Indeed, much of the anxiety surrounding finance capitalism seems engendered by the ways that changing market practices continuously shifted the threshold between the visible and the invisible, and between reality and abstraction. If capital became a veritable illusion as money and goods disappeared from view, and if speculators were charlatans who excelled in tricks, hiding places, concealment of facts and artful deceptions, then who or what could be trusted? This was a very real problem in the Exchange, and throughout the seventeenth century, the States General of the United Provinces passed various edicts prohibiting activities such as \"trading in wind\".43 The phrase \"trading in wind\", or windhandel. was used to describe the selling of shares that the trader did not possess or had not yet paid for.44 An increase in speculative trading in the 1680's was accompanied by the escalation of such abuses, and in 1689, Amsterdam's government levied a new tax on stock transactions in an effort to curtail these fraudulent practices.45 This legislation may have come, at least in part, in response to lively public debate about the problems of speculative trading.46 Joseph de la Vega's pamphlet participated in this controversy, and so, I would argue, did children's prints of Tetjeroen, which mockingly address the practice Of using theatrical tricks to sell empty promises. 113 Vega's book, written in the form of a dialogue between a shareholder, a philosopher, and a merchant, is a detailed description of the stock business, which is clearly differentiated from mercantile practices.47 As the merchant character explains, it is his wish to learn about stock trading because, ...the importunities of instructions, the shipment of goods, and the circulation of bills of exchange are all so burdensome to me. The load of work leads me to look for another means of acquiring a fortune and, even at the risk of loss, to slough off these many wearisome activities.48 In the end, after hearing the stockholder's complicated description of the irrational behaviour and multiple misuses of stock trading, both the philosopher and the merchant declare that they would never participate in these practices. The philosopher claims that philosophical speculation suited him better than speculation in stocks, for \"what is fair in the latter is dubious in the former.\" The merchant concurs: \"I esteem business but hate gambling. It is possible that I shall become a holder of shares and shall deal [in shares] in an honest way, but I am very sure that I shall never become a speculator.\"49 Thus Vega's pamphlet constructs stock market speculation as an activity that threatened honest business practices and raised pointed questions about personal accountability in the market. Of course, these types of moral questions about business dealings were not new to Amsterdam's mercantile society. While the wind trade was an abuse of the system, as Simon Schama points out, \"it was in fact only a more extreme form of the practices which arose naturally in an economy where delivery times were bound to be uncertain and prolonged.\"50 It seems that the real threat of financial speculation was not so much that it endangered morality as that it jeopardized commercial capitalism.51 Indeed, historians have pointed to the changing financial policies of Amsterdam's elite as a possible factor in the drastic decline of trade and 114 industry in the final decades of the seventeenth century, as merchant capitalism was eclipsed by the new trading practices of finance capitalism.52 From here we can begin to understand why children's prints of Tetjeroen, which poke fun at the extremes of speculative market practices, may have emerged at this time. As vernacular farce was censored from the new classicist theatre as unfit for the children of wealthy financiers, this material was disseminated in prints for the sons of merchants. Manipulating the interpretive conventions of the mercantile community, prints of Tetjeroen seem to appropriate the familiar farcical figure of the merchant-as-player in order to strike a blow in battles over the redefinition of the market and the theatre. As we shall explore in more detail in the following section, in a manner similar to Joseph de la Vega's satirical booklet, children's prints of Tetjeroen strategically mock the selling of empty promises in order to castigate the extremes of unethical financial practices, which were difficult to regulate, and posed new threats to mercantile identity. Indeed, by employing specific visual and rhetorical strategies, the prints position their readers as a community of disinterested critics of market ethics. Like the merchant character in Vega's dialogue, these boys were encouraged to survey the money-making possibilities of new market practices, judge them unscrupulous, and opt to remain honest traders. With rhetorical immediacy, the titles of the prints explicitly address the intended audience in order to persuasively influence the ways in which these prints were used.53 The rubric, \"Boys, if you want to increase your Pleasure, study this print, Because it is Tetjeroen, Who can persuade one and all,\" is followed by a subtitle, which instructs the boys: \"And if you want to have even more fun, Then make little Paintings out of this. Cut them out carefully, and then stick them down onto stiff paper\" (see figs. 2.4 and 2.5). As I argued in the previous 115 chapter, gridded catchpenny prints were associated with steek sanctjes. In this game of chance, prints were cut apart, and the segments either thrown in the air or poked from between the pages of a book with a pin, knife, or key in order to predict the future. Jan Steen's painting, The Village Schoolroom of c. 1670, positions this collective use of print as a superstitious game played mainly by peasants and little girls~a practice that not only fragmented the prints, but also seemed to divide the community. In the painting, the irrational abuse of print was opposed to the docile bodies and private reading practices of rational individuals. Significantly, the Tetjeroen prints seem to make the same types of distinctions between readers and uses of the prints. In Jan and Jacobus Bouman's version of the printed story of Tetjeroen, each scene is bordered by heavy dark lines (fig. 2.4), emphasizing the grid format and encouraging fragmentation. This print must have sold well, for Bouman's competitors copied, adapted, and distributed their own versions of the career of Tetjeroen.54 Significantly, in all subsequent versions of this print, a small picture frame borders each scene (see figs. 2.5 and 2.6). It is as if textual directions were not enough to discourage the subversive game of steek sanctjes. The addition of picture frames visually embeds the didactic message of the verse in the form itself. This curtails the reader from fragmenting the print in order to play games of chance, and redirects this practice by instructing boys to treat each scene in the print as a little painting to be cut out carefully and then glued directly onto another piece of paper. The grid composition typically was used to organize diverse children's prints from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.55 However, the strategy of turning the squares of the print into picture frames in combination with specific instructions about what type of game to play with these fragments is peculiar to prints of the trickster Tetjeroen. 116 For although the,grid format was an effective means for representing narrative sequences, it also encouraged the practice of disrupting and shuffling the sequence of events. Explicit instructions to cut up prints and then glue them back down thus reassert the linear narrative of the story. This reinforces a certain type of reading practice by implicitly advocating the silent, interiorized reading of an isolated reader.56 And, significantly, the rubrics encourage a specific group\u00E2\u0080\u0094middle-class boys\u00E2\u0080\u0094to consume the prints in this way. Indeed, prints that were not cut into bits and thrown away actually bear testimony to the privatization of the act of reading. FOr example, the marks of use on the Bouman print indicate that the reader had carefully folded the print in four (fig. 2.4). Possibly this was so that he or she could fit the print into one of the wooden boxes that children carried to and from school.57 Intimate in size, inexpensive and portable, this print was treated as a private possession. Yet, these prints do not address an individual reader, but target a collective audience: \"Boys, if you want to increase your pleasure, study this print\". The title mimics the cries of vendors who sold inexpensive wares, such as woodblock prints, at markets.58 This device situates the audience for these prints in the marketplace, where people were bound together through processes of buying and selling. In order to address a consistent print-consuming public, therefore, the prints must reconcile the push and pull between the solitary rational reading of the private individual and the communal experience of the group.59 The characteristic gridded format of these catchpenny prints appears to negotiate such tensions between the individual and the collective. In the production process, twenty-four individual woodblocks were locked into a chase, inked and then impressed onto a piece of paper 31 x 40 cm in dimension. The result is a pictorial narrative sequence that presents itself all on one large page. Unlike the format of a book, which requires that an individual reader turn 117 pages to reveal the story, catchpenny prints lend themselves to communal visual consumption, in which readers could gather around to see the contents. Moreover, the presentation of diverse individual viewpoints within one form also seems to call up a collective. Just as the format brings together individual woodblocks to make a cohesive narrative, an intersubjective community could come together to collectively consume the print. Ideally, such activities forged a sense of shared identity. In this way, the message of the prints is embedded in the forms themselves, which organize the subject matter in a manner that both engages individuals and connects them to other readers.60 The consumption of print\u00E2\u0080\u0094the buying, viewing, reading aloud and discussion of printed material\u00E2\u0080\u0094is thus implicitly posited as a consensus-building activity among individuals. From here we begin to get a sense of the type of reader that these prints attempted to fashion. This reader is discouraged from engaging in collective and irrational games of chance, which were increasingly associated with girls of the urban and rural lower classes. Instead, the title and even the format of the prints seem to encourage different types of collective uses, which brings together a community of readers made up of the subjective opinions of private individuals. This audience is persuaded to study the farcical marketing tricks of the charlatan Tetjeroen, indicating their interest in entrepreneurial practices. Moreover, as they are urged to take pleasure in vernacular farce, the readers are distinguished from the children of the classicizing elite, who increasingly spurned these comic traditions. The prescribed reader thus begins to emerge as a rational, masculine, middle-class subject who critically discussed moral issues about market practice in a public made up of bis peers. However, as we turn to analyze Tetjeroen's role as quack doctor in the next section, we begin to see that the very strategies that 118 direct the consumption of the prints concurrently undermine prescribed readings and call into question the coherence of a mercantile community. The Quack Who Deceives One and All The opening scene of these prints depicts Tetjeroen, wearing his fool's costume, performing together with a monkey on a pedestal. The accompanying caption tells readers, \"Tetjeroen has decided that he wants to try and learn the doctor's art\" (fig. 2.4-1). In the next two scenes, we see him apprenticing with a doctor, and then he drags his medicines and equipment into the market. From here it becomes clear that Tetjeroen does not take up the doctor's art for altruistic reasons, but because there is money to be made. \"Tetjeroen informs the peasant, that his elixir is exorbitant\" is followed by \"Tetjeroen makes tooth powder from, the cooking down of horse's dung\" (fig. 2.4-6, 2.4-7). Here we begin to see a crucial difference between the career of strolling player and Tetjeroen's new occupation as a quack doctor. A comedian for his times, Tetjeroen revels in the free enterprise of the markets of seventeenth-century Amsterdam; the fool becomes a businessman who uses deception and laughter to sell sham merchandise at excessive prices. The story of Tetjeroen, as the titles of the prints tell readers, is worth studying: he will please you for he is able to satisfy one and all. Part of the pleasure the prints promise is that they teach methods of persuasion. And one of the secrets of Tetjeroen's success is humour. He pleases and persuades the readers and his patients alike because he makes them laugh: \"Tetje's master takes him on, because he's such a joker. Tetje causes great roars of laughter, and follows his master to the theatre\" (fig. 2.4-10, 2.4-11). Bouts of laughter were considered therapeutic in the early modern period, breaking up the black bile that could congeal into melancholy.61 But 119 the doctor who hires Tetjeroen is probably more interested in the persuasive, rather than the healing powers of the jester's art. For his traditional comic antics work well as mechanisms to cultivate consumerism. And so Tetjeroen begins a short career as the doctor's zany.62 Unexpectedly, he uses laughter to trick, not only his customers, but also his boss: \"His master's ointment he commends, says it will sort of help you mend. Here Tetjeroen is selling a lot, but most of it is from his own stock. Then Tetjeroen sells out you see, and his master makes him leave\" (fig. 2.4-13, 14, 15). Making jokes about the potency of his master's remedies allows him to sell his own merchandise, concocted from horse manure. Like the speculators at the Amsterdam stock exchange, taken in by a veritable illusion, Tetje's audience is cheated by the comic deceptions of the merchant-player into buying empty promises, nothing but wind. Like every speculative exchange, this one has its winners and its losers. The doctor, outsmarted by a hired stooge in a competitive marketplace, and the sick, who bought and swallowed the medicinal manure, have definitely been duped. While Tetje loses his job, he comes out ahead in the next frame (fig. 2.4-16), where he appears with horse and carriage: \"Tetjeroen becomes his own Boss, See him riding in a coach.\" But how. are the readers situated in Tetjeroen's tricky transactions? \"Boys, if you want to increase your Pleasure, study this print, Because it is Tetjeroen, who can satisfy one and all.\" Cajoled into buying the prints, have they been satisfied? If we look closely at the group of spectators that gathers to watch Tetje play from the market booth, these on-lookers seem to resemble children (fig. 2.4-12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24). Picturing the print's intended audience within the story is a visual device that engages viewers in the action. As they are prompted to identify with the group in front of the salesman's 120 booth, young viewers become self-consciously aware of their own role as spectators and consumers. Locating themselves in front of the huckster's stall, beholders must scrutinize the charlatan's act as they decide whether or not to trust and invest in his wares. This conflation of onlooker with potential costumer draws attention to one of the most important faculties needed in consumer society\u00E2\u0080\u0094the skill of careful observation.63 While the texts allude to the quack's compelling cant, they do not reproduce his words, thus placing emphasis on the power of images to attract, amuse, and convince.64 Indeed Tetje attempts to exert a captivating power over his audience through the visual enticements of his colourful costume, sweeping theatrical gestures, quick action, and packaged merchandise. As the saying goes, however, appearances can be deceiving. We have already seen how the peasant was taken in by Tetje's convincing facade. This would be understandable to readers, for peasants traditionally were positioned as rural rubes easily swindled by slick urban types.65 Significantly, the other individual that Tetjeroen is able to hoodwink is a blind man (fig. 2.4-19). Here blindness is equated with ignorance: unable to see, or to see through, Tetje's act, the blind man is easily misled. In this way, viewers could comfortably distinguish themselves from the inexperience of the foolish peasant and the oblivion of the sightless man. For the viewers, after all, have seen more than these characters. Privy to pictures of Tetje concocting his phoney elixirs behind the scenes, they will be harder to cheat, for they have seen that he sells nothing but wind. In this way, as the prints expand upon the familiar trope of merchant-as-player, they seem to address the problems of rapidly shifting boundaries between the visible and the invisible in a changing market situation. In the context of Amsterdam in the final decades of the seventeenth century, the exploits of Tetjeroen could have been linked to controversies 121 surrounding the windhandel. the selling of empty promises, which continued in spite of deterrent regulations. These insights endow beholders with discernment and point to the crucial role of vision in cultivating informed judgement in the marketplace. Not only should this prevent viewers from being deceived by the trickster, but their shared knowledge binds them together, challenging them to perceive, reflect upon and dispassionately judge the morality of these transactions. Until they start to laugh. The role of humour in these prints collapses the distance between virtuous viewers and the unscrupulous quack. For the pleasure of this printed story does not really lie in its serious moral lesson, but stems from seeing Tetjeroen deceive one and all. Because the readers are given insights that should prevent them from being deceived, they can safely laugh at Tetje's victims. No sooner do viewers begin to laugh, however, than they are implicated in the very practices they condemn. In fact, as the prosperous Tetjeroen rides through one of the. final scenes on horseback, the text directly addresses its audience: \"Boys, you can join in the fun, because you will ride with Tetje\" (fig. 2.4-23). Having learned Tetje's tricks, the boys are now ready to share his success. As they ridicule his customers and identify with the trickster, the readers seem to have the last laugh. This is certainly a topsy-turvy world, however, in which master, peasant, and blind man alike are taken in by a duplicitous itinerant quack doctor, who rides off in a horse-and-carriage. In fact, this ending departs from the conventions of Dutch comic tradition. Practitioners of medicine, from the poorest quack to the most learned surgeon, were stock comic characters in seventeenth-century visual imagery, farces and oral tales.66 As Rudolf Dekker and Herman Roodenburg argue, within comic tradition, doctors were most often positioned as the butt of jokes.67 Prints of Tetjeroen are distinctive within this tradition, therefore, because they 122 encouraged readers to identify and laugh with, rather than at, the doctor. To understand the implications of this, we must explore the function of this comic type in more detail. Why was the doctor such a consistent figure of fun? Consider the following joke. Amsterdam university's prestigious Doctor Nicolaas Tulp and his son-in-law, also a doctor, lived next door to each other in two fine houses. Despite their financial success, their medical abilities were in question, as the story goes, since above Tulp's door stood the motto \"Walk with God\" while his son-in-law's lintel proclaimed, \"Seek eternal life.\"68 Jokes, as Mary Douglas argues, provide \"glimpses of a truth which escapes through the mesh of structured concepts,\"69 and the one about Tulp and his son-in-law certainly gets to the heart of the matter. The doctor, after all, profited from, suffering and from death. Like mercantile exchanges, medical transactions also had their winners and their losers. And while the sick needed to depend on doctors, it was with the knowledge that a self-interested doctor could manipulate life and death to his own advantage, and that a healthy patient meant a loss of revenue.70 Which is why, as the joke suggests, it may have been wiser to walk with God, who had absolute power over life and death, and to seek eternal life, rather than to put faith in doctors. While university doctors such as Tulp were not spared, quack doctors especially were singled out within comic tradition as profiteers who exploited sickness.71 In his character sketches of seventeenth-century types, for example, the writer Richard Verstegen describes the quack as an enterprising silver-tongued vagabond: It's enough for him just to know the names of people's infirmities because if he can name them, then he immediately can cure them with his tongue. He knows that people have no stable place in the world, and therefore when he's deceived the people of one city as much as he can, he picks up and moves to another place.72 This description links the empty promises of the quack doctor to his extreme mobility. Like Tetjeroen, Verstegen's quack escapes the bonds of neighbourhood, family, kin, and guild. 123 Travelling from place to place to sell their wares, quacks were not guild members, and therefore had no professional status. Indeed, in 1675, the charter of the Amsterdam surgeon's guild ordered: ...that no bunglers, adventurers or quacks, or anyone else under any title whatsoever should be allowed to practice their so-called art, unless they have first done the appropriate proof, and also contributed to the burden of the guild...73 Repeated regulations of this sort indicate that the practices of those who operated on the fringes of the sanctioned medical profession were difficult to control. Like the strolling player, the quack doctor was socially and professionally marginal. However, the quack differed from the player in that he used theatre play, not just to entertain, but also to hawk his bogus wares. Unfettered by community, he was not commercially, ethically or medically accountable to any regulating body; moving with ease between towns and identities, he cared for no one but himself. The quack, therefore, emerges in comic tradition as a social type who demonstrates the selfish individualism engendered by excessive mobility and unregulated commercial practices.74 This type of freely moving individual has no home other than the market square. Indeed, one of the most curious scenes in the Bouman print is the image of Tetjeroen shaking hands with the doctor who has just hired him (fig. 2.4-10). The master stands in front of the door of his house on top of a black and white checked floor, which hovers like a floating carpet above the horizontal lines that represent the exterior world of the market in every other scene. The bizarre disjunction between this patterned tiled floor, evoking the domestic interior and the surface that Tetje stands on seems to emphasize the quack's homeless status. It is as if he is so estranged from domestic space that he cannot enter or even approach it. Manoeuvring within the market, Tetjeroen hawks his wares from a table (fig. 2.4-5,6,22), a booth (2.4-12,13,14), a 124 podium (2.4-17), a platform (2.4-18), a barrel (2.4-20, 21), and a peculiar wheeled pyramid (2.4-24). These temporary, portable structures could be loaded onto his cart and moved easily from market to market, city to city; they do not anchor his body in space. Moreover, the quack's mobile body is pictured as estranged from the bodies of others. In many scenes where he sells his merchandise, the figure of Tetjeroen is strikingly disproportionate in contrast to the bodies of his audience (see especially fig. 2.4-13, 17). Even if these on-lookers are children, the discrepancy in size alienates the enormous charlatan from his tiny customers. This jarring visual disharmony emphasizes the distance between audience and quack, whose ability to fashion constantly shifting identities facilitates the exploitation of physical suffering for profit and pleasure.75 In this way, the estranged body-in-motion of the quack doctor has very little physical awareness of other bodies. With the lack of sympathetic contact between buyer and seller, and doctor and patient in these scenes, the market emerges as a space powered by the forces of greed and aggression, desensitizing individuals to the bodies around them.76 As a marginal itinerant type who escapes professional and commercial regulations, Tetjeroen demonstrates the dangerous extremes of the personal freedom, individuality and self-interest generated by commerce. Indeed, printed stories of his career illustrate how the money-making practices of the street vendor could contribute to the breakdown of traditional class distinctions.77 This startling possibility is illustrated by Tetjeroen's sudden transformation into a rich man with a horse-drawn carriage (fig. 2.4-16).78 However, these printed stories concurrently worked to curtail the threatening mobility of lower-class individuals. Depicting commercial abuses committed by a quack operating outside of the guild system, prints of Tetjeroen resonate with increasing restrictions on the practices of itinerant medical . 1 2 5 practitioners.79 Moreover, as they associate the immoral excesses of commerce solely with these types of marginal, unregulated practices, the prints create and secure the moral and social position of their intended audience. Not only this, but as tensions about increases in speculative trading escalated in the late seventeenth century, readers also could have compared the tricks of the travelling quack doctor with the unethical trading activities of speculators who sailed close to the wind in their business dealings. As we have seen, at the time that these prints of Tetjeroen first were published, stock market trading was burgeoning, and there was much public debate about the destructive dangers of unbridled economic competition. Abuses such as trading in wind were met with demands for greater controls on stock trading, which was pointed to as a cause for drastic declines in mercantile trade. Distributed to middle-class boys at a time when elite financiers were spurning Amsterdam's comic traditions, these prints appear to address concerns about the growing separation between middle-class merchants and wealthy investors. Encouraging readers to disparage unregulated money-making, prints of Tetjeroen thus posit conventional mercantile activity as the only respectable practice. However, while prints of Tetjeroen use satirical mockery to attack the activities of groups whose increasing fluidity posed a threat to merchant practice, as we have seen, protean theatricality was also central to mercantilism. Exposing a deep contradiction, the prints reveal that mobility was both the ideal and the nightmare of merchant identity.80 While the exemplary reader is positioned as a disinterested critic of the unethical or ignorant practices of others, it is significant that the prints simultaneously prompt readers to subvert this distanced position. For they also encourage readers to identify with the unprincipled quack. 126 \"Boys if you want to increase your pleasure, study this print because it is Tetjeroen who can satisfy one and all.\" In the ambiguity of the title, contradictory subject positions come into play. This rubric could indicate that readers should study the dissolute career of Tetjeroen in order to improve their critical faculties. But, with the sly wink of the Fool, it also could imply that if the boys wanted to increase their pleasure, they needed some of Tetje's tricks in order to survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive market. Thus, as the boys laugh at Tetje's deceptions, their laughter takes on a somewhat subversive quality, for it undermines the disinterested viewer position. Identifying with Tetjeroen's triumphs, the sons of merchants were prompted to realize that they had much at stake in a changing mercantile situation, and that their own future success lay in their ability to manipulate the market where they would need, in the words of Barlaeus, \"to distinguish honest from dishonest gain,...[and] to use the enticements of language to praise the wares they so eagerly endeavour to sell.\"81 \"And if you want to have even more fun,\" the rubrics urge, \"Then make Paintings out of this print.\" In the spirit of the tale of Tetjeroen, a penny print masquerades as a series of framed paintings. Here, the artful practices taught by the prints are demonstrated by the form, which ludicrously attempts to sell itself as something else. Just as Tetjeroen turns horse manure into medicine, the boys laughingly are encouraged to transform prints into paintings. Acting as repositories for deceitful tactics, the prints thus invite boys to study and absorb the everyday know-how that they convey.82 And toying with the value of objects is offered as a worthwhile trick to know. With this comes the betrayal that while commercial transactions may bind merchants together, it also pits them against each other in competitive relations of exchange. As viewers assimilate the tricky practices of both Tetjeroen and the prints, the ideals of the 127 shared knowledge, compassion and disinterested consensus of a model public begin to break down. The small picture frames also draw attention to the relationship between the viewer and the prints as material objects that were bought and sold.83 Indeed, at the bottom margin of these catchpenny prints is the name of the publishers and specific coordinates that locate their shop: \"In Amsterdam, Printed by Jacobus and Jan Bouman, on the New dike, between the two Haarlem locks.\" A common device used by printers to advertise their location, this line of text encourages readers to come and buy more merchandise.84 In conjunction with this, the text across the top margin attempts to sell the print by impersonating the persuasive voice of a vendor. Along the edges of the prints, therefore, the reader is reminded that these objects were commodities sold in printers' shops and at markets and fairs by peddlers.85 This positions readers as consumers in a competitive marketplace,86 where it was imperative that they be careful observers, able to detect fraudulent practices in order to protect their own self-interests. In their role as potential buyers, viewers thus shift from identifying with Tetjeroen to situating themselves among his audience. As they take this position, however, they discover that if they laugh at the trickster's victims, they may well be laughing at themselves. While Tetje cheats the peasant, the blind man and his boss, the prints also include a scene with the caption, \"Tetjeroen sells his wares, to one and all in public,\" that pictures boyish clients reaching up to buy the phoney merchandise (fig. 2.4-18, 2.5-18). Here, the duped begin to look uncomfortably like the readers. No longer disinterested, they too could be deceived by slick marketing techniques. Indeed, the rubric's promise of pleasure and worthwhile knowledge in exchange for money may have prompted canny readers to wonder about the voice that addressed them. The 128 compelling language of salesmanship forms a collusion between marketer and customer, between the prints and their buyers, between Tetjeroen and his readers. In this way, the forms as well as the subject matter of these prints demonstrate modes of exercising power in market relations. Buying a print, after all, is a transaction in which money is exchanged for goods. And reading a print is also a form of exchange between the intended meaning and the reader's own interpretative skills.87 As they teach readers to judge theatrical marketing techniques, the prints self-consciously draw attention to their own powers of persuasion\u00E2\u0080\u0094to their status as representations. By aligning viewers with the trickster's victims, catchpenny prints of Tetjeroen emphasize their own compelling visual power, as well as the possibility of erroneous viewing, or faulty judgement on the part of readers. This reveals the conflicting possibilities of print's capacity to influence audiences, and allows that readers potentially could see through the traps they lay. Astute readers, who understood the role of trickery in market exchanges, must have wondered if, like Tetjeroen, the prints themselves could be employing entertainment and rhetoric to deceive one and all. \"Boys if you want to increase your pleasure, study this Print, because it's about Tetjeroen, who can satisfy everyone\" might indicate that the readers who learn the skills of persuasion would share in Tetje's success, riding off on horseback with him at the end. However, this rubric certainly also implies that prints of Tetjeroen could satisfy the readers in the same way that Tetje tricks his boss and his patients: by beguiling them to collaborate in their own deception. Madman or Rich man? The Deceiver Deceives Himself Tetjeroen has one more trick that raises troubling questions about the manipulative strategies of market practices and representations. Certain versions of these prints end with an 129 image of Tetje hobbling on a crutch followed by one of him riding with his sweetheart in the horse and carriage: \"Tetjeroen! well this is sad, through his art, he's gone quite mad. Now Tetje's a boss with lots of money, Riding in the coach with his honey\" (fig. 2.6-23, 24).88 Juxtaposing these very different conclusions to Tetjeroen's career seems like a strange way to end the story, for the contradictions of these two scenes are quite obvious. How does Tetjeroen move so quickly from madman to rich man? According to Michel Foucault, in the seventeenth century, madness, brought about by an excess of passion, was characterized by the inability to distinguish between reality and illusion.89 In this sense, madman is quite a fitting role for Tetjeroen; through his self-interested artifice, he finally dupes himself. For madness, argues Foucault, begins with a surrender to one's own desires: .. .because a man is attached to himself...he accepts error as truth, lies as reality.... The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.90 If madness is a case of the self-interested deceiver deceiving himself, then the happy-ending image of Tetjeroen as a rich boss could be read as the hallucination of a lunatic. The madman's delusive self-attachment, says Foucault, \"enables him to grant himself all the qualities, all the virtues or powers he lacks.... Poor, he is rich; ugly, he admires himself'.91 Is this then a real horse and carriage, or a mere chimera? By ending the narrative with these two scenes, this version of the printed story of Tetjeroen posits madness as a risk of trickery. As we have seen, in mercantile exchange, feigned or theatrical identity was understood as a powerful tool to captivate others. However, the scene of Tetjeroen's madness demonstrates that deception could also seize upon and possess the deceiver himself, who was particularly vulnerable to the forces 130 he played with.92 \"Tetjeroen! well this is sad, Through his art he's gone quite mad.\" The trickster's artfulness finally catches up with him, leaving the reader to wonder if the passions of the itinerant quack bring prosperity, or if they actually lead to impoverished insanity. And what does this imply for the readers' own expectations of success? Easily memorizable and captivatingly dramatic, these prints transmit vestiges of theatre performance, and possibly cue readers to mimic the duplicitous gestures and repeat the familiar patter of the trickster. Coaxing readers, not only to believe in Tetjeroen, but also to physically embody his actions and his passions, the prints turn readers into actors. As they identify with a fictional character, however, readers also run the risk of being seized by the passions they impersonate,93 and of losing the ability to distinguish between reality and the strategic inventions of print. For to think that an itinerant player is really a rich boss is possibly as foolish as accepting the clumsy trompe l'oeil of a cheap print that vainly presumes to be a series of framed paintings. And to be completely taken in by the persuasive powers of representation is also a form of madness.94 Indeed, as reworked versions of the prints incorporate conspicuous framing devices around each scene, they emphasize the boundary between the viewer and the Active realm of Tetjeroen. For the frames accentuate the status of the prints themselves as representations that used artifice to convince readers of their truth. In this way, the deliberate addition of frames to later versions may have been intended as a device that distanced viewers from the image.95 Ideally, such a strategy would have worked to reassert a coherent viewing subject who did not identify with the trickster, but stood outside of the image in order to judge delinquent practices.96 131 Significantly, edited versions of this printed story contain a number of devices that work to encourage a distanced viewer position. In later versions of the print, for example, the scene of Tetjeroen's madness occurs at the end of the narrative (fig. 2.6-24). Here it is placed exactly where, in earlier versions, viewers saw the image of Tetjeroen riding on horseback and were encouraged to identify with him: \"Boys, you can join in the fun, because you will ride with Tetje\" (figs. 2.4-24 and 2.5-24). This equestrian scene now comes much earlier in the story, and has been altered to read: \"Tetje's art is worthy of praise, He rides a horse like a gentleman\" (fig. 2.6-10). Readers still see the signs of Tetje's good fortune in these revised versions, but they are discouraged from the madness of identifying with the fictional trickster. Instead they must wonder how praiseworthy his art really is. Moreover, in the revised versions, the on-lookers who gather around Tetjeroen's booth no longer are depicted as a group of children (see fig. 2.6-5, where a single child stands among the adults). This works to dissuade viewers from situating themselves in the story and from identifying too closely with Tetjeroen's customers. The titles of these later versions do not refer ambiguously to the need for boys to study Tetje's ability to satisfy one and all, but simply state, \"Here, oh Youth! you are given the farcical life of Tetjeroen.\" In this way, readers cease to act as Tetjeroen's understudies. Instead, the printed story is presented as a comic fictional account for a general audience.97 In the earlier Bouman version, by contrast, the image of Tetjeroen's madness is presented in quite a different way. Here, it is elucidated by the suggestive caption: \"Tetjeroen is grunting strangely, He wants to go out and be hired as a zany\" (fig. 2.4-9). This scene follows images of Tetje making his fake medicines, and comes just before scenes where he is hired by the doctor and then gets carried away and deceives one and all from the market booth. 132 \"Zany\" does not quite capture the nuances of the Dutch word \"gek\", used to designate both a clown and a lunatic. Do Tetjeroen's strange grunts imply that he is feigning madness in order to play the fool? Or is he really mad? Is the player nothing more than a lunatic? And what about the merchant? A silver-tongued self-made man driven by selfish passions into an endless series of deceitful performances, Tetjeroen, as we have seen, has already lost a stable sense of place and identity. This makes him insane, for madness is the confusion of role-play with true identity, of representation with reality. It is believing that you are what you want to be; it is mistaking a succession of theatrical roles for the authentic self. And herein lies the problem, for what is Tetjeroen's true self? It is impossible to judge if he is actually mad in this scene, or if his craziness is just the calculated pretence of insanity\u00E2\u0080\u0094a ruse to help Tetje find work as a joker. With this, the reader sees that madness may not just be a risk of unregulated commercial practices; rather, it seems inextricably intertwined with the passions that drive the market. In the viewer's inability to distinguish between an essential inner self and an unauthentic representation of self, a disturbing possibility begins to present itself: perhaps there is no true Tetjeroen behind the fool's facade. This prompts a reconsideration of the questions that began this chapter: Who was Tetjeroen? Did he truly exist? Following the strange twists of this story, it becomes evident that the truth of the tale of Tetjeroen is located in the specific ways that it conveys itself to readers by both producing and destabilizing conditions for the suspension of disbelief. This generates contradictory viewer positions. An engaged viewer position is created as readers are encouraged to identify with the characters in the prints and participate in market practices. However, the prints also provide a distanced position that differentiated viewers from the 133 action. In this position, they could evaluate the delinquent activities of unprincipled market activities, such as selling empty promises~a practice that Amsterdam's merchants commonly associated with itinerants and speculators. By becoming absorbed in the fictional story, viewers ran the risk of falling victim to the extremes of mercantile practice: greed, deception, callousness, poverty, homelessness, madness, loss of identity, and the fragmentation of social cohesion. To counter these hazards, the prints concurrently attempted to fashion dispassionate and judicious readers who would understand the need to regulate the excesses of commerce. In this way, readers could take up conflicting subject positions, enabling them to learn the various and inconsistent skills they needed to participate in market practices. Revised versions of this printed story increasingly discouraged the audience from identifying too closely with the trickster or his clients.98 Closing off these possibilities, they work to safeguard the integrity of the distanced viewer. These alterations to the prints betray the problem created by the ceaseless vacillation between the disinterested and self-interested subject positions of earlier versions. As the readers constantly shift identities\u00E2\u0080\u0094a process necessary to succeed in Amsterdam's competitive markets-they become like Tetjeroen, immersed in continual role-play, with no coherent sense of an essentially moral self. Perhaps this is why nineteenth-century folklorists, in search of authentic national characteristics, chose to believe that the unscrupulous Tetjeroen was not a fictional character who exposed the dilemmas of mercantile identity, but was merely an eccentric entertainer who played Amsterdam's markets as the golden age of merchant capitalism waned. 