@prefix vivo: . @prefix edm: . @prefix ns0: . @prefix dcterms: . @prefix dc: . @prefix skos: . vivo:departmentOrSchool "Arts, Faculty of"@en, "Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of"@en ; edm:dataProvider "DSpace"@en ; ns0:degreeCampus "UBCV"@en ; dcterms:creator "Vanhaelen, Engeline Christine"@en ; dcterms:issued "2008-08-26T22:49:50Z"@en, "1993"@en ; vivo:relatedDegree "Master of Arts - MA"@en ; ns0:degreeGrantor "University of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:description "In the mid-seventeenth century, printers in the city of Amsterdam began to publish and disseminate prints which depicted, with images and words, the fictional story of Jan de Wasser. Jan de Wasser is a hen-pecked husband: his wife Griet wears the pants in their household, and forces Jan to carry out numerous domestic tasks. In this way, Jan takes on the prescribed role of the seventeenth-century Dutch housewife. The Jan de Wasser prints became extremely popular with the Dutch public: numerous printers put out their own versions of the story, and the prints maintained their popularity until the beginning of the twentieth century. This thesis seeks to explore the complex relationship between the Jan de Wasser prints and their mainly middle class Dutch audience, within the social and cultural context of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Taking the prints themselves as a starting point for this study, I have analyzed the forms of the prints: their layout, images and texts, for insights as to how they would have been understood by a seventeenth-century public. The Jan de Wasser prints draw on previous cultural traditions and transform these traditions by investing them with domestic and didactic meanings. As the prints were issued by different printers, they were edited, reworked and injected with new uses and new meanings. Because of their production, contradictory meanings coexist within the forms. The themes of the prints link them to concepts of marriage, women's roles, the education of children and the importance of the home and family which were being reworked in the late seventeenth century. This thesis will examine connections between the Jan de Wasser prints and shifting understandings of the importance of domestic life in defining both the individual and the nation. The contradictory meanings inherent in the prints reveal the struggle involved in redefining these issues. While they present the reader with the dominant ideologies of the day, the prints also retain vestiges of previous ways of life. In the final analysis, the conflicting meanings of the Jan de Wasser prints allow for various readings and uses of the prints. The cultural consumption of the prints indicates a range of subject positions which were possible in the social and cultural context of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Thus the Jan de Wasser prints played an important role in constructing middleclass identity at this historical moment."@en ; edm:aggregatedCHO "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/1514?expand=metadata"@en ; dcterms:extent "6940477 bytes"@en ; dc:format "application/pdf"@en ; skos:note "FASHIONING IDENTITY:THE JAN DE WASSER PRINTS AND THE BURGHER CLASSbyENGELINE CHRISTINE VANHAELENB.A., The University of Western Ontario, 1990A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFMASTER OF ARTSinTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES(Department of Fine Arts)We accept this thesis as conformingto the required standardTHE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIASeptember 1993© Engeline Christine Vanhaelen, 1993In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanceddegree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make itfreely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensivecopying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of mydepartment or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying orpublication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my writtenpermission.(Signature)Department o ^-761/43-L,1-SThe University of British ColumbiaVancouver, CanadaDate ^7,7 trtel DE-6 (2/88)iiABSTRACTIn the mid-seventeenth century, printers in the city ofAmsterdam began to publish and disseminate prints whichdepicted, with images and words, the fictional story of Jan deWasser. Jan de Wasser is a hen-pecked husband: his wife Grietwears the pants in their household, and forces Jan to carry outnumerous domestic tasks. In this way, Jan takes on theprescribed role of the seventeenth-century Dutch housewife. TheJan de Wasser prints became extremely popular with the Dutchpublic: numerous printers put out their own versions of thestory, and the prints maintained their popularity until thebeginning of the twentieth century.This thesis seeks to explore the complex relationshipbetween the Jan de Wasser prints and their mainly middle classDutch audience, within the social and cultural context ofseventeenth-century Amsterdam. Taking the prints themselves asa starting point for this study, I have analyzed the forms ofthe prints: their layout, images and texts, for insights as tohow they would have been understood by a seventeenth-centurypublic. The Jan de Wasser prints draw on previous culturaltraditions and transform these traditions by investing them withdomestic and didactic meanings. As the prints were issued bydifferent printers, they were edited, reworked and injected withnew uses and new meanings. Because of their production,contradictory meanings coexist within the forms.The themes of the prints link them to concepts ofiiimarriage, women's roles, the education of children and theimportance of the home and family which were being reworked inthe late seventeenth century. This thesis will examineconnections between the Jan de Wasser prints and shiftingunderstandings of the importance of domestic life in definingboth the individual and the nation. The contradictory meaningsinherent in the prints reveal the struggle involved inredefining these issues. While they present the reader with thedominant ideologies of the day, the prints also retain vestigesof previous ways of life.In the final analysis, the conflicting meanings of the Jande Wasser prints allow for various readings and uses of theprints. The cultural consumption of the prints indicates arange of subject positions which were possible in the social andcultural context of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Thus the Jande Wasser prints played an important role in constructing middleclass identity at this historical moment.iv10223751TABLE OF CONTENTSAbstractTable of ContentsList of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroductionSection One^Production, Dissemination andLongue Dur6eSection Two^The Imprints of Popular Festiveand Theatrical TraditionsSection Three Audience:^The^ContestedBoundaries of The Burgher ClassSection Four The Gendered Subject: Women, theDomestic and MarriageSection Five The Comic and the Didactic:Children, Education, Games andthe Ambiguous Body 65Section Six^Carnivalesque Inversions:Social Protest or Social Control?