134 Notes 1. \"...een Noach's ark, waar man schier alles te koop ziet wat bedenkelijk is.\" Quoted in J. ter Gouw, De Volksvermaken (Haarlem: Erven F. Bonn, 1871) 469. 2. A Jan Velten (alias van Valenkijn) is listed as a sailor (varensman) from Bergen op Zoom in Amsterdam's Poorterboek no. 4, p. 636, housed in the Gemeente Archief Amsterdam. The date of poorterschap, January 30, 1679, coincides with the time that a Jan Velten was compiling a sketchbook of exotic animals and peoples seen in Amsterdam. Indeed, the occupation of sailor is in keeping with these interests. 3. F. Pieters, \"De Dieren in de Menagerie van 'De Witte Oliphant' te Amsterdam zoals gezien door Jan Velten rond 1700,\" Over Beesten en Boeken. eds. K. van der Hprst et al. (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishers, 1995) 165-180. Jan Velten's sketchbook is in the collection of the Artis Bibliotheek of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Thank you to Florence Pieters for sharing her research on this work with me. 4. The story of Tetjeroen and the Czar seems to originate in J. Scheltema's Peter de Groote, Keizer van Rusland. in Holland en te Zaandam in 1697 en 1717. vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Hendrik Gartman, 1814) 198-199. Scheltema also wrote about Tetjeroen in Volksgebruiken der Nederlanders bij het Vrijen en Trouwen (Utrecht: J.G. van Terveen en Zoon, 1832) 171, 224-225. 5. Versions of Scheltema's account have been repeated in numerous folkloric studies from the nineteenth century to the present. J. ter Gouw, De Volksvermaken (Haarlem: Erven F. Bohn, 1871) 656-677; G.D.J. Schotel, Vaderlandsche Volksboeken en Volkssprookjes van de Vroegste Tijden tot het einde der 18de Eeuw. (Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1873) vol. 1, 294-297; M . Kalff, Amsterdam in Plaatjes en Praatjes (Amsterdam: Scheltema en Holkema, 1878) 49-51; and E. Kappers and R. Erenstein, \"Theatre in the Kaart Gekeken,\" Scenarium 8 (1984): 97-100. 6. The only evidence I found is a chalk drawing, dated to the early eighteenth century, in the collection of the Atlas van Stolk in Rotterdam (no. 3042). It is of a street performer, and has the name \"Tiat jeroen\" along with a poem written in ink across the bottom. However, it's difficult to tell whether this name was written by the artist, or if it was added later by someone who thought that the figure in the sketch was Tetjeroen. G. Van Rijn and C. van Ommeren, Katalogus der Historie- Spot en Zinneprenten Betrekkelijk de Geschiedenis van Nederland. Verzameld door A. van Stolk ('s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1933) vol. 3, 352. 7. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) 14-16. 8. Scheltema seems to draw on familiar school prints of Tetjeroen and augments them with anecdotes, prints and farces about quack doctors and market players. In order to explain why details about the Czar, the stock market, his house, wife and children are not depicted in the prints, he argues that the children's prints only deal with Tetjeroen's youth. On Scheltema's r 135 unreliable use of legends and stories in his history of the Czar, see Boris Raptschinsky, Peter de Groote in Holland. 1697-98 (Zutphen: W.J. Thieme, 1926) vii-ix. 9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 77-90,115-130. 10. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts. Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) 1-2. 11. The Tetjeroen prints are catalogued by Maurits de Meyer, De Volks- en Kinderprent in the Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e Eeuw (Antwerpen: Uitgevers Standard-Boekhandel, 1962) 467-8. The earliest known version is published by Jan and Jacobus Bouman (fig. 4); very few of their prints survive and this one has been dated to the 1690's, although the blocks may have been older. Meyer 81. The printers de Groot, Kannewet and van der Putte each published a similar version in the early eighteenth century (fig. 5 is by van de Putte). The Belgian firms of Brepols, Glenisson and Van Genechten, and Beersmans published late nineteenth and early twentieth-century versions. These prints are also discussed in E.M. van Heurck and G. J. Boekenoogen, Histoire de rimagerie Populaire Flamande et de ses Rapports avec les Imageries Etrangeres (Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1910) 182. For information on printers, A . M . Ledeboer, De Boekdrukkersr Boekverkoopers en Uitgevers in Noord-Nederland (Deventer: A. Ter Gunne, 1872). 12. \"Jongens wilje vreught vermeeren, wilt in dese Print stuhdeeren. Want het is Tetjeroen, die een yder kan voldoen.\" This rubric appears on most seventeenth and eighteenth-century versions. 13. While this may have been the intended audience for the prints, the actual audience would obviously have included girls, as well as children and adults from other social groups. The work of Roger Chartier has been instrumental in examining the ability of print to cross social boundaries. See The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) 3-12. 14. Netherlandish imagery of the fool is catalogued in Paul Vandenbroek, Over Wilden en Narren. Boeren en Bedelaars. Beeld van de Andere. Vertoog over het Zelf (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1987) 40-56. 15. Much has been written about the Fool. Of particular importance for this study are: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); Natalie Zemon Davis, \"The Reasons of Misrule,\" Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 97-123; Foucault, Madness 14-22; Keith Moxey, \"The Ship of Fools and the Idea of Folly in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Literature,\" The Early Illustrated Book. Essays in Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald. ed. Sandra Hindman (Washington D . C : Library of Congress, 1982) 26-104; Herman Pleij, Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit. Literatuur. Volksfeest en Burgermoraal in de late Middeleeuwen 136 (Amsterdam, 1979); Herman Pleij, \"Volksfeest en Toneel in de Middeleeuwen,\" De Revisor 3 (1979): 52-63; and Vandenbroek 40-56. 16. See Pleij. Het Gilde. 17. Moxey 95-100. 18. The narrative function of the comic strip format is examined in J. Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 8-10. Bakhtin discusses the transformation of festive forms in the seventeenth century, 24-30; Jean-Christophe Agnew expands upon his theories in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 60-67. 19. As Agnew argues, while the medieval Fool mocked those who overstepped their social rank, in the seventeenth century, the Fool exposed the misrepresentation of private meanings in social and economic transactions. Agnew 60-67. 20. Joseph Roach, The Player's Passion. Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985) 31. 21. Construction of the new theatre was completed in 1637. Maria Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt. Themes and Ideas (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1991) 13-14; J.A. Worp, Geschiedenis van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg 1496-1772 (Amsterdam: S.L. van Looy, 1920) 40-43. 22. Parts of Barlaeus' speech are quoted in Dutch Arts. Theatre in the Netherlands (Rijswijk: Dutch Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1992) 15; Gary Schwartz describes the political controversies surrounding Barlaeus' appointment in Rembrandt: His Life. His Paintings (New York: Viking, 1985) 144. 23. Elizabeth Honig discusses sixteenth-century Flemish uses of this convention in Painting and the Market in Early Modem Antwerp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 24. The church excluded both strolling and professional actors from Christian rites. Calvinist condemnations of players are detailed by G.D.J. Schotel in chapter 3, \"De Tooneelspelers en de Geestlijkheid,\" of Tilburgsche Avondstonden (Amsterdam: J. Stemvers, 1850). Also of interest is the career of the successful strolling player, Jan Baptist van Fornenburgh, who gave up acting, formally repented, and became a church member in 1681, perhaps in an attempt to gain social acceptance for himself and his family. Ben Albach, Langs Kermissen en Hoven: Ontstaan en Kroniek van een Nederlands Tooneelgezelschap in de 17de Eeuw (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1977) 128-133. 25. In 1662, the magistrates legislated that no other troupes could perform plays from the Schouwburg repertoire in the city, as this would take profits away from the charities. Worp 119. The distinction between professional and wandering actors was in fact not great: in the summer months, the Amsterdam troupe joined forces with itinerant groups as they performed 137 together at markets and fairs throughout the Netherlands. Albach Langs Kermissen 111-123. Other studies of travelling players include Ben Albach, \"Vondel's Stage Brothers,\" ed. P. Binnets et al. Essays on Drama and Theatre: Liber Amicorum Benjamin Hunningher (Amsterdam: Moussault, 1973) 9-22; J. van Dalen, \"Rederijkers en Comedianten in de 2de helft der 17de Eeuw te Dordrecht,\" Pud Holland XVII (1899): 47-52; Barbara Sierman, \"Paulus Hilverding en de Vier Kronen,\" Scenarium 5 (1981): 69-72; J.A. Worp, \"Varia uit de Amsterdamsche Tooneel Wereld in de 17de Eeuw,\" Pud Holland XXII (1904): 39-47. 26. Albach 11-12. For the similar status of common players in England, see Agnew 103. 27. \"Een reizendt speelder heeft gemeenschap met de winden, Men ziet hem overall: maar hij is nergens thuis.\" Quoted in G. Kalff, Literatuur en Tooneel te Amsterdam in de 17de Eeuw (Haarlem: de Erven J.Bohn, 1895)294. 28. The use of stock characters to explore themes of economic abuses and manipulations of the market was common in seventeenth-century farces. Johan Snapper, \"The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Farce: Social Refractions of a Golden Age,\" Barocker Lust-Spiegel. Studien zur Literatur des Barock Festschrift Fur Blake Lee Spahr. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Vol. 3 of Chloe Beihefte zum Daphnis. ed. Martin Bircher et al., 1984. 67-71. 29. Schwartz 144. 30. While the Leiden University was an elite institution where classical subjects were taught in Latin, the Nederduytsche Academie fashioned itself as a university for the people, with Dutch as the official language. Schenkeveld 13-14. 31. Indeed, it could have been understood as a deliberate dig against orthodox Calvinists: both those in Leiden, who had deposed Barlaeus, and those on Amsterdam's church council, who bitterly attacked his new position in their city. Schwartz 186. 32. This poem is attributed to poet Joost van Vondel: \"De weereld is een speeltooneel. Elck speelt zijn rol en krijght zijn deel.\" Quoted in Worp 82. Pn the significance of this oft-repeated motto in mercantile protestant society, see Agnew 14-17,118; Albach Langs Kermissen 11-12. 33. Moreover, he did so as a Remonstrant who publicly opposed the doctrine of predestination. 34. I argue this in Chapter Pne, section two, \"Farce as Weapon: Battling over the Public Theatre,\" of this thesis. 35. J.L. van Zanden describes the effects of the changing financial policies of the civic elite on Holland's economy in The Rise and Decline of Holland's Economy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) 136-140. See also Charles Wilson, \"The Economic Decline of the Netherlands,\" Economic History Review 9 (1939) 111-127; and J.A. van Houtte, 138 An Economic History of the Low Countries. 800-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977)303-304. 36. A detailed account of the increasing social differentiation of the elite in the second half of the seventeenth century is found in J.C. van Dillen, Van Rijkdon en Regenten. Handboek tot de Economische en Sociale Geschiedenis van Nederland Tijdens de Republiek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) 461-480. Pieter Spierenburg links the new courtly identity of the patricians with a distance from mercantile trading practices in Elites and Etiquette: Mentality and Social Structure in the Early Modern Northern Netherlands (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit, 1981) 23-27. 37. Joseph de la Vega, Confusion de Confusiones. 1688. Ed. Hermann Kellenbenz (Boston: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957). Vega was a member of Amsterdam's Sephardic community, and his pamphlet seems, at least in part, to respond to printed allegations that abuses of stock trading were committed mostly by Jewish speculators. 38. Neil De Marchi and Paul Harrison examine the threat posed by speculative trading to conventional mercantile practices in their essay, \"Trading 'in the Wind' and with Guile: The Troublesome Matter of the Short Selling of Shares in Seventeenth-Century Holland,\" Higgling. Transactors and Their Markets in the History of Economics. Neil De Marchi and Mary S. Morgan, eds. History of Political Economy 26, special issue (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994) 58-63. Although Agnew's study of the links between late seventeenth-century shifts in market practice and theatre practice focuses mainly on England, he does make some references to the Dutch situation, ix-xi, 143-144. 39. J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success. Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy. 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 147. 40. Vega 16. 41. Quoted in Violet Barbour. Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963) 79. 42. Quoted in Barbour 45. 43. De Vries and Van der Woude 151. 44. A detailed description of the practice of short selling can be found in De Marchi and Harrison 48-49. 45. De Vries and Van der Woude 151. 46. See Kellenbenz' introduction to Confusion de Confusiones xi-xiii. Prints that satirized the problems of the windhandel during the early eighteenth-century speculative manias are 139 catalogued in A.H. Cole, The Great Mirror of Folly (Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid). An Economic-Bibliographical Study (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1947). 47. As De Marchi and Harrison point out, that fact that De la Vega's share trader has to explain these transactions to the others implies a considerable gap between ordinary trade and the traffic in shares. De Marchi and Harrison 61. 48. Vega 3. 49. Vega 42. 50. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987) 350. De Marchi and Harrison claim that the practice of short selling commodities dates from at least the sixteenth century, if not earlier. De Marchi and Harrison 49. 51. Here, merchants who were threatened by speculative trading could draw on the arguments of Calvinist preachers, who condemned the immorality of these practices throughout the seventeenth century. De Marchi and Harrison 56-57. 52. Wilson 113-121; Zanden 136-140. 53. On the mechanisms that constrain the meanings of representations, see Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff. History, Language, and Practice, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 102. 54. Subsequent versions were distributed by most late seventeenth and eighteenm-century producers of children's prints in Amsterdam: the printing firms de Groot, Kannewet, van der Putte, van Egmont and Ratelband en Bouwer. Meyer 468. 55. See de Meyer's catalogue. 56. On reading practices and private identity, see Roger Chartier, \"Texts, Printing, Readings,\" The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984) 3-7. 57. C. F. van Veen describes these school boxes in Catchpennyprints: Dutch Popular and Childrenprints (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976) 15. They also are depicted in Jan Steen's The Village Schoolroom, which is discussed in Chapter One of this thesis. 58. On the distribution of print in the Netherlands, see Craig Harline, Pamplets. Printing and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987) 87-88. 59. Chartier explores the overlap between oral and written forms in \"Texts\" 158-164, 170-171. 140 60. Hubert Damisch makes a similar argument about the multiple vam^hing points characteristic of early Flemish paintings in The Origin of Perspective, trans. J. Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 131. 61. Rudolf Dekker and Herman Roodenburg, \"Sickness, healing and death in the jokes of Aernout van Overbeke (1632-1674),\" Curing and Insuring. Essays on illness in past times: the Netherlands. Belgium. England and Italy. 16th-20th centuries, ed. H. Binneveld et al. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993) 69. 62. Quack doctors actually did hire comedians to help them sell their wares. K.S. Grooss et al., Van Piskfjkers en Heelmeesters. Genezen in de Gouden Eeuw (Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 1994) 8-9. 63. Agnew 83. 64. Celeste Brusati examines seventeenth-century discourse that links the captivating power of images, particularly paintings, with the theatrical self-fashioning of artists in Artifice and Illusion. The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 65. The boer was repeatedly depicted as one of the quack's standard victims. Carol Fresia, Quacksalvers and Barber-Surgeons: Images of Medical Practitioners in 17th-Century Dutch Genre Painting, diss! Yale University, 1991 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997) 190. 66. On the function of the doctor in genre paintings, see Fresia; in theatre plays, J.B.F. van Gils, De Doktor in de oude Nederlandsche toneelliteratuur (Haarlem: F.Bohn, 1917); in jokes and anecdotes, Dekker and Roodenburg; in prints, M . van Vaeck, Adriaen Van de Vennes 'Tafereel van de Belacchende Werelt' (Den Haag 1635). 3 vols. (Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal en Letterkunde, 1994) 3: 665-755, and J.G. de Lint, Geneeskundige Volksprenten in de Nederlanden (Gorinchem: J. Noorduyn en Zoon, 1918). 67. Dekker and Roodenburg 69-70. 68. Cited in Dekker and Roodenburg 75. 69. Mary Douglas, \"Jokes,\" Rethinking Popular Culture. Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. C. Mukerji et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 306. 70. Agnew 80; Gils 2-3. 71. With the rise of modern medicine in the late seventeenth century, distinctions between guild members and quacks were more sharply defined. However, as Roy Porter argues, there was also a great deal of overlap between orthodox and quack medicine at this time. Roy Porter, \"The Language of Quackery in England, 1660-1800,\" The Social History of Language, ed. P. Burke and R. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 76-77. On different types of medical practitioners in the Netherlands, see Grooss; and M.A. van Andel, Chirurgijns. Vrije 141 Meesters. Beunhazen en Kwakzalvers. De Chiriirgijnsgilden en de Practijk der Heelkunde 1440-1800 (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen en Zoon N.V., 1941). 72. \"T is hem ghenoech dat hy maer de naemen van des menschen ghebreecken mach weten want als hijse noemen can, soo can hijse met de tongh terstonts cureren. Hy weet datmen inde werelt gheen blijvende stede en heeft, ende daerom als hij de menschen in d een Stadt soo veel bedroghen heeft als hy can, dan treckt hy naer een ander.\" From \"De Character van eenen Quacksalver,\" 1622. Quoted in E. Rombouts, Richard Verstegen: Een Polemist der Contra-Reformatie (Brussels: Algemeene Drukinrichting, 1933) 214. 73. Quoted and translated in Fresia 188. 74. Fresia 173-174, 187-189. 75. The important concept of disinterested love in burgher and civic identity is discussed in Joanna Woodall, \"Love is in the Air\u00E2\u0080\u0094Amor as motivation and message in seventeenm-century Netherlandish painting,\" Art History 19. 2 (1996): 222-224. Once again, Tetjeroen's characteristics position him outside of middle-class identity. 76. These aspects of market practice are discussed in Richard Sennet, Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994) 21, 200-208. 77. David Harvey describes the democratizing effects of money in Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) 3-5. 78. It is interesting to compare this scene to a story told about the well-known eighteenth-century actor Jan Punt, who was scorned by Amsterdam's wealthy citizens when he took to driving about town in a horse and carriage. Because he was from a lower-class background, Punt was accused of the theatrical sin of attempting to appear greater than he actually was. Undoubtedly, these taunts were meant to curtail his troubling social mobility. Punt's career is discussed in Martin Corver, Tooneel-aantekeningen vervat in een Omstandigen Brief aan den Schrijven van het Leven van Jan Punt (Leiden: Cornells Heyligert, 1783). 79. These legislations are connected to the increasing professionalization of medicine in the late seventeenth century, and are discussed in Fresia 187-189. 80. Agnew 14. 81. Dutch Arts 15. 82. De Certeau argues that a story does not act as a manual to learn behaviour, but can be understood as a form of \"living memory\" which says exactly what it does, and thus keeps practices in circulation for future use. De Certeau 80-89. 142 83. On the power of the frame to undermine a disinterested viewer position by connecting the object with its historical and economic milieu, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 61-63. 84. The printer's name and location are prominently displayed in this way on most seventeenth-century books, pamphlets, and prints. 85. Harline 87-88. 86. There is evidence that buyers of these prints actually did haggle over the price. In the collection of the Rijksprentenkabinet (Waller S, Ratelband and Bouwer no. 37) is a half-sized print of Tetjeroen that includes the title, but reproduces just the bottom three rows of the print. Undoubtedly, these half-prints cost less than the full prints. 87. . Chartier, Forms and Meanings 1-2. 88. This version, published by Kok and Van Kolm, is the same as editions printed by Wendal and Rynders, and can roughly be dated to the late eighteenth century. Meyer 467-468. 89. Foucault 14, 85, 104. 90. Foucault 26-27. 91. Foucault 29. 92. Roach 27-28. 93. Roach 45. 94. Foucault 29. 95. Such a device has contradictory possibilities. As Derrida argues, the frame is a hybrid site. It creates a dispassionate observer who judges the intrinsic qualities of an object. Concurrently, it links the object with its historical, economic and political context. Derrida 37-82. 96. However, by isolating each scene, the frames also fragment the flow of the narrative, thus disrupting a smooth, coherent reading of the print. 97. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Amsterdam printing firm of Kannewet issued a print entitled, \"Here is Tetjeroen, A respectable man, Who is now dead. And all the crazies with their insults, who were there, at his funeral.\" In the nineteenth century, the Belgian publishers Noman produced a version entitled, \"Hans Beuling comes onto the stage, He plays his role and receives his part. He no longer wants to be called Tetjeroen, Wherever his work is not forgotten.\" Meyer 467-8, Lint 99-102. Both of these versions also work to discourage viewers 143 from identifying with Tetjeroen. In one, his identity is erased by death; in the other, he denies his own identity and plays the role of a German quack. 98. Undoubtedly, there were specific historical reasons for these shifts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the purposes of this study, the censorship of later prints reveals much about how seventeenth-century versions would have been read. 144 Chapter Three H o m e T r u t h s : T h e B u s i n e s s m a n gets M a r r i e d In late seventeenth-century Dutch comic prints of domestic life, the word most often rhymed with marriage, or \"trouwen,\" was \"rouwen:\" regret. \"Trouwen doet rouwen.\" Marriage leads to regret. This catchy doggerel was repeated in a range of printed images of marriage turned-upside-down that proliferated at this time, presenting readers with \"home truths\": unpleasant worries about the character of social relations in private life.1 For the homes represented are not static oases of calm where the hard-working man of business could find respite from the cares of the market. Rather, in these prints, the merchant brings his problems home with him, and the domestic is pictured as a site of struggle, where deceit and desire are as troublesome as they are in the marketplace. Consider, for instance, the much-published children's print of Jan de Wasser and his wife Griet. While opening scenes of the wedding ceremony and banquet appear harmonious enough, the text warns, \"Jan de Wasser die zal trouwen, Maar ik vrees het zal hem rouwen\"-\"John the Washer is getting married, But I fear that he will regret it\" (fig. 3.1-1). And regret it he does, for no sooner does the newly married couple arrive home, than we see them exchanging costumes; Jan ties on his wife's apron, while Griet holds up Jan's trousers (fig. 3.1-3). From then on, she wears the pants in their family, while Jan submits to a seemingly endless routine of household chores. He cooks, stokes and cleans out the hearth, serves dinner to his seated wife, washes dishes, cleans the windows, scrubs and wipes the floors, and does the laundry (fig. 3.1-4 to 12). Then the couple makes a curious voyage across the Amsterdam harbour to the island of Volewijk to pick a baby from a special baby-bearing tree that grows 145 there, a scene we will return to in the following chapter (fig. 3.1-13). The second half of the print catalogues Jan's childcare duties. He rocks, feeds, and plays with the baby, teaches it to walk and takes it for rides in a wagon. We even see him holding the infant while it defecates (fig. 3.1-20). It's important that Jan keep the baby happy, the prints tell us, because whenever the child cries, Griet comes after Jan brandishing cudgel and whip (fig. 3.1-17, 23). The tale ends with the couple arguing about the future of their child. It is a very curious story. However, when seventeenth-century readers encountered the devastating transformation of Jan de Wasser's wife into a virago, this would not have come as a shock to them, for the unruly woman had been a prevalent figure in Dutch visual culture for centuries. Students of Dutch cultural history also will not be surprised by the appearance of this alarmingly violent figure, for a number of recent studies explore the role of disorderly women in prints and paintings, as well as in theatre plays, and in actual riots and protests.2 As Simon Schama points out, the figure of the wily, duplicitous woman was a stock character in misogynist satire that flourished in Western Europe, especially in the Netherlands, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries.3 Included in this genre were a number of catchpenny prints that depict marriages turned-upside-down.4 Why a sudden rise in misogynist printed images at this time?5 Moreover, how did the imagery of violence, sex and deception function in prints for children? This chapter begins by locating children's prints of the mismatched Jan and Griet within misogynist traditions connected to Netherlandish theatre. Plays about chaotic households are explored in terms of how they used the visual, sensual and ludic pleasures of farce to define domestic life by encouraging both men and women in the theatre audience to scrutinize their own private behaviour. Significantly, this traditional form of social critique underwent dramatic changes in 146 the 1670's and 1680's. As governance of the Amsterdam theatre was taken over by the classicist society Nil Volentibus Arduum, farcical plays about dissolute households were revised to become increasingly didactic, or they were banned altogether. Misogynist prints must be considered within this context, for the sudden proliferation of this material coincided with the increasing censorship of farce in the Amsterdam theatre. The second section of this chapter takes up this series of late seventeenth-century prints in more detail. Like Tetjeroen, the fool transformed into a market seller, in these prints, the familiar festive figures of the domineering woman and her hen-pecked husband were adapted in ways that linked the theatre, not only with the home, but also with the market. The unruly woman was recast as the merchant's wife, and the profit-seeking trader was given the role of her farcical; effeminate husband. These adaptions signal new uses of stock types, which intervened in contests between Amsterdam's elite and burgher classes. In this way, the satirical potential of these up-dated characters was appropriated to address drastic shifts in economic power at this time, and to raise pointed questions about who wore the trousers in the Amsterdam marketplace. The final section considers the ways in which the numerous children's prints of Jan de Wasser and his wife Griet were edited and adapted. Continuous readjustments to the prints indicate that the definition of private life was never just the imposition of social norms by those who vied for authority. Rather, the ways in which these prints attempted to shape children often met with the contradictory practices and understandings of communities of readers, which in turn spurred increasingly didactic revised versions. This series of moves and counter-moves reveals the complex process of exchange between producers and consumers of print, signaling 147 that the role of these prints in the socialization of children cannot be understood soley in terms of its success. The Disciplinary Uses of Farcical Pleasure Catchpenny prints of Jan de Wasser and Griet undoubtedly were the most commercially successful Dutch children's prints. First published in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century, these types of prints were printed and reprinted until the beginning of the twentieth century, as more than forty different publishers produced a version of this well-loved theme.6 Unlike prints of Tetjeroen, which singled out boys as the intended audience, prints of the domestic life of Jan de Wasser almost always were addressed to \"kinderen,\" indicating their significance for girls as well as boys. Printers produced three different variations of the story of Jan and Griet in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, indicating its wide appeal. One of the earliest editions, comprised of forty-eight wood blocks, is entitled: \"Here the youth may view at leisure, the career and life of Jan de Wasser\" (fig. 3.2).7 In this version, Jan undertakes all of the housework and childcare without being forced. In fact, he beats his wife in several scenes, but she does not retaliate, nor does she don the pants. There is no easily discernible narrative sequence, and the disjointed nature of the story probably indicates its connection to oral tales and theatre plays familiar to readers, who would have been able to fill in the gaps in the story from the highlights depicted.8 A roughly contemporaneous eight block print presents a pared down version of a similar story: \"Children, here you see the Life of Jan and Griet\" (fig. 3.3).9 It begins with the courtship and marriage of Jan and Griet. Then their relationship sours as Jan comes home to find that 148 supper is not ready. He goes after his wife with the shovel and tongs, but she manages to get the upper hand and batters him with her distaff. In the next scene, Jan is wearing an apron, while Griet brandishes her husband's trousers. From then on, she has the upper hand, and forces him to spin, cook, and care for the baby, beating him with a cudgel if he does not comply. By the early eighteenth century, printed stories of Jan and Griet took on a more definitive form as a twenty-four block linear story with introduction, climax, and conclusion (fig. 3.1).10 After the wedding ceremony and feast, the couple quietly exchanges pants and apron. Griet then calmly instructs Jan to do a series of household chores. He becomes immersed in domestic routine, punctuated only by Griefs beatings, and the boat trip to the baby island. Jan no longer batters his wife in this version. Indeed, this is the least violent and sexual of the prints, and variations of it were published until the early twentieth century. While the precise origins of these different Jan de Wasser prints are difficult to determine, it is clear that the Amsterdam printers who first published these broadsheets did not invent this subject matter. For the theme of marital inversion certainly was familiar to seventeenth-century readers. Derived from centuries-old carnival traditions, comic farces and oral tales, marriages turned-upside-down appeared in divers forms of visual representation throughout Western Europe.\" The grid format of these prints, for example, may have reminded viewers of the well-established broadsheet tradition of the World Upside Down (fig. 3.4). Gridded prints of the \"topsy-turvy world\" circulated throughout Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and Dutch versions of this theme were often printed by the same Amsterdam firms that published the Jan de Wasser prints.12 These types of broadsheets consisted of a number of motifs depicting symbolic reversals. The inversion of gender roles 149 was a popular topos, and most often was portrayed by women engaged in traditional masculine activities, such as going off to battle, while their husbands stayed behind and cared for the children and the home (see fig. 3.4-3, 23). By placing these themes of what historian Natalie Zemon Davis has termed \"Women on Top\" in the \"World Upside Down\" grid format, Dutch printers fashioned from these genres a continuous, linear narrative about the domestic life of two individuals named Jan and Griet.13 As we noted about prints of Tetjeroen in chapter two, the grid format also serves as an effective means to represent the flow of narrative, allowing the depiction of movement through time and space. In all of the Jan de Wasser prints, the scenes are contained in shallow box-like spaces, which resemble stage sets (see especially fig. 3.3-4). The action is directed outward for the audience through the vivid rhetorical gestures and expressions of the characters, which recalls comic dialogue. In the eight block version, Jan and Griet wear different costumes in every scene; in one of these episodes, the two struggle so wildly that Jan's wig is knocked off and can be seen laying on the floor beneath him (fig. 3.3-4, 5). All of these visual strategies call up theatre performance. In fact, narratives about Jan and Griet would have been familiar to all that attended the Amsterdam theatre, for these characters were stock comic figures in numerous farces that consistently drew large crowds to the Schouwburg.14 Theatre historians have noted that these plays were derived from Southern Netherlandish theatre traditions.15 For example, a farce published in Antwerp, Cornells de Bie's Jan the Good Simpleton and Griet his Wife of 1670, about a battling shoe-maker and his wife, bears strikingly similarities to the Jan de Wasser prints.16 And in the foreword to the printed copy of this play, we find a valuable clue about the function of these types of farces in the Southern Netherlands. The prologue tells readers that 150 this comedy first was performed in the town of Lier on June twenty-third and twenty-fifth of 1669.17 This information is not incidental to the meaning of the work. Associating the printed play with these specific dates, the preface embeds this farce of Jan and Griet within the festive life of the town, for these performance times coincide with the annual feast days of St. John the Baptist. St. John the Baptist day occurred near the feast day of St. Margriet, and in Netherlandish festive tradition, particularly in the predominantly Roman Catholic south, these saints' days were celebrated together as a summer carnival at the end of June.18 Could it be that Jan and Griet, the battling married couple, find their ancestors in these two saints? In the northern Protestant city of Amsterdam, the story of Saint Margriet was circulated in an anti-Catholic book entitled The Popish Owl's Mirror or the Catholic's Maze. Collected from various old Roman Catholic Legend books, and other Writers, published in 1671.19 It is worth summarizing this version of the old tale of St. Margriet, especially since an edition of this work was published by the printing firm of the de Groot family, who were among the first printers to publish catchpenny prints of Jan de Wasser.20 A chapter of the book is devoted to re-telling the story of the beautiful Margriet, who guards her virginity against an arranged marriage by dressing as a man and fleeing her parents' home the night before her wedding. Calling herself Pelagius, she retains her masculine disguise and seeks shelter in a cloister, where she eventually is appointed male Abbot over the nuns. Her excessive holiness attracts the attention of the devil, however, who comes to torment her. The story continues: Once when he [the devil] came into her room, she made him so afraid, that he was forced to creep into a barrel which stood there, on top of which she threw a cushion, in order to smother him. At the same time, or at another time (for this is uncertain) she took the devil and bound him on a cushion. (For hardness must be won over by the softness of women.)21 151 The devil then lays another trap for Margriet. One of the nuns becomes pregnant, and accuses the Abbot Pelagius as her violator. Banned to a rocky cave, Pelagius/Margriet dies, and only when they find her body do the nuns realize, too late, that their Abbot was actually an innocent virgin. The Popish Owl's Mirror follows the tale of St. Margriet with a mocking poem that links the saint to the unruly wife of farce. The final verse warns male readers: It is weighty, So choose carefully, Men, choose a funny creature, If she's a Saint Or a Fool, Everyone finds his Griet here.22 In this way, this Protestant work retells the story of St. Margriet to reflect or \"mirror\" the foolishness of Roman Catholic practices and beliefs.23 Indeed, St. Margriet had both positive and negative connotations within Roman Catholic traditions. The medieval cult of St. Margriet venerated her as the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth, a connection that will be explored further in the next chapter.24 However, Margriet, a cross-dressing woman strong enough to defeat the devil himself, was also the prototype for \"Griet,\" the most common Netherlandish appellation for a shrewish, disorderly woman. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries especially, Griet appears in festive celebrations, proverbs, anecdotes, paintings, and farces as a disruptive female force.25 In children's prints and farces, the unruly Griet usually is espoused to the absurdly effeminate Jan, often called \"Jan de Wasser.\" This male character seems to be derived from St. John, for during the summer carnival, Saint John the Baptist was mockingly referred to as \"Sint Jan de Wasser.\" \"Wasser,\" of course, in this case refers to the washing away of sins by the 152 waters of baptism. Indeed, during the St. Jan's festival, it was believed that water had special healing powers, and symbolic links to purification and renewal.26 Coinciding with the summer solstice, St. Jan's was also a fertility festival, which both celebrated and mocked the marital relationship. As Mikhail Bakhtin has argued in his work on the symbolic importance of early modern carnival traditions, in such a festive context, violent beatings took on a broad and ambivalent meaning. They killed and regenerated; ended the old life and started the new. As such, these thrashings had sexual connotations; for example, brides traditionally received erotic, or \"bridal creative blows\".27 The ambiguous associations of these types of beatings are especially evident in the earliest versions of the Jan de Wasser prints, where no sooner do Jan and Griet get married than they begin their furious struggle for the trousers (fig. 3.3). In the context of St. Jan's Day, battles between the two symbolized, not only the reproductive aspects of marriage, but also the cyclical regeneration of the seasons, as Old man winter suffered his annual defeat by the force of summer's powerful fertility. As ancient fertility rites were combined with Christian feast days, the cross-dressing, devil-routing St. Margriet was coupled with John the Baptist, the saint who was beheaded at the request of a woman.28 In children's prints, these characters are adapted once again to address the concerns of a middle-class Protestant audience. And so Sint Jan de Wasser becomes the impotent, hen-pecked Jan de Wasser, reduced to washing the floors, the street, the laundry, the dishes and the baby's bottom, while the fearless St. Margriet is transformed into his uncontrollable domineering wife Griet. As the example of Comelis de Bie's farce Jan the Good Simpleton and Griet his Wife of 1670 demonstrates, these old traditions of mocking the saints were an integral part of the festive life of the4 predominantly Roman Catholic towns in the Southern Netherlands. In the opening 153 scene of this short play, Griet rushes on stage and shouts at Jan, \"Watch out...or I'll smother you!\"29 This scene must have invoked laughter because of its obvious associations with the well-loved story of St. Margriet vanquishing the devil with a cushion. Farces about Jan and Griet that were performed in Protestant Amsterdam, on the other hand, were no longer linked specifically to festive celebrations of the saints' days of John the Baptist and Margriet at the summer solstice. Surviving records of the Amsterdam theatre indicate that these types of plays were performed regularly throughout the Schouwburg's season. In 1658, to note one pertinent example, The Farce of the Mean-Tempered Griets was offered at diverse times of the year: on the seventeenth of February, the first of April, the fifth of August, the seventeenth of October, and the thirtieth of December.30 Severed from the festive calendar, this play did retain connections to traditions of saints Jan and Margriet, however. In the centre of the frontispiece of copies of this oft-performed and much-published play is the rhyme: \"The best Griet that men ever found in creation, Was the one who bound the Devil onto a cushion\" (fig. 3.5).31 The printers De Groot produced a version of this play. This was the same firm that published The Popish Owl's Mirror and disseminated early versions of the Jan de Wasser prints.32 Indeed, a number of Jan de Wasser prints contain scenes that make explicit references to the same episode in the story of St. Margriet. The forty-eight woodblock version, for example, contains an image of Jan chasing his wife with a broom, followed by a picture of him sticking his head into a barrel: \"Jan the Wasser hits his wife, Because she wants to smother him\" (fig. 3.2-13, 14). At the edge of this scene, his wife lays in bed, perhaps a reference to the implicit sexuality of female softness quelling male hardness. An unusual eight-block version of this story (fig. 3.6) contains a scene where Griet, holding a cushion and a stick, fights a devil-figure 154 whose pitchfork extends from between his legs towards Griefs skirt (fig. 3.6-7). It is a curiously explicit image, especially considering the intended audience of children. Moreover, the festive fertility traditions of Jan and Griet do not seem to fit particularly well within the context of Calvinist Amsterdam. Indeed, it often has been argued that Protestantism suppressed the vibrant, free and popular carnival traditions of late medieval culture in the seventeenth century.33 More recent studies on the theatre and festive customs of Flemish cities deflate the notion of a spontaneous folk culture that flourished freely before the Reformation, however. The work of cultural historian Herman Pleij in particular has been influential in demonstrating that these festive forms were not just associated with \"the folk\", but worked to shape norms of urban middle-class behaviour in the Southern Netherlands in the late middle ages.34 When the Southern Netherlandish city of Antwerp was eclipsed by Amsterdam as a centre of trade at the beginning of the seventeenth century, many wealthy residents from the southern cities relocated in the North, bringing strong cultural traditions with them. We already have noted that Reformed churchmen such as Petrus Wittewrongel worked hard to eradicate such \"Popish\" theatrical and festive forms of entertainment from Amsterdam. As the previous chapters have indicated, the similarities between church and stage were a problem for Calvinists who struggled to gain hegemony over the morals of the civic population; as a strategy in these contests, churchmen posited a moral Reformed church as the binary opposite of a degenerate civic theatre. These Calvinist texts form the basis for a number of subsequent scholarly arguments that have tended to contrast the rigid discipline of the church to the merry freedom of the playhouse.35 155 Reassessing these debates, I would argue that Southern Netherlandish Roman Catholic comic theatre customs cannot be understood as impetuous festive freedom. Rather, these farces were imbued with religious and moral issues. Moreover, these comic traditions were taken up in seventeenth-century Amsterdam precisely because the goals of theatre did not always contradict the aims of the Protestant church. To the contrary, by exarnining printed copies of farces of Jan and Griet more closely, I shall suggest that Amsterdam's comic tradition did not completely repress conventions of Roman Catholic Flemish comic tradition. It is more accurate to argue that the pleasures of these festive forms were recuperated for the specific disciplinary purposes of Protestant mercantile society. Printed editions of these types of plays in the Roman Catholic Southern Netherlands in fact emphasize the moral intent of farce. The woodblock image on the frontispiece of Cornells de Bie's Jan the Good Simpleton and Griet his Wife, published in Antwerp in 1670, does not depict a scene of household chaos from the play itself. Instead, it presents the reader with a stereotypical image of female virtue: that of a housewife immured in the domestic sphere (fig. 3.7). She is in the \"bakermat,\" a piece of furniture resembling a large, low cradle, used by women while nursing and caring for babies. Rocking an infant in front of the lire, the housewife's body is completely hemmed in by hearth, cradle, table, and children. The tiled floor pattern and the vertical lines running down the walls in the background serve to reinforce her total enclosure within the space and routines of the household. This type of image of the dutiful wife and mother is already familiar to us from the frontispiece of preacher Petrus Wittewrongel's Calvinist treatise on The Christian Household (fig. 3.8), which pictures the ideal housewife in the same position, rocking a baby in the \"bakermat\" before the hearth. Such 156 representations of female virtue served to define and regulate both the female body and the space of the home. The frontispiece of De Bie's play illustrates this explicitly. Here, the image of exemplary female behaviour is supported by the moralizing verse above it, \"Discord breeds strife, and shameful household squabbling, for those who have lost their freedom, and live with a mean-tempered wife\" (fig. 3.7).36 To further emphasize this moral, on the next page, the reader finds an allegorical image of a small female figure called \"Ratio\", or Reason, standing with her foot on the neck of the prone giantess, \"Voluntas\", or Passion (fig. 3.9). With this, the didactic strategies of farce become clear: where the play itself may present discord, strife, squabbling and mean-temperedness, this printed version indicates that such behaviour is both ridiculous and shameful. The moral lesson is that female passions and desires are chaotic forces that must be restrained, preferably by the confining walls and demanding duties of the home. Only the slight scowl on the housewife's face in this frontispiece image allows viewers to speculate on how effectively housewifery subdued rebel emotions. Rarely do we encounter viewer responses to this type of imagery, which makes the Leiden University Library's copy of De Bie's play particularly interesting. Here an anonymous reader has commented on the play by inserting pictures between the pages of this small booklet.37 Some of these are woodblock prints, which probably were cut either from other chapbooks, or from single sheet prints, and then pasted into the printed play at points where they interact with the narrative. At the bottom of page eleven, for example, we see a woodblock print of a soldier, positioned just where the printed text indicates the entry of two soldiers into the action (fig. 3.10). Even more interesting is the picture pasted onto the flyleaf of the book. It is a watercolour painting; the modelling and shading of the figures indicates that 157 it was done by a person with some artistic training, possibly the reader (fig. 3.11). He or she has rendered a scene that summarizes the farce quite well. A menacing woman is depicted brandishing a shoe in one hand while grasping the neck of a kneeling man in the other. The cowering male figure looks up in fear and brings his hands together in a gesture of supplication. It is tempting to speculate that the reader chose to oppose this startling image to the representation of the model housewife on the title page. In contrast to this idealized image, the small watercolour reasserts the visual strategies of farce: exaggerated body language is employed to indicate the flagrant disruption of exemplary gender roles. The immediacy of the gestures and bright colours of this hand-drawn image captures the slapstick, sex-tinged violence of comedy in ways that the didactic printed image does not. The reader who has inserted this lively watercolour was careful not to flout the didactic intent of farce, however. Neatly handwritten at the bottom of the image is the proverb: \"The passion of a woman, Often violates marriage\".38 In mocking the excesses of the unruly wife, this moral message regulates female behaviour just as effectively as more conventional images of housewifely virtue. For this text works to close off the potentially subversive meanings that such a representation of a powerful female figure controlling her grovelling husband might suggest. In this way, it demonstrates how the reader has internalized certain values. Even though this ambiguous image was pasted into what was probably the reader's own copy of Jan the Good Simpleton and Griet his Wife, he or she made sure to denigrate the behaviour depicted. With this striking evidence, we begin to see how the enjoyment of farce could work to shape audiences into self-censoring individuals. In this regard, I would argue that the plays performed in Protestant Amsterdam did not differ greatly in intent from the Southern Netherlandish farces. As we have already noted in 158 chapter one, in late seventeenth-century debates about the pedagogical role of theatre in Amsterdam, comedies about dissolute households especially were attacked by Calvinist and Classicist detractors, who claimed that such plays encouraged audience members to imitate immoral behaviour. While these two groups had very different motivations for condernning farce, each argued that this particular medium encouraged audiences to emulate the disruptive behaviour performed on the stage. In response to these concernSj supporters of the theatre countered with the motto, \"Theatre play teaches the folk to know their own vanity.\"39 By this, they did not simply mean that theatre taught play-goers to spurn improper behaviour. Rather, those who supported the function of theatre in civic life seemed to be pointing out that farce was not the antithesis of Protestantism, but was embedded in it. The intent of theatre was to reform spectators: as stock characters mockingly enacted improper domestic behaviour, audience members were encouraged to scrutinize and judge their own private transgressions.40 The Farce of the Mean-Tempered Griets. a staple in the Schouwburg's repertoire for decades,41 serves as a good case study of some of the very specific ways that the ludic and visual pleasures of farce were used to shape spectators into self-disciplining subjects. The play begins with a monologue by Jan, where he turns to the audience and says: I'll just cast my eyes back and forth across-the Schouwburg, and I'll bet that I won't see many who will find my words strange, and when they go home, find them to be quite true, as long as they have wives... Thus I can say that no one is satisfied with his situation; because if he's single, he regrets not having a wife. But the man who has one considers it a plague, and prays to Heaven, that he might be delivered from this Hell: Just as I do now...42 This strategy of direct address encouraged spectators, particularly the men, to identify with the marital troubles of the characters on stage. It pointedly urges on-lookers to align themselves with the victims of ridicule, who, because of their own faulty judgement, have been deceived into making bad marriage choices. After Griet storms on and off the stage, Jan turns again to 159 the audience with this warning: \"Didn't I just say, that a mean-tempered wife is worse than Hell? ...I married her, and she must always be my wife. But you young ones, who still live alone, Watch that you don't end up shackled like this.\"43 By admonishing young unmarried men about the folly of choosing an undisciplined wife, the play uses a favourite theatrical theme\u00E2\u0080\u0094appearances can be deceiving\u00E2\u0080\u0094to address specific concerns about marriage transactions. Indeed, the institution of marriage itself had recently been transformed. As a number of historical studies have demonstrated, by the second half of the seventeenth century, arranged marriages had ceased to be the norm among members of the middle class4 4 Rather, marriages were increasingly established by personal choice. 'Companionate marriages', based on affection, mutual comfort, and the reciprocal duties of wife and husband became more common. In theory, the structure of this type of marriage was clearly defined. While the husband was head of the household, he was to behave responsibly towards his family, and give his wife the freedom to govern the home. The wife was to manage the household, oversee the servants, care for the children, and lovingly advise and even correct her husband. While still formally subjected to male authority, she was given new powers in order to protect the home, and, when necessary, the family business, against threat.45 Such a home, governed by a wise and rational patriarch, was often described as both the model and foundation for the republic. Moralist Johan van Beverwijk offers a pointed illustration: \"The first community is that of marriage itself; thereafter in a family household with children, in which all things are common. That is the first principle of a town and thus the seed of a common state.\"46 Clearly, household business was a weighty issue in the Dutch Republic, and changes in domestic circumstances were certainly accompanied by new anxieties about gender roles within the home. Not surprisingly, farces of the time repeatedly enacted the 160 chaotic consequences of making marriage choices based on sensual attraction. By combining these comic scenarios with didactic warnings to audience members about how a proper household should be run, the theatre thus actually reinforced the teachings of Amsterdam's church consistories, which commonly disciplined violent husbands and wives.47 While The Farce of the Mean-Tempered Griets addresses men in the audience as if they had either made or were about to make bad decisions about marriage partners, particularly pointed instructions were reserved for female spectators. Some printed versions of this play begin with a preface addressed \"to the reader\". Here, an anonymous writer states: Possibly there are Griets hiding amongst their sex, who will want to perform this example. Men say that examples are good teachers, and that one man's fault is another man's lesson. So if my Griet learns any good qualities from this, then I don't regret taking up my pen.. . 4 8 These preliminary remarks work to close off some of the dangerous possibilities of farce, deplored by Calvinists and Classicists alike. In this way, the didactic text urges the \"Griets\" in the audience to recognize their own potential rebelliousness, not to perform the role of Griet in their own lives, but to learn virtuous behaviour from the immoral examples of farce.49 Moreover, while men were faulted for their unwise choices or for failing to control their wives, the play suggests that this was a somewhat reasonable mistake since, when it came to potential wives, there was really not that much to choose from. As Jan's monologue implies, all women made men's lives a misery. Quoting a well-known proverb, he categorically states, \"A wife is a necessary evil\".50 In fact, a number of proverbs, which were connected to the themes and characters of these farces, circulated in Amsterdam at this time. \"Where two Griets are in one house, no barking dog is needed;\"51 \"A mean-tempered Griet brings a man nothing but grief;\" \"Griet is wearing pants;\" \"She wants to pull on the pants, whether they fit her or not;\" \"It's an angry 161 Griet.\"52 In this way, the disciplinary mockery of the stage also functioned in the oral culture of the streets as it attempted to regulate female behaviour, and deflect anxiety about assertive women.53 For to insult a woman by calling her a \"qua Griet\" clearly would have implied that she had transgressed certain behavioural expectations. These types of insults undoubtedly also were used by women who did not define themselves as \"Griets\" to denigrate other women.54 Thus these types of proverbs and insults could have been employed in specific situations to shame individual women into conforming to norms of housewifely virtue. As men were admonished to identify with the miseries of hen-pecked Jans who had better learn to control their wives,55 and women urged to see themselves as unruly Griets in need of reform, theatre audiences were encouraged to examine their own domestic behaviour. This strategy was heightened in the late seventeenth century, as the stock characters in farces about dissolute households ceased to be lower-class types who the audience could comfortably mock. As Maria-Theresia Leuker has recently argued, under the governance of Nil Volentibus Arduum~the classicist group that worked to cleanse the Amsterdam theatre in the 1680's\u00E2\u0080\u0094plays about disorderly family life were increasingly situated in middle-class households, and included didactic advice about the moral values and inner virtues of domesticity.56 These shifts encouraged audience members to identify more closely with the stock characters of comedy; by admonishing spectators to see and judge the farcical violation of middle-class social norms, theatre ideally prompted viewers to examine their own guilt. Leuker argues for the efficacy of these disciplinary strategies; indeed, by reflecting the values, performance and settings of the audience more directly, these plays certainly worked to shape audience members into self-scrutinizing subjects. However, these devices also could potentially destabilize the process of identification. As I argued in the previous chapter, plays 162 about lower-class life cannot be understood as realistic portrayals, but probably provided a means for middle-class audiences to project societal problems onto the lower classes. In the late seventeenth-century plays, by contrast, the viewer and the object of viewing are uncomfortably similar. This would have made it more difficult for middle-class theatre goers to take up the position of distanced and controlling viewers, who could ridicule the tribulations of stock lower-class characters from a safe distance. Instead, they were increasingly implicated in the very scenarios that they mocked. Such strategies created an uneasy viewing experience, ultimately calling into question the very act of viewing. Audiences were encouraged to identify with characters who had been deceived by attractive surface appearances into making faulty marriage choices. This certainly poses a challenge to the spectators' own powers to see and judge. Part of the pleasure of watching these plays was in apprehending the uncomfortable truths revealed on stage. Public performances of private anxieties about marriage, sexuality, and gender roles prompted spectators to self-reflexively examine their own guilty pleasures. And as farce lured viewers with the sensual enjoyment of viewing lurid performances of licentious behaviour, it pointedly demonstrated that theatre goers were susceptible to the very pleasures that they should renounce. The very medium of theatre reinforced this message: the enticing artifice of the stage worked to draw people into the playhouse. As they were attracted by the theatre, however, the audience's own vulnerability to visual and sensual pleasures were trenchantly exposed. In this way, theatre worked both to captivate audiences and to instill in them a somewhat Calvinist distrust of the dangers of this medium.57 Or, as a seventeenth-century defender of the moral function of farce would put it, \"Theatre play teaches the folk to know their own vanity.\" 163 Passion over Reason: Mercantile Marriage The didactic strategies of farce, however, always mingled somewhat uneasily with the transgressive potential of festive forms. As we have seen, seventeenth-century theatre debates converged around questions of the effects of theatre on susceptible audience members: did representations of deviance reinforce norms, or did they encourage spectators to emulate unruly behaviour in their own homes?58 A close examination of these plays reveals that pleasure was interwoven with its restraint in these forms in an endeavour to create self-disciplining subjects. But, since the home was understood as a microcosm of the state, was there not another equally dangerous issue at stake? Did imagery of the household gone awry not open up ways to critique governing authorities? Undoubtedly farce, through its combination of comic pleasure and critical acuity, had this subversive potential. Thus, although there is no direct evidence, we cannot rule out the possibility that Nil Volentibus Arduum\u00E2\u0080\u0094appointed to govern the theatre by the civic government after the political upheavals of 1672\u00E2\u0080\u0094censored these farces from Amsterdam's theatre because of their rebellious implications. Significantly, familiar plays such as The Farce of the Mean-Tempered Griets were not performed in the Amsterdam Schouwburg from 1681 to 1688, years that marked the height of Nil's influence over the theatre's repertoire.59 As I have argued, the censoring of these plays was a crucial part of Nil's attempts to designate the civic theatre as site set apart for the moral instruction of the children of Amsterdam's patrician class. Farce, long integral to burgher identity, thus was redefined as a boorish form of entertainment, unfit for the consumption of the increasingly distant elite. In place of these plays, translated works of French classicism were integrated into the repertoire, for Amsterdam's governing class increasingly emulated the French aristocracy as they 164 distinguished themselves from the Dutch middle classes. It may be no mere coincidence that during this time, catchpenny prints of Jan and Griet first were published. If so, it is conceivable that the themes of these farces re-emerged in printed forms for the burgher children of Amsterdam as a way to oppose Nil's policies of purifying and censoring familiar plays that had been consistent crowd-pleasers for decades. In order to explore these potential connections, it is instructive to consider other works that disseminated farcical themes of marriages-turned-upside down in print at this time. A book entitled The Ten Pleasures of Marriage of 1678 was a much-published misogynist satire.60 Comprised of two volumes, the three hundred and thirty-one pages of this book probably were directed at a fairly literate adult audience. The first volume presents a chaotic year in the domestic life of a mismatched middle-class couple from Amsterdam, from courting to the birth of their first child; volume two, The Marriage Trap, catalogues the on-going troubles of the same couple as the child grows up.61 Many episodes from this work bear strikingly similarities to scenes in the Jan de Wasser prints. In fact, the firms of De Groot, Kannewet, and Van der Putte, who were among the most prolific producers of catchpenny prints in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, printed editions of this work.62 Thus it seems that, in what Roger Chartier terms \"the vast labour of adaptation,\"63 printers drew on well-known themes and characters from farces, festive traditions, oral stories and proverbs, combining them with a modified and simplified version of The Ten Pleasures of Marriage. In this way, various strands of misogynist tradition were brought together into these gridded picture stories for a surprising new community of readers, the children of Amsterdam. The title page of The Ten Pleasures informs readers that it was written by Hippolytus de Vrye (\"the Free\"), a widower. This was probably a humourous pseudonym used by the book's 165 publisher, Hieronymus Sweerts, who was also an outspoken critic of Nil's reform of the theatre.64 This indicates a possible connection between the proliferation of misogynist printed imagery, and contemporary contestations about the function of farce. The sudden flourishing of farcical themes in print thus appears to be, at least in part, a response to Nil's censorship of this material in favour of more decorous classical works for Amsterdam's elite. The frontispiece image of The Marriage Trap (fig. 3.12) certainly seems to address these debates, for it cleverly plays on the educated viewer's knowledge of the visual conventions of both classicism and farce. In the centre of the title page sits a corpulent satyr. His sceptre a fool's marrot, this goat-man is enthroned on a fish-trap. Strands of this wicker trap spring up to both cover and suggest his genitals. The grotesque body of this naked half-animal obviously differs from the bodies of the elegantly dressed men and women that surround him, and the humourous thrust of this image seems to lie in this comparison. A poem, which accompanies the title print, helps viewers to decipher this complicated representation. The apparently sophisticated people, the text indicates, confess and lament their marriage troubles. The decolletage of the seductive woman, who sits off to the right in the foreground, resonates with the mask she is holding to signify desire and deceit. A woman with a candle swarmed by insects elucidates the consequences of this devastating combination: \"She complains, O ashamed am I! Attracted and burned by the fire like a fly\".65 A marriage of passion is thus likened to a bug blindly sizzling itself on a flame. To reinforce this message, the repetition of fish traps, mouse traps, shackles and chains throughout the print visually call up the snares of wedlock. From here, viewers who were even somewhat versed in classical tropes could see the relationship between this unfortunate group and the satyr. For they would have recognized him 166 as a grotesque figure within classical tradition\u00E2\u0080\u0094a ludicrous embodiment of excessive sexual desire. His marrot, an attribute, not of the classical satyr, but of the carnival fool, further undermines the opposition of the classical and the comic, giving the image its satirical impact. The figure of the satyr-as-fool thus intertwines uncontrollable passion with foolishness in a festive figure that instigates, reveals, and laughs at human folly. In this way, the elegant men and women are made ridiculous: like the satyr, they are driven by immoderate lust, and then deceived by sensual pleasures and trapped into marriage. Such mockery of the tribulations of marriage would have been familiar from Amsterdam's theatre tradition. What is surprising about this image is that it does not use the visual idioms of farce to convey these themes, but draws on the tropes of classicism to depict the topsy-turvy world of comedy. At a time when the wealthiest citizens of Amsterdam sought to distinguish themselves by spurning vernacular farce in favour of classicism, this image draws on comic grotesque conventions within classical tradition. Not only does this focus attention on the fact that the comic was integrally part of the classical, but such a blurring of boundaries also works to subvert new social and cultural hierarchies. It reveals that the separation of cultural traditions and social groups was not a natural divide, but a labour of the elite. As Nil Volentibus Arduum and its supporters worked to juxtapose educated connoisseurs who appreciated and understood classicism with boorish ignoramuses who revelled in the pleasures of farce,66 the frontispiece of The Marriage Trap seems to respond by interrogating these new rules of inclusion and exclusion. In this print, the bodies driven by sensual pleasure into farcical marriages-turned-upside-down are not the lower-class boors of farce tradition, nor the middle-class housewives and businessmen seen in Nil's updated 167 comedies. Rather, the elegantly dressed bodies of the elite are mocked, intimating that the wealthiest citizens of Amsterdam were not above sensual pleasures and immoderate desires. In fact, the costumes that these figures wear~their wigs, high heels and ruffled lace--call up contemporary fashions of the French court. And not only do these people dress like the French, but they also act like the French. For the satyr/fool occupies a confessional, and acts as a priest who hears them divulge hedonistic excesses. Printed not long after the disastrous French invasion of the Netherlands in 1672, this image satirically points out a central contradiction in Dutch society. While the Dutch patrician class fashioned a new aristocratic identity based on French courtly traditions, the French were the Republic's greatest political and religious enemies.67 Thus this image viciously turns on the distancing strategies of the elite by deriding the coupling of Dutch and French as foolish, Popish, wanton and vain: a marriage-turned-upside-down that ultimately threatened the very identity of the Republic. The Marriage Trap thus plays on viewer expectations of farce tradition by incisively combining comic themes with classical motifs in a strategy that would have disrupted the patrician ideologies of Nil. This shift in the genre of marriages-turned-upside-down addresses Amsterdam's changing socio-economic situation. For, in The Marriage Trap, the familiar farce scenario of the battle for the trousers is not connected to female dominance in the household. Instead, as the impotent hen-pecked husband is consumed by his desires for drinking and gambling, the wife seizes her opportunity to don the pants, and leaves the house to run the family business, a draper's shop. At this point, she is transformed into a broekdragende vrouw, or woman-who-wears-the-trousers, to signify that she has taken control, not just in the domestic sphere, but also in the economic sphere. 168 The startling imagery of the domineering broekdragende vrouw in the marketplace appears in another much-published misogynist satire of the late seventeenth century, The Stock Exchange of Women of 1690.68 Like The Ten Pleasures of Marriage. The Stock Exchange of Women is also divided into ten parts, each one dedicated to a specific facet of feminine passion. Similarities between these two misogynist works suggest that the concerns addressed by this mode of representation had to do, not only with the redefinition of domestic space, but also with specific tensions about changes in Amsterdam's economic hierarchies at this time. The text of the Stock Exchange of Women begins far from Amsterdam, recounting the stormy voyage of a Dutch trader who is washed up on an Island of Pleasure.69 Here, he encounters Constantia, a woman who claims to share his interest in commerce. Their love affair takes an unusual form as the trader masquerades in women's clothing, while the female merchant plays the male role, and courts him. In fact, the Dutchman soon discovers that Pleasure Island is a society where women rule over men. Towering over the landscape of this topsy-turvy world is the Stock Exchange, run by Constantia and a group of powerful businesswomen. The rest of the book takes the trader and the reader on a tour through the interior of this building. Each column supporting the gallery of the stock exchange is dedicated to a specific type of woman and her \"illustrious deeds.\"70 On Pleasure Island, however, vices are virtues, and the unstable architecture of this fragile economy actually rests on feminine weaknesses. The frontispiece of the book depicts these women inside the colonnade of the Stock Exchange building (fig. 3.13). In the foreground of the image, standing on a stone pedestal at the centre of the building's courtyard, is a nude statue of Pandora, who lifts the lid from her container of human vices. The upward spiralling of the flying vices together with Pandora's 169 fluttering drapery create a sense of movement, endowing this classical sculpture with an unusual liveliness. While the masculine fantasy of a beautiful nude female statue coming to life recurs in classical mythology, here Pandora's animation will not fulfil the male desires that she arouses. A gift of the gods to man, this woman is actually a deceit: attractive, yet brimming with evils, Pandora brings a curse on the male gender. Indeed, on this frontispiece, she stands as a personification of disorder; and her power to disrupt the world is signified by the escaping vices. The head and arm of one of these tiny figures actually overlap the solid dark line that frames the title print. Breaking through the top border of the image, this body transgresses the boundary between the print and the world: female vices seem to fly off the page, out of the book, and into the space of the reader. The connection between the vices that Pandora releases and the reader's world also is signified by the businesswomen of the exchange in the background, who are dressed in contemporary modish middle-class attire. While they are realistically portrayed as late seventeenth-century Dutch women, the figures assembled here also embody the ills Pandora lets loose: they are proud, vain, jealous, gluttonous, deceitful, domineering, complaining, garrulous, drunken, dishonest, and like to wear pants. Transgressing the separation of feminine and masculine spheres of activity, each one occupies a place along the stock market's colonnade. The underlying fear that the release of these \"feminine\" vices would signal the end of male dominance is revealed on the frieze of Pandora's pedestal. Flanked by the serpent of guile and the ape of folly is a representation of a man being held or stuck down by a woman who kneels above him.71 Indeed, the book closes with the marriage of the cross-dressing Dutch merchant and the domineering Constantia. Undoubtedly, he will regret it. 170 The Stock Exchange of Women does not use the familiar festive figure of Griet to symbolize a world-upside-down scenario in which female passions overflow to transgress the domains of the home and the market. Instead, the allegorical Pandora represents the female body that violates limits. Lively and statuesque, alluring and deceptive, classical and transgressive, the figure of Pandora plays on the boundaries of categories. Like the figure of the satyr on the title print of The Marriage Trap. Pandora also prompts viewers to consider the contradictions of the classical body at a time when classical representations increasingly were favoured by Amsterdam's patrician class. Here, this strategy is used to interrogate the economic sphere. For it raises pointed questions, not only about who sets the terms of cultural classifications, but also about who wears the pants in contemporary market practices. For the women's stock exchange is clearly a parody of the Amsterdam Beurs. A poetic explication of the title print of The Stock Exchange of Women explains that the \"present-day bad morals\" infesting everyone these days were learned at the stock market.72 Thus, the anxieties that this book addresses do not turn on the unlikelihood of what would happen if women were to rule society. Rather, this attack on the Stock Exchange interacts with contemporary debates about market practice that I examined in chapter two. For the cultural differentiation of the elite was a strategy that coincided with new economic distinctions, as the wealthiest members of society increasingly reinvested capital away from trade and into finance.73 In The Stock Exchange of Women, the masculine trader is emasculated by the feminine speculator. By feminizing stock trading as a degenerate activity, this work incisively mocks the trading practices of the wealthy, contrasting them with the toil and danger of masculine sea-faring trade.74 Thus, like The Marriage Trap. The Stock Exchange of Women does not exempt the wealthy members of Amsterdam's classicizing elite from the forces of 171 irnmoderate desire. Rather, both works imply that this upper-class group is governed by such \"feminine\" vices. Here, we begin to see that those driving passions were represented, not only as sexual, but also as economic. Depictions of the world-upside-down of a market ruled by chance and by uncontrollable desires that fed on themselves and were without limit thus seem to express contemporary concerns about unregulated entrepreneurial practices, particularly the speculative trading in stocks. In this way, both of these works employ the farcical trope of a marriage-turned-upside down, and combine it with classical motifs in order to castigate threats to burgher power in Amsterdam's marketplace. The mechanisms of this mockery would have been familiar to readers. Similar constellations of classical female allegory, domineering women, effeminate men, and the folly of the passions run amok in an unregulated market appeared in numerous prints satirizing the speculative manias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.75 During the infamous tulip mania of 1637, for instance, when a frenzy of speculative trading caused the tulip bulb market to crash, satirical prints were issued depicting greed as a force that turned men into fools ruled by women. A widely-circulated print by Crispijn van de Pas the Younger entitled Floraes Mallewagen. or Flora's Wagon of Fools, of 1637, pictures a ship of fools transformed into a dune car driven by the fickle winds of fortune (fig. 3.14).76 Presided over by the bare-breasted Flora and her duplicitous female assistants, Forget all, who weighs bulbs, and the two-faced Idle Hope, who releases the bird Idle Hope Flown Away, the mad crew of this wagon are a group of men named Eager for Wealth, Travelling Light, and Greedy Beard. Tulips replace the bells on the fool's caps of these avaricious speculators, who are literally driven by passion, and do not see that they've been duped by the false attractions of Flora and her attendants. 172 Flying from the mast of the car is the carnival banner of the world turned upside down: economic anarchy is represented here by the familiar festive theme of \"women on top\", adapted to the specific madness of the tulip craze. Desire for wealth conflates with sexual passion across the eroticized body of Flora, who personifies the tulip. Embodying this object of desire, she is the driving principle behind the madness of speculation, with power to stir up the passions of men and rob them of their reason. Chasing behind Flora's wagon we see a group of fashionably-dressed citizens who clamour, \"We want to come on board.