^81Endnotes 87Bibliography^ 101Figures 111Figure 1LIST OF FIGURESHere Young People May View at Leisure TheVCareer and Life of Jan de Wasser 111Figure 2 Section of fig. 1, Here Young People MayView at Leisure The Career and Life of Jande Wasser 113Figure 3 Children, Here You See Before You the Lifeof Our Klaas and Griet 114Figure 4 Children, Here You See the Life of Jan andGriet 116Figure 5 Here^is the Career and Life of Jan deWasser and His Wife 118Figure 6 Detail from The Life of Jan de Wasser andHis Wife 120Figure 7 The Revised Jan de Wasscher 122Figure 8 Lamme Goedzak.^Le Bon Guillaume 124Figure 9 Everything is Here, The Old Jan Dressed Upin the New Style.^What's in Store for Himis Certainly the Same Joy and Sorrow 126Figure 10 The World Upside Down 127Figure 11 The Battle for the Pants 129Figure 12 The^Theatre^of^the^Crazy^People^ofAmsterdam 130Figure 13 Children's Games 131viACKNOWLEDGEMENTSMany people have contributed to this work. My advisors,Rose Marie San Juan and Maureen Ryan, have shared many creativeinsights and suggestions. Leslie Nordtvedt, Christine Kooi,Bronwen Wilson and Joseph Monteyne have been supportive andgenerous with ideas and resources.My curiousity about Dutch folktales stems from stories toldby my parents, Andra and Iet Vanhaelen. Their interest andenthusiastic help in offering translations have been invaluable.I thank my sister, Joanne Ernest, for her understanding andsupport, and also my brother, Jean Baptiste, who doesn't quitesee the humour of 'Sint Jan de Wasser'.I am especially grateful to Ray Geurkink, for all of hishelp and tireless encouragement.1IntroductionThe commercial success of the group of woodblock printsdepicting the theme of \"Jan de Wasser\", or John the Washer isindisputable. First published by Amsterdam printers in thesecond half of the seventeenth century, this type of print wasa staple in the repertory of over thirty different Dutch andBelgian publishers of 'catchpenny prints' for well over twocenturies. What was the appeal of these prints for theirreaders? All of the prints present a version of the story ofJan de Wasser and his wife, Griet. Most begin with scenes ofthe courtship and marriage of Jan and Griet. Soon after thewedding celebration, however, Jan comes to regret his choice ofmarriage partner, for the couple begins to fight over who willrule their household. The domineering Griet gains the upperhand in this battle, and forces Jan to give up his trousers inexchange for her apron. From then on, Griet 'wears the pants'in their family, while the 'hen-pecked' Jan takes on theprescribed role of a Dutch housewife, and is constrained to doa variety of mundane domestic chores, from scrubbing pots towashing dirty diapers.This theme of marital inversion was certainly familiar toseventeenth-century publics, for it was derived from centuries-old carnival traditions, comic farces and oral tales, andappeared in numerous forms of visual representation throughoutWestern Europe. The Jan de Wasser prints, however, aredistinctive in that they rework the well-established theme of2marital inversion in order to address particular domesticconcerns. Choosing a marriage partner, raising children, and,strangely enough, doing housework, were crucial issues formembers of the seventeenth-century Dutch middle class as theystruggled to fashion a coherent identity for themselves in themidst of political, social, economic and cultural shifts.In 1648, the United Provinces of the Netherlands signed theTreaty of Munster, ending an eighty-year war with Spain. Havingovercome the domination of their Roman Catholic rulers, theUnited Provinces organized themselves as a sovereign Protestantrepublic, resulting in a weakening of the traditional nobilityand clergy of the Netherlands. As established socialhierarchies broke down, a newly empowered group of middle classburghers, a literate and wealthy group, emerged as the leadersof the new republic.' One of the ways in which this new rulingclass redefined the operation of social power was through thereworking of cultural traditions. I will be examining how thepopular Jan de Wasser broadsheets functioned in Dutch society asthey actively participated in these social shifts, and operatedas a site for the continuous reformulation of the status of themiddle class Dutch subject during the late seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries.Almost every major study of seventeenth-century Dutchsociety and culture argues that issues surrounding domestic lifewere crucial to the fashioning of a specific Dutch middle classidentity. In the course of my research, I have drawn on the3works of Simon Schama, A.T. van Deursen, Alice Clare Carter,Mary Frances Durantini, David Smith and Bertha Mook for theirinterpretations of Dutch domesticity. While these studies arefilled with insights into the character of seventeenth-centuryDutch society and culture, the question of the actual processesthrough which Dutch subjectivity was constructed at thishistorical moment still requires attention. It is towards thisend that I undertake this analysis of the range of readings anduses which the Jan de Wasser prints allowed. As will bedeveloped in this thesis, the often contradictory meanings ofthe prints reveal that the growing importance of domestic lifewas a process fraught with anxieties and ambiguities, and a newcultural identity did not completely wipe out previous ways oflife. Thus, while the Jan de Wasser prints functioned as alocus for the hold that the ideologies of middle class identityhad on Dutch subjects, the diverse uses and perceptions of theprints also suggest ways in which readers could resist thedominant ideologies of the day. Consequently, the 'Dutchsubject' emerges as a divided and provisional entity, whooccupies shifting and contradictory positions.' As Paul Smiththeorizes, resistance can take place in culture. But hestresses that, \"it takes place only within a social contextwhich has already construed subject-positions for the humanagent.\"' This study explores some of the disparities betweenprescribed behaviour and how people lived, between theconstraints imposed by the Jan de Wasser prints and individual,4subjective experience. In this way, the Jan de Wasser printsfunction as a site of struggle and resistance as well as alocation of appropriation and acceptance,` indicating theprocesses by which middle class identity was fashioned and therange of subject-positions which were available to Dutch middleclass subjects within the social and cultural context of thistime.The vitality of the Jan de Wasser prints can be linked topeculiarities of their production. There were no strictcontrols governing print production in seventeenth-centuryAmsterdam and these types of prints were cheaply and hastilyproduced by profit-seeking printers who pieced together bits andpieces which they culled from various genres. This processgenerated complex cultural mixtures, giving the prints theirdisparate character and facilitating their numerouscontradictory readings and uses. As a result of the variablesof their production, the prints resemble what Roger Chartier hastermed \"a mix of forms and themes, invention and tradition,literate culture and folklore.\" 5 Consequently, the printsoperated as dynamic forms with great potential for furtherdevelopment, allowing them to survive for centuries.The prints borrow from a number of communal festivetraditions, such as the carnival and the theatre, and combinethem with themes usually found in household advice books.Because of this contradictory mixture, practices of oral culturelinger in the forms and mingle with attributes of written5culture. As we shall see, the prints were edited to constructa reader who was less of a communal member engaged with festiveoral forms, and more of a moral private citizen influenced bydidactic literature. It should be noted here that throughoutthis thesis I have used a broad definition of 'reading' as acreative practice which encompasses various uses andunderstandings of images as well as words. Implicit in thisconcept of reading is the notion that the reader is never thecompliant subject of a monolithic text, but an agent with thefreedom to resist or accept imposed meanings. In this way,while the prints participated in a shift from oral to writtenculture, because they retained many oral characteristics, theyallowed readers to reassert communal and festive practices.My understanding of traditional festive practices has beeninfluenced by Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of the sixteenth-century carnival in Rabelais and his World. According toBakhtin, the carnival embodied the festive life of the people asit opposed official culture.' Carnival was linked to cyclicaltime, with emphasis on birth and death, change and renewal andthe suspension of hierarchies. Because the Jan de Wasser printscombine popular festive forms linked to carnival and theatretraditions with specifically Dutch middle class concernsregarding domestic life, they become what Bakhtin has called'bourgeois truncated festive forms' and lose many of thesubversive meanings of the carnival. For example, the ancestorsof the characters Jan and Griet lived in Netherlandish farces6that were connected to annual festive celebrations. However, inthe prints, these characters shake off their carnivalesqueassociations as they are transformed into a burgher coupleplagued by domestic concerns.As Stuart Hall points out, culture is not merely a 'way oflife', but also a 'way of struggle' as \"differently orientedaccents intersect in every ideological sign\".' A struggle formeaning goes on in the very forms of the Jan de Wasser prints.The prints cannot be understood as 'pure' forms of popularculture. In many ways, they were the products of 'officialculture', for these broadsheets were distributed in schools andplayed a role in the education of children. Thus they wereinvested with constraints and controls which dictated didacticuses for them. However, readers also maintained the comic andfestive associations of the prints by using them to play gamesof chance. My analysis of the Jan de Wasser prints demonstratesthat 'print culture' operates as a shifting network of practicesand uses of printed objects which contributed to the definitionof middle class culture in Dutch society. However, printedmatter was also given meaning by the cultural and socialpractices of the day. Therefore, 'culture' emerges as a complexnetwork of meaning that was generated from a variety ofdiscourses and practices.'This issue is central to current debates in the field ofpopular culture. Theorists such as Bakhtin have argued that theinversion of a fixed hierarchy such as the husband/wife7relationship has subversive meanings and can function as acriticism of the social order.' However, other scholars statethat these types of inversions ask to be righted rather thanchanged.