\"77 The city of Haarlem is visible in the background, emphasizing that this scene of unregulated excess takes place outside of the restrictions of the town walls. Notably, the middle-class women of the town lead the crowd, while their husbands follow behind. Here, excessive passion is personified by the realistically depicted burgher wives. Thus in this image, desire is portrayed both as an external feminine force incarnated by women who rule over men, and as internal fantasies and appetites, which could overcome men and transform them into feminised fools. One of the merchant husbands running after Flora's wagon of fools seems to be wearing an apron, which resonates with the character of Jan de Wasser, who appears in so many children's prints. Jan de Wasser is the quintessential effeminate man who puts on an apron in order to wash, cook, care for the baby, spin, sweep, launder, and scrub \"like a woman,\" as the prints say. Intriguingly, some versions of the Jan de Wasser prints include a scene in which \"Jan exchanges his wages for bulbs\" (fig. 3.2-39). While the print was published decades after the tulip mania, this reference surely would have reminded viewers of the folly of speculative trading. Thus, the hen-pecked Jan is as much at the mercy of the boom and bust of mobile and speculative property as he is the victim of his unpredictable wife, whose identity is as slippery 173 as the non-existent tulip bulbs that he tries to possess. In all of the transactions he makes, Jan de Wasser falls victim to the illusions of his own desires. Investing his wages in tulips, and swapping his trousers for his wife's apron are presented as equally absurd exchanges. Such connections between imprudent market practices and unwise marriage choices were taken further in an unusual series of catchpenny prints about a character named Spring in't Veld. In creating these prints, printers actually combined two staple children's prints from their repertoire, mixing the career of the duplicitous market seller Tetjeroen with the private life of Jan de Wasser. \"Come up Boys, bring your hopes, and buy these Prints, because here for your Money, is the Life of Spring in't Veld\" (fig. 3.15).78 The life of Spring in't Veld starts out in a familiar way. In the first scenes, he is hired as a quack doctor's zany, and performs farces on the market stage in order to sell his wares. Like Tetjeroen, he soon quits this job. But at this point, about half-way through the print, the story of Spring in't Veld takes quite a different twist. For rather than going into business on his own, as Tetjeroen did, Spring in't Veld decides to improve his fortunes through marriage. It seems like a good plan. Courtship is represented by a scene of Spring in 't Veld and his sweetheart locked in a - passionate embrace beside a suggestive canopy bed. In the ifollowing scene, Spring in't Veld throws up his arms in a gesture of wonder as his betrothed brings out her dowry. Marriage, these scenes suggest, will fulfil his deepest desires, which are as sexual as they are material. Driven by this two-fold longing, the couple is rushed to the church by a coachman who cracks his whip over a galloping horse: \"Because they can't control their passion, they charge towards marriage in a hasty fashion\" (fig. 3.15-14). A joining of hands represents the exchange of marriage vows. This gesture is repeated throughout the print to signify transactions of money, goods, and promises. Marriage, however, 174 does not fulfil Spring in't Veld's physical or economic desires. As the caption under the image of the wedding ceremony predicts, \"And so they get married, but Spring in't Veld will soon regret it\" (fig. 3.15-15). In this transaction, Spring in't Veld comes out the loser, who does not naturally slip into his new role of husbandly authority. In another case of the deceiver who is deceived, this market player has been misled by bis wife, who turns out to be quite different from the acquiescent young woman who seemed so eager to give up both her body and her worldly goods. For no sooner are they married than she turns on him with a rather large stick: \"Spring in't Veld has got to flee, For his wife wants to beat him you see\" (fig. 3.15-20). Unable to accept a reality so different from his illusions of married life, Spring in't Veld is overcome by madness. He takes to his bed, displaying all the symptoms of melancholy: withdrawal from society and a delirious break with truth.79 In the final scene, he lies dead on his bed, leaving his contrite wife in great need. This combination of the stories of Tetjeroen and Jan de Wasser is quite revealing. A trickster driven by the greed of commerce is carried away by sexual passion and hastily marries. Marriage, however, does not satisfy him, for he is a weak and ineffectual husband who is dominated by his uncontrollable wife. Thus Spring in 't Veld pursues his passions, like Tetjeroen, and is a victim of passion, like Jan de Wasser. In this story of a man overpowered by economic and sexual desires, a lack of reason and control is represented as a loss of masculine authority. In the home as in the market, the forces he plays with take him over, and his wife's furious attacks cause him to fall into a state of melancholy and die. Michel Foucault, among others, has noted that in seventeenth-century medicine of humours, The passions necessarily cause certain movements in the humours;...sadness excites melancholy (black bile), and the movements of the humours are on occasion so violent that they disrupt the entire economy of the body, even causing death.80 175 Violent passion thus was understood to have power to cause melancholy and to snuff out life. In prints of Spring in't Veld, and in much misogynist satire of this time, the character type most vulnerable to this dangerous drive was a man who lusted after both money and sex\u00E2\u0080\u0094the profit-seeking businessman of marriageable age. When immoderate passion gets the better of him, as it always does, the merchant's domineering wife embodies this fierce force. John Pocock has argued that this type of satire was widespread in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As individuals and property became more mobile in an increasingly commercial society, the man of business often was mocked as an effeminate being at the mercy of the uncontrollable acquisitiveness of market behaviour.81 Within this construct, the unpredictable forces of passion and desire that drove the market were gendered feminine, in opposition to masculine reason. Thus the merchant was satirized as a man dominated by the \"feminine principle\", which usurped his manhood.82 As we have seen, much Dutch misogynist satire of this time plays on these themes. In most of these prints, unrestrained sensual and mercantile passion is gendered feminine, and overcomes both men and women, leading to the extremes of madness, drunkenness, destitution and even death. Illustrating the power of passion unrestrained by reason, these adaptations of the farcical unruly woman and henpecked husband were mobilized to critique certain aspects of capitalist behaviour, particularly speculative trading, which increasingly threatened mercantile practices at this time. Thus uncontrolled passion was represented as a force that could turn society upside down, transforming citizens into fools, men into women, and women into men. As many feminist scholars have argued, the gendering of passion as a feminine trait has served as justification for the very real exclusion of women from the public sphere of political participation, economics, opinion and debate, and for their confinement in the private sphere to 176 do the unpaid labour of childrearing and housework.83 In the Netherlands, this sphere of private life, presided over by a virtuous housewife, often was described by moralists as the antidote to the greed and self-interest of mercantile society. Summarizing these views, Simon Schama argues: \"When properly established and run, the family household was the saving grace of Dutch culture that otherwise would have been indelibly soiled by materialism.\"84 While moralists such as Van Beverwijk may have idealized loving family life as the foundation of a harmonious society, however, satirical images delighted in pointing out an irreconcilable contradiction: that lust\u00E2\u0080\u0094sexual passion and the desire for material goods\u00E2\u0080\u0094was a driving force behind both marriage and mercantilism. Thus, the derisive laughter invoked by satirical representations of domestic life could potentially destabilize the divisions that were so crucial in ordering the social structure. For the imagery of effeminate businessmen and overbearing wives certainly implies a lack of fit between patriarchal and mercantile identity. Ruled by market forces beyond his control, the merchant could not naturally embody power. And if passion was a female trait, how could the private sphere be presided over by women and concurrently serve as a haven from greed? As if to compensate for such contradictions and defend masculine authority in the home and in the market, all of the misognist prints examined above clearly indicate that, although the man of business may sometimes be weak and foolish, this was typically the fault of a woman or a feminine force that overwhelmed him. Thus, regardless of the mode of representation\u00E2\u0080\u0094whether classical or grotesque\u00E2\u0080\u0094women were made to embody irrational excess. These misogynist satires bring this message home to female audiences by adopting some of the disciplinary strategies of farce, such as the use of direct address, to encourage individual viewers to identify directly with the behaviour depicted. The preface of The Stock 177 Exchange of Women, for example, makes reference to the unruly Griet of farce tradition, stating that \"the only good [woman] that ever lived was the one who vanquished the devil.\"85 This preface, addressed to \"the honourable and virtuous sex of Women\" goes on to conflate the ills Pandora lets loose on society with female readers, advising each of them to recognise her own pillar of vice within the stock exchange.86 In a similar manner, the conclusion of The Ten Pleasures viciously turns on women. It emphatically warns young male readers against the horrors of a mis-matched marriage, which, it summarizes, could be \"an enduring hell of discord, cursing, grumbling and muttering, and yes, even fighting and beating, which is mostly brought about by the peevish, domineering, extravagant, selfish, haughty and uncontrolled nature of many of the female sex.\"87 Children's prints of the lives of Jan de Wasser and Spring in't Veld also take up these didactic theatre themes, vividly illustrating that a marriage driven by passion always leads to regrets. Thus, while all of these interconnected misogynist prints may have attempted to redress a loss of middle-class power in the market, they concurrently worked to reassert patriarchal authority in the home. It is as if economic emasculation was deflected into private life, with misogyny working as a means to resecure mercantile authority within the domestic sphere. Farce into Print: The Private Body The numerous versions of the Jan de Wasser prints provide insights into the complicated workings of this process of controlling private life. Emerging in the midst of debates that converged on conflicting definitions of the theatre, the market, and the home, these prints attempt to shape the mrure of these contests by initiating children to accede to these spaces.88 Therefore, they are extremely attentive to the potential of farcical pleasure to regulate 178 the behaviour of children. Coinciding with the adaptation of farce into printed form, however, was the constant editing of this print series. These printings and reprintings reveal some of the specific dilemmas posed by the peculiar combination of comic entertainment with didactic instruction. Much of the enjoyment of viewing these prints lies in deciphering the ways that the gestures and placement of the figures played with the visual codes that articulated gendered identity in different types of seventeenth-century representations. For example, many viewers would have been familiar with visual conventions for depicting proper marital relations, which could be seen in the marriage portraits that hung in numerous middle-class homes. Portraiture conventions dictated that the husband traditionally was depicted on the left of the picture plane so that the viewer, scanning from left to right, would see him first. Often the male figure was shown gesturing towards his wife, a device that leads the viewer's eye to this subordinate female figure, usually posed in a passive and demure fashion.89 In the farcical Jan de Wasser prints, by contrast, these codes of body language are reversed. The masculine Griet often is placed at the left, and her violent or imperious gestures direct the viewer to the subservient Jan (see especially fig. 3.1-4, 6,14,17, 23). This unruly wife is anything but demure: she storms in with cudgel and whip, or jumps up with arms akimbo (fig. 3.1-23; fig. 3.3-3, 7). Thus, the depiction of the bodies of Jan and Griet deviates strikingly from well-established conventions for picturing marital norms. In this way, they vividly conveyed the theme of marital inversion to seventeenth-century viewers, especially those familiar with the portraits displayed in so many homes. The way that the bodies of Jan and Griet are located in the space of the household also plays on conventional images of domestic virtue. Particularly hilarious is the industrious Jan. 179 Enacting the role of the typical Dutch housewife, his body is often surrounded and constrained by the hearth, the cradle and the bed (fig. 3.1-4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 22; fig. 3.2-18, 27, 31, 43; fig. 3.3-7 & 8). For example, Jan de Wasser sits in the \"bakermat\" in front of the hearth, rocking the baby on his aproned knee (fig. 3.1-15) in a parody of stereotypical images of motherly virtue discussed above (figs. 3.7 & 3.8). An unusual early eighteenth-century print of the story repeats the distinctive tiled floor pattern of a domestic interior in every image, even in scenes where Jan is outdoors washing the windows or taking the child for a stroll (fig. 3.16-9, 19-21). The repetition of checkered floors and grilled windows\u00E2\u0080\u0094consistent features of the Jan de Wasser prints\u00E2\u0080\u0094echoes the gridded format of these prints. This pattern of grids within grids imprisons Jan's body in the domestic sphere, visually reinforcing the repetitive drudgery of his household chores and his confinement in the home. Any notion of individual masculine achievement is subsumed by the routines of housework.90 Griet, on the other hand, is less restrained by domestic space, and is usually placed nearer to windows and doorways. While Griefs proximity to these openings implies her ability to come and go, she is never depicted entirely outside of the walls of the home, however. Rather, the images tend to situate her in an in-between space, on the threshold of the house. (See especially fig. 3.1-23, and fig. 3.3-4, 7, 8, where her body is placed so that it just overlaps the open door.) This makes her an extremely troubling figure, for the boundaries of both the home and the female body had great symbolic significance in society at this time.91 As Simon Schama has noted, representations of Dutch women often were ordered in terms of social space: the moral huisvrouw (housewife) was contrasted to the anti-housewife, the uithuisigevrouw. which literally means woman-outside-of-the-home.92 Within this construct, an ideal woman had a closed mouth, a closed body and was enclosed in the home, 180 while an unruly woman could be recognized by her gaping mouth and grotesque body which transgressed limits.93 Indeed, middle-class identity depended on such distinctions, for the well-run, moral household came to symbolize the exclusiveness of Dutch middle-class citizens: a way for them to define themselves as different and separate from outside groups.94 To become a burgher, and play an active role in the urban community of Amsterdam, for example, one had to purchase citizenship, or poorterschap. which could only be procured with proof of residence. As a result, burghers defined outsiders as those who were without residence or occupation\u00E2\u0080\u0094 literally, as those outside of the home.95 As we have noted, these concepts of middle-class identity were extended to definitions of the whole Dutch Republic: moralists consistently reminded citizens that a godly home, run by the ideal housewife\u00E2\u0080\u0094a perfect and impermeable container\u00E2\u0080\u0094was a fitting microcosm of an inviolate Republic.96 The operation of distinguishing housewives from women-outside-of-the-home can be understood as an attempt to separate insiders from outsiders, and thus to fix the boundaries of middle-class and national identity. The figure of Griet interrogates the rigidity of these conventions, however. Notably, she does not fit neatly into the category of either huisvrouw or uithuisigevrouw. For although she refuses the duties of housewifery, Griet does not escape the home's confining walls. Stomping on the threshold, she represents a disruptive outsider who also is on the inside. In this way, she troubles the boundaries of the private moral middle-class home, the very space that defines itself by excluding chaos and disorder. Griefs disturbing position on the threshold of the home seems to be connected to the way that the subordinated Jan occupies the domestic sphere. We have already seen that as world-upside-down comic traditions were used to satirize the market, this ideally rational masculine space was represented as irrational and feminine. If an ideal home was usually 181 r^-defmed as a virtuous feminine space, then, following the logic of the world-upside-down, its opposite should be an immoral masculine space. And herein lies the difficulty. For in patriarchal societies,* the derogation of the female body as volatile, uncontrollable and chaotic works to uphold notions of a rational, controlled and authoritative male body; Indeed, is it possible to make the masculine signify confusion and disarray? Adjustments and alterations made to this series of prints seem to demonstrate the process of working through this dilemma. In one of the earliest prints, the forty-eight block version, Jan de Wasser does housework, works outside of the home, exchanges his wages for bulbs, and beats his submissive wife (fig. 3.2). Griet does not play a very prominent part in these prints.97 Thus, her domineering behaviour cannot be condemned as the force that transforms Jan into a housewife. In this version, therefore, the chaotic household is represented as a masculine space, presided over by a very strange hybrid\u00E2\u0080\u0094the male housewife. Based on the scarcity of surviving prints, however, it seems that this version of the story of Jan de Wasser was not very widely published.98 By contrast, it seems that more printers disseminated the eight-block version of the story. And, significantly, this print takes a different approach to gendering the disruptive household. Here, the tale has been pared down to essentials. It begins with an image of Jan (whose name is Klaas in this account) with his hand on Griefs bodice (fig. 3.17-1). This picture is accompanied with the verse, \"Klaas loves Griet and feels her bare breasts\". The overt sexuality of this scene serves a two-fold purpose. In the tradition of farce, it uses sensual pleasure to lure viewers into the story. At the same time, it alerts them that this is a marriage of passion, which can only lead to regret. Indeed, the sexual caress is followed by the wedding ceremony, and from then on the violence is unremitting as the two raise up lists, shovel, tongs, 182 spindle, cudgel and stick in their battle for dominance in the home. Griet gains the upper hand in the end. But, while the defeated Jan is shown taking on prescribed female roles within the domestic sphere, the victorious Griet does not leave the house to engage in masculine activities. Thus, these versions of the Jan de Wasser prints do not depict a true inversion; in fact, they depart from earlier broadsheets of The World Upside Down in which women a r e shown in traditional male roles such as going off to war and fighting battles (fig. 3.4-3, 23). It is as if Griefs transgressive female body must necessarily remain on the threshold of the domestic sphere, where it\u00E2\u0080\u0094rather than the male body\u00E2\u0080\u0094signifies the disruption of boundaries. In contrast to the foriy-eight-block version, therefore, in these representations, the opposite of an inviolate feminine home is not a chaotic masculine home. Rather, it is defined as a chaotic feminine home, in which the power of passion has taken over. Thus, as in images of the market, masculine failings could be blamed on feminine forces. While this version reworks the dilemma of how to gender a chaotic home, it poses new difficulties, for the depiction of uncontrolled passion is necessarily sexual and violent. Not surprisingly, printers were quick to edit this particular print. It is telling that although the woodblock image of Jan caressing Griefs bare breast was reused by various printers, the verse underneath this explicit opening image was altered to read something like: \"Jan loves Griet and will love her until death\" (fig. 3.3). In this way the text, which attempts to re-write this sexual representation, actually denies the image, setting up a sort of competition between comic and moralizing understandings of the body. The imagery of violence, which carried with it the erotic connotations of festive \"bridal creative blows\", is also increasingly toned down in later editions of the prints. In the twenty-four block print (fig. 3.1), for example, Griet and Jan exchange pants and aprons without a scuffle. Jan does not beat Griet at all in these versions, 183 while Griet only hits Jan to correct the childrearing mistakes he makes. Variations of this twenty-four block print, which condemns disorder in the household as feminine passion while censoring the overtly sexual and violent depiction of this force, became the most widely-published version of the Jan de Wasser story. In these versions, attempts also have been made to clarify the blurring of gendered identity that was part of the pleasure of viewing farcical scenarios of marital inversion. Calvinist anti-theatre polemicists vigilantly condemned the theatre practice of cross-dressing on the stage. They consistently argued that this was a form of sexual impurity that instigated lust in the audience. For not only did male actors sometimes play female roles, but there is evidence that female actors occasionally played male roles.\" In response to these practices, the churchmen argued that if men acted as women, or women as men, audience members would not be able to clearly identify with characters of their own gender, giving rise to the danger of passions being aroused in \"unnatural\" ways.100 The admission of women into the Amsterdam troupe at mid-century made it unnecessary for men to play the female roles, and the practice of cross-dressing seems to have declined by the end of the century.101 However, there is evidence to suggest that these practices continued in a somewhat clandestine manner. Of significance here is a very small discrepancy between printed versions of the farce of The Mean-Tempered Griets (Die Qua Grieten). which were commissioned by the theatre regents, and archival references to this play. In the theatre archives, this play is sometimes registered as T h r e e Mean-Tempered Griets ( D r i e Qua Grieten). and sometimes as T w o Mean-Tempered Griets ( T w e e Qua Grieten).102 The transformation of \"die\" to \"drie\", or \"the\" to \"three\" is underlined in these documents as if to signify that this small change is more meaningful than a slip of the pen. Who is the third Griet 184 in Three Mean-Tempered Griets? There are no known printed versions of a play with this specific title. However, in the records of the theatre, this extra role is allotted to a male actor.103 Thus it seems that performances of Three Mean-Tempered Griets reasserted the controversial practice of cross-dressing. Indeed, the range of \"unnatural\" cross-gender identifications were quite varied in a play where Jan is effeminate, two Griets are domineering, and one Griet is a man dressed as a woman who acts like a man. Early versions of the Jari de Wasser prints may pick up on these theatre conventions. We have already noted how the eight-block version in particular calls up theatre performance. In these prints, there is a striking difference between Griefs sexualized body in the opening scene of courtship (fig. 3.3-1), and her bulky physique and grimacing face as she is transformed into the domineering wife (fig. 3.3-3). As Griet struggles with her husband for the trousers, she becomes a more masculine character. The depiction of Griefs indeterminate gender in these scenes may have signalled to viewers, anticipating the pleasures of farce, that this could be a man dressed in a female costume. In the increasingly moral twenty-four block version, on the other hand, Griefs trim figure and neat dress allowed viewers to take in her unambiguous feminine appearance at a glance (fig. 3.1). Renditions of the Jan de Wasser prints published in the nineteenth century used even more overt strategies as they attempted to put an end to the alarming possibility that young viewers might learn to act like these mixed-up characters. Editions published by The Society for Public Welfare, a nineteenth-century group committed to educational reform, went so far as to include didactic rubrics. These exhorted girls not to imitate the behaviour of Griet, and warned boys against making a hasty marriage choice and ending up doing housework in the manner of Jan (fig. 3.18). The subtitle of a version entitled \"The New Jan de Wasser\" 185 prosaically tells children how to read the print: \"Jan de Wasser shall teach you something good and useful, Oh children! notice how both Griet and Jan, have changed places with each other in a contradictory way; Housework suits the woman and trade is fitting for the man.\"104 The first half of the print depicts the childhoods of sissy Jan and tomboy Griet, accompanied by didactic captions such as \"Shame, Jan! Girlish doll's games, Are never for boys,\" and \"Climbing trees doesn't suit you, Leave this to the boys, wild Griet!\" (fig. 3.18-1 & 5). These versions signal the decline of the Jan de Wasser prints in Holland. Evidently their preachy tone had little appeal, for they no longer sold well.105 honically, as they were stripped of their ambiguous pleasures, these prints also lost their disciplinary impact, for sensual enjoyment and moral insight had always worked together in these forms. This continuous process of censoring representations of the body in the Jan de Wasser prints reveals much about the process of using print to shape children into moral adults. For these changes cannot be understood as the mere editing of printed forms. Rather, through forms such as these, interior censorship was made implicit in readers. Indeed, later versions were revised both to appeal to an audience that had a higher \"threshold of shame and repugnance\",106 and to instill in them new notions of bodily decorum. As Francis Barker argues in The Tremulous Private Body, the construction of a private middle-class citizen in the late seventeenth century required that the subject learn to dominate the disruptive \"mess of the body.\"107 The new private subject was profoundly self-conscious, with a deep sense of corporeal guilt and a need to repudiate the body. However, the body could never be completely denied, as merchant capitalism required a productive and reproductive body.108 Barker describes the uneasy equilibrium of the seventeenth-century body, which always threatened insurrection: 186 Neither wholly present, nor wholly absent, the body is confined, ignored, ex-scribed from discourse, and yet remains at the edge of visibility, troubling the space from which it has been banished.109 As the Jan de Wasser prints demonstrate, this body was always ambiguous and contradictory. While editors continuously censored images of sex, violence, and cross-dressing, the body was never completely repressed or entirely obscured by text. This tension between the denial and reassertion of the body in the Jan de Wasser prints is linked to the historical circumstances of their production. As the grotesque body of farce performance was increasingly purified and even banned from the Amsterdam stage in the 1670's and 1680's, farce tradition was made over in printed form. Thus, these prints can be seen to represent bodily passions in the face of their repression. However, while these prints might reassert the grotesque body of farce to critique theatre reforms, they also employ a range of disciplinary strategies in order to regulate the private behaviour of young readers. Specifically, these printed images of the grotesque body were increasingly censored over time. Not only this, but the very form of print necessarily articulates a distance from corporeality. For the body in print is not experienced in the same way as the physical bodies seen in theatre performances. The printed body, after all, is a two-dimensional image on the page; it could never be mistaken for the material body of the stage.110 In this way, the medium of print itself works to prompt readers to deny the body and turn inwards. Indeed, some of the very minute specifics of reading practices give impetus to this turn away from the body. As has often been argued, interactions with printed material played an important role in constructing the private individual: the practice of solitary reading \u00C2\u00ABin particular isolates the body from other bodies as the reader retreats into an interior world.111 187 This process certainly is evident in the Jan de Wasser prints. Notably, the prints increasingly took on linear and objective characteristics of the written form as they were edited over time. The linear narrative recounts the life of the burgher couple, pausing to describe landmarks such as their wedding day, the arrival of their first child, and their discussions of the child's future. The text accompanying the images is composed of simple rhyming couplets descriptive of the gestural images above them. This undoubtedly served as an aid to those learning to read, allowing young readers to interiorize information in a practice that posits an individual who is increasingly separate from the world. It is significant, however, to note how this didactic literary function could also be undermined by the reader. As Roger Chartier points out, while mnemonic devices serve as aids for those learning to read, they also make narrative easily memorizable, which destines the text to return to oral form.112 And, while these prints tend to assert the linear narrative, they also contain many repetitions, a trait of oral culture, as Jan performs chore after chore, punctuated by the routine of beatings and disputes. As we have noted, the forty-eight block version (fig. 3.2) is extremely disjointed, with no easily discernible narrative sequence. The first line of the print, \"Here comes Jan de Wasser\" resembles formulas that traditionally were used in the recitation of folk tales.113 This prompts readers to draw on their previous knowledge of anecdotes, insults, and theatre plays. The printed story thus could easily be transformed back into a tale that was physically acted out, or told out loud in a group. Consequently, the body in print could provoke the reconstitution of the material body of farce. The rhetorical gestures of the figures also act as a mnemonic device, creating an unwritten performative narrative.114 The texts below the images are simple descriptions: Jan plays the boss / Jan insults the neighbours / Jan and Griet argue, etc. These texts could work to 188 censor the abusive language that undoubtedly accompanied the many violent gestures in the prints. Or, as in the case of \"Jan loves Griet and will love her until death\", printed words were used to deny the explicit sexuality of the accompanying imagery. In several instances, however, the bodily gestures of the characters work against the simple descriptive texts as they draw on the readers' familiarity with farce tradition and reassert the vernacular of slap-stick comedy. For example, speech is indicated in scenes where Griet points as she gives instruction on how to do the housework (fig. 3.1-4), Jan stands with hands on hips while gossiping with the women (fig. 3.2-20), Jan shakes a finger as he pokes fun at the neighbours (fig. 3.2-21), Griet jumps up from her chair when Jan comes home late for dinner (fig. 3.3-3), and so on. These performative gestures function as visual representations of spoken words. This allows readers to reenact the story, or even invent their own comic narratives based on the gestural images. Thus, the prints are characterized by a vacillation between written and oral processes of story telling, between internal and communal experiences of narrative, and between the repression and reassertion of the farcical body. Because traits of the written form tend to occur more frequently in the later prints, we can assume that they took part in a larger pattern of change, as early modern European societies moved away from communal social life towards private domestic life.115 As the prints were edited, Jan actually undergoes this same conversion. In the earliest Jan de Wasser prints, Jan is often depicted outside, socializing with neighbourhood people (See especially 3.2-15, 17, 20, 21), while in later ones (fig. 3.1), he is increasingly confined to interior domestic spaces. The many editions of these prints did not merely reflect this transition, but actively fashioned a reader who was more of a private individual and less of a communal member. Yet, as the case of the Jan de Wasser prints demonstrates, while printed material redrew boundaries between the 189 body and the community, it certainly did not extinguish oral practices. Rather, these prints functioned as a place where different experiences of the body overlapped, sometimes in contradictory ways. This chapter has traced various appropriations, transformations and adaptations of Griet and Jan, the farcical domineering wife and effeminate husband of Netherlandish misogynist tradition, in order to explore how these persistent characters continuously were adjusted to address the historically specific concerns of different audiences. As these comic characters were taken up in the theatre practices of Protestant Amsterdam, the ludic, sensual and visual conventions of festive celebrations were intertwined with efforts to regulate audience behaviour. Thus the civilizing efforts of both Calvinist churchmen and the classicist Nil Volentibus Arduum cannot be understood as the censorship of unregulated, free and uninhibited fleshly practices of previous carnival and farce traditions. While these groups may have claimed that they were imposing decorum upon spontaneous excess, in reality, battles about farce were embedded in contestations about the control of public theatre, a crucial site for those who wished to influence the opinions and behaviour of the urban populace. In the case of Nil specifically, the strategy of repudiating farcical theatre traditions in the 1670's and 1680's was connected with efforts to create new class distinctions. By redefining farce's audience, which included the merchant middle classes, as undisciplined and immoral, they sought to distinguish and elevate the classical traditions increasingly espoused by Amsterdam's elite. Thus, the reassertion of misogynist farce traditions in printed form at this time can be understood as an attempt to castigate the sensual and especially the economic indulgences of this increasingly separate upper-class group. As they ridiculed farcical excesses, 190 however, these forms remained attentive to the disciplinary mechanisms of theatre, particularly strategies that endeavoured to regulate the gendered division of paid and unpaid labour. Indeed, the constant editing and adapting of the Jan de Wasser prints betrays divers concerns about how these prints functioned to prepare children for future roles. The analysis of the subject matter and consumption of this series of prints indicates that defining private life was a process fraught with anxieties and ambiguities. For the continuous readjustments to the prints demonstrate that the imposition of discipline by those in authority often met with its failure, as their peculiar mix of morality and farcical pleasure could be apprehended in contradictory ways by readers. In response to these possible readings, new editions of these prints increasingly denied the ambiguous grotesque body of farce until they lost much of their appeal and ceased to be efficacious instructors. Thus the Jan de Wasser prints, published and disseminated to children for over two centuries, reveal what they attempt to conceal, for they confirm that the separation of masculine and feminine social spaces and tasks was not a natural division. Instead, it emerges as the product of continuous contestations, both between various powerful groups who sought to impose their authority, and between the disciplinary strategies of representations and the rebellious understandings of audiences. 191 Notes 1. Madan Sarup defines \"home truths\" in this way in \"Home and Identity,\" Traveller's Tales. Narratives of Home and Displacement, eds. G. Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1994) 94. 2. For women's roles in riots, see Rudolf Dekker, Holland in Beroering. Oproeren in de 17de en 18de Eeuw (Baarn: Ambo, 1982) 51-59. On cross-dressing practices, Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989). The representation of women in theatre plays is discussed in Maria-Theresia Leuker, 'De last van't huys. de wil des mans...' Frauenbilder und Ehekonzepte im Niederlandischen Lustspiel des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munster: Verlag Regensberg, 1992). Two more general works on this type of imagery are, Lene Dresen-Coenders, Helse en Hemelse Vrouwen-macht onstreeks 1500 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1988), and Martha Peacock, Harpies and Henpecked Husbands: Images of the Powerful Housewife in Netherlandish Art. 1550-1700. diss. Ohio State University, 1989 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989). See also Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987) 375-480. 3. Schama 445. 4. In fact, while negative stereotypes of shrewish wives and hen-pecked husbands proliferated, there were no children's prints of harmonious family life published at this time. As G.D.J. Schotel puts it, these prints only depicted \"jammer en ellende\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094misery and wretchedness. See Vaderlandsche Volksboeken en Volkssprookjes van de vroegste tijden tot het einde der 18e Eeuw. 2 vols. (Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1878) 1: 295. 5. Indeed, although Schama devotes several pages to a range of representations of deviant femininity, his footnotes acknowledge unanswered questions about this material: \"Just why this period saw a flowering of these biting anti-feminine comedies remains mysterious and merits serious investigation.\" Schama 668. 6. The Jan de Wasser prints have been catalogued by Maurits de Meyer in De Volks- en Kinderprent in the Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e Eeuw (Antwerpen: Uitgevers Standard-Boekhandei, 1962) 495-500, 514. 7. An anonymous late seventeenth-century printer published the first version of this print. The De Groot firm of Amsterdam (1656-1757) then reissued it. The Van Veen Collection of Children's Books and Juvenilia (London: Sotheby's, 1984) n.p. Maurits de Meyer's catalogue also lists two eighteenth-century Amsterdam firms\u00E2\u0080\u0094Kannewet (1725-1780) and Ratelband en Bouwer (1774-1799)\u00E2\u0080\u0094that published copies of this print. Meyer 514. The dates of various publishing firms are catalogued in J.A. Gruys and C. de Wolf, Thesaurus 1473-1800 Nederlandse Boekdrukkers en Boekverkoopers. Met Plaatsen en Jaaren van Werkzaamheid (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1989); and in C.F. Van Veen, Catchpennyprints: Dutch Popular and Childrenprints (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976) 132-133. 192 8. C. F. Van Veen, Dutch Catchpenny Prints: Three Centuries of Pictorial Broadsides for Children (The Hague: W. Van Hoeve, 1971) i. While I have been able to trace some of these connections, much of the print remains obscure. 9. The eight block version was probably first published by the widow G. de Groot en A. van Dam of Amsterdam (1692-1739). Since these dates overlap with those of the forty-eight block version, it is difficult to determine which variation of the story was printed first. The stock of de Groot was taken over by Kannewet (1710-1780) who reissued the print. Various copies were also produced by the Amsterdam firm of van der Putte (1723-1793), and by J. Noman of Zaltbommel (1814-1830). Meyer 34, 215, 514. 10. Meyer attributes the first twenty-four block version to Gijsbert de Groot-Keur of Amsterdam (1738-1767). He lists thirty-five other printers who published an edition of this version. Meyer 514. 11. There is much written on this. Important studies which address printed representations of this theme across a range of early modern societies are: N.Z. Davis, \"Women ori Top,\" Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 124-151; Sara Grieco, \"Pedagogical Prints: Moralizing Broadsheets and Wayward Women in Counter-Reformation Italy,\" Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 61-88; David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from 1450-1825 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973); Joy Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992). 12. These types of broadsheets are discussed in David Kunzle, \"The World Upside Down: The Iconography of a European Broadsheet Type,\" The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) 39-94; and in Peter Stallybrass, \"The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State,\" The Matter of Difference. Materialist Feminist Criticisms of Shakespeare, ed. V. Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 201-217. 13. The theme of gender inversion commonly occurred as a single vignette in gridded broadsheets of the \"World Upside Down\" or as the sole subject of sixteenth-century broadsheets throughout Europe. See Davis, \"Women on Top.\" The Dutch adaptation of this theme is discussed in E. Van Heurck and G. Boekenoogen L'Imagerie Populaire des Pays-Bas: Belgique-Holland (Paris: Editions Duchartre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1930) 35. 14. The Burgherweeshuis oud-archief, housed in Amsterdam's Municipal Archives, contains the books of the Civic Orphanage, which provide valuable information about the revenues and repertoire of the Amsterdam Schouwburg. These records indicate the popularity of farces such as The Mean Tempered Griets. Part. Arch. no. 367. Scenes from some of the Jan and Griet plays have been republished in J. Van Vloten, Het Nederlandse Kluchtspel van de 14e tot de 193 18e Eeuw. 3 vols. (Haarlem: De Graaf, 1881); and in P. H. van Moerkerken, Het Nederlandsch Kluchtspel in de 17e Eeuw 2 vols. (Sneek: J.F. van Druten, 1899). 