\" Thus, should the Jan de Wasser prints be understoodas criticisms of larger political structures, or as a means ofreasserting social norms? I hope to show that there might bemore productive frameworks for understanding the operation ofJan de Wasser prints in Dutch society. A close analysis of theforms and their uses reveals the multiple ways in which theprints functioned as a site where subjectivity was formulatedand redefined, revealing a range of subject-positions availableto Dutch subjects who neither completely accepted nor totallyresisted the social structures of their day.As the starting point for an investigation of the Jan deWasser broadsheets, it is necessary to understand the range ofprints in question. The first section of this thesis exploresthe prints as objects and investigates their production,duration and dissemination mainly within the context of theflourishing printing industry of Amsterdam. Section II examinesthe imprints of oral and communal festive traditions. A closeanalysis of the forms of the prints gives insights into theintermingling of oral and written cultural practices and pointsto the diverse constituency which this cultural mixture reached.The various reading practices which the prints permittedindicate a range of readers. Section III investigates how thecontradictory ways in which the prints could be read reveal a8society which was not homogenous. While the prints participatein the attempts of official culture to smooth over internaldivisions within the middle class and to distinguish this classfrom perceived inferior and superior groups, they also take partin schisms within the Dutch middle class and blur boundariesbetween this class and those who were considered outsiders.Section IV and V both explore the ways in which the Jan deWasser prints were infused with domestic and didactic concernsand the particular importance which these issues had in thefashioning of individual and national identity. Section IVlinks the emergence of the prints in the second half of theseventeenth century to changing definitions of marriage andgender roles. In this section, some of the particular meaningsthat the domestic sphere had for the Dutch Republic are outlinedwith an emphasis on women's roles. Section V looks at theprints' didactic functions in the context of the education ofchildren. These didactic functions struggled against thecontradictory comic and festive ways in which the prints wereused in children's games. This struggle between comic anddidactic understandings of the prints also takes place indepictions of the body and bodily functions. The visual andtextual editing of representations of the body introduce newmeanings into the prints and give insights into the shiftingseventeenth-century understanding of the body.In a brief conclusion, I will address the debate overwhether the prints functioned as a form of social protest or as9a mode of social control. The late seventeenth century was atime of political crisis in the Netherlands, and the possibilityof the subversive potential of the Jan de Wasser prints will beexamined in this context. This section questions the usefulnessof the social protest/social control debate and points to otherapproaches for analysing the operation of popular culture.1 0I. Production, Dissemination and Longue DureeIn the mid-seventeenth century, when the first Jan deWasser prints were published, there were four hundred andeighteen known booksellers and printers in Amsterdam, which wasthe largest centre of catchpenny print production in theNetherlands.\" The substantial production of printed materialoperated as both a response and a stimulant to the demand forreading matter. While much of this output was for the foreignmarket, a large local market was necessary to sustain such athriving printing industry .12The size of the audience for printed publications led toincreased specialization by printers. Based on the survivinginventories of many of the workshops that published the Jan deWasser prints, it seems that these firms were able to make aliving by specializing in the printing of ephemera such ascatchpennies and chapbooks.\" Printers often were backed bywealthy publisher-patrons to cover the cost of producingexpensive books. However, ephemera were not generally supportedby patrons, and as printers produced these types of prints attheir own expense, the costs for generating this material waskept quite low.\" Catchpenny prints were usually printed onpoor quality paper from woodcuts and wornout fonts of type.While woodcuts required initial labour and cost to engrave, theywere reusable and could last for centuries.\"In the case of Jan de Wasser (see, for example, figure 1),each small scene is a separate woodblock. The basic layout of11all the different versions of the prints follows a formula. Theimages are organized in rows in a grid-like structure; eachimage depicts a scene in the story and is surrounded by heavydark lines. Beneath each scene is one or two lines of simpledescriptive text, printed from moveable type. As the blockswere passed down to different printing houses, the familiarimages could be updated by being combined with different text.To keep costs down, the prints were hastily produced andproofreaders were a luxury that only the most prosperous firmscould afford. Thus, errors were the status quo\", and blockswere sometimes arranged in the wrong order, or accompanied bytext which had grammatical and spelling errors.Knowledge of the market was crucial as printers could onlyafford to publish what would sell. Therefore they frequentlyreworked previous popular traditions into a new format, andoften augmented their stock by copying successful prints thatwere put out by their competitors.\" Decisions to print aparticular text, format and press run depended mainly on thecharacter and extent of the public that the printers perceivedto constitute a potential clientele.\" It seems that Amsterdamprinters and booksellers had a reputation for printing forprofit. In 1662, a Dutch writer cited the following adage,\"'Men will always seek their own interests, even to thedisadvantage of others'\", and added, \"No one practices this morethan certain profit-seeking booksellers.