15. Leuker 209. W.A. Ornee, Van Bredero tot Langendijk (Amsterdam: De Walburg Pers, 1985)7,220. 16. Cornelis de Bie, Jan Goethals en Griet syn wyf (Antwerp: Weduwe Thieullier, in de Wolstraet, 1670). Maurits de Meyer points out the similarity between this play and the Jan de Wasser prints, p. 498. 17. DeBie4. 18. While carnival usually took place in February, in the Low Countries it was often postponed to the more temperate season of the St. John's Day Festival which developed out of the older celebration of midsummer and occurs near the summer solstice on June twenty-third and twenty-fourth. D.J. Van der Ven, Ons Eigen Volk in het Feestelijk Jaar (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1915) 169-175; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978) 181, 195; K. ter Laan, Folklorisch Woordenboek van Nederland en Vlaams Belgie ('s Gravenshage: G.B. van Goor, 1949) 161-4, 476-480. 19. Den Roomschen Uylen-Spiegel ofte Lust-hof der Catholijken. Getrocken uyt verscheyden oude Roomsch-Catholijcke Legende-boecken. ende andere Schrijvers (Dordrecht: Simon Onder de Linde, 1671). 20. The publishing history of this work is detailed in J. Gieles et al, ed., Bibliografie van het Nederlandstalig Narratief Fictioneel Proza 1670-1700 (Neiuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers BV, 1988). 21. \"Als hy eens by haer in een kamer quam, soo maecktese het hem aldaer soo bangh, dat hy genootsaeckt wierdt in een tonne te kruppen die aldaer stondt, op welcke sy een kussen wierp, om hem daer onder te smoren. Op de selve tijd, of op eenen anderen (want dit onseker is) heeftse den duyvel genomen ende op een kussen gebonden (Want de hardigheyd moet met sachtigheyd der vrouwen overwonnen worden.)\" Den Roomschen 368. 22. '\"T Is gewichtigh, Kiest voorsichtigh, Mannen, kiest een geestigh dier, 't is Santinrie, OfSottine Yeder vint sijn Grietjen hier.\" Den Roomschen 373. 23. J. Grauls analyses this book in Volkstaal en Volksleven in het Werk van Pieter Bruegel (Antwerp: N.V. Standard-Boekhandel, 1957) 16-20, 34-39. 194 24. Grams 14-15. 25. In all of the prints, Jan's wife is named Griet, except for the very earliest version (fig. 2), where she is called 'Bot'heid', which plays on the Dutch words for 'stupid' and 'lazy'. The transformation of St. Margriet into the unruly Griet has been examined by Grauls, 6-68. See also Walter Gibson, \"Bruegel, Dulle Griet, and Sexist Politics in the Sixteenth Century,\" Pieter Bruegel und Seine Welt (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1979) 9-16; and Lene Dresen-Coenders, Helse en Hemelse Vrouwen-macht onstreeks 1500 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1988) 17-19. An important study on medieval misogynist traditions is Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), especially Chapter Five. 26. Van der Ven 169-173. Otto van Reinsberg-Duringsfeld, Calendrier Beige (Brussels: F.Claassen, 1861) 427. Maria Leach, ed., Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary of Folklore. Mythology, and Legend 2 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnall's Co., 1950, II) 723. 27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968) 198-206. 28. To link these two saints\u00E2\u0080\u0094who both abstained from sexual relations\u00E2\u0080\u0094within the context of a fertility festival was also particularly hilarious. 29. \"Past op...oft ick zal u vermooren.\" De Bie 5. 30. Burgerweeshuis oud-archief, Part. Arch. no. 367, no. 428,429. 31. \"De beste Griet die men ter Waerelt vant, Was die den Duyvel op't Kussen bant.\" De Qua Grieten. Kluchtspel (Amsterdam: Erfgen van J. Lescaillje, 1706). 32. Notably, De Groot also published many theatre plays. I.H. van Eeghen, De Amsterdamse Boekhandel. 1680-1725 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1978) vol. Ill, 145. 33. Such arguments were put forth by Calvinist scholars, for example G.A. Wurnkes (Predikant te Sneek), \"Kermissen.\" Uit Onzen Bloeitijd: Schetsen van het Leven onzer Vaderen in de XVIIe Eeuw. ed. S.D. van Veen (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij, 1910) 305-307. They also appear in more recent scholarship such as, G.H. Jansen, Een Rose van Vrijheid. Kermis in Nederland (Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 1987) 30-32. 34. Herman Pleij, Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit. Literatuur. Volksfeest en Burgermoraal in de late Middeleeuwen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1979). 35. L.F. Groenendijk's \"De Nadere Reformatie en het Toneel,\" De Zeventiende Eeuw 5, 1 (1989): 141-153 is a good example of this type of scholarship. 36. \"Oneenigheyt baert twist, en schandigh huys gekyf: Wee die sijn vryheyt mist, en leeft met een quaet wyf.\" De Bie. Jan Goedhals. 195 37. Unfortunately, it is difficult to date these insertions. 38. \"De Boosheyt van een Vrouw, Brecht mernckmael de trou.\" 39. This is from Jan Vos' poem, printed at the bottom of an engraving commissioned by the Schouwburg regents that pictured the audience within the theatre. See Chapter One, fig. 6. 40. My interpretation of the disciplinary functions of the Amsterdam farces is influenced by Huston Diehl's analysis of comic plays in early modern England. Huston Diehl, \"Reforming Spectacle: Visual Regimes and Disciplinary Strategies in the Comedy of Early Modem England,\" Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference, Bellingham, Washington, 24 April 1998. '41. G.A.A., Burgherweeshuis oud-archief, Part. Arch. no. 367. 42. '\"k Zel maar myn oogen eens heen en weer over de Schouwburg slaan, 'k Wed ik 'er geen kleyn partytje zel zien staan, Die myn zeggen neit vreemt vinden, en als ze t'huys komen, Welgewaar worden, zo ze maar wyven hebben... Dus mag ik wel zeggen dat niemand vernoegt met zyn staat is; Want een vryer zal meenen dat zonder vrouw te leven En die der een heeft, zal 't rekenen voor plagen, En bidden den Hemel, dat hy van die Hel mag zyn ontslagen: Gelyk ik nudoe...\" DeOuaGrieten3. 43. \"Heb ik flus niet wel gezeyt, dat een quaat wyf arger als een Hel is? ...Ik hebze getrout, en het moet altyt myn wyf blyven. Maar jy jonge luy, die noch leven alleen, Wacht jou doch daar voor datje niet en krygt zo een blok aan't been.\" De Qua Grieten 10. 44. Such a large historical shift is of course impossible to date. This transition occured earlier in certain places and among certain groups, and much later in other cases. Historians seem to agree that in Holland, new marriage norms were established by the late seventeenth century. Donald Haks' work on the history of the Dutch family is especially important: Huwelijk en Gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de Eeuw. Processtukken en Moralisten over Aspecten van het laat 17de- en 18de-eeuwse Gezinleven (Assen: van Gorcum, 1982); D. Haks, \"Continuiteit en Verandering in het gezin van de vroeg-moderne tijd.\" Vijf EeUwen Gezinsleven. Liefde. Huwelijk en Opvoeding in Nederland. eds. H. Peeters et al. (Nijmegen: SUN, 1986) 31-56. 45. Marriage conventions are discussed in Schama, especially 398-427; David Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenm-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982) 10-36; and Alice Clare Carter, \"Marriage Counselling in the Early Seventeenth Century: England and the Netherlands Compared,\" Ten Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations, ed. J. Van Dorsten (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1974) 110-125. For information on the rights of unmarried women and widows, see Carter \"Marriage\" 109; Schama 405-406 and S.M. Wyntjes, \"Survivors and Status: Widowhood and Family in the Early Modem Netherlands\" Journal of Family History 7 (Winter 1982) 396-405. 46. Johan van Beverwijk, Van de Wtnementheyt des Vrouwelicken Geslachts. Quoted and translated in Schama 386. 196 47. Offenders could be banned from religious rites. Most commonly, it was women who complained to consistory about abusive husbands. While there were some cases of husband-beating wives, it seems that usually this occurred for reasons of self-defence. Herman Roodenburg, Onder Censuur. De Kerkelijk Tucht in de Gereformeerde Gemeente van Amsterdam 1578-1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990) 362-367. Neighbourhood associations also fined married couples who beat each other. Haks 154. 48. \"Mogelijck schuylender Grieten onder haer geslacht, die sy dit als een voorbeeld willen vertoonen. Examplen, seyt men, leeren wel, en hy spiegelt sich sacht, die aen een ander spiegelt. Kan dan dese mijnen Griet eenige deugt aen de hare doen, soo berout het mij niet mijn pen in't werckt ghestelt te hebben...\" Klucht van de Qua Grieten (Amsterdam: Dirck Cornelisz. Houthaak, 1649). . . . . . 49. Many of these types of farces about Jan and Griet begin with similar didactic prefaces, warning the Griets not to follow the example on stage and the Jans to tame their domineering wives. For example, De Broekdragende Vrouw. Kluchtspel (Amsterdam: Jacob Lescaille, 1666); Klucht van de Ghedwonghe Griet (Brussels: J. de Grieck, n.d.); De Ontvoogde Vrouw. Kluchtspel (Amsterdam: Erv. Lescailje, 1688). 50. \"Een vrouw is een nootsakelyk quaat.\" De Qua Grieten 11. 51. \"Daer twee Grieten in een huys zijn, behoeft men gheenen bassende hont.\" Quoted in Gibson 9. Also catalogued in A. de Cock, Spreekwoorden en Zegswijzen afkomstig van Oude Gebruiken en Volkszeden (Gent: Algemeene Boekhandel, 1908) 52. 52. \"Een qua Griet is een mans verdriet;\" \"Griet in de broek;\" \"Zij wil de broek aantrekken of ze haar past of niet;\" \"'t is een booze Griet.\" Listed in Cock 52, 61,158. 53. On connections between theatre and insults, see Maria-Theresia Leuker, \"Schelmen, hoeren, eerdieven en lastertongen. Smaad en belediging in 17de-eeuwse Kluchten en Blijspelen,\" Volkskundige Bulletin 18, 3 (Dec. 1992) 314-339. The function of insults in Amsterdam's neighbourhoods has been examined by Roodenburg 246-252. On the uses of proverbs, see J. Obelkevich, \"Proverbs and Social History.\" The Social History of Language, eds. P.Burke and R. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 43-72; Natalie Zemon Davis, \"Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors,\" Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 229-266. 54. Roodenburg notes that there was little privacy in Amsterdam's neighbourhoods, where women closely watched each other. To openly insult someone on the street was considered a serious offence, however, as it had very real effects on honour and social standing. Complaints about insults were brought either to the church consistory, or to the \"Bank van Injurien en Calumnien.\" Roodenburg 246-252. 55. While sayings about Griet proliferated, Cock's catalogue does not include proverbs about Jan de Wasser. An interesting reference to him occurs in rogue literature, where he is described 197 as the comrade of a notorious thief called the \"Achtkantige Boer.\" Here, the name is in keeping with the aliases and deceptions of criminal subcultures. Perhaps Jan de Wasser was the nickname of a real or fictional thief who disguised himself as a woman? The reference occurs in Histori. ofte Practijke der Dieven (Utrecht: Willem van Paddenburg, 1688) 645, where as introduction to chapter 63, the reader is told that a second volume could be written about the misdeeds of the Achtkante Boer and his companions Jan de Wasser, Vergru and other adventurers. On stories about the Achtkante Boer, see J. van der Kooi, \"Schinderhannes en de Achtkante Boer,\" Driemaandelijkse Bladen voor Taal en Volksleven in het Oosten van Nederland 33 0980: 81-95: 34 (1982): 43-58. 56. See Leuker, especially chapters 4 and 5. On the connections between earlier plays, which depict the domineering wife and hen-pecked husband as a rural peasant couple, and the concerns of a growing urban middle-class audience, see Herman Pleij, \"The Function of Literature in Urban Societies in the later Middle Ages.\" Dutch Crossing 29 (1986): 3-22; H. Pleij, \"Wie wordt bang voor het booze wijf? Vrouwenhaat in de Middeleeuwen,\" De Revisor 4. 6 (1977): 38-42; and Wilma van Engeldorp Gastelaars, 'Ic sal U Smiten opUwen Tant': Geweld Tussen Man en Vrouw in Laatmiddeleeuwse Kluchten. diss. Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1983 (Amsterdam: Doctoraalscriptie Historische Letterkunde, 1983). 57. Diehl, \"Reforming Spectacle\". 58. Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol argue that there was not always a clear divide between the masquerade of actresses who played the \"trousers roles\" on the stage and the permanent cross-dressing of women who disguised themselves as men in their daily lives. See The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989) 7-9. The role of unruly women in riots has been examined by Rudolf Dekker, \"Women in Revolt: Popular Protest and its Social Basis in Holland in the 17th and 18th Centuries,'' Theory and Society 16 (1987): 337-362. 59. J.A. Worp, Geschiedenis van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg 1496-1772 (Amsterdam: 5. L. van Looy, 1920) 146. 60. The oldest surviving copy of this work is the second edition, dated 1678. The first edition therefore may have been published a few years earlier. See the editors' epilogue to the 1988 edition. Hippolytus de Vrye, De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks. eds. E.K. Grootes and Rob Winkelman,T988. (Amsterdam: Hieronymous Sweerts, 1683) 116. 61. The book is loosely based on the fifteenth-century French work, Les Quinze Joies de Mariage. Grootes and Winkelman 111. 62. Grootes and Winkelman 117. 63. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books. Readers. Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) 13. 198 64. Grootes and Winkelman argue that Sweerts was probably also the author of Den Berg Parnas of 1689, a book that directly criticized Nil's policies, p. 115. 65. \"De zesde klaagt, Dc ben, o schand, Gelijk een mugge aan't licht verbrandt.\" Hippolytus de Vrye, De Biegt der Getrouwde. zynde het Tweede Peel vande Tien Vermakelijkheden des Houwelijks (Amsterdam: Hieronymous Sweerts, 1679). 66. Andries Pels, Gebruik en Misbruik des Tooneels. 1677, ed. M . Schenkeveld-van der Pussen (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink, 1978) 22. 67. The war of 1672 was defined by many as a religious war, as French Roman Catholicism was seen as a threat to Protestant religious traditions. Schama 267-83. 68. Publius Felicius, Pe Beurs der Vrouwen (Amsterdam: Sybrand Stepraed, 1690). 69. \"Eiland van Vermaak,\" Felicius 4. 70. \"doorluchtige daaden,\" Felicius 20-21. 71. Schama 448-9. 72. \"Pe trotsheid, hier ter Beurs geleert, En hedendagse quaade zeden, Waar door nu de eene de ander eert.\" \"Pefiance is learned at the Bourse, and today's bad morals, with which one now honours the other.\" Felicius 2. 73. Charles Wilson, \"The Economic Pecline of the Netherlands,\" Economic History Review 9 (1939): 113-121. 74. The \"easy money\" of speculative trading was commonly compared to the hard-won gains of trade at this time. See J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success. Failure and Perseverance of the Putch Economy. 1500-1815 (Cambridge: .Cambridge University Press, 1997) 156. 75. Prints satirizing the speculative manias of the early eighteenth century are catalogued in A.H. Cole, The Great Mirror of Folly (Het Groote Tafereel der Pwaasheid). An Economic-Bibliographical Study (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1947); they are also discussed in Schama 365-371. 76. See Schama's discussion 363-5. 77. The phrase \"Wy willen me vaeren\" is printed above their heads. 78. Prints of Spring in't Veld are catalogued in Meyer. The earliest version of this print, published by Kannewet, can be dated to the 1730's, although the woodblocks may have been carved earlier. Meyer 470. 199 79. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) 118. 80. Foucault 86. 81. John Pocock, \"The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,\" Theories of Property. Aristotle to the Present, ed. A. Parel and T. Flanagan (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1979) 152-155. 82. Pocock 153. 83. See, for example, Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women. Democracy. Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) especially 3-7, 119-132; Nancy Fraser, \"What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,\" Feminism as Critique, eds. S. Benhabib and D. Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 32-36; Nancy Armstrong, \"Some Call it Fiction: On the Politics of Domesticity.\" The Other Perspective in Gender and Culture Rewriting Women and the Symbolic, ed Juliet Flower MacCannell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 59-84. 84. Schama 388. 85. \"...dat 'er slechts eene goede [vrouw] oit geweest is, doch dat de duivel die nog weg gevoert heeft.\" Felicius2. 86. The preface is entitled, \"Aan de Eerbare en Deugdelijke Sexe der Vrouwen.\" Felicius 1. 87. \"Daar wordt een gedurige hel van onenigheid, vloeken, knorren en morren, ja, vechten en slaan gevonden, hetwelk meestal door de wrevelachtige, heerszuchtige, geldkwistende, eigenzinnige, hovaardige en tomeloze natuur van velen der vrouwelijke sekse veroorzaakt wordt.\" Tien Vermakelijkheden 108. 88. For the importance of this initiation process, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 35. 89. As David Smith makes clear, these portrait conventions are not limited to a seventeenth-century Dutch context. The tradition of situating the man on the left is actually derived from the devices of heraldry. Smith 34,43-49. 90. The threat of domesticity for the masculine subject was that it formed, in Norman Bryson's terms, \"a cage of cultural repetitions so binding and confining that all possibility of individual uniqueness and distinction is effectively annulled\". N. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) 140. 91. As Heidi de Mare argues, \"In Holland, the boundary between street and house becomes a ritual area, and female figures play an important role in the establishment of that space.\" H. de Mare, \"The Domestic Boundary as Ritual Area in Seventeenth-Century Holland,\" Urban 200 Rituals in Italy and the Netherlands, ed. H. de Mare and Anna Vos (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993) 109-131. 92. Schama 401. The term uithuizigevrouw was also used as an insult. Roodenburg 251-2. 93. P. Stallybrass, \"Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,\" Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe, ed. M.W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 126-128. 94. Schama 380-388. 95. Poort literally means doorway, threshold or gate. Schama 386, 570-573. 96. Such ideas were circulated in the early seventeenth century in the writings of Jacob Cats. At the end of the century, they were consistently repeated in the works of Christian polemicists such as Wittewrongel. Schama 4,403. De Mare 110-112,128. 97. Meyer 514. 98. R.N.H. Boerma, Oude Blokken. Nieuwe Teksten en de Strijd on de Broek. diss. (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1994) 63. 99. C. Wybrands, \"De Amsterdamsche Schouwburg gedurende het seizoen 1658-59,\" Het Nederlandsch Tooneel 2 (1873) 247; G. Kalff, Literatuur en Tooneel te Amsterdam in de 17de Eeuw (Haarlem: de Erven S. Bohn, 1895) 298-299. 100. Anti-theatre discourse is remarkably consistent on this point, as a comparison of the discussion on cross-dressing in the following works indicates. Cornelius Poudroyen, Catechisatie. dat is. een grondige ende eenvoudige Qnderwij singe over de Leere des Christelicken (Amsterdam: Weduwe van Joost Broersz, 1659) 902-903; Antonius Sleidanus, D'Overtuyghde Dina of Korte en Nodige Waerschouwing tegen 't besien vande hedens-daegsche Schouw-Spelen so in't ghemeen. als wel bysonderlijk in dese Bloedighe Oorloghs-Tijden (Amsterdam: Willem van Havert, 1667) 45-50; Casparus Streso, Christelyck en Bescheyden Oordeel. over Dansseryen. en Schou-speelen. Die onder de Litmaten vande Gereformeered Kercke gepleegt werden ('s Gravenhage: Jasper Doll, 1680) 29-43; Petrus de Witte, Catechizatie over den Heydelberghschen Catechismus der Gereformeerde Christelicke Religie (Enkhuizen: Rieuwert Jansz. Landtman, 1656) 879-881; Petrus Wittewrongel, Het Tweede Boek van de Oeconomia Christiana ofte Christelicke Huys-Houdinghe (Amsterdam: Weduwe van Marten Jansz. Brant, 1661)1179-1181. 101. J.A. Worp, Geschiedenis van het Drama en van het Tooneel in Nederland. vol. 2 (Rotterdam: Langerfeld, 1908) 32-36. 102. \"Kluchten en Naspelen op den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg vertoond, sedert het jaar 1638\" Familie arehief Huydecoper, no. 163, olim. no. 314. Rijksarchief te Utrecht. This 201 list of farces performed from 1638 to 1730 includes references to Drie Qua Grieten as well as to Twee Qua Grieten. 103. In 1658, actor Abram Hendrix played the third Griet. G.A.A. Burgerweeshuis oud-arcbiefP.A. no. 367.no. 429, \"Parsonaaje boek\". Wybrands 253. 104. \"Zal Jan de Wasscher u iets goeds en nuttigs leeren, 6 Kinderen! merkt dan op, hoe beide Griet en Jan, In tegenstrijdigheid hier met elkaar verkeeren; Het huiswerk voegt de Vrouw, het hand werk voegt den Man.\" On the revision of children's prints by the Society for Public Welfare, see Lene Dresen-Coenders, \"De machtsbalans tussen men en vrouw in het vroeg-moderne gezin,\" Vijf Eeuwen Gezinsleven. Liefde. Huwelijk en Opvoeding in Nederland. eds. H. Peeters et al. fNijmegen: SUN. 1986) 74. 105. As print collector Arie van den Berg pointed out in conversation, after these moral revisions, the Jan de Wasser prints became so boring that they quickly died out. Interestingly, at about this time, these themes were picked up by the French printers of \"les images epinals,\" who were working to revive \"folk\" traditions. 106. Norbert Elias uses this term to describe the shift to private life. See Power and Civility, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), vol. Ill of The Civilizing Process 292. 107. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984) 7. Barker's analysis is based on Bakhtin, who argues that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the \"grotesque\" body was increasingly denied; its unfinished parts disavowed, its protuberances and apertures closed off. The new private body, by contrast, was constituted as complete, alone and isolated from other bodies. Bakhtin 19-21, 26-29. 108. Barker 52, 67. 109. Barker 63. 110. Barker 63-65. 111. W. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982) 132-133. 112. Roger Chartier, \"Texts, Printing, Readings,\" The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 160. 113. C F . Van Veen suggests this in Dutch Catchpenny Prints: Three Centuries of Pictorial Broadsides for Children (The Hague: W. Van Hoeve, 1971) ii. For folk tale formulas, see Burke 127. 202 114. This term is used by Svetlana Alpers' to describe characters who gesture in accompaniment to spoken words in Dutch narrative paintings. S. Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)211. 115. Numerous historical studies have shown that during the course of the seventeenth century, as state apparatuses began to intervene in family and kinship roles, the family increasingly withdrew into the home and concentrated on the few traditional roles that it had retained such as running a household, maintaining a satisfying partnership between spouses, and childrearing. A series of essays, which address this shift, can be found in R. Chartier, ed. Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989) vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, gen. ed. P. Aries and G. Duby. Trans. A. Goldhammer. 203 Chapter Four W h e r e D o B a b i e s C o m e F r o m ? T h e G a l l o w s F i e l d as a P l a c e o f O r i g i n s In his Natural History of Holland of 1776, Johannes le Francq van Berkhey recorded that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the children of Amsterdam asked their parents where babies came from, the traditional reply was, \"Oh, Mother has been to the Volewijk.\"1 According to this tale, mothers would make the short voyage across the Amsterdam harbour to this marshy island in the river IJ to pluck a new baby either from the children's well, or from special baby-bearing trees that grew there. Arriving on the shores of the island, they were greeted by the cries of the infants: \"Pick me, pick me. I'll always be sweet.\"2 Such a scene is imaged in children's prints of Jan de Wasser and his wife Griet. A nuclear family\u00E2\u0080\u0094father, mother, and their new-born baby\u00E2\u0080\u0094are being transported in a small boat steered by a man holding a lantern (fig. 4.1-4). Behind the boat loom the island's baby well and children's trees. Viewed with knowledge of familiar stories about the origins of Amsterdam's children, it seems that the couple has just picked their baby from the island and is making the voyage home. Initially this scene from a children's print appears as a censoring of sexual explanations of childbirth: a humourous local version of the stork or the cabbage patch. A different reality begins to emerge when this picture is compared to other images of Volewijk, however. A sketch of the island, dated 1664 (fig. 4.2),3 serves to expose the bizarre and disturbing fact that Volewijk, the mythical source of Amsterdam's children, was at the same time that city's gallows field\u00E2\u0080\u0094an island at the marine entrance to the city utilised to display the corpses of executed criminals.4 Not surprisingly, such comparisons have largely been suppressed from interpretations of this peculiar folk tale about the origins of Amsterdam's residents. For in the interaction between these two images of Volewijk, the children's well 204 becomes visually conflated with the gallows, and the baby trees can be recognized as the wheels used to display criminal bodies. In the deciphering of the elegant pictorial economy at work in the children's print, an almost unspeakable truth presents itself: the hanging bodies depicted there are both decomposing carcasses and new babies. And the man steering the boat may well be the executioner,5 that social outcast whose job it was to transport corpses from the public place of execution in front of the town hall at, across the River IJ to Volewijk, the island of the dead, to display them on the gallows and wheels there. With this comparison, a comforting tale about the source of Amsterdam's children turns into a nightmare in which the members of this companionate family, sitting in the executioner's boat, with their baby/corpse, are transformed into the living dead. Although they seem to take their new baby back into the city, the boat and its passengers are still turned towards the island. Floating betwixt Amsterdam and the gallows field, they are neither here nor there, both coming and going in a watery passageway between the city and its outside. The other scenes in this printed story also draw attention to the in-between status of Jan and Griet.6 After the marriage ceremony (fig. 4.1-1), the two battle over household roles, and exchange pants and apron (fig. 4.1-3). Then they travel to Volewijk, and in the scenes that follow, the family returns to the home, where Jan lies in the childbed (fig. 4.1-5), and Griet has the upper hand, in which she holds a whip (fig. 4.1-6). As we have seen in previous chapters, as the couple swaps domestic roles, normative gender divisions commingle. Travelling in their boat through a space-time of hybrid origins, Jan and Griet drift between seemingly essential categories such as birth and death, male and female, the city and its outside. Like the dangling decomposing cadavers, the members of this family are matter in transition, with no solid ground beneath their feet. 205 My study does not attempt to search out the original meaning of this bizarre tale. Rather, I will examine evidence mdicating some historically specific uses of the Volewijk story\u00E2\u0080\u0094cases in which images and anecdotes that linked the decaying corpse, the pregnant body, and the permeable maritime boundaries of Amsterdam were appropriated in contests about civic, group, and individual identity. In each case, the story of Volewijk's babies has the power to interrogate official representations that construct a coherent \"body politic\". Jettisoned from the city by the mechanisms of justice, the criminal corpse had crossed and thus created the civic boundary; brought back in as a baby, it retraverses and intrudes upon this frontier. This trajectory of the body is clearly not a linear passage through space and time, nor is it even a cyclical path of life, death, and rebirth. Rather, the movement of the cadaver is a constant vacillation paralleled only by the restless back and forth of pregnant mothers sailing in and out of the city in search of babies. The criss-crossing of these imaginary voyages unsettles official attempts to fix civic identity. For no sooner are boundaries secured than they begin to burgeon or to decompose. And repeatedly, just as the mystery and mess of disintegrating and reproductive bodies seems to effectively disrupt the notion of a coherent city, such imagery is expunged, replaced or denied by official demarcations of the social body. Each repression in turn is answered by the re-emergence of this haunting imagery in different, sometimes unexpected, modes of representation. This distinctive pattern of appropriation, repression, and reassertion indicates how extremely troubling this imagery must have been to those who sought to control urban spaces and populations. Moreover, it provides surprising insights into the ways in which the residents of Amsterdam might have defined their city and themselves. My discussion of the uses of imagery of Volewijk is divided into three parts. The first section explores the depiction of criminal corpses on the margins of sixteenth and early 206 seventeenth-century maps and city views of Amsterdam in conjunction with the significance of the recurring rite of transporting executed corpses from the town square to an island beyond the city walls. In sentencing formulas initiating Amsterdam's spectacular ceremonies of public punishment, criminals condemned to execution were declared \"children of death\".7 Put to death in theatrical ceremonies of corporeal torment at the city centre by rituals of civic justice that pursued the corpse beyond death and pain to the island of Volewijk, the body of a child of death was visibly and violently eliminated from the civic community. Hovering on the frames of maps of Amsterdam, the bodies of transgressive polluters arrayed at the city's edge were crucial to the definition of a pure and homogenous civic interior. While the centuries-old repeated transfer of bodies from inside to outside served to display the boundaries of Amsterdam and its judicial power, however, in a contradictory movement, the corporeal imagery of these demonstrations of might also revealed the spatial and temporal limitations of such attempts to master transgression. It is this inability of civic power to subdue the body that is forcefully emphasized by the story of Volewijk's babies. The second part of this chapter turns to representations of bodies that linger in the ambiguous passageway between the city and its outside. If the overt dramatic bodiliness of highly visible rituals of execution always closed in death and expulsion, what did it mean for children of death to come back to life and re-enter the space that defined itself through their exclusion? Here I shall argue that the imagery of Volewijk's ambiguous bodies was commonly seen in the streets of Amsterdam, where it called up the practice of midwifery. For the island of death was the emblem of the city's mid-wives, pictured on their street signs. In this way, the watery space between Amsterdam and Volewijk takes on a peculiar gendered significance. As a metaphor for the pain and danger of childbirth, the trafficking of bodies from Volewijk back 207 into the city was specifically a journey made by women. An examination of concerted attempts on the part of Amsterdam's medical college to expunge images of Volewijk from the city streets and to regulate midwifery exposes the threat that beliefs about Volewijk's corpses/babies posed to new forms of knowledge about the body and associated configurations of the social body. The final section takes up the appropriation of this imagery in battles over the definition of a coherent \"body politic.\" In official representations of the city commissioned by the magistrates in the second half of the seventeenth century, the island of Volewijk began to disappear, and female allegories of Amsterdam increasingly replaced criminal corpses at the maritime boundary of the city. This noticeable shift in the way the city was imaged coincided with larger historical changes, as the identity of Amsterdam as a centre of state gradually eclipsed notions of the city as a mercantile centre. It seems that imagery of the story that linked childbirth with Volewijk's corpses began to circulate in satirical prints in response to these displacements. These printed images forcefully attacked the increasing closure of the \"body politic\" by imagining an open, fertile and reproductive city. Imagery of bodily and geographical transgression was used to rearticulate the city with a belly laugh that disrupted new boundaries. At the same time, it signals the decline of spectacles of public punishment in favour of methods of discipline that focused on the interior private life of the individual. In a brief conclusion, therefore, I return to questions of the role of catchpenny prints in the Calvinist education of children. For while imagery that derisively links the bodies of women, children and criminals had subversive potential, it also upholds certain social norms by working to maintain the exclusion of these groups from political life. 208 Decomposing Boundaries: Mapping the City and its Outside The tip of the island of Volewijk, with its grisly display of decomposing corpses, was consistently depicted in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century maps of Amsterdam, where it was almost always placed in the bottom right hand corner, just resting on the frame.8 The prototype for this spatial arrangement is Cornells Anthoniszoon's bird's-eye view map of the city, a panel painting commissioned by the civic government and completed in 1538 (fig. 4.3).9 Some years later, in 1544, Anthonisz produced a large woodcut version of this map (fig. 4.4), and at least five different editions of this view were subsequently published.10 Believed to be the first bird's-eye view town panorama produced in the Northern Netherlands, this particular perspective became the model for numerous maps of Amsterdam printed throughout the next century.11 At the centre of Anthonisz's painted map is the Amsterdam Town Hall (fig. 4.3). As the viewer's gaze moves up the width of the Amstel River, which flows through the middle of the map and the town, it is arrested by a bridge joining the old and new sides of the city. This obstruction redirects the eye into the blank white space of the square in front of the Town Hall. It is within this building that this painted map was hung.12 There, the objective truth-claims of cartography worked to legitimize the authority of civic leaders. For this map allowed the city magistrates to look down on the territory that they governed. The power and the pleasure of such a viewpoint, according to Michel de Certeau, is the illusion of being able to see the city without being part of it.13 Distanced from the noise, smell, and confusion of the everyday life of the streets, the impossible vantage point of a disembodied celestial eye actually frees the viewer from the limitations of corporeality. In this way, the painted fiction of a totalizing view of the 209 city attempted to transform burgomasters into omniscient god-like figures, able to see the entire city from without while remaining within its confines.14 The inclusion of the gallows field at the map's margin served as a reminder that town oligarchs also were like gods in their power to punish. This authority was manifested in specific practices: the \"ontsaggelijke plegtigheeden,\" or \"awesome ceremonies\" of capital punishment.15 These civic rituals occurred anywhere from one to four times per year, depending on the number of delinquents to be punished on the scaffold.16 On justice days, the crowds who gathered to see the spectacle of execution also came to watch the burgomasters. Arrayed in ceremonial black \"blood robes,\" tied with \"blood sashes\" embellished with the red St. Andrew's crosses of the arms of the city, the magistrates sat in the open window of the gallery of the second floor of the Town Hall. 1 7 There, they were visible witnesses who looked down on the violent justice meted out on the scaffold in the square below. In his detailed study of the practice of execution in Amsterdam, Pieter Spierenburg claims that the official presence of town oligarchs at public executions was unique to Amsterdam.18 Burgomasters did not represent the judicial branch of civic government, and therefore this unprecedented ceremonial role served to symbolically extend their power to all spheres of municipal authority.19 Michel Foucault contends that the violence unleashed upon the body of the condemned in countries such as France restored the integrity of the King's body.20 If this was the case, then in the city of Amsterdam, magistrates usurped this ritual of sovereign power by situating their own bodies, clothed in ceremonial raiment, as a body of authority. For in Amsterdam, transgressors did not affront the person of the monarch; they violated the civic body. Prisoners condemned to death were sentenced with the formulaic 210 phrase: \"These are things which cannot be tolerated in a city of law and have to be punished as an example to others.\"21 Clearly it was the magisterial and rational judgement of the city that violently subdued the offensive criminal body. The corpse of the condemned therefore functioned as a visual representation of the civilizing force of reason over the brutal criminal world, of mind over transgressive bodies, and of corporate power over an individual's deviant will.2 2 The repeated representation of these criminal cadavers in maps of Amsterdam is indicative of the centrality of such rituals to the identity of the city.23 Moreover, only certain types of criminals were condemned to the infamy of exposure on Volewijk. The majority of those punished with death on the scaffold were from the lower classes. Of these, only the worst offenders were gibbeted after execution: murderers found guilty of crimes against the body, and, increasingly in the late seventeenth century, burglars convicted of offences against property.24 The latter is significant to Amsterdam, for if Volewijk was a consistent feature of its maps, so was the city's busy harbour, filled with the masts of trading vessels, and so were its warehouses, which stored goods from around the globe.25 In such a warehouse-city, the severe repression of crimes against property rights was crucial.26 The gibbeting of a criminal body was thus an urban rite of purification that expunged internal enemies from the civic community in order to ensure the protection of both the bodies and the goods of citizens. Executions took place at the urban centre, in Dam square in front of the Town Hall. 2 7 Departing from the customs of many other European cities of the time, in Amsterdam, there was no procession of the condemned through the streets before this event. Rather, the parade came afterwards, as the corpse was placed on a wagon pulled by a white horse and carted from the centre of the city to the outside of its walls.28 From the harbour-front, the next stage of the journey began as the body was transported away from the city by boat to 211 the island of Volewijk, a site at the marine boundary of the city. Here the cadaver was hung either on the gallows or displayed on the wheels and left to rot away (see fig. 4.2).29 These bodies were condemned, in the poetic words of the sentencing formula, \"to be consumed by the air and the birds of the sky\".30 This punishment ritual thus ensured that the corpses of those who had violated the rights of citizens were eternally excluded from city space. In this process, the hangman's boat functioned as a vehicle that created a spatial network of differentiation by moving the bodies of transgressors to the other side of the urban boundary. The repetition of the ritual journey of the criminal body from the city centre to its border can thus be understood as an attempt to cleanse the city. It worked to divide a purified interior from a polluted exterior, and to separate bodies within the walls from bodies arrayed on the outside. Such crucial divisions were produced and maintained by this process of passage: the repeated transfer of alien criminal bodies was a movement that defined and constituted the city's boundaries. The watery passageway between Amsterdam and the gallows island of Volewijk thus worked to separate the city from the deviant bodies that were physically expelled from the civic centre. This particular body of water was anything but an empty space dividing the city from its exterior, however. In fact, it was the bustling entrance to the harbour of the largest trading centre in seventeenth-century Europe (see figs. 4.3 & 4.4). The harbour was integral to the city's identity as the powerful hub of a vast commercial empire, and a number of official guidebooks of Amsterdam printed during the 1660's opened with large fold-out views of this site, bristling with the masts of hundreds of ships (fig. 4.5). Celebrating the city's might, such harbour scenes reminded viewers that Amsterdam's merchants and traders made their fortunes as middlemen who bought, stored, refined and sold products from other places.31 212 Its protected harbour was Amsterdam's greatest strength, and depictions of it delimited the city's unique identity. However, imagery of the harbour concurrently betrays the autonomy of Amsterdam as a self-sustaining entity by displaying its very dependence on places beyond its boundaries. Built on a bog, Amsterdam had few natural resources or industries, and therefore was almost completely reliant on goods from outside.32 The harbour, therefore, was a place where peoples and goods from around the globe mingled in a fluid process of exchange and exploitation, and the site where the city was most open to and dependent upon its outside.33 The spokes radiating out from this commercial hub conversely functioned as maritime routes carrying new and unfamiliar elements into the city. Here, categories of thought usually separate and opposed\u00E2\u0080\u0094local and foreign, centre and periphery\u00E2\u0080\u0094coexisted to jeopardize notions of unchanging, impenetrable civic space. It was crucial, therefore, to secure the marine entrance to the harbour and the city. Although the gibbets of Volewijk would have been visible from Amsterdam, the display of bodies along the main shipping route must have been intended mainly as a grisly warning to maritime traffic corning in and out of the busy harbour.34 Here, the decaying bodies of thieves and murderers did not just recall the past workings of justice to vanquish threats to civic society. They also actively reconfigured the future of the community by reminding in-coming citizens and foreigners alike of the power of city magistrates to penalise violations of the city's laws. The hanging bodies on Volewijk thus served as highly visible reminders and reinforcers of civic might, prompting viewers to remember the recurring rituals of public punishment that marked the daily lives of the city's inhabitants, and the frontiers of municipal power.35 Moreover, these corpses functioned as explicit visual admonitions that sought to secure the future of the city: \"These are things which cannot be tolerated in a city of law and have to be 213 punished as an example to others.