\"\" Printing for profitresulted in prints that were filled with multiple errors and12inconsistent mixtures of elements from disparate genres anddifferent times. These variables endowed the prints withnumerous contradictory readings, giving them great vitality.Because of their versatility of form and theme, the Jan deWasser prints remained a much-published and widely distributedprint from the seventeenth up to the beginning of the twentiethcentury. Throughout their longue dui-6e, different groups andindividuals utilized, appropriated and transformed the prints,creating a large public for them. Jan de Wasser woodblocks wereowned by more than thirty different printing houses during thethree centuries of their production. Given the large outputpossible with woodblocks, and the fact that some printersdistributed different renderings of this subject, thousands ofJan de Wasser prints must have been disseminated throughout theLow Countries over the course of three centuries. Only a minutenumber survive, however, as the prints were not treated asprecious objects to be saved, but as possessions of little valuewhich had a transient existence.That a number of Jan de Wasser prints have endured untiltoday is largely due to the efforts of C.F. Van Veen, atwentieth century Dutch collector of popular prints. Several ofthe prints that I will be examining were part of Van Veen'scollection. He reproduced many of his prints in twopublications: Dutch Catchpenny Prints: Three Centuries of Pictorial Broadsides for Children of 1971, and CatchpennyPrints: Dutch Popular and Children's Prints of 1976.^His13collection was auctioned off in 1984 after his death and some ofthe Jan de Wasser prints are reproduced in the Sotheby'scatalogue, The Van Veen Collection of Children's Books andJuvenilia. Other Jan de Wasser prints have been reproduced intwo major studies of Dutch and Belgian prints: Emile van Heurckand G.J. Boekenoogen's L'Imagerie Populaire des Pays-Bas: Belgique-Holland of 1930 and Maurits de Meyer's De Volks- enKinderprent in de Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e Eeuw of1962. The works of Van Heurck, Boekenoogen and de Meyer alsodescribe a few Jan de Wasser prints which are not reproduced intheir books. Thus, while I am aware of the existence of somedifferent editions of this subject, I have not been able tolocate published copies of these versions.Although there will be some gaps in my analysis, it ispossible to trace the development of the Jan de Wasser printsthrough several generations of printers. All sources agree thatthe earliest known print of this popular subject entitled, Here Young People may View at their Leisure the Life and Career of Jan de Wasser (fig. 1), was published in the mid-seventeenthcentury by an anonymous printer. The Sotheby's catalogue statesthat the forty-eight woodblocks of this version later were usedby the de Groot firm of Amsterdam (1656-1757).\" According toMeyer, a few prints survive that were printed from theseseventeenth-century woodblocks by the eighteenth-centuryAmsterdam firms of Kannewet (1725-1780), which took over thestock of de Groot; and Ratelband and Bouwer (1774-1799), which14often copied prints by de Groot and Kannewet.' Van Veen'scollection includes a sixteen block print (fig. 2) whichillustrates a segment of this version and would have been soldat a lower price.The de Groot firm published a later version of the Jan deWasser story entitled, Children, Here You See Before You theLife of Our Klaas and Griet (fig. 3). De Groot was one of thelargest seventeenth-century producers of catchpenny prints andthe earliest known firm to publish the Jan de Wasser theme.Four generations of the de Groot family operated the companyfrom 1656 to 1759. Figure 3 was put out by the firm of theWidow Gysbert de Groot and A. Van Dam (1692-1739) of Amsterdam.The Widow de Groot was Hendrina Blaeu of the Blaeu family whoran one of the largest and most influential publishingbusinesses of Amsterdam. Hendrina Blaeu also had relatives inthe firms of Lootsman and Van Der Putte, which were the othertwo most important seventeenth-century producers of catchpennyprints in the city. 22 Thus, there were significant family andbusiness connections between the different firms that publishedthe Jan de Wasser prints. The stock of de Groot was taken overby the firm of Kannewet (1710-1780), which, as we have seen,also published the forty-eight block version of Jan de Wasser.Kannewet's blocks became the stock of Stichter, another largeAmsterdam firm (1646-18--) and were later used by J. Noman(1814-1830). 23 In the nineteenth century, many Belgianpublishers of popular prints formed their stock by buying up15woodblocks at the liquidation of Dutch firms.'^Thus, theoriginal stock of de Groot eventually became the property of thelarge Belgian printer, P.J. Brepols of Turnhout.In the eighteenth century, the Amsterdam firm of Van derPutte, the large establishment that was connected to the deGroot family firm, published another new version of the Jan deWasser theme. I have only found a detail of this renditionwhich was printed by Hendrick Van Der Putte (1761-1767) and isentitled The Life of Jan de Wasser and his Wife (fig. 6).Wendel of Amsterdam (1788-1842) copied the text of this printbut had new blocks carved to update the story which was giventhe title Here is the Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and His Wife. The blocks that were used by Wendel may have been passedon to the Widow de Roode and Son of Zaandam (1796-1798) (fig.5), and later were given updated text by Van Kolm of Amsterdam(1785-18--) (fig. 7). Broese and Company of Breda used the textof Van Kolm and had new blocks carved to give the story anineteenth-century setting (fig. 9).P.J. Brepols of Turnhout, the nineteenth-century firm whichinherited the seventeenth-century stock that originally belongedto the de Groot family, published a few revised versions of Jande Wasser. Turnhout was a nineteenth-century centre of popularimage making in the northern Belgian province of Anvers, whichis near the Dutch border. Other Belgian firms such as Wellensand Delhuvenne, and Glenisson and van Genechten also published16versions of the Jan de Wasser theme in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.Throughout the history of their production, the Jan deWasser prints were continuously altered. By examining thevarious representations in more detail, certain patterns ofchange emerge. Several later prints seem generally more linear,with a recognizable narrative sequence. They also appear to beless abusive and sexual, and increasingly moralizing. Theirlanguage is refined and they tend to focus on details ofdomestic chores and childrearing.In the earliest renditions of the Jan de Wasser story, Janis only slightly victimized by his wife. While he does all ofthe housework, he also beats his spouse and she does notdominate him. In the first Jan de Wasser print (fig. 1), Jan'swife is named 'Bottheid', which plays on Dutch words for stupidand noisy. She does not play a major role, appearing in only afew scenes in which Jan beats her (1:13 and 1:23) and ends hisday by getting into bed with her (1:48). There is no easilydiscernable narrative sequence in the early versions. Many ofthe scenes do not seem connected to each other. Van Veensuggests that this is because the story of Jan de Wasser is ashortened account of a longer folk tale. In this way, the printdepicts highlights of the story and the readers would have beenable to fill in the gaps from their knowledge of the oral tale.Possibly, the story of Jan de Wasser was an oral tale, for thefirst line of the print, \"Here comes Jan de Wasser\" resembles17formulas that were traditionally used to begin ballads offolktales.