\"36 An eighteenth-century sketch of Volewijk by R. Vinkeles (fig. 4.6) indicates how the people of Amsterdam might have apprehended the moral messages provided by criminal cadavers.37 A winter scene, it pictures groups of people who have skated or sledded to the island.38 Prominent among them are two nuclear families, both standing at the base of the gallows. In each family, the father figure gestures to the gibbeted cadavers that swing above. Presumably, these paternal characters have seized the opportunity to give a lesson to wives and children by pointing to the ethical examples provided by Volewijk's dead bodies.39 Such an image has strong connections to Calvinist teachings; not only was continual inward scrutiny the duty of every believer, but, as heads of the household, fathers and husbands especially were admonished to encourage self-reckoning and respect for authority in their families.40 And yet, what is most striking about this image is the bizarre contrast between the pleasures of a family outing and Volewijk's putrefying corpses. Beneath a skeleton that slumps on the wheel at the far right, a group of adults and children picnic at a table, while at left several people cluster around what appears to be a refreshment stand, set up on the ice. At the base of the gallows crouches a figure that defecates. Skaters and sledders glide past. Pieter Bast (fig. 4.7) sets up a similarly strange connection between leisure activities and decaying corpses in a much earlier sixteenth-century printed image of the Amsterdam harbour. While Vinkeles draws on the Dutch painting tradition of depicting \"ijsvermaak,\" the pleasures of winter, Bast's image shows a summer sailing expedition. In the foreground is Volewijk, peopled by a small group who appear to be dancing and making music. Their moored boat implies that they have come from Amsterdam, visible as a dense jumble of buildings on the horizon, to this uncrowded space on the outskirts of the city. As in Vinkele's sketch, Volewijk 214 appears as a place of leisure, where city dwellers could escape from the pressures and congestion of urban life.41 It is also a spot that allowed the enjoyment of power described above: that of viewing the city from a distance. Indeed, this seems like an image of a pleasurable excursion until one notices the gibbeted corpses to the right of the tethered boat. The physical enjoyment of eating, drinking, skating, sledding and defecating in Vinkeles' sketch, and of dancing, music-making and conversation in Bast's print seems almost implausible given the nearness of so many decaying cadavers. Yet the visual juxtaposition of death and physical pleasure was a familiar theme in Netherlandish art. Conventional interpretations describe such a contrast as a momento mori~a moral warning that sensualism was vanity that would always come to an end.42 Such an admonition has particular significance when the city itself is pictured in the scene. For to view the busy life of the city and its bustling harbour from a place where leisure and death commingled certainly implied, not only that people and their vain enjoyments were transient, but also that civic wealth and power would not last forever. While both images clearly resonate with these vanitas themes, however, they also hint at something beyond this well-known moral message. For excessive enjoyment of life's sensual pleasures might not always be discouraged by death; rather, the proximity of so much rotting flesh seems almost to heighten desire. Here we must note that both the sixteenth-century print and the eighteenth-century sketch display a fascination with the dead, dismembered and decaying body.43 If crowds swarmed to Dam square to witness public rites of justice with their own eyes, in these images people make pleasure trips to Volewijk to picnic among the dead. Awesome ceremonies of suffering and punishment seem to arouse a peculiar frisson of transgressive desire. 215 With this insinuation of dark and morbid attractions, civic rituals of justice and punishment can no longer be apprehended as purely rational and utilitarian practices. Fostering a fear of authority that traded on cruel spectacles tinged with dark sensualism, the constraints created by these procedures certainly also opened up transgressive possibilities. And, although Volewijk's corpses were intended to function as visible signs of the power of the civic government to legislate the city, we are beginning to see how they concurrently indicated that fashioning the future of the community through the control of its subjects was an uncertain process at best. Located exactly on the frame of official and ostensibly objective cartographic representations of the city, these bodies defined the urban interior by marking its border and recalling rituals of punishment. While the bird's-eye view perspective of the Town Hall map of Amsterdam works to create the illusion of a god-like viewer, this effect is both emphasized and destabilized by the inclusion of Volewijk's corpses. Positioned on the margin, between the life of the viewer and the work of art, the imagery of death frames the beholder's understanding of the representation, the world, and his or her place in relation to both.44 Here, it is important to notice how the inclusion of a small portion of Volewijk in this representation produces a curious spatial disjunction that effectively disrupts the illusion that the map creates. For the jut of land at the bottom of the image implies the continuation of the island into the space in front of the map where the viewer is standing. In this way, the tip of Volewijk brings the beholder back down to earth: feet on the ground, looking at the city from the perspective of death. The island and corpses of Volewijk thus destroy the pretentious omnipotence of disembodied heights of power, for they remind beholders of their own bodies: their transitory experience of a living city that gives lie to the static consistency of the represented city.45 216 The imagery of death on the frame of the map thus hints at practices and places that exceeded the rational workings of justice.46 For Volewijk's corpses do not just recall past transgressions; as consistent features on the city's outskirts, they also insinuate the very impossibility of preventing future crimes against society. Moreover, the repeated display of corpses on Volewijk, and the compulsion to represent and re-represent these cadavers in maps and city views also provokes the dark and forbidden pleasures sustained by viewing the decaying body. By demarcating the boundaries of Amsterdam's jurisdiction, Volewijk's corpses concurrently draw attention to geographical territories beyond the city's control. And, as they indicate the limits of civic control, these cadavers also vividly recall the final frontier of death, which inevitably destroys not only the individual human body, but also the civic body. From their place of banishment, criminal cadavers graphically point to the spatial and the temporal limitations of municipal authority. We can now begin to understand the subversive humour at work in stories of the return of these corpses as babies. Making no claims to objectivity, these tales actually reverse the traditional route of expulsion as Volewijk's lively dead make their way back towards the city centre. Historians have characterized the ritual journey of the criminal body from the town square to the city's exterior both as a rite of passage that invariably closes in death, exclusion and decay, and as a dramatic theatre event with clear moral meanings.47 Yet, not every ceremony ends so predictably. This story mockingly plays on the contradictory messages of the decaying corpse by emphatically pointing out that death is not so easily mastered and understood. In Amsterdam's theatre tradition, a serious work of drama was always followed by a \"nastuk,\" a short farce that came after the main performance. Indeed, surviving references to 217 the story of Volewijk's babies occur almost exclusively in farcical prints, satirical booklets, and printed comic plays.48 Clearly, this tale shares the conventions of the \"nastuk\", which pokes fun at the orthodox messages of tragic drama. Having examined the moral meanings of the theatrical production of municipal power, therefore, let us now turn to the farce that followed it. From the magistrates' point of view, the criminal body had been vanquished, put to death, and expelled from the city. History tells the same story. But this is not the only story. If we shift position\u00E2\u0080\u0094to consider corporeal experience of the city on the level of its streets and canals instead of looking down at it from the sky~a very different picture emerges of the body that is about to stage a come-back voyage to Amsterdam as a baby. For the stories and beliefs that the residents of Amsterdam wove around the criminal corpse certainly do not mesh with the official story. Jacob Bicker Raye, who attended many executions in Amsterdam, records a curious tale about Volewijk's dead in his journal entry of December 17, 1746.49 On this day, a group of people had gathered on Volewijk to watch the executioner and his assistants hang the body of the recently executed Hendrina Wouters on the wheel. And then, as his co-workers looked on in horror, a grain regulator climbed up onto another of the island's wheels. This structure, Bicker Raye tells us, held up the decaying body of Abraham Mozes, alias Bram de Pijpeman, broken and displayed there three and a half months earlier. Throwing his arm around this putrid corpse, the audacious grain regulator turned to it and asked, \"Well comrade, how's it going so far? How goes the voyage?\"50 This stunt enraged the executioner, who ordered him down. When the grain regulator refused, a struggle ensued as the executioner tried to chain him to the wheel. Bicker Raye goes on to note that the grain regulator was reprimanded by the law for his 218 actions, and, perhaps more seriously for him, from then on his colleagues refused to work with him, because he had touched a criminal corpse and sat upon the wheel. This short anecdote gives many insights into seventeenth and eighteenth-century attitudes towards Volewijk's dead. The way that the grain regulator addresses the corpse is especially intriguing: \"How's it going so far? How goes the voyage?\" As we have seen, bodies hung at Volewijk had no place in the urban community. While burial in a cemetery allowed the dead to remain at home within the city walls, bodies taken to the gallows field were condemned \"to be consumed by the air and the birds of the sky\".51 To be denied Christian burial rites and left for the birds was truly thought of as a fate worse than death. For not only was the corpse condemned to remain forever outside the community of the living, but it concurrently was excluded from the world of the dead. Dangling in the air between heaven and earth, the homeless dead of Volewijk were doomed to a living death in which peace and repose were forever denied.52 When the grain regulator addressed Abraham Mozes as if he were still alive and in the process of voyaging towards death, this was very much in keeping with contemporary attitudes about the deceased. In fact, historians recently have argued that in Northern Europe throughout the early modem period there was a widespread belief that all corpses retained vestiges of previous identities until they had completely decayed. As Katharine Park has suggested, the process of death was thought to correspond to the amount of time it took a body to decompose: about one year. During this liminal period, the body remained semi-animate. Its personal identity\u00E2\u0080\u0094its soul\u00E2\u0080\u0094did not die until all flesh had rotted from its bones.53 Certainly, it is striking how in Bicker Rayes' journal entry, crirninal remains are given names and even nicknames: Hendrina Wouters, and Abraham Mozes, alias Bram de Pijpeman. 219 The executioner and his assistants, and the grain regulator and his colleagues, on the other hand, remain anonymous. Here, the moral significance of death as a momento mori\u00E2\u0080\u0094a reminder of the transience of personal identity-ceases to function. Hendrina Wouters and Abraham Mozes: their names alone suggest gender, ethnicity, and notoriety.54 As long as their bodies could be seen on Volewijk, their identities lived on. It is as if on Volewijk, the personhood of the dead was stronger than that of the living. For if every dead body was thought to possess a residual liveliness, the gibbeted corpse, restlessly positioned between the worlds of the dead and the living, was especially potent. The strange half-life of the corpse endowed it with magical energy. The executioner sold fragments of this body: fingers, toes, skin, blood, as curative remedies.55 While it had positive healing powers, however, the in-between semi-animate status of this body made it ambiguous, endowing it with potential for both good and evil. For these cadavers were the dangerous dead; hostile strangers who might try to reincorporate into the world of the living.56 As the story of the grain regulator indicates, physical contact with such a body was a taboo act, bringing infamy upon the offender and resulting in exclusion from the life of the community.57 Such beliefs about the half-life of the decaying body, and the power of criminal corpses that never came to rest, were absolutely antagonistic to Calvinist creeds. An anecdote about the Grand Pensionary Johann van Oldenbarnevelt and his servant Jan Francken serves to illuminate church doctrines that governed attitudes towards the recently dead. According to this story, before Oldenbarnevelt's execution in 1618, Francken promised his master that he would always remember him in his prayers. Eschewing this comfort, Oldenbarnevelt remained staunchly Calvinist to the end and reprimanded his servant, \"No, Jan, that is popish, that is now ended when one is dead. If you want to do something good, do it now, now is the time to pray; after 220 death it doesn't help any more.\"58 Oldenbarnevelt's admonition is clear\u00E2\u0080\u0094to pray for the dead was pointless. For with death, even death by execution, the body ceased to live and the soul left the world. In opposition to Roman Catholic doctrine, Calvinism emphatically taught that the dead did not enter a time of purgatory, when they could still be helped by the interventions of the living. If Calvinism forbade the comfort of praying for the deceased, beliefs in the power of the dead body were anathema. Ironic, therefore, that assumptions about the liveliness of the corpse were particularly long-lived in the predominantly Protestant North of Europe.59 It is as if the severity of Reformed doctrines was met with recalcitrant convictions that pointedly reasserted contact with the recently dead. Not only did these beliefs counter Calvinist customs, but they also drew attention to contradictions within the practices of municipal authority. Both menacing and sacred, the status of the criminal cadaver seems to call into the question the very notion of the civic boundaries that it secured. As Mary Douglas has argued in her influential study, Purity and Danger: ...all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of the fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins...The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.60 Powerful, energetic, vulnerable and dangerous: bodies positioned on the edge of the city and its maps draw attention to the boundary's contradictory status. For the margins of these bodies were decomposing: as the surface of the body eroded, the crucial interface between its inside and its outside was destroyed. Such a break-down of the border between what is interior and what is exterior to the subject clearly has the power to dissolve identity.61 It is a powerful image, therefore, for calling into question the integrity of the civic body. While criminal 221 remains were positioned with the intent of securing the boundaries and identity of the city, the transitional quality of bodies whose margins were continuously rotting away poses a threat to the very notion of a fixed and eternal border. Killed and excluded from the community, decaying criminal bodies remained vital and visible at the city's edge. Thus the rational power of the civic magistrates to master the bodies of transgressors by putting them to death in rituals that cleansed and restored order to the city was disrupted by the living, powerful and potentially hostile presence of these restless bodies. While the mortality of the body, its finite nature, may have pointed to the spatial and temporal bounds of civic power, beliefs in the vitality of the corpse\u00E2\u0080\u0094its stubborn refusal to die\u00E2\u0080\u0094were more troubling yet. Indeed, as we begin to comprehend the insights of these everyday beliefs, the official reason driving rituals and representations of these corpses starts to appear as a desperate attempt to shore up authority that was always in the process of decomposing. For these agitated cadavers, poised just at the city's edge, are perfectly positioned to voyage back in. When the grain regulator turned to the decaying Bram de Pijpeman to ask, \"How goes the voyage?\" perhaps he referred-not just to the body's transition into death-but also to the possibility of a journey back into the life of the city. As late as 1746, beliefs in the liveliness of the corpse persisted. Potent body parts dropped from these decomposing carcasses into a pit under the gallows. We have already identified this structure as the \"children's well,\" where mothers went to draw up babies. Fished out of this pit of obliteration, the powerful fragments of the semi-animate decaying body start life anew as infant bodies. Doomed never to rest, and possessing an ambiguous power, the deviant bodies and wills of children of death begin their uncanny voyage back into the civic community as children of life. 222 Infant Bodies: The Other Within There is compelling evidence to indicate that the story of Volewijk's bodies returning to the city as newborn babies was more than just an unusual and eccentric folk tale. The delivery room of Amsterdam's hospital, for instance, was called the \"Voolewijk.\" Hospital records included the \"roeiboekje\", or \"row-book:\" a volume used to record the names of midwives, and the number of children they had delivered.62 This gives an indication of just how familiar this myth must have been in the life of the city. For in Amsterdam's vernacular, the phrase \"to row to Volewijk\" was a commonplace metaphor for the process of giving birth. And as the one responsible for steering a safe course for the boat and its passengers, the midwife often was designated as \"navigator of the Volewijk boat\".63 In fact, the gallows island was the emblem of Amsterdam's midwives, who hung the sign of Volewijk outside their doors as a way of advertising their skills to passers-by.64 Although midwives' sign boards do not survive, based on printed images of the \"Volewijk voyage\" (see figs. 4.1-4, 4.14 & 4.15), it seems likely that they depicted midwives and expectant mothers rowing to or from the island's gibbets and wheels. Thus the residents of Amsterdam would not only have been familiar with oral tales and references to the Volewijk voyage, but they also would have readily understood the associations of visual imagery that linked the island of death with the process of birth. A series of legislations from Amsterdam's Medical College tells the tale of repeated attempts to banish midwives' signs of Volewijk from the city streets.65 An ordinance of March 2, 1691 forbade the hanging of signboards by midwives who had not completed a four-year apprenticeship and undergone examination by the College. The signs of midwives who had been approved, it went on, had to be painted with clearly legible letters. On the eighth of 223 January 1704, it was decreed that midwives who had been suspended by the college must take down their signs. And on January 30, 1712, this decree was repeated with the addendum that midwives had to bring their signboards to the college so that they could be approved and stamped with the seal of the Inspectores Collegii Medici and with the personal seal of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. After this, they could be hung in the city streets. This was restated in an ordinance of the thirtieth of January 1742. Declaring that each approved midwife must hang a sign outside her house, it stipulated that this sign had to have large and legible letters that said CITY MIDWIFE, and clearly designated her district.66 Signs with large and legible letters. No pictures. What emerges from these legislations is the history of the erasure\u00E2\u0080\u0094and repeated reassertion\u00E2\u0080\u0094of the image of Volewijk in the city streets. Efforts to rid Amsterdam of this imagery clearly were connected to the regulation of midwifery on the part of emerging, objective medical practices. There is an official group portrait, painted by Jan van Neck in 1683, of Doctor Frederik Ruysch and his medical colleagues-the very men who later decreed that every midwife must bring her clearly lettered signboard for their seal of approval (fig. 4.8). Commissioned by the surgeons and hung in their guild hall,67 this painting pointedly indicates some of the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that undergirded the new truth claims of medicine. This group of doctors chose to have themselves portrayed in the act of dissecting a dead baby. It is early days yet in the history of empirical medicine, and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch still jolts the viewer into recognizing the human sacrifices demanded by scientific objectivity. For at the right-hand edge of the painting, a young boy watches the lesson. He holds the skeleton of an infant between himself and the group clustered around the 224 baby's corpse. This young on-looker has been identified as Hendrik Ruysch, the only one of Dr. Frederik Ruysch's sons to survive childhood.68 The impact of this painting does not trade on sentimental notions of childhood, however. Rather, it plays upon the seventeenth-century trope of the ages of man. Different stages of a man's existence are depicted in the same scene: infanthood, childhood, adulthood, and, of course, death. Older than an infant, yet younger than the anatomists, Ruysch's son takes up an intermediary position. This may have prompted viewers of the painting to wonder whether this boy identifies with his father, or with the other children in the painting. In fact, Hendrik Ruysch was actually twenty years old at the time this portrait was painted;69 thus the choice to depict him as a young boy emphatically positions him between the surgeons and the dead infants. The young Hendrik is dressed like the anatomists in the sober costume of the Dutch middle classes; the white cravats highlight faces while the black coats cause bodies almost to disappear into the darkness of the background.70 Yet, the skeletal child that the boy holds up vividly recalls his body by suggesting his own mortality. Moreover, it links him to the highly visible body of the dead child in the centre of the composition. In this way, the identity of this youth seems to split between the living and the dead, between the practitioners of medicine and the thing that they examine. Caught somewhere between the subjects and the object of medicine, this intermediary figure stands as a reminder of the violence of the subject/object division. The hands and the faces of the anatomists form two concentric rings around the dead body, visually unifying these men into a cohesive social group. Indeed, they form a social body through their shared access to a body of knowledge~in this case, obstetrics.71 In light of the 225 efforts of these men to repress unregulated midwifery practices, it is important to note how this attempt to consolidate a social group depended oh the rigorous exclusion of other forms of empirical knowledge. For the crucial distinction between detached practitioners of medicine and the passive objects of their observation also works along gender lines. As Valerie Traub has argued, The gendering of scientific knowledge as masculine - the emergence of medicine as a modem science through the creation of a male subject and a female object of knowledge - depended not only upon anatomists' claims to objectivity, but on the professionalization and regulation of midwifery, the success of which eventually led to the exclusion of women from all branches of medicine.72 In this way, this portrait sets new limits on knowledge by establishing medical, social, and gender hierarchies. Notably, the painting was hung in the formal meeting room of the surgeon's guild hall\u00E2\u0080\u0094in the very room where midwives underwent examinations to be certified by the College.73 Here, its message undoubtedly would have been seen and understood by this group of female medical practitioners. Indeed, it is tempting to view this painting as an effort to legitimate new forms of knowledge about babies in response to traditional midwifery practices.74 For the model of social order it depicts was one that actually legislated that unsupervised midwives take themselves and their street signs of Volewijk out of the public domain. Amsterdam's midwives, however, resisted such attempts to mandate their practices. A poem, said to be written by a midwife, incisively protests the suppression of the midwives' signboards. Published in 1682 in Jeroen Jeroense's Droll and Ernest Inscriptions on Awnings. Wagons, Windows. Street Signs, etc.. it reads: Let the dissenters freely hang up the Volewijk...if they desire, I have never had another sign for my work, and I also will not Let myself be censured, When I'm out rowing, there are always all kinds of folk 226 Waiting for me. I bring in as many children as a City Midwife.75 As this poem clearly indicates, to display a picture of Volewijk in the form of a signboard that did not say City Midwife, or bear the stamp of approval of the Medical College was a creative and clandestine reassertion of the practice of midwifery in the face of its restriction. While midwives probably used the sign of Volewijk long before the 1680's, in light of these conflicts, tensions about the function of this imagery were intensified. The hanging of these boards in contempt of the College's ordinances thus emerges as a defence of the skill, specialized knowledge and legitimacy of midwives, known in Dutch as \"vroedvrouwen,\" or wise-women. Repeated attempts to legislate against such practices in turn indicate the continuous and troubling visibility of the signs that these women used to forge and maintain their own identities. In this context, the image of the Volewijk voyage asserts a different kind of knowledge of the body. Indeed, the conflation of baby and cadaver works quite differently in the group portrait than it does in the imagery of midwifery. The painting positions the baby as corpse: a dead object to be mastered and understood by science.76 Imagery of Volewijk, on the other hand, points beyond the realm of reason and objective knowledge by turning corpses into babies. When pictured on these street signs, the wisdom behind the curious conflation of the womb with the place of death outside of the city walls appears to lie in the ways that such a comparison allowed women to picture fears about the dangers and suffering of childbirth. Many women only made it half-way to Volewijk.77 The return journey is thus a hopeful image. In contrast to the anatomist's portrait, such imagery vividly expresses the terrors of the body in pain, the fragmentation of the body divided against itself, and the profound mysteries of birth and death.78 227 It also relates women's experiences of their own bodies to the space in which they lived, the city of Amsterdam. Seen in the context of late seventeenth-century battles about midwifery, the appropriation and reassertion of the watery passageway between the city and its outside was particularly pertinent for a group who was losing its traditional place within the city. Midwives' imagery of the maternal body in this fluid in-between space seems to interrogate the power hierarchies of objective medical narratives of the body, and thus to defy the exclusion of midwifery both from these discourses and from civic space. We have already seen how the decaying bodily margins of corpses arrayed on the boundaries of the city called into question the integrity of individual and civic identity. Here, the decaying surfaces of the cadaver are linked with the burgeoning and permeable margins of the pregnant body. Containing a foetus that both is and is not distinct from it, the maternal body blurs yet produces one identity, one body, within another. Like the decomposing corpse, it is a body that lacks clear boundaries. Imaged on the watery edge of the city, such a body also has the power to call into question larger categories of thought. For, as the corpse points beyond objective reason to the unknowable realm of death, the body of the mother serves as a potent reminder of the mystery of birth. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, this body \"marks the site of an unspeakable and unpayable debt of life, of existence, that the subject (and culture) owes to the maternal body.\"79 In opposition to the increasingly serious, masculine undertaking of medicine, therefore, the emblems of midwives make an incisive visual joke about the ambiguous power of bodies to resist knowledge and control. Giving lie to truth claims about the body, the imagery of Volewijk pictures the bodies of women, babies and criminals, not as static objects mastered by reason, but as persistent and irrepressible forces with the power to disrupt discourses that sought to produce unified and stable identities. 228 The Genitals of the City: Maternal Excess By the late seventeenth-century, at a time when the midwives' signs of Volewijk were being expunged from the city, the imagery of the island of death also was disappearing from official maps and views of Amsterdam. This repression is especially noticeable within the genre of civic chronicles. The 1660's saw a flourishing of \"beschryvingen\", or \"descriptions,\" of the city of Amsterdam. These volumes detailed the histories of religious, charitable, professional, business and educational institutions, and included items such as lists of all past and present burgomasters and civic officials.80 Containing numerous copper-plate engravings, these large, leather-bound, gold-embossed depictions of civic wealth, power and piety were dedicated to and commissioned by city magistrates. Expensive and erudite, these volumes thus seem to target readers and buyers from Amsterdam's elite.81 One of these works, Olfert Dapper's Historical Description of the City of Amsterdam, published in 1663, includes a number of double-page bird's-eye view maps of the city that serve to strikingly illustrate the changing place of Volewijk in civic identity. The first of these maps, between pages thirty-one and thirty-two, claims to picture the city \"as it was before the year 1400\" (fig. 4.9). Conspicuous in the right foreground at the bottom of the right page, where even a reader who was quickly paging through the book would notice it, is the island of Volewijk.82 When compared to Anthonisz' map (fig. 4.3), this view forcefully draws attention to the island by emphasizing its size and prominence. Not only this, but Volewijk is peopled by over twenty figures (not including the dead); they view the gallows and stroll and fish along the island's shores in a manner reminiscent of earlier city views such as Bast's (fig. 4.7). In the next map of Amsterdam, between pages thirty-seven and thirty-eight, the reader finds a representation of the city \"with the enlargement of the year 1482\" (fig. 4.10). While 229 Volewijk still features on the bottom right margin, it is only a fraction of the size that it was in the previous image. The number of dead has increased, while the living have decreased to five tiny figures who seem to have just stepped from a small boat. Moreover, the island appears to be at a much greater distance from the city. It is as if its importance to the representation of Amsterdam is receding. By the final map between pages forty-nine and fifty,83 \"A Neat Mapping Out of the Old and New Order of the City of Amsterdam\" (fig. 4.11), which lays out proposed extensions to the city's new canals, Volewijk has not just shrunk, it has disappeared altogether. Readers could not have overlooked the absence of this island and its dead, consistent and expected features of views of Amsterdam until this point. Volewijk's corpses, potent reminders of the spatial and temporal limits of civic power, have gradually ebbed away until they are expunged entirely from plans surveying the city's future development. It seems that there was no place for the marginal messy disruptions of decaying cadavers in this neat and orderly conceptualization of the future city.84 With this disappearance, the intended effect of a bird's-eye view can at last be experienced-viewers finally float free. No longer grounded by the tip of the island (see especially fig. 4.9 for this effect), they take God's place in the sky as the entire city lays itself out below. Indeed, the only thing of note in the lower right comer of this map is the lack of a shoreline where land and water meet. This erased boundary is all that remains to call up the ghost of Volewijk in this place. Clearly, gibbeted cadavers no longer do the work of defining the city's borders. Indeed, their dramatic disappearance points to significant historical shifts in the definition of Amsterdam. For the conspicuous recession of criminal cadavers from the city's maps actually 230 coincides with a decline in public spectacles of repression. And as rites of punishment became less important in the late seventeenth century, Amsterdam's civic magistrates gradually began to remove themselves as visible witnesses at these ceremonies.85 Pieter Spierenburg connects these shifts to the increased distance of Amsterdam's governing elite from the rest of the population.86 This interpretation is in keeping with one of the threads that runs through this study, tracing responses to distancing strategies of Amsterdam's patricians, particularly their attempts to ban the unruly, violent and sexual body from the civic theatre. Here, the distinction of the elite in conjunction with the suppression of sensual public spectacles of the body converge on another social site: the island of Volewijk. Spierenburg ultimately links such changes to the process of early modern state formation and the concomitant privatization of repression, which finds new loci, particularly in the domesticated nuclear family.87 To follow up on these points, it is crucial to examine the kinds of images of the city favoured by increasingly distant and decorous elites at this time. As we have seen, in civic histories commissioned by the magistrates in the 1660's, Volewijk's bodies appeared in representations of the city as it was in the past, but were noticeably absent from images of the future Amsterdam. This seems to indicate that a new identity was being formulated for the city. Thus it is significant that the civic histories do include other types of depictions of the watery boundary between Amsterdam and its outside. On the frontispieces of a number of these books, the Amsterdam Maid, a female personification of the city, is shown seated at the harbour entrance. Imagery of the Maid certainly was not new to representations of Amsterdam.88 However, in the context of books where Volewijk's bodies were pointedly being pushed into the city's past, the placement of the Maid takes on heightened significance. It is as if she actually supplants and thus redefines the place of the island and its dead. 231 The title print of Tobias van Domselaer's Description of the City of Amsterdam of 1665 (fig 4.12) illustrates particularly well how the Maid's body displaces the island of Volewijk at the outskirts of the city.89 Flanked by the male deities of the river and the sea, the Maid is enthroned on a water coach, which floats in front of the harbour and the city. When compared to previous city profiles, such as Bast's harbour view of 1599 (fig. 4.7), it becomes evident that the Maid sits almost precisely in the space once occupied by Volewijk. This depiction of Amsterdam raises a number of issues. How does the body of a female allegory define the city's edge differently than a decomposing criminal body? Such a representation also brings to mind the provocative questions concerning seventeenth-century personifications of the city posed by Elizabeth Grosz in her essay \"Bodies-Cities\": \"...if the state or the structure of the polis/city mirrors the body, what takes on the metaphoric function of the genitals in the body-politic? What kind of genitals are they? In other words, does the body-politic have a sex?\"90 Such questions have particular resonance when the female body stands in for the city. Grosz raises these points in reference to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, a seventeenth-century English political treatise on the divine rights of kings.91 The title print of this book (fig. 4.13) pictures the crowned head of the King surmounting a body made up of the undifferentiated bodies of his subjects. Clearly, the genitals of this body, as Grosz rightly points out, can only be phallic, for this body politic is implicitly coded masculine.92 Such an image of state power would have had little purchase in Amsterdam, however. We have already seen how town magistrates usurped public rituals of monarchical power to position themselves, clad in the city's coat of arms, as rational protectors of the trade emporium that was Amsterdam. In this role, they defended individual rights as they harshly mastered criminals who violated the bodies and the private property of the city's citizens. Clearly an 232 image of the body politic headed by one absolute monarch was antagonistic to republican values, necessitating other sorts of representations of state power. Domselaer's title print of the Amsterdam Maid is one such representation. Here, Barbara Johnson's insights into the workings of female allegories indicate some of the Maid's possible functions. Exploring the etymology of the word 'allegory,' Johnson draws certain conclusions about how allegory signifies: ...alios, 'other'; agorein. 