\"In the next rendering of this subject (fig. 3), Jan's wifeGriet plays a much larger role. The story begins with thecourting and marriage of Jan (named Klaas in this account) andGriet. Then their relationship turns sour as Jan/Klaas comeshome to find that supper is not ready. He goes after his wifewith the shovel and tongs, but she manages to get the upper handand forces him to surrender his trousers. From then on, Grietdominates her husband and forces him to spin, cook and care forthe child and beats him if he does not comply. The narrative ofthis version is somewhat more linear than that of earlierprints, although the couple still beats each other repeatedly.In a later printing of these blocks (fig. 4), sexual referencesare edited out of the text.By the early eighteenth century, the story took on a moredefinitive form, with a discernable narrative sequence comprisedof introduction, climax and conclusion. A twenty-four blockversion (fig. 5) begins with the wedding of Jan and Griet. Theythen exchange pants and apron and Griet instructs Jan on how todo a variety of domestic tasks, such as cooking, scrubbing pots,polishing the windows, sweeping the floors and washing thelinen. The sexual nature of marriage is denied as the coupletravels to Volewyk, a mythical island where the residents ofAmsterdam went to get babies.' After this, it is Jan who liesin the childbed, cares for, and teaches the child, while Griet18punishes Jan for any mistakes. While Griet beats Jan in severalscenes, he no longer abuses her in this account. The story endswith Jan and Griet arguing over the future of their child.In the nineteenth century, many firms began to put outrevised versions of Jan de Wasser. In 1784, a society calledthe Maatschappij voor het Nut van het Algemeen (Society forPublic Welfare) was formed. This society studied educationalmethods and aims, and therefore had a direct influence onprinters of children's ephemera and books. According to theMaatschappij voor het Nut van het Algemeen, all prints should bepatriotic, virtuous, useful and instructive.' At this time,many old prints were deemed inappropriate for use in the schoolsand were reworked by printers. Among these were the Jan deWasser prints.\" In some cases, seventeenth-century blocks weregiven updated text (fig. 7), and in other cases completely newblocks were made, with contemporary costumes and settings (fig.8 & 9).\"Since there was no censorship of print production in theDutch Republic, the numerous editing and reworkings of the Jande Wasser prints were based mostly on the printers'understandings of what would be acceptable to their audience.The changes to the prints were not merely market-driven,however, but also played a role in transforming culturalpractices. As Roger Chartier points out, because this type ofreading material imposed certain social and cultural norms, itoperated as a means of regulating the conduct and thought of the19readers.\" Thus, the Jan de Wasser prints were not 'pure' formsof popular culture, for many of their meanings were in keepingwith the dominant ideologies of the day. However, the meaningsof the prints were not determined solely by printers orinstitutions. There is a gap between the norms that weredictated and the actual uses of the prints. In this gap, theimposed cultural model was appropriated, reformulated oravoided. While the prints exerted ideological pressures, thisdoes not curtail practices which resisted the establishedmeanings.nThe Jan de Wasser prints were circulated in a number ofways. The most admissible means of distributing prints inseventeenth-century Amsterdam was by selling them in bookshops.Often printers had their own shops, but booksellers could alsobe independent business people who bought stock from printers orhired printers to produce certain texts.' The Jan de Wasserprints were probably also distributed by less legitimate means.Itinerant pedlars purchased inexpensive printed material fromprinters and then travelled to markets, fairs and cities to selltheir stock.' Pedlars were unwelcome competition for thebooksellers. Throughout the seventeenth century, thebookseller's guild of Amsterdam complained of pedlars who soldbooks, courants, tidings, songs, ballads, verses, almanacs,prognostications, leaflets and folktales in the public spaces ofthe city.\" For example, in the mid-seventeenth century, theAmsterdam bookseller's guild protested:20It is well known that more than ever complaints are heardamong our guild brothers of the decline in the booktrade...These complaints are legitimate, and can beredressed, namely, by STEMMING THE ILLEGAL BOOK TRADE. Itis generally known that there are almost no bridges orcanals without a table--in some places practically a shop--filled with books, where all can purchase books at a modestprice, to their hearts' content.\"This quote gives important insights into the book trade ofAmsterdam. First of all, the fact that pedlars were perceivedas dangerous competition by the booksellers' guild implies thatpedlars did not cater to 'popular buyers' at the bottom of thesocial scale, but rather had the same urban clientele ofmerchants and artisans who patronized the bookshops.Although the bookseller who made this statement may haveexaggerated the situation for emphasis, it does give anindication of the extent of people involved in the book trade ofAmsterdam and also of how the printing industry transformed thepublic spaces of the city. Amsterdam emerges as an urban centrewhere printed material was present everywhere. Prints were notcontained in bookshop windows, but they were sold in thestreets, bridges, and church doorways, posted on the walls oftaverns, workshops, churches and homes, carried on the person,passed from hand to hand and discussed in the markets andsquares. Thus, printed material was visible and familiar toeveryone who lived in the city, providing at least some degreeof exposure to written culture for the inhabitants ofAmsterdam.