'to speak in the open square,' from agora, 'the marketplace, the public sphere.' Allegory is speech that is other than open, public, direct. It is hidden, deviant, indirect - but also, I want to emphasize, public. It folds the public onto itself. It names the conflictuality of the public sphere and the necessity of negotiating those conflicts rhetorically.93 Bodying forth an abstract concept\u00E2\u0080\u0094in this case \"the city\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094allegory thus works to negotiate conflicts of the public sphere. As my visual analysis of Anthonisz' map of Amsterdam indicated, one such conflict in Amsterdam was the dilemma of how to represent a city that was open to the flux of commerce, yet simultaneously closed and in control. Indeed, throughout the seventeenth century, controversies about the identity of the city converged on contradictions between state power and mercantile values. Political crises of 1650 and 1672 both came to a head as Amsterdam's merchant oligarchs, who sought to protect trade, opposed the military policies of the stadholder, or quasi-monarch of the Netherlands, who sought to protect the integrity of the state.94 By the late seventeenth century, as town oligarchs increasingly dominated the politics of the entire Dutch Republic, tensions about how to define Amsterdam\u00E2\u0080\u0094as hub of the Dutch trading empire, or as a centre of government power\u00E2\u0080\u0094escalated.95 Such conflicts were extremely difficult to reconcile for they converged on antithetical notions of time and space. As a point of transit in commerce, it was crucial that the merchant city remain open to sometimes chaotic, 233 unregulatable and ever-changing flows of commodities, information, and people. The state city, on the other hand, needed to represent itself as a solid, static and cohesive seat of power.96 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, in numerous misogynist representations of the late seventeenth century, market forces\u00E2\u0080\u0094the drives of trade, money and desire that were so crucial to the power of Amsterdam\u00E2\u0080\u0094often were personified as unruly female figures. Depicted as naturally grotesque, riotous, anti-social, and sexually immoderate, these female figures were used to satirize the excesses of commercial society. The difficulty of picturing a mercantile centre as feminine yet not overtaken by uncontrollable passions thus presents itself as another conflict of the public sphere that the allegorical Maid must negotiate. The image of the Maid on the title page of Domselaer's civic history seems to mediate these dilemmas by representing the civic body as a virgin body. Indeed, the boundaries of the Maid's body are made to correspond to the boundaries of the city. She is placed directly in front of the wide opening of the Amstel River, which leads into the city centre. Blocking this entrance, her body closes off and thus protects the city. Not only does the Maid secure the city in this way, but her body itself, which stands for the city, is represented as inviolate: it is virginal, closed, and coherent. The X X X of Amsterdam's coat of arms, placed exactly between her spread knees, bars access to her body as it obstructs the sharp pointed objects held by the male figures surrounding her. Neptune's triton, Africa's tusk, Europe's baton, America's long string of pearls, and the river god's oar are all deflected; the Maid remains as impenetrable as the city. Her other attributes reinforce this message. Balanced on the Maid's left knee is a closed vessel, undoubtedly a symbol of chastity that echoes the virginal intactness of the female body as civic body.97 On her other knee she holds open a large book, which she does not read, 234 possibly the very history of Amsterdam whose title page she embellishes.98 If this is the case, then both her body and the text stand in for the city behind them. Virginal body, authoritative text, and coherent city together indicate the dominance of logos, knowledge, and reason over the passions that drive commerce. The margins between the inside and outside of this allegorical female body therefore are crucial in defining civic integrity. Here, the visual language of classicism is used to represent a closed and intact human body that attempts to buttress and naturalize the authority of the state city. Representing city space as a virgin female body satisfies the need for clear boundaries and definitions as it contains the unruly excesses of both female sexuality and the flux of trade. Such a representation also works to bar the viewer from city space by denying the body and its functions. As it elevates and idealizes the female body within the securing boundaries of civic discourse, this image of the Maid seeks to produce unified, rational and coherent subjects who, no longer reminded of their own bodies which enter and participate in the life of the city, view urban space from a decorous distance.99 Such an image, which labours so hard to close off and seal up the female and the civic body begs us to return to Grosz1 provocative question. What kind of genitals does the body politic have? Here it is revealing to take another look at the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century bird's-eye view maps of Amsterdam (figs. 4.3, 4.4, 4.9 & 4.10). Viewed with this question in mind, the contours of Amsterdam, laid out below, appear unmistakably vaginal. Could it be that, in spite of its obviously ambiguous implications, visual metaphors of Amsterdam as reproductive female genitalia gave shape to notions of a fertile trading centre, open to flows that could penetrate and issue from its orifices and canals? Certainly imagery and oral stories about the watery passage into the city and the maternal bodies that voyaged there 235 suggest that the residents of Amsterdam were quite familiar with the sexualized geography of their city. In the early sixteenth century, when Antonisz painted the prototype for this particular view (fig. 4.3), Amsterdam was a modestly prosperous commercial centre, overshadowed by the mercantile accomplishments of Antwerp to the south.100 By the 1660's, new images celebrating the city's meteoric rise to power proliferated.101 As we have seen, maps in the civic histories such as \"A Neat Mapping Out of the Old and New Order of the City of Amsterdam\" (fig. 4.11), graphically demonstrate how previous cartographic conventions of imaging the city had been altered. The deletion of the gallows field from the map's margin was one such modification. Moreover, in this new view, the entire shape of the city has been radically transformed by completed and proposed expansions. To see this newly expanded city in its entirety necessitated a more distanced viewing position. As a result, the wide opening of the Amstel river, which penetrates the urban centre, has been considerably narrowed and diminished. In brief, Amsterdam no longer looks anything like female genitalia. Using the .objective visual tropes of cartography, the \"Neat Mapping Out of the Old and New Order of the City of Amsterdam\" works to create a new myth of origins for the city. Here, the make-up of the city clearly derives from the rational concepts and controls of engineers and planners.102 When this map from Dapper's guidebook, and the allegorical representation of Amsterdam from Domselaer's civic history are contrasted with previous types of depictions, therefore, a drastic shift in the metaphor of the city as body becomes evident. Female birth canals and lively decaying corpses alike are exterminated by representations of a closed and inviolate city. To completely close off the reproductive metaphor of the city as a procreative body that takes in raw materials and turns out new products would be a counter-productive move, 236 however. For a city or body completely sealed up surely will die. And the body that was Amsterdam desperately needed to be linked to a network of flows. Cast outside of these nets, it could only become, to quote Grosz, \"a body depleted, abandoned, and derelict\".103 This presents the Maid with yet another dilemma to negotiate. Floating in the midst of these struggles between the open, fluctuating merchant city, and the stable and unchanging state city, the Amsterdam Maid's impossibly disembodied femininity attempts to smooth the troubled waters of this identity crisis by providing a ground for commerce and government to meet. For, as she hovers in the space between the city and its outside, the Maid also works to mediate the uncertainty of the harbour, which both creates the city and opens it to the influx of alien peoples, ideas, and merchandise. For this contained, classical woman is positioned, not as a mother, but as a guardian of bodies, goods, and spaces. The four continents gather at her feet; Africa, Europe, America and Asia are all represented as small children who bestow the wealth of their regions in homage to Amsterdam. Blocking the opening of the main canal, her impermeable body stops these foreign bodies from entering the city. They must deal with the Maid outside of the centre in the ambiguous space between Amsterdam and what lay beyond it. Here, the Maid is receptive to exotic people\u00E2\u0080\u0094and more importantly, goods\u00E2\u0080\u0094from outside, but she remains steadfastly in control of them. Thus the city's dependence on its exterior is reversed as its foreign trading partners are infantilized and made reliant upon and subservient to the queenly Amsterdam. As she usurps the place of Volewijk's lively dead, who jangle menacingly from the gallows, and displaces Amsterdam's mothers and midwives who sailed this channel in search of babies, the Maid's body redefines the city's maritime boundaries. On this frontispiece image, the harbour entrance is a space where Amsterdam receives, deflects and controls potentially 237 threatening elements: wealth from abroad is divested of its otherness as it adds to Amsterdam's glory. Not only does this leave the city untainted, but it also defuses and secures the uncertain fluidity of the in-between space by putting it to good use. In this way, Amsterdam is shown mastering diverse forces beyond her control: the foreign, the dead and, not least, the feminine. This image of the Maid thus works to mask conflicts about the city's changing values. In the process, it displaces reminders of the Volewijk story with yet another myth of origins. For the depiction of Amsterdam as a body works to reimagine conflicts about the redefinition of civic space as inevitable organic processes. This endows the city with an untroubled continuity: like the body, it is destined to grow and develop.104 For the city/body construct sets up a causal relationship between the two terms in which the body, particularly the female body, as nature, dictates the ideal form of culture, the productive city.105 Using the classical aesthetic favoured by the elite, this image works to present a city that is both naturalized and idealized, changing and static, organic and closed. As we have seen, the flexibility of this metaphor seems incredibly efficacious in resolving a range of struggles about civic identity. Yet, classical allegory has its own inner conflicts, which actually converge on questions of origins. For the distance between the Maid in the foreground and the city's spires far behind her certainly indicates the unbridgeable gap between this allegory and its own referential source.106 Indeed, the very versatility of allegory's meanings points to the impossibility of classicism's desire to fix meaning. When abstractions such as the homogenous city are given flesh, they necessarily betray the elusiveness of origins in the process. Expunged from maps of the city and replaced by classical and cartographic representations of a unified and coherent body politic, imagery that brought criminal corpses 238 and pregnant bodies together at the city's margin did not die off in the late seventeenth century. To the contrary, if the truth claims made by representations increasingly favoured by the governing elite sought to repress elements of the unknown from the city's identity, then these restraints seemed to spur the insistent reassertion of the Volewijk story in print. These ambiguous bodies persistently refused to be subdued, and in the 1670's, their disruptive power was mustered in the satirical book The Ten Pleasures of Marriage.107 In contrast to the costly, classical, civic chronicles commissioned by the elite. The Ten Pleasures is an inexpensive octavo booklet illustrated with comic copper plate engravings.108 This allowed it to be circulated to a broader spectrum of the population. It is unlikely that the three hundred and thirty-one pages of this two-volume work were directed at the lower classes, however. Presuming a literate audience familiar with political satire, the form of the work seems to indicate a middle-class audience. Moreover, as I argued in Chapter 3, this book probably was connected to a literary and political movement that appropriated visual traditions of farce in battles to keep the city open to trade, and to oppose the growing distance of the classicizing elite.109 Playing with the notion that a harmonious family was the basis for an orderly state, The Ten Pleasures represents the disorderly domestic life of a merchant who is governed by his uncontrollable wife. The private life of this mis-matched couple seems to serve as a chaotic manifestation of a society that was not well governed. Significantly, imagery of the Volewijk story figures largely in this book. An engraving of this well-known tale appears in chapter seven (fig. 4.14), where it accompanies an ironic description of the seventh pleasure of this marriage turned-upside-down: 239 ...the seventh [pleasure] came rather unexpectedly, for the wife began to look so afraid, she moaned so, and groaned and cracked, so that it looked like she wanted to sail to the Volewijk for a baby.110 To assist her in this journey, the wife sends her hen-pecked husband from his warm bed into the cold night to get the mid-wife. As he leaves, she threatens him, saying that if he brings the wrong mid-wife, then \"she would be so upset that all the sails would hang limply from the mast, and the Volewijk boat would immediately encounter head winds and strong currents.\"111 The mid-wife arrives, but she cannot tack, swing, and steer the boat on her own, and so a crew of women is brought on board; the sisters, sisters-in-law, aunts, cousins and friends of the wife all join the expedition. Their voyage towards Volewijk, the island of death/birth is described as a difficult one: But alas, [the husband] could see the little ladies' dejected faces as they looked at each other, as one began to pray and another to cry, for the little Volewijk's boat was drifting backwards and was completely buffeted by head winds and currents, yes, it was so off course that wife or child, and maybe both were done for.112 These passages clearly indicate how the \"trip to Volewijk\" worked as a vivid metaphor for the physical pain and danger of childbirth. At the centre of the image is the wife who is in labour. The cloth covering her head, her empty drooping eye sockets and slack open mouth give her face the appearance of a death's head. The mid-wife sits in front of the pregnant woman, and reaches under her skirt as she delivers the baby. Her back is turned to the viewer, her body effectively blocking any glimpse of the moment of birth. Beside her, at the right, another woman appears to encourage the wife through her labour. Directly above her is the bed, perhaps a reminder of the sensual pleasures that lead to the present suffering. The woman on the other side of the wife looks away, drawing attention to a fifth woman, who holds a cloth in front of the fire. Through the window above her we see five women rowing a little boat towards Volewijk's gallows and wheels. The actual 240 scene of labour and the strange metaphor of childbirth as a voyage to Volewijk are pictured together as two versions of the same event. Here, the unspeakable link between the gallows field and the womb is made by a visual device\u00E2\u0080\u0094the thick plumes of smoke that run up the side of the image joining the fireplace to the scene outside the window. Black smoke usually obscures, but in the case of a story where opposites are inverted or confused, dark fumes may actually illuminate; they may shed some light on the bizarre link between decomposing and maternal bodies. For certainly there is an excessive amount of smoke coming up from the hearth. It seems to rise from the rag held up to the flames by the woman in the foreground. Possibly she is drying this cloth, and the evaporating dampness forms the pillar of smoke. From here, we begin to speculate about how this rag got wet in the first place. This calls up the unrepresented mess of childbirth: blood, urine, faeces\u00E2\u0080\u0094do these bodily secretions soak the cloth? With this, clouds of smoke begin to smell, attracting the attention of others in the room. Revulsion billows up to Volewijk's putrid carcasses. Above, I argued that midwives' imagery of the maternal body and the decaying corpse may have called up the powers and mysteries of both bodies as a strategy to fight against the growing control of midwifery practices within the city. The Ten Pleasures seems to appropriate the disruptive potential of the familiar signboards of midwifery. In fact, a publisher called Jeroen Jeroense-the same Jeroense who published a book on Amsterdam's street signs-printed an edition of this book in 1678. Moreover, it is possible that Jeroense is none other than Hieronymus Sweerts, who wrote and published The Ten Pleasures.\"3 The connection between these two books indicates that the author of The Ten Pleasures undoubtedly would have known the midwives' signboards, and the controversy surrounding them. 241 While the imagery may be similar, the uses and meanings of the Volewijk story in this work are strikingly different. Given the political agenda of The Ten Pleasures to oppose the policies of Amsterdam's patricians, it seems likely that the book mobilizes the imagery of Volewijk to strike a blow at representations, such as those in the civic histories, that worked to redefine the Amsterdam harbour. As classical allegories and evermore-accurate maps were established in efforts to fashion an ideal city and body, this image of the Volewijk voyage seems to row relentlessly against the tide of reason. Rearticulating metaphors of the city as fertile and open to trade, it mobilizes pregnant and decaying bodies\u00E2\u0080\u0094bodies that lacked self-containment\u00E2\u0080\u0094to attack the closed boundaries of classical and rational imagery of the body politic increasingly favoured by the elite. It is crucial to emphasize, however, that, unlike the midwives' imagery, the engraving in The Ten Pleasures has obvious misogynist undercurrents. For in this work, links between the maternal and the decomposing body are forged by repulsion.114 Here, it is as if the brutal execution, mutilation, banishment and messy decay of the criminal cadaver is linked to the cracking open of the body in childbirth, a process described by Julia Kristeva as \"a violent act of expulsion through which the nascent body tears itself away from the matter of maternal insides.\"115 This tearing of flesh from flesh, as that which is internal to the body is expelled, both creates the subject and destroys it in the process.116 This, of course, is the profound ambiguity of imagery that links birthing with death and decomposition. And the overt misogyny of The Ten Pleasures seems to come, at least in part, as an attempt to redress this damage to the subject, particularly the male subject. For the merchants who appropriated this disturbing imagery certainly did not propose a body politic that was completely open and unbounded. In fact, the misogyny that drives The Ten Pleasures 242 of Marriage finds its fullest expression in the strange conflation of the pregnant body and the rotting corpse. While midwives may have used this vivid visual metaphor on their signboards to fight for their inclusion in public life, this book seizes upon such imagery to opposite effect. For in The Ten Pleasures, the Volewijk story emphatically fosters loathing for the female body and its functions.117 This becomes evident when we consider the title page of the book (fig. 4.15). The composition of this frontispiece image calls up the lay-out of the title print of the Amsterdam Maid in Domselaer's Beschrijving (fig. 4.12). Below a title banner held up by mythological figures sits an allegorical figure holding a text; the middle ground contains water and boats, while the background depicts a recognizable part of Amsterdam. Of course, these superficial similarities only serve to emphasize that these images could not be more different in intent, for the title print of the Ten Pleasures parodies classical conventions. Indeed, the allegory in the foreground of The Ten Pleasures embodies folly. This laughing fool points to a trapped rat in his lap, and he holds another rodent trap over his shoulder. The imagery of animals lured by their appetite for \"herbs for rats and mice\" (\"Kruyt voor de Rotten en Muyzen\" is written on the box beside him) is clarified by the familiar motto that the fool/rat catcher clutches in his left hand: \"trouwen doet rouwen\"~\"marriage leads to regrets.\" This placard points up to the women in the right middleground, who are rowing from the recognizable gibbets and wheels of the gallows island. The analogy between these women and the trapped rats is in keeping with misogynist themes of the time. Lured into marriage by their uncontrollable animal appetites, these women are shown paying the price of passion-their sexual desires are being punished by the physical terrors of a journey to Volewijk. As the 243 housemaid, who witnesses the birth imaged in chapter seven, comments in an aside to the reader, Oh, if this is what marriage leads to, then I'll never risk it in my life. I believe that it's pleasurable to sleep with a gentleman, but this voyaging to Volewijk\u00E2\u0080\u0094there's absolutely no pleasure in that!118 In this way, the book blames women for their own suffering: \"trouwen doet rouwen,\" laughs the fool.119 While such mockery may seem extraordinarily vicious, in the Protestant Dutch Republic, the pain of childbirth was commonly understood as punishment for female transgressions. Contemporary justifications of the patriarchy used the biblical story of origins as grounds for women's subordinate social status: because the original sin was committed by Eve, the first woman, all women were to be subjected to the laws of men. For the book of Genesis recounts how God punished Eve and her female descendants with the travail of childbearing and with desire for husbands who would rule over them.120 Indeed, women's uncontrollable passions often were blamed on their wombs, described as hungry animals that overpowered reason and sense.121 Within this seventeenth-century understanding of the female body, therefore, the uterus was both the seat of potential rebellion and the site of its punishment.122 The Ten Pleasures may attempt to manipulate the power of maternal bodies in order to disrupt the increasing closure of the body politic. At the same time it uses specific devices\u00E2\u0080\u0094the stinking black smoke, the fool's motto, the trapped rats, the pit beneath the gallows-to link the female body to the criminal body. Both are punished with immense suffering because of their perceived transgressions. And the disgust evoked by the connections between these two bodies works to maintain their exclusion from new models of the public sphere. 244 For these printed images of the Volewijk voyage actively intervene in a major shift in strategies of power and concepts of the public body. As Spierenburg has pointed out, the withdrawal of the burgomasters from rituals of public punishment in the late seventeenth century signified, not a decline in state control, but subtle shifts in the locus of its power.123 Gradually, within new regimes of punishment, whether transgressors were wayward women or dangerous lawbreakers, strategies of interior discipline and rehabilitation increasingly focused on the individual private body. Concurrently, ideals of community were based on the notion of a nation made up of families of docile self-scrutinizing citizens.124 The use of the Volewijk Story in The Ten Pleasures therefore makes both a suture and a break with public rituals of corporeal retribution: although the criminal body remains integral to definitions of the social body, it begins to signify in very different ways.125 As corpses become babies, it is as if the object of penal display is fractured, decomposed, and transformed into the individual bodies of the nuclear family. Thus, the focus of the Volewijk story has shifted. Volewijk's gibbeted bodies are no longer apprehended primarily as public spectacles of penal display. Instead, they are linked with suffering that takes place within the domestic sphere. The viewer now sees the gallows field through a window from within a private interior. Given the centrality of harmonious domestic life to the definition of a well-ordered Dutch Republic, it is not surprising to find that the derisive Ten Pleasures provoked a moralistic backlash. The Ten Delicacies of Marriage, or the Refutation of the Ten Pleasures of Marriage by Petrus de Vemoegde, or Peter the Satisfied, appeared in 1678.126 In response to the satirical booklet, The Ten Delicacies rewrites each of the ten pleasures as a virtuous and fulfilling aspect of married life. Reworking the familiar misogynist verse, a man in the foreground of the title page asks, \"Wat kompt er van niet trouwen?\" (\"What comes from not marrying?\"), and 245 receives the response from a cupid above: \"Rouwen, rouwen, rouwen\" (\"Regrets, regrets, regrets\") (fig. 4.16). At the centre of the print, a well-dressed couple joins hands as cupids shower them with garlands and money The seventh delicacy, when the wife gives birth, is described as a peaceful moonlight sail on a quiet night: \"The little boat has good stern wind, and does this sweet trip with gladness and pleasure\".127 The engraving accompanying this description (fig. 4.17) also is quite different from the one in The Ten Pleasures (fig. 4.14). The pregnant woman and a female assistant sit in front of the fire. Behind them, three women fold and put away clean linen\u00E2\u0080\u0094there are no smoking rags in this image. The amiable husband stands at the door and welcomes another woman into their home. Of most significance to this discussion, however, is what is not represented. Volewijk's cadavers are nowhere to be seen in this book. While civic histories of Amsterdam replaced these corpses with allegories of the Maid and maps of a planned and controlled city, in The Ten Delicacies, the gallows and wheels of Volewijk are displaced with another idealization of the social body: an image of companionate married life. As Volewijk's bodies emerge, vanish, and reassert themselves only to be censored again, we begin to get a sense of the profound importance of both the female body and the criminal body in struggles to fashion a coherent body public. Subversive and transgressive, both bodies stand at the border of socially constructed categories: thus they are powerful indicators of the fragile limits of corporeal, civic and social identity.128 In this way, the control of these bodies\u00E2\u0080\u0094putting them to death or sealing them up\u00E2\u0080\u0094works in tandem with efforts to secure social identity, while the assertion of their potential to cross and upset boundaries often functions as a derisive endeavour to disrupt official models of the body politic. 246 Marginal imagery of the city as open, porous and flexible is not intrinsically more progressive than representations of the city as bounded, impermeable and fixed, however. For, in these late seventeenth-century struggles about the constitution of the body politic, opposing groups seized upon femininity as a concept to ground male authority.129 Within these contests, images of the city as a procreative female body appropriate reproduction to naturalize the fertile money-making activities of the city's merchants. Allegories of the city as closed virginal space, on the other hand, appear to make the idea of a coherent, fixed government seem natural. In both views, the city is built, controlled, and defined by men to serve their needs. Neither of these extremes\u00E2\u0080\u0094not the grotesque, permeable, reproductive body, nor the closed, classical, virgin body\u00E2\u0080\u0094has much connection with the specificity and diversity of actual women and female corporeality. In fact, each of these visual conventions of the body politic was inextricably bound up with the legal subjection of women to fathers and husbands, and their exclusion from thepublic sphere of political opinion and debate.130 Despite appearances to the contrary, the genitals of the body politic remained emphatically phallic. Conclusion: Children of Death Imagery of the Volewijk story also was circulated to the children of Amsterdam in catchpenny prints (figs. 4.1 & 4.18). These printed pictures raise questions about what this curious tale of origins might have taught young viewers about their own identities. Indeed, such questions about the interconnections between comic printed images and the formation of identity have structured this project. Children's prints of the effeminate Jan de Wasser and his overbearing wife Griet picture a family coming into being in a back and forth movement through the passage between Amsterdam and the gallows field (fig. 4.1-4).131 The couple and 247 their newborn float between the city and its outside, the living and the dead, and even the masculine and the feminine. This calls up\u00E2\u0080\u0094but cannot really represent-identity as a fluid and ever-changing process. For such a representation seems to pose questions of community from the fiction of a momentary limbo before the family re-enters society's discourses of gender, class, ethnic and generational differences.132 Indeed, this image draws attention to the uncertainties of historically changing boundaries by playing upon the laws of inclusion and exclusion in civic life\u00E2\u0080\u0094divisions that ultimately converged on the separation of men from women, adults from children, and citizens from criminals. While in the children's prints, these binaries combine and overlap to disrupt notions of internal and timeless individual, civic or state identities, these images emphatically do not teach children that such destabilizing would liberate them from the boundary's constraints. As I have argued throughout this study, children's places within society's categories were closely regulated in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Until properly educated by parents, teachers, and preachers, children were excluded from participation in civic life. Indeed, the Calvinist doctrine of original sin taught that all children were by nature \"children of death\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094born into sin, and inclined to do evil. Equating an infant body with a criminal body thus was strangely in keeping with contemporary beliefs about childhood. Significantly, the printed story of Jan and Griet itself reminds young viewers of concerns about child rearing. For the tale does not end with the equivocal imagery of the Volewijk journey. Instead, the family returns to the home, where attention is focused on the infant's up bringing. Originating from the decaying body of a \"child of death\", and brought into a home governed by feminine passions, this child will need rigorous preparation for its future in society's hierarchies.133 248 As if in response to anxieties about the role of the prints themselves in education, the ambiguous imagery of the voyage to Volewijk gradually was censored from children's prints. In late eighteenth-century versions, Volewijk's grisly \"children's tree\" has been transformed into an apple tree. By the late nineteenth-century, the island of Volewijk has been excluded entirely, replaced by a scene of Jan and Griet on a pleasurable sailing trip. While such censoring effectively expunges potentially subversive imagery, the repeated editing of this scene also points to the inability of printed representations to satisfactorily fix meaning and identity. Such constant alterations are characteristic of comic children's prints. This, combined with the manner in which the imagery itself draws attention to the mutability of identity, opens up a consideration of the gap between representations that attempt to fix meaning, and identities that are always in flux. Indeed, the final scene of the print points to the very uncertainties involved in the use of print to shape children into perfectly moral and law-abiding adults. Here, an image of Jan and Griet is accompanied by the text: \"Jan and Griet are disputing about what they will let their child be taught\" (fig. 4.18-24).134 By raising the issue of education at the end, the print prompts a consideration of the contradictory capacities of its own comic imagery. As this study has demonstrated, although comic prints were widely used to regulate the up bringing of Amsterdam's children, they also had the potential to subvert the imposition of social norms. Indeed, it is this tension, between didactic uses of print, and uses of print to elude this manipulation, which characterizes the function of this material. As it eschews the finality of a happy ending, therefore, such a conclusion is pregnant with indefinite new beginnings. 249 Notes 1. Johannes le Francq van Berkhey, Natuurlijke Histone van Holland, vol. 2 (Amsterdam, 1776) 1238. Quoted in P. Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 97,249. 2. \"Pluk mijn, pluk mijn. Ik zal altijd zoet zijn.\" D. J. van der Ven, Ons Eigen Volk in het Feestlijk Jaar (Kampen: J.H. Kok N.V., 1915) 173. This story is also discussed in G.J. Boekenoogen, \"Waar de Kinderen Vandaan Komen,\" Volkskunde XX1TI (1912): 29-37; C. Koord, Oude Amsterdamse Volksverhalen (Maastricht: De Lijster, 1981) 151-152; and P. van Boheemen et al., eds., Kent, en Versint. Eer datje Mint: Vrijen en Trouwen. 1500-1800 (Apeldoom: Historisch Museum Marialust, 1989) 193. 3. The sketch, in pen and grey pencil, is by Anthony van Borssom. While a copy of this drawing can be found in the Atlas of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, the original is housed in the collections of the Rijksprentenkabinet in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. 4. Amsterdam bought the island in 1618 in order to secure and deepen the entrance to its harbour. J. Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zijn opkomst. aanwas. geschiedenissen. voorregten. koophandel. gebouwen. kerkenstaat. schoolen. schutterijen. gilden en regeeringe. vol. 3, 1767 (Alpen aan den Rijn and Amsterdam: Uitgeversmaatschappij Repro-Holland, 1971-1972) 83. As Antonisz' map evidences, the island was already being used as a gallows field at that time. Today, the site of the former gallows field is the corporate headquarters of Shell International. 5. The inclusion of the lantern in this scene might work to draw attention to the way that this story plays on the division between the mortal body and the immortal soul. The 1644 dutch edition of Ripa's Iconologia contains an image of the Corpo Humano, or human body, holding a lantern with a text that reads, \"van't licht komt het leven,\" \"life comes from the light.\" Just as a lantern contains a light, so the body contains a soul. In this image of Volewijk, the lantern has been snuffed out only to be relit. The body refuses to die. The importance of the Ripa emblem to contemporary anatomy lessons is discussed in W. Heckscher, Rembrandt's Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp. An Iconological Study (New York: New York University Press, 1958) 36; and in W. Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt's \"Anatomy of Dr. Tulp\" (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1982) 45-46. 6. The text accompanying this image might also play on the in-between status of the passengers: \"Jan en Griet die twee gelijk / Die varen na de Volewijk\" (fig. 4.1-4). \"Die twee gelijk\" refers to the couple, and could be translated as \"together\" or as \"both the same.\" Therefore this verse could read, \"Jan and Griet, both the same, are sailing near Volewijk.\" In all other references that I found to the Volewijk voyage, husbands did not accompany women to the island. The effeminate Jan thus participates in a specifically feminine quest. 7. Spierenburg 47. 250 8. Maps of Amsterdam have been catalogued in A.E. d'Ailly, Catalogus van Amsterdamsche Plattegronden (Amsterdam. 1934). 9. C. Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 12. 10. Armstrong 141. 11. The Dutch Cityscape in the 17th Century and its Sources (Amsterdam: Amsterdams Historisch Museum; Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1977) 69-71,104. 12. Armstrong 12. 13. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 91-93. 14. De Certeau 91-93; see also Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map. Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 12. 15. Spierenburg 45. 16. In the decade from 1671 to 1680, there were eighteen justice days; from 1681 to 1690, there were sixteen. Spierenburg 81-82. 17. Spierenburg 46-47. 18. Spierenburg 54. 19. Spierenburg 47-55. 20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 28-29,48-49. 21. Spierenburg 55. 22. Jonathan Sawday discusses Amsterdam's rites of execution in his insightful analysis of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson in The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) 152. 23. Willem Blaeu's 1604 map of Holland, for example, includes twelve city views along its edges. The view of Amsterdam alone is foregrounded by the gibbets and wheels of the gallows field. All of the other city profiles rise behind pastoral or maritime scenes. 24. Spierenburg 153-158. From the period 1650 to 1750, of 390 death sentences, 219 were condemned to the further infamy of exposure at Volewijk. Spierenburg 58. 251 25. The centrality of trade and merchandise in the city's identity is clearly emphasised in an anonymous print, copied from Anthonisz's map, entitled Amstelodamum Emporium. The title reinforces the visual emphasis on ships and warehouses, defining Amsterdam a vast emporium stocked with goods. 26. Foucault 84-90. 27. Either a scaffold was set up in the square, or offenders were hung from the first floor window of the Waag (the weigh house), or a temporary scaffold was extended from the side of the new Town Hall. Jelgersma 41. Links between the architecture of the Town Hall and public executions are explored in K. Freemantle, \"The Open Vierschaar of Amsterdam's 17m-century Town Hall as a Setting for the City's Justice,\" Pud Holland 77 (1962): 206-234. 28. Spierenburg 53. The journal of Jacob Bicker Raye mentions the white horse in a description of a specific execution. Whether a special horse was always used to transport the dead body is uncertain. See H.C. Jelgersma, Galgebergen en Galgevelden in West en Midden Nederland (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1978) 38-39. 29. There is evidence that crowds accompanied the executioner and corpse along this route, even crossing the water to the island of Volewijk. Detailed accounts of Amsterdam's execution ritual are given in Spierenburg 43-80; and in Jelgersma 37-41. The executioner was paid extra for actions such as dragging the corpse to Volewijk (3 guilders), placing the corpse on the wheel or hanging it from the gallows at Volewijk (6 guilders), placing parts of a severed body on Volewijk (3 guilders), hanging a weapon or symbolic object over the corpse's head (3 guilders), etc. Spierenburg 212. 30. Quoted in Spierenburg 57. \"Volewijk\" is possibly a derivation of \"Vogelenwijk\", the region of the birds. Jelgersma 37. 31. Amsterdam's important role in the world economy is analyzed in Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade. 1585-1740 (Gxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 32. R.S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars. 1559-1715 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 116-117. 33. The hybrid nature of early modern market centres is described in P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 27. 34. Volewijk was not Amsterdam's only gallows field. Corpses also were hung outside the city gates. Jelgersma 41. Antonisz' map (fig. 4.3) indicates that gibbeted bodies may have been displayed along other main routes into the city as well. ; 35. On this function, see Foucault 14-15; Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art. Pain. Violence and Martyrdom fNew York: Rizzoli. 1990111. 36. Spierenburg 55. 252 37. Atlas Dreesman, GAA. Pencil drawing signed R. Vinkeles and dated 1790. 38. It seems that people did make trips to see Volewijk's bodies. Rembrandt, for example, went there in 1664 to sketch the gibbeted body of an 18 year old girl from Jutland, executed for the murder of her landlady. R. Kistemaker and R. van Gelder, Amsterdam 1275-1795. De Ontwikkeling van een Handelsmetropool (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff Informatief, 1983) 105. 39. As William Schupbach convincingly argues in his work on Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, to point to a corpse was a gesture that, in the seventeenth century, exhorted the viewer to \"know thyself.\" Schupbach 38. Spierenburg also argues that these corpses served as educational tools. Spierenburg 97. 40. In the late eighteenth century, there appeared catchpenny prints featuring images of the incarceration, whipping, branding and execution of criminals. Their didactic titles instruct, \"Children, read this print and learn to fear evil from childhood.\" The circulation of printed pictures of rites of corporeal punishment works as another kind of visual reminder of the examples these practices provided. Here, the imagery of bodily pain was used to instill internal discipline in young viewers. For these prints certainly imply that children should not only learn to fear evil, but also learn to fear authority from childhood. In an attempt to safe-guard the future of society, they seek to shape children into law-abiding citizens. 