\"Recent scholarship on Dutch print culture argues that booksand pamphlets published in Amsterdam were often meant for a21national market rather than for a regional or local one.\"Itinerant booksellers bought small, low-priced, quick-profittitles in one city and then transported and distributed them inmany Dutch cities. If their stock ran low, pedlars would payprinters in the different towns they visited to reprint theitems that needed to be replenished.\" 'Foreign' works,published outside of Amsterdam, were also sold legally by localbooksellers. Records of contacts between printers andbooksellers reveal that an extensive commercial network wasestablished between those involved in the print industry invarious Dutch cities. Amsterdam printers sent agents to otherDutch cities and towns with lists of titles which theydistributed and posted. These agents also set up bookstalls atmarkets and fairs which became focal points for book sellingactivity.\" This interaction between printers and booksellersin different urban printing locations explains the disseminationof the Jan de Wasser prints to other Dutch cities such asZaandam and Rotterdam, as well as to Belgian publishing centres.While the Jan de Wasser prints probably were known in variousDutch cities, for the purposes of this study, I will focusmainly on issues pertaining to Amsterdam as a context in whichto examine the prints.22II. The Imprints of Popular Festive and Theatrical Traditions While the precise origins of the Jan de Wasser printsremain unclear, we do know that the Amsterdam printers who firstpublished these broadsheets did not invent the theme. In fact,it was to be found in communal festivals, theatrical farces, andpopular prints. Drawing on these familiar cultural forms, theprints address specific seventeenth-century Dutch concernsrevolving around the domestic and the \"national fetish ofwashing everything\" .40 The patching together of bits and piecesfrom different genres and different times gives the prints adisparate character and facilitates the number of contradictoryreadings which they allow.' Like the peculiarities ofproduction noted above, this eclectic use of sources opens uproom for different readings and uses. The reworking of oldermaterial also points to a shift in the assumed public for theprints. Thus, the sixteenth and early seventeenth-centurymaterial was modified and invested with new themes in order toaddress a late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuryaudience. However, through the revising of cultural forms andpractices, the Jan de Wasser prints also transformed theiraudience. In this way, the Dutch subject was, to borrowJonathan Crary's terms, \"both the historical product and thesite of certain practices, techniques, institutions, andprocedures of subjectification.\"\"As the Jan de Wasser prints borrowed from and transformedcommunal festive forms, they participated in a larger shift23which took place throughout Western Europe in the seventeenthcentury. A number of historical studies have shown that duringthe course of this century, societies moved away from communityinteraction in the streets, markets and neighbourhoods to asocial life which was increasingly centred on the home andfamily. At this time, state apparatuses began to intervene inseveral traditional family and kinship roles such as education,the policing of the community, aid and welfare and the controlof sexuality and marriage. As a result, the private came tomean that which was outside of the purview of the state. As thestate took on a larger role in local affairs, space and timewere reorganized and available for private activities. Thefamily withdrew into the home and began to concentrate on thefew traditional roles that it had retained such as running ahousehold, maintaining a satisfying partnership between spousesand childrearing.\" As we shall see, in the Dutch republic, thepublic/private split was also a gendered division, as women andchildren were increasingly confined to the private sphere of thehome while men retained active roles in public life.Therefore, as the Jan de Wasser prints were reworked bydifferent printers, the numerous editions took part in thislarger shift away from communal social life towards privatedomestic life. The many changes that were made to the forms didnot merely reflect this transition, but rather participated init as the prints actively constructed a reader who was more ofa private individual and less of a communal member. Indeed,24through the editions of the prints, we see Jan undergo this sameconversion. In the earliest Jan de Wasser print (fig. 1), Janis often depicted outside, socializing with neighbourhood people(See especially fig. 1: 15, 17, 20, 21), while in later ones(fig. 5), he is increasingly confined to interior domesticspaces.The grid format of the Jan de Wasser prints would have beenfamiliar to the seventeenth-century reader from popularsixteenth-century broadsheets of the 'World Upside Down' (fig.10). This indicator of genre links the Jan de Wasser prints tothe theme of a 'topsy-turvy world' and could have called upexpectations and anticipations of understanding in aseventeenth-century reader.\" The 'World Upside Down' was apopular theme in print culture throughout Europe from thesixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.\" Dutch versions of thistheme were often printed by the same firms that published theJan de Wasser prints. These broadsheets consist of a number ofmotifs depicting symbolic reversals, which were derived frommedieval farces, oral tales and carnival themes. Roger Chartierhas classified eight categories of inversion: social roles,gender roles, adult/child relations, associations between peopleand animals, relations among animals, order among the elementsof nature and the position of people and things.