41. Links between leisure and the city's margins have been explored by Elizabeth Honig, \"Country Folk and City Business: A Print Series by Jan van de Velde,\" Art Bulletin 78. 3 (1996): 511-526. 42. A recent essay that summarizes and challenges conventional vanitas interpretations of Dutch still life paintings is Celeste Brusati, \"Natural Artifice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life,\" Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Realism Reconsidered, ed. W. Franks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 144-157. 43. As Sawday argues, to associate the dead body with sensual pleasures was not uncommon during this period. Sawday 39-53. On the \"festive\" nature of Amsterdam's public anatomy lessons, see Heckscher 4-6. Also of interest is G. Ferrari, \"Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna,\" Past and Present 117 (1987): 50-106. 44. The ambiguities of this type of imagery are explored in W. Engel, Mapping Mortality. The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) 131. 45. De Certeau 91-95. 46. The contradictory meanings of public rites of punishment are discussed in Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: Licence. Play and Power in Elizabethan England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 119. 253 47. Anton Bloch, \"Openbare Staf-voltrekkingen als Rites de Passage.\" Tijdscrift voor Geschiedenis 97 (T984): 470-481. Spierenburg 43-44. Puppill . 48. The etymology of Volewijk is detailed in W. de Clerck, Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986) 746-748. This entry includes references to the Volewijk story in printed plays, but does not mention stories and imagery of Volewijk conveyed in children's prints, or in the satirical book De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelijks. which were also connected to Amsterdam's comic theatre traditions. Other references to Volewijk from contemporary comedies are quoted in Boekenoogen 30-33. 49. The details of this event are recounted in Jelgersma 40-41. 50. \"Wel kameraad, hoe gaat het U al, hoe vaart gij?\" Quoted in Jelgersma 40. 51. Spierenburg 57. 52. Sawday22. 53. K. Park, \"The Life of the Corpse,\" Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50.1 (January 1995): 115. See also V. Traub, \"Gendering Mortality in Early Modem Anatomies,\" Feminist Readings of Early Modem Qulture. ed. V. Traub et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 47. Sawday 114-115. 54. The publicity surrounding both cases is discussed in Spierenburg 63-66, 90-91. 55. Spierenburg 30; Park 115-118. Midwives would have been among the clientele for these curative body bits, for women in labour sometimes wore belts of tanned human skin to help the birthing process. See Kathy Stuart, \"The Executioner's Healing Touch: Health and Honor in Early Modem German Medical Practice,\" Infinite Boundaries. Order. Disorder and Reorder in Early Modem German Culture; ed. Max Reinhart (Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998) 359, vol. 40 of Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, gen. ed. R. A. Mentzer. Connections between midwifery and the gallows field are explored further in the following section. 56. A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. M . Vizedom and G. Caffee (London: Routledge, 1960): 160-161. 57. The infamous status of the executioner is detailed in Spierenburg 13-42. 58. Recounted in A.T. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture. Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 246. 59. Park 115. Such beliefs probably pre-dated Christianty, and later became intertwined with Roman Catholic beliefs. The attempts of Calvinists to change attitudes about death are discussed in A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture. Religion and 254 Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 242-247. 60. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London: Ark, 1988) 121. On the power of margins, Douglas states, \"The idea of society is a powerful image.... This image has form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Its outlines contain power to reward conformity and repulse attack. There is energy in its margins and external areas.\" Douglas 114. 61. My argument here is indebted to Julia Kristeva's definition of the 'abject' as that which falls away from the body, and thus disrupts the subject's necessary belief in its own integrity and stability. Kristeva analyzes the centrality of the body in processes of subject formation in Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Elizabeth Grosz has expanded upon Kristeva's theories in an important essay, \"The Body of Signification,\" Abjection. Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. ed. J. Fletcher and A. Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990) 80-103. 62. LH. van Eeghen et al., Vier Eeuwen Amsterdams Binnengasthuis (Amsterdam: Immerc B.V., 1981) 67-69. Van Eeghen draws on evidence pertaining to hospital renovations in 1680. The practice of referring to the delivery room as the \"Voolewijk\" may have begun earlier however. 63. \"Naar de Volewijk varen\" meant \"to have a baby,\" and \"de stuurman van de Volewijk\" was the midwife. These sorts of references occur in theatre plays from the early 1600's. Oral and anecdotal uses of these phrases probably were well-known by then, indicating that links between the island and Amsterdam's babies date back at least to the sixteenth century. Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal 746-748. H.C.H. Moquette links the notion of \"a guide to Volewijk\" to the midwives' more common title: \"vroedvrouwen,\" or \"wise women.\" See her discussion of midwifery and its repression in H.C.H. Moquette, De Vrouw. vol. 3 (Amsterdam: H. Meulenhoff, 1915) 51-53. 64. J. van Lennep and J. Ter Gouw, De Uithangteekens in Verband met Geschiedenis en Volksleven Beschouwd. vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Gebroeders Kraaij, 1868) 87-91. These boards are also mentioned in the important primary source on street signs, Jeroen Jeroense, Koddige en Ernstige Opschriften op Luyffels. Wagens. GlazenP Uythang-borden. etc. (Amsterdam: Jeroen Jeroense, 1682) 126. 65. J. van Lennep and J. ter Gouw have reconstructed the history of the repression of the midwive's imagery of Volewijk in their study of seventeenth-century street signs. Van Lennep and Ter Gouw 87-91. 66. Van Lennep and Ter Gouw 87-91. 67. The tradition of the Amsterdam surgeon's guild to commission and display paintings of anatomy lessons is discussed in G. Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life. His Paintings. (New York: 255 Viking, 1985) 143-144. Van Neck's painting has recently been analyzed by Julie Hansen, \"Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch,\" Art Bulletin 78 (December 1996): 663-679. 68. This figure is identified as Hendrik in the records of the surgeon's guild. Hansen 666. Jonathan Sawday observes that the history of medicine follows a patrilineal model. Although Ruysch's daughter Rachel was also involved in her father's studies, the notion that knowledge about the body is passed down from father to son certainly resonates with this portrait. See Sawday 39-43. 69. Hansen 666. 70. He also holds under his arm a broad brimmed black hat, much like the hat his father wears. Hansen 666. 71. Ruysch was the official supervisor of Amsterdam's midwives. One of Ruysch's colleagues, Dr. Hendrik van Roonhuysen, inventor of the obstetric lever, a forerunner to the forceps, became Amsterdam's official city obstetrician in 1648. He used this post to restrict the practices of the city's midwives. Links between this painting and the denigration of midwifery are discussed in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987) 526-7. 72. Traub 85. 73. Hansen 663. 74. Midwifery practices and contemporary attitudes about midwives are discussed in Schama 525-535. 75. Laat andere vrij de Volewijk...uithangen zooveel als zij willen, Ik heb ook nooit een ander bij mijn werk gehad, en ik laat mij ook met bedillen, En als ik uit roeijen hen staan er gedurig alderhande volk op mijn vloer. Dc haal zo veel kinderen als een Stads-Vroemoer. Quoted from Jeroense by Van Lennep and Ter Gouw I, 91. 76. Hansen argues that the baby in the painting appears to be asleep, rather than dead. She sees this as a tribute to Ruysch's renown as an innovative embalmer, who developed new methods for making corpses\u00E2\u0080\u0094particularly infant corpses\u00E2\u0080\u0094appear life-like. Hansen 675. I would argue that Ruysch's mastery of embalming techniques serves to further secure his mastery over -the dead body. 77. According to the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal an assertive response to the question, \"Zie je de Volewijk wel?\" or, \"Do you see the Volewijk?\" indicated that a woman would survive the perils of the voyage. Woordemboek 746. 256 78. In Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), Richard Sennett argues that master images of the body: the body as whole, complete, one, and coherent\u00E2\u0080\u0094the body as body politic\u00E2\u0080\u0094speak the vocabulary of power. To this he contrasts the sacred image of the body: the body at war with itself, which is a source of suffering and unhappiness, and is dissonant and incoherent within. To understand the sacred body is not to dominate the world, while to deny the sacred body is to seek power. Sennett 15-27. 79. Grosz, \"Body of Signification\" 92. 80. There were about a half-dozen \"beschrijvingen\" published in this decade. The civic histories I have consulted are O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1663); Tobias van Domselaer, Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam van haar eerste beginselen. oudtheydt. vergrootingen. gebouwen en geschiedenissen tot op den Jare 1665 (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz Doornick, 1665); and M . Fokkens, Beschryvinge der Wijdt-vermaarde Koop-Stadt Amstelredam (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz. Doornik, 1662). 81. For example, former burgomaster Comelis Witsen, whose public career is detailed in the book, commissioned Dapper's civic history. It seems that Witsen also provided Dapper with papers and documents, as the city archives were closed to the public. See the editor's note at the end of a recent republication of the book, J.H. van den Hoek Ostende, \"lets over de Auteur en Zijn Werk,\" Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam, by O. Dapper (Amsterdam: B.V. Buijten and Schipperheijn, 1975) n.p. 82. The conspicuous position of the island in terms of its location on the page was pointed out to me by Bronwen Wilson, who immediately identified Amsterdam in this way while paging through Braun's atlas of city maps. 83. It is actually just at page forty-eight that the pagination of the book suddenly stops, so the map is located between two unnumbered pages. There are about ten unnumbered pages altogether, and then pagination recommences with page forty-nine. J. van den Hoek Ostende attributes this error to the publisher's haste to print the book. 84. This is in keeping with Lefebvre's claims that the processes of state formation work to homogenize space by violently destroying differences. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 372. 85. Spierenburg 47-48. 86. 1650 to 1690 saw a gradual decrease injustice days, which Spierenburg argues coincides with the withdrawal of the elites, 47-57, 82. 87. Spierenburg vii-x, 200-207. 257 88. The Dutch visual tradition of depicting 'city maids' is discussed in M . de Vries, Publieke Vrouwen. Zinnebeelden in de Openbare Ruimte (Amsterdam: Amazone Reeks, 1994) 27-28. The use of female allegory to represent a city is a classical tradition, which probably began in Athens with the figure of Athena in the 5th century BCE. Parallels between Amsterdam and Athens, another city that resisted monarchical models of government, were frequently drawn in the seventeenth century. An interesting discussion of the body of Athena and the body politic of Athens can be found in Andrew Stewart, Art. Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 147-150. Comparisons also were made between Amsterdam and sixteenth-century Venice, another mercantile republic. The signiiicicance of the Venetian Maid is examined in a forthcoming article by Bronwen Wilson, '\"il bel sesso, e l'austero Senato': The Coronation of Dogaressa Morosina Morosini Grimani,\" Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 73-139. 89. Tobias van Domselaer, Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam van haar eerste beginselen. oudtheydt. vergrootingen. gebouwen en geschiedenissen tot op den Jare 1665 (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz Doornick, 1665). 90. E. Grosz, \"Bodies-Cities,\" Space. Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995) 106. 91. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 1651, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 92. Grosz, \"Bodies-Cities\" 106. 93. Barbara Johnson, \"Women and Allegory,\" The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)61. 94. In each case, Amsterdam's regents advocated peace treaties with the Republic's enemies. Not only was peace more conducive to the smooth functioning of trade, but it also curtailed the powers of the stadholder, the Republic's military commander. J.L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd., 1974) 3-11, 26-29. 95. Spierenburg 54. 96. Grosz details the tensions between state power and commerce in \"Bodies-Cities\" 107. 97. The meanings of these types of attributes are discussed in Linda Nead, The Female Nude-Art. Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992) 8. 98. Drawing on the work of Paul de Man, Johnson argues that allegory forces recognition of the difference between signifier and signified, thus revealing the very impossibility of reading. Johnson 63-67. 99. The viewing of a classical female body is analyzed in Nead 2. 100. Armstrong 7. 258 101. These are catalogued in d'Ailley. 102. See Lefebvre's discussion of \"representations of space\" 38-39. 103. Grosz, \"Bodies-Cities\" 107. 104. Lefebvre 275. 105. \"In this sense, nature is a passivity on which culture works as male (cultural) productivity supersedes and overtakes female (natural) reproduction.\" Grosz, \"Bodies-Cities\" 106. 106. As Paul de Man puts it, \"...allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self.\" Quoted in Johnson 62-63. The Maid, therefore, is a floating signifier. 107. Hippolytus de Vrye, De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks. 1683, eds. E.K. Grootes and Rob Winkelman (Amsterdam: Querido, 1988). 108. Schama 445. 109. The political aims of this booklet are discussed in section II, \"Passion over Reason: Mercantile Marriage,\" of Chapter 3 of this thesis. 110. ...komt de sevende zeer onverwacht te voorschijn, want de vrouw begint zo bang te zien, zo te kreunen, te steunen en te kraken, dat het schijnt of ze naar de Volewijk om een Popje wil varen: Tien Vermakelikheden 67. The reason that this birth is unexpectedly premature is because, in a typical farce scenario, the wife is having another man's child, and has duped her cuckolded husband into believing that it is his. 111. ...dan zal zij zich zo druk maken dat al de zeilen slap voor de mast zullen hangen en het Volewijks schuitje zal terstond tegenwind en -stroom hebben. Tien Vermakelikheden 68. 112. Maar helas, hij ziet dat al de tronien der wijfjes zeer bedrukt naar elkander kijken, dat de een begint te bidden en de ander te schreien, want het Volewijks schuitje drijft geheel ten achteren en krijgt gans tegenwind en -stroom, ja, het raakt zo uit de koers, dat vrouw of kind en misschien allebei om hals zullen raken. Tien Vermakelikheden 70. 113. The publishing history of The Ten Pleasures is detailed in De Grootes and Winkelman 115-116. Van Lennep and Ter Gouw claim that Jeroen Jeroense, publisher and author of Koddige en Ernstige Opschriften. was a pseudonym for Hieronymus Sweerts. 259 114. According to Kristeva, bodily excretions dissolve boundaries between the interior and exterior of the body, thus provoking feelings of disgust, even horror: These body fluids, this defilement, this shit of what life withstands, hardly, and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.... Such waste drops so that I might live, until from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit\u00E2\u0080\u0094cjderg, cadaver. Kristeva 3. In this engraving, the smoke that rises from the secretions of the pregnant body brings the eye to the border of the image, and so to the corpse, the horrific extreme of bodily waste. 115. Kristeva 101. 116. Also of importance to this discussion is Sigmund Freud, \"The Uncanny,\" 1919, Art and Literature, ed. J. Strachey and A. Dickson. Pelican Freud 14. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 339-376. The two bodies that Kristeva most associates with abjection: the decomposing cadaver and the maternal body, are connected to Freud's notion of the 'unheimlich,' or the uncanny, \"that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.\" Freud 340. Freud has argued that the sight of dismembered limbs, the return of the dead, and~particularly for men\u00E2\u0080\u0094the female genital organs, all arouse the uncanny. \"This unheimlich place...is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.\" Freud 368. For Freud, therefore, uncanny anxiety is linked to the origins of the subject, and thus is always connected to the fear of castration. Yet, as has often been argued before, while the Freudian narrative of origins is useful for its explanations of sexual difference and misogyny, it is premised upon heterosexual male desire. The journey from pre-Oedipal wholeness to Oedipal separation from the mother has certain well-rehearsed limitations, for it always ends with the construction of passive castrated feminine and dominating phallic masculine subject positions. See the discussion of \"women's corporeal flows\" in E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 202-210. 117. As Elizabeth Grosz argues: It is women and what men consider to be their inherent capacity for contagion, their draining, demanding bodily processes that have figured so strongly in cultural representations, and that have emerged so clearly as a problem for social control. Volatile 197. 118. Och komt dit van trouwen, so waag ik het mijn leven niet. Be geloof wel dat het plezierig is bij een Sinjeur te slapen, maar dit Volewijks varen heeft gans geen vermaak in zich. Tien Vermakelikheden 72. 119. The Ten Pleasures focuses mainly on the misery of men who have made poor marriage choices. Here, both men's and women's suffering are blamed on the excesses of female behaviour. 120. The biblical text is Genesis 3:16. 260 121. Natalie Zemon Davis, \"Women on Top,\" Society and Culture in Early Modern Fiance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 124-127. 122. Sawday 225. 123. Spierenburg vii-x. 124. This is the shift traced by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Francis Barker applies Foucault's insights to the growing importance of private life for seventeenm-century Protestants in The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), especially 74-77. 125. Sawday 84; Barker 62. 126. Petrus de Vernoegde, De Tien Delicatessen des Houwelicks of de Wederlegging van de Tien Vermakelijkheden des Houwelicks (Amsterdam: Thimotheus ten Hoorn, 1678). 127. \"Het schuytje heeft voor wind, en doet dit lieve tochje, met vreugde en vermaak,\" Tien Delicatessen 75. 128. Nead 32. 129. Johnson argues that this is the function of female allegories. Johnson 59. 130. A recent essay on these issues is Moira Gatens, \"Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic,\" Imaginary Bodies. Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996)21-28. 131. When the protagonists are Jan and Griet, the Volewijk story takes another humourous twist, for Jan de Wasser is connected to St. John the Baptist, a saint with particular connections to water, while Griet is descended from St. Margriet, the patron saint of pregnant and labouring women. The cult of St. Margriet has been explored by Jan Grauls, Volkstaal en Volksleven in het Werk van Pieter Bruegel (Antwerp: N.V. Standard Boekhandel, 1957) 13-15; and by L. Dresen-Coenders, Helse en Hemelse Vrouwen-macht onstreeks 1500 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1988) 18-19. In Amsterdam after the reformation, the convent chapel of St. Margriet was converted into a meat market. The upper floor served as the city's anatomy theatre, where public dissections were performed on criminal cadavers. Heckscher 29-31. Hansen 664. Schupbach 48-49. 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Amsterdam: Thimotheus ten Hoorn, 1678. Vos, Isaac de. Iemant en Niemant. Amsterdam: Jacob Lescailje, 1670. Vries, Jan de. \"The Decline and Rise of the Dutch Economy, 1675-1900.\" Technique. Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modem Economies: Essays in Honor of Wm. N. Parker. Ed. G. Saxonhouse and G. Wright. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1984: 149-189. Vries, Jan de. European Urbanization. 1500-1800. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Vries, J. de, and A. van der Woude. The First Modem Economy. Success. Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy. 1500-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Vries, M . de. Publieke Vrouwen. Zinnebeelden in de Openbare Ruimte. Amsterdam: Amazone Reeks, 1994. Vrye, Hippolytus de. De Biegt der Getrouwde. zynde het Tweede Peel vande Tien Vermakelijkheden des Houwelijks. Amsterdam: Hieronymous Sweerts, 1679. Vrye, Hippolytus de. De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks. 1683. Eds. E.K. Grootes and Rob Winkelman. 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Woodall, Joanna. \"Love is in the Air\u00E2\u0080\u0094Amor as motivation and message in seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting.\" Art History 19. 2 (1996): 208-246. Worp, J.A. Geschiedenis van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg 1496-1772. Amsterdam: S.L. vanLooy, 1920. Worp, J.A. Geschiedenis van het Drama en van het Tooneel in Nederland. 2 vols. Rotterdam: Langerfeld, 1908. Worp, J.A. \"Varia uit de Amsterdamsche Tooneel Wereld in de 17de Eeuw,\" Oud Holland 22 (1904): 39-47. Wumkes, G.A. (Predikant te Sneek). \"Kermissen.\" Uit Onzen Bloeitijd: Schetsen van het Leven onzer Vaderen in de XVIIe Eeuw. Ed. S.D. van Veen. Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij, 1910. Wybrands, C. \"De Amsterdamsche Schouwburg gedurende het seizoen 1658-59.\" Het Nederlandsch Tooneel 2 (1873): 246-322. 287 Wybrands, C. Het Amsterdamsche Tooneel. 1617-1772. Utrecht: J.L. Beijers, 1873. Zanden, J.L. van. The Rise and Decline of Holland's Economy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Zaretsky, Eli. Capitalism. The Family and Personal Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Zumthor, Paul. Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland. New York: MacMillan Co., 1963. 288 1.1. Children. Here you See the Life of Jan and Griet. J. Noman. 289 1.2. Salomon Saverij, Schouwburg Auditorium. 1637. 1.1 Jan Steen, The Village Schoolroom, c.l670. 291 1.2. Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Ass at School. 1556. 1.3. Jan Miense Molenaer. Family Visiting a School. 1634. 1.4. Jan Steen, The Village Schoolroom, detail. Jan Steen, The Village Schoolroom, detail. 295 1.6. Salomon Saverij, Schouwburg Auditorium. 1637. 1.7. Salomon Saverij, Schouwburg Stage. 1637. 297 1.8. Frontispiece, Petrus Wittewrongel, Oeconomia Christiana ofte Christelicke Huyshoudinghe. 1661. 298 1.9. Caspar Netscher, The Reading Lesson, c.1675. 299 1.10. Peter Paul Rubens. The Brazen Serpent, c. 1635-1639. 1.11. Jacob Ochtervelt, Family Portrait. 1663. 301 1.12. Jan Luiken. De Leiband. from Des Menschen Begin. Midden en de Einde. 1712. A D V E R T I S E M E N T MIts defen maakt men hekent alie Heeren , Dames, Borgers, Coopiieden en vctdersaaa allc Licfhebbers van Gedierre , dat regenwoar-digalhicr is tc zicn eenlevendig Djcrgcr.aamt EQUUS AQJJ ATIGL ' S , of ar.dcrstezcg-gcn,waaterofiLcepaait,i$ gevange door grootc moc\ tc cn k o & t wde Rc\'icr den Eupharit in : A M E R I C A : waar veci Schrij\crs gewag maaken , diergelijkcn niet in dc werrelt zijn foude: cn dew vl men zockt de Licflicbbery van dag tor dag aan tc quecken, cn tc toonen wat dc Na-tmiF*kaIj Moeder zijnde siller dingen ;vooribrcngen doct, ialmcn fulcksecnigc dagenvoor een kicyne prijs aaude In* eondcxs cn tncdcboigcxs vande Stad Amftcrdam laatcn rien. Rc den > om dat hetieu remarcabcl is, co dc Mectlcr van het fclfdc daarvcel mocjte enoakoirca : om gedaan heeft (4Jaarcn lang; wijl z i j - K c \ zcrlijke Majeileit daarexpreflelijk na hcert Jarcn -ockcn.cn het zelve ook vcrwagtende ii. Die begecrig of Curieus zijn mogte, om dk wondct Schcpfcl, 't wclk by getn geheugenjs van menfehen in deze Landcn gefien is: kan hem r\u00C2\u00ABr-voegen opdc Bocrcr-Markt,, in dc groote wittc Oliphant, alwaar, het felve ;te zicn is van de Morgen tot den A voat Z e g g e t y o o r t , N . B. DitrocmwaardjgeGedkrte . -5 r . j is mak ca tsm gemaakt, zoo dat \"t xclfde van yeder \u00C2\u00AB e a kan gchan-44L*&fcftt... _ . \u00E2\u0080\u0094 . . . . . . 2.1. Advertising print of a tapir from the White Elephant Inn, 1704. From Jan Velten's Album, \"Wonderen der Natuur\". 303 2.2. Jan Velten's sketch of a sea turtle, seen at the White Elephant Inn, c. 1700. 304 2.3. Jan Velten's sketch of a four-horned sheep from Arabia. 2.4. Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, Jan and Jacobus Bouman. Boys, if you want to increase your Pleasure, study this print, Because it is Tetjeroen, who can satisfy one and all. And if you want to have even more fun, Then make Paintings out of this. Cut them out carefully, and then stick them down onto stiff paper. 1. Tetjeroen has decided that he wants to try and learn the doctor's art. 2. Hey boys, listen to this, Tetje is working for a doctor. 3. Tetje learns to look at the water (urine), and see what he has to prescribe for the rich. 4. Here's Tetjeroen, he's the man, who already knows the doctor's art. 5. Tetjeroen becomes an apothecary, And mixes medicines in a beaker. 6. Tetjeroen informs the peasant, that his elixir is exorbitant. 7. Tetjeroen makes tooth powder from, the cooking down of horse's dung. 8. Here, in short, Tetjeroen is making something for those who are hoarse. 9. Tetjeroen is grunting strangely, He wants to go out and be hired as a zany. 10. Tetje's master takes him on, because he's such a joker. 11. Tetje causes great roars of laughter, and follows his master to the theatre. 12. Tetjeroen steps foreward with his master, Repzeteur (?) 13. His master's ointment he commends, says it will sort of help you mend. 14. Here Tetjeroen is selling a lot, but most of it is from his own stock. 15. Then Tetjeroen sells out you see, and his master makes him leave. 16. Tetjeroen becomes his own Boss, See him riding in a coach. 17. Tetjeroen has a funny act, for those who want to buy something from him. 18. Tetjeroen sells his wares, to one and all in the public square. 19. Tetjeroen heals a blind man, who no longer can find his way home. 20. Tetje has begun something new again, See him sitting in a barrel. 21. Tetjeroen performs strange farces, And honest people run away. 22. Tetjeroen turns eggs into swift doves. 23. Boys, you can join in the fun, because you will ride with Tetje. 24. The last thing that you see, Is Tetje in his Pyramid. U \"g u m t c r whin*, Wc\u00C2\u00AB\u00E2\u0080\u009E Atf SthhUrqcn. Smjt/euytdan n, Jfwtr, cnpl*chf\u00C2\u00ABtm.yT\u00C2\u00BBtT*tler. Atryciatti LU, j reu oj_cfi i i i j ) j i tc i i i\u00C2\u00BBjurtUffu pji): f >J\u00C2\u00ABw two; bk CflWftp hcijgr. .H V.rrlr t\u00E2\u0080\u0094<\u00E2\u0080\u00A2 iirtrrx Mr marfi-r; ^aagau. ssaesrjaw gggsSF \u00C2\u00BB s s \u00C2\u00AB Cmrceni rnaecIU fiwtf \u00C2\u00AB i l t o t / \u00E2\u0082\u00ACrt(ftam twrittwpt fijii liutc/ 9*oj Dk ban ftrmmt hooprntofflr. Urn prOrr cm in't opnitafc \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 \" \" w ^ * raSHKBRST^ ffWJSSKB\" tAjnfterdjm, Gednikt b/ Jacc-WBci /MjBounuo, op dc Nieuwcadyk, tidea de twee HMlcmaicr-%fen. 2 4 Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, Jan en Jacobus Bouman. Ss\u00C2\u00BBtfg-> \u00E2\u0080\u00A2\u00E2\u0080\u00A2>&szs&sss.' \u00C2\u00BB ^ g & r fr- 7i rr~ \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 / l K 1 . \u00E2\u0080\u009E ' l ^ L / l Capon tap oa UrtKmMJUDttj-JtatSuttttf / ' B p M j iim W D \u00C2\u00BB;\u00C2\u00ABni\u00C2\u00BBtfiaultt torn era Sxrtrt. \u00C2\u00A9M5inHttm\u00C2\u00BBi*0uiirt\u00C2\u00ABMM)*. >WD\u00C2\u00ABtlJW>tmt\u00C2\u00ABnt W\u00C2\u00BBcwm. 71 rs n i m i m 71 Fs IW1 Ca |tf4 fcMcrfl a taaar un ty&M. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2atlkinjgnlOaar'cnvrlhiitml/ GtatlxHunstt\" DJ\u00C2\u00AB(Ict Z*t trait uit \u00C2\u00ABrf\u00C2\u00A3\u00C2\u00BB DVn JM Mugtfn l ' A . i ? \u00C2\u00BB 4 ' f c , a , k; \u00C2\u00AB\u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Krttti it, W\u00C2\u00BBJ j . I U T E U A N I ) , \u00C2\u00AB J K O U \" I a , >f l i R w u ( . ( i f , 7 A . f u l f i l * , ia *c R,UI-Ut\u00C2\u00AB\u00C2\u00BB kw7\u00C2\u00BB. 2.5. Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, Ratelband and Bouwer (text the same as fig. 2.4). 2.6. Catchpenny print of Tetjeroen, Wed. C. Kok, en Van Kohn. Here, oh Youth! You are given the farcical life of Tetjeroen. 1. Tetjeroen has decided that he wants to try and learn the doctor's art. 2. Here's Tetjeroen, he's the man, who already knows the doctor's art. 3. Tetje is selling his wares, and is ready to be a conjurer. 4. Tetje already has an assistant, and he daily instructs him. 5. Here Tetje is sitting in his chair, And he's certainly a hustler. 6. From the theatre he hands around notes with a lively patter. 7. He looks at the water through a glass, To see if there's anything amiss. 8. Tetjeroen sells his wares, He only desires the pennies. 9. See what Tetjeroen has contrived, He practices his art in a barrel. 10. Tetje's art is worthy of praise, He rides a horse like a gentleman. 11. Out of the barrel he comes, Here Tetje chases his assistant away. 12. Tetje performs a new art, Mostly for money and favour. 13. Tetjeroen seeks out the peasants, To lure money from their pockets. 14. Because he does this easily, He becomes a genteel man. 15. Tetje makes medicines from, The cooking down of horse's dung. 16. Tetje gives the poor man, Something to purge himself with. 17. Here, once again, he makes a racket, As a respectable doctor's boss. 18. Tetjeroen becomes an apothecary, And mixes medicines in a beaker. 19. He wheels his medicine forth, On his barrow as he should. 20. Tetjeroen plays a scurvy trick, And takes three guilders from a peasant. 21. Here he finely grinds powders, To make the best medicine. 22. Tetjeroen says: Sir, your pulse is beating far too slow. 23. Tetjeroen! Well this is sad, Through his art he's gone quite mad. 24. Now Tetje's a boss with lots of money, Riding in the coach with-his Honey. 309 Jtrugd! gegever Tetjeroen ryn kluchtig leven. No. *7 I I P I ?VTkf M DoAen tow* fciu f\u00C2\u00AB\u00C2\u00AB, ffiwf U T<*)croen Jo I S M , DM JC Dufteit bum i ! fee*. Tette die nrtoopc TJ* m r , Ca te is Net Goockk* l i m . T\u00C2\u00BBje keeft nc tee4 \u00C2\u00ABa taedu, H.CJ \u00C2\u00ABokl of ntfttW |-rt _r; \u00E2\u0080\u0094 rt C U i-~\u00C2\u00BB> n u n - \" c o -a w w 5.-4- c cj r, CD'P C J>-C r-- \u00C2\u00AB \u00C2\u00AB > i\" 5 JS ~ to \u00E2\u0080\u00A2> \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 r\u00E2\u0080\u0094> CJ \u00E2\u0080\u00A2w cq o\" g o o \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 d coo . - - ^ -a. o \u00C2\u00AB , S u . aj CJ e i i - ! t -CJj \u00C2\u00AB-> r- \" O ^s-o^o S c o 3.9. Image of Ratio and Voluntas. Jan Goedthals en Griet Syn Wyf. 324 3.10. Insert, woodblock print of a soldier. Jan Goedthals en Griet Syn Wyf. 3.11. Insert, watercolour painting. Jan Goedhals en Griet Syn Wyf. 326 3.12. Title page, H. de Vrye, De Biegt der Getroude. 1679. 328 3.14. Floraes Mallewagen. Crispijn van de Pas Younger, 1637. 329 3 15. Catchpenny print of Spring in't Veld, Hiers of H. van der Putte. Yes Boys, bring your hopes, And buy this Print, Because here for your Money you have, The life of Spring in't Veld. 1. Here comes Dr. Stok-vis, He has hired an assistant. 2. His wife also wants to have a look at him, to see if he will suit her. 3. This assistant looks good, And the doctor names him Spring in't Veld. 4. His master has him take good herbs out of the barrel. 5. Spring in't Veld follows behind, He's going to the Theatre. 6.. Spring in't Veld plays the comedian, as he sells his master's wares. 7. Spring in't Veld nimbly acts out a farce with Klaas-klomp. 8. Now he acts as Jan Klaasen, and his wife is Saartje Jans. 9. After he sells his wares, he brings the money to his master. 10. Here he takes his leave, His master has fired him. 11. Spring in't Veld goes out courting, He wants to find a wife. 12. All at once his love is great, He takes his lover on his lap. 13. She lets him see her dowry, He thinks that he sees his bride-to-be. 14. Because they can't control their passion, They charge towards marriage in a hasty fashion. 15. And so they get married, But Spring in't Veld will soon regret it. 16. After the wedding, they have the marriage feast. 17. After eating heartily, the bridegroom and bride dance. 18. Spring in't Veld becomes a boss, Here he is with the zany Jorde. 19. Because they haven't conceived, they scratch their heads (?) 20. Spring in't Veld has got to flee, Because his wife wants to beat him, you see. 21. Now Spring in't Veld is under his wife's thumb, And cries out, have mercy, my sweet wife. 22. Here he tries to make peace, And she consents. 23. Spring in't Veld is melancholy, and becomes sick. 24. Here Spring in't Veld lies dead, leaving his wife in great need. ?a gfonrjfpd Somt raft hoopen / *\u00C2\u00A9ant fcter btbjt boo} u \u00C2\u00AB5rio / ^ct Urbtn ban .Spjitnj in 't'J\u00C2\u00A9ciSu Blf^ eimt\u00C2\u00A9octooi,gtoft-t)l\u00C2\u00ABB\u00C2\u00ABn/ ^egurTrJumtoiitimioohbtliijncii/ C r e r.i>eot fctji'iinb tort stflrlb Eiju jEetflrt b\u00C2\u00ABt fcrni tiptoe itsa iJtefteeilsriEBtBTiumitiaaiv. *>(X3eIu\u00C2\u00ABa' fcfurttjclsalsijltm VeCccroo;breUjem,\u00C2\u00A3p;tiiBitr(BrlD. fcnipOeitfctpB\"'/ 6t3Snl>on-/ipjlHBmt'BcliHiJlanipaamRHi/ m^li>u m'l E>clj finat Jjtcrraat' I^tinln'rfitlbnccrarhietocbhtm/ Viv sutlet na 'i jEneatct aaai. \u00C2\u00A9ct&ooytJiJi jSaftai UDaat. *p .spetlbiuet filaa^-Slomy Oe Jiluj:. Baojgm-HaafTt ftaar JptaDtf/ i)ii Wmf bit tod hern f!nan #?;ViSlnH\u00C2\u00BBelblr^ 6oub\u00C2\u00ABbt\u00C2\u00BBoet/ *utacStHUiai(tiuiniB)onto;je3o'rt. StTjocSt hp.oru Itetfie B\"rtl Zf l)tm bit bftuiltsjt boti. p^ilnata't Brib 10 mtlaiAoUeH tOaac 80s; bp Ip'BtooitiraXiA ^isjfrratn'e TMbBJt-IeptiniCooS/'-e^ i Uat sgn B.mrtote In rjteatoi no\u00C2\u00ABJ, |' \u00C2\u00BBnf.\u00C2\u00AB.iu:ri b^;uti; uy tu eet*i?e.CjiU tail Bel *tfcte gjffe oi JSoeSUxhocpo* ep't IfttttJn tie \"Co^nHrVt 330 3.15. Catchpenny print of Spring in't Veld, Heirs of Hendrik van der Putte. 331 CotIfmflrrDitm/ &y j. K A N N I U T T , ^ortttjfrtioopetuOt^fp/ mBt\u00C2\u00A9ttiwonlt\u00C2\u00ABfaff\u00C2\u00AB^pl){l . 3.16. Here you have the Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and his Wife. J. Kannewet (text the same as fig. 3.1). 332 3.17. Children. Here You See Before You the Life of Our Klaas and Griet. Heirs of the Widow G. de Groot and A. Van Dam. 1. Klaas loves Griet, and feels her bare breasts. Behind them is fiddler Pete, playing a love song, his very best. 2. Griet cannot restrain her love, and has given Klaas her Yes. Here people can see them getting married. 3. Klaas comes home late for supper. Griet gets up from the chair She is sitting in, and makes a big fuss. 4. Klaas tells Griet to shut up, He takes the shovel and tongs in hand, Or you'll receive a beating from me, The man must have the upper hand. 5. The angry and determined Griet grabs the tongs from him. She hits him hard and tells Klaas that now he must fear her. 6. Now Klaas has to take off his pants, Griet stands there with them in her hand. She makes a fool of him and he hits his head in shame. 7. Klaas has to sit spinning and rocking the cradle, Because Griet has the upperhand. She threatens the simpleton with a stick. 8. Griet pays Klaas a visit in the kitchen and pulls his hair, Because the pancakes he is baking have not risen. 333 lll\u00C2\u00ABart(|)ol/J\u00C2\u00BB\u00C2\u00ABa\u00C2\u00BBeKn|)^\u00C2\u00BBii'Ml\u00C2\u00ABWMl\u00C2\u00BBT^ r*\^ \u00C2\u00AB |u f l ran i tMi I > ' a l s>R?Mbtbn' \u00C2\u00ABl\u00C2\u00ABwbrmunOonM 10betbut/ ' f i^BTl t t l l l , Bjrd'ErTaitMd,Wed^S/ibcfldcGroCPtai AnianjrioDani, Bock\u00C2\u00BBctKopeiiopdcN\u00C2\u00ABw\u00C2\u00ABi\u00C2\u00ABlijk, indeGrouuBjbcl. 3.17. Children. Here You See Before You the Life of Our Klaas and Griet. Heirs of the Widow G. de Groot and A. Van Dam. 3.18. The New Jan de Wasscher. H. van Minister and Son. Jan de Wasser shall teach you something good and useful, Oh children! notice how both Griet and Jan, Have changed places with each other in a contradictory way; Housework suits the woman and trade is fitting for the man. 1. Shame, Jan! Girlish dolls games, are never for boys. 2. Girl's housekeeping fits with Griet, but not with a strong little boy. 3. 'Bikkles' is a girl's game, and therefore does not suit a boy. 4. A girl's hat on your hair? Jan! Jan! That looks ridiculous. 5. Climbing trees doesn't suit you, Leave this to the boys, wild Griet! 6. 'Kooten' is a fun game, for boys, but not for girls. 7. Well, Griet! So fearlessly riding a horse? That's more for boys, isn't it? 8. Fie! Boys, Boys! Are you crazy? With Griet as captain, you all look ridiculous. 9. See sly Griet, who flirts, While Jan makes shoes. 10. Oh Jan, o Jan, I'm afraid this marriage with Griet will lead to many regrets. 11. Here things are already going badly, For Griet is the boss, and Jan is the servant. 12. Griet cuts leather for slippers and shoes, While Jan has to do the woman's work. 13. Griet sells the leather, while poor Jan scrubs the floor as clean as he can. 14. Jan, this work suits women, He rocks the baby while he washes. 15. Jan cares for the child, while Griet does the sales, It's as if everything here is absurd. 16. Griet beats the assistant, and chases him out of the shop. 335 D E N I E U W E J A N D E W A S S C H E R . Z\u00C2\u00BBl J\u00C2\u00ABn de Wasfcher a iers goeds en nuttigs lecren, 6 Kind'ren! merkt dan op, hoe beide Griet en Jan, 1\ DD. In tegenflfijdlgheid hiet met elkaar rerkeereti; Het huiswerk voegt de Vrouw, het hand werk voegt dea Man T e A r o l U r d a i n , m B v t k a n . H t f i | nu il. v \u00C2\u00BB \u00C2\u00AB M U N S T E * <8 Z O C N , op dt W \u00C2\u00AB r a n j \u00C2\u00AB . | r i g t . N< & *** . 7 3.18. The New Jan de Wasscher. H. van Munster and Son. 336 4.1. Detail. The Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. Hendrick Van der Putte. 1. Jan de Wasser is getting married, But I'm afraid he'll regret it. 2. When the wedding ceremony is over, The feast begins. 3. Jan and Griet boldly exchange, Pants for skirt. 4. Jan and Griet, both the same, Are sailing near Volewyck. 5. Jan lies in the childbed, While his wife takes it easy. 6. Because Jan has gone out drinking, Griet goes after him with the whip. 337 4.1. Detail from The Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. H. van der Putte. 338 339 4.4. Map of Amsterdam. Woodblock print by Cornells Anthonisz, 1544. 342 4.6. Volewijk. sketch by R. Vinkeles, 1790. 343 4.7. Pieter Bast, View of Amsterdam from the North. 1599. 4.8. Jan van Neck, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. 1683. 345 4.9. Amsterdam. A s it was before the year 1400. in O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam. 346 4.10. Amsterdam, with the enlargement of the year 1482. in O.Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam. 347 4.11. A Neat Mapping Out of the Old and New Order of the City of Amsterdam, in O. Dapper, Historische Beschrijving der Stadt Amsterdam. 348 4.12. Amsterdam Maid, title print, Tobias van Domselaer, Beschryving der Stat Amsterdam. 1665. 349 4.13. Title print, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 1651. 350 4.14. The Seventh Pleasure of Marriage. Engraving illustrating chapter 7, Hippolytus de Vrye. De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks. 1683. 351 f AmfterQitm, hy Hierojiimus Sweerts, 4.15. The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, title print in Hippolytus de Vrye, De Tien Vermakelikheden des Houwelyks. 352 4.16. The Ten Delicacies of Marriage, title print, Petrus de Vernoegde, De Tien Delicatessen des Houwelicks. 1678. 353 4.17. The Ten Delicacies of Marriage, engraving illustrating chapter 7, De Tien Delicatessen des Houwelicks. 354 * Inn i\u00C2\u00BB 9*01 3*\" * ' r u T ' v \u00E2\u0084\u00A2 *\" * * 4.18. The Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. H. van der Putte (text the same as fig. 3.1). "@en . "Thesis/Dissertation"@en . "1999-11"@en . "10.14288/1.0099451"@en . "eng"@en . "Fine Arts"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en . "Graduate"@en . "Guilty pleasures : the uses of farcical prints for children in early modern Amsterdam"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10127"@en .