\" The reversalof gender roles was most often portrayed by women taking ontraditional masculine roles, such as going off to battle, whiletheir husbands stayed behind and cared for the children and the25home (see, for example, fig. 10: 3, 23). This theme of 'Womenon Top\"' which resulted in an inversion of marital rolescommonly occurred as a single vignette in gridded broadsheets ofthe 'World Upside Down' or as the sole subject of sixteenth-century broadsheets throughout Europe.The 'World Upside Down' and the various themes that fallunder the category of 'Women on Top' (for example, the 'Battlefor the Pants', the 'Hen-pecked Husband', marital beatings,unequal lovers, etc.) are all manifestations of a long traditionof ritual inversion found in forms of popular culture associatedwith public festivals. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, thefestive laughter of role-reversal had the power to invert socialstructures in order that they could be examined, criticized andregenerated.\" The incorporation of recognizable motifs fromthe 'World Upside Down' in the Jan de Wasser prints had thepotential to draw on the reader's previous knowledge of festiveforms and guide the ways in which these prints were understood.Yet, these forms were transformed and radically altered as theywere invested with specific domestic concerns. The Dutch werethe first to place the theme of 'Women on Top' in the 'WorldUpside Down' grid format and fashion from these genres acontinuous, linear narrative which centred on the domestic lifeof two named individuals.\" These new themes were foreign totraditional festive forms and were usually expressed in otherways in Dutch emblem books and didactic literature. Thisradically alters traditional festive forms and plays a role in26the specifically Dutch reworking of domestic life, which will betaken up in more depth in Section IV. Because of thistransformation, the prints played an active role in the largershift from exterior communal life to interior private life.While these prints borrowed from and reworked communal festivetraditions, they were edited in explicit and implicit ways togive them didactic value. In this way, they became what Bakhtinhas termed 'bourgeois truncated festive forms', never whollyliberated from the practical and utilitarian.\"Early prints of the theme of the 'Battle for the Pants'almost always feature some sort of spinning apparatus (see, forexample, fig. 11). Women use their spindles as weapons in thestruggle for the pants, and afterwards force the subdued men todo the traditional women's work of spinning and weaving.\"Often scenes of 'Women on Top' and the 'Battle for the Pants'took place in spinning rooms. In the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, spinning rooms were places where women gathered towork and tell stories.\" These precincts evolved into centresfor village social life as men joined women after work. As awoman's domain, spinning rooms were ideal settings for world-upside-down scenes of the power of women. However, by the mid-seventeenth century, Dutch spinning rooms were no longer aworkplace for women and a meeting place for the sexes. Rather,a spinhuis became a house of correction for female offenders.\"In the Jan de Wasser prints, the woman's work of spinning isconfined to the private sphere of the home.27Not only the themes, but also the characters of the Jan deWasser prints emerge from familiar conventions. Jan and Griethave a long history in the festive traditions of the LowCountries. Griet, the name of Jan de Wasser's wife, was acommon Netherlandish appellation for an unruly woman. In fact,the names Margaret, Greta, Margot, Griet and Magrite hadpejorative connotations throughout Europe. These names weregiven to women in prints, paintings and farces to communicatethe idea of the fool.\" In the popular comic tradition that isdescribed by Bakhtin, Griet is related to the material bodilylower stratum. In this way, she debases, brings down to earthand destroys, but she also gives birth and reasserts.\" Hernaturally grotesque body interrogates and inverts the closedbody of the private home and acts as a symbol of temporaryrelease from traditional and stable hierarchies.The name Jan de Wasser also had a place in Netherlandishfolk tradition. 'Sint Jan de Wasser' was a popular name forSaint John the Baptist. Wasser in this case refers to thecleansing powers of the waters of baptism. The summer festivalof St. John's Day and Eve, which commemorates the birthday ofthe saint, developed out of the older celebration of midsummerand occurs near the summer solstice on June twenty-third andtwenty-fourth. St. John's Day was an important festival in theLow Countries because the annual carnival was often postponeduntil this more temperate season. During this festival, it wasbelieved that water had special healing powers, and symbolic28links to purification, renewal, regeneration and fertility.'These ideas are mocked in the Jan de Wasser prints as 'Sint Jande Wasser' is transformed into a hen-pecked husband who isreduced to washing the floors, the street, the laundry, thedishes and the baby's bottom. Although, as we shall see, all ofthese housewifely tasks did have a somewhat sacred significancein seventeenth-century Dutch society.As the St. John's Day festival lost its popularity andstrength in the late seventeenth century, it seems that many ofits themes were adapted and transformed in the Jan de Wasserprints. For example, the St. John's festival was a love feast.Many of the games played during the festival were connected withmarriage and choosing a mate. Games of chance were associatedwith the theme of the folly of marriage, and the outcome of thegames was understood to determine the players' future marriages.Marriage itself was understood as a game of chance, because ofthe uncertainties of choosing a compatible mate.\" Each year abattle between summer and winter was enacted with games of tug-of-war, fighting and pulling hair. According to MikhailBakhtin, these festive thrashings had a regenerative symbolism:while they put to death the old season, they also brought aboutthe rebirth of the new in the cyclical repetitive time of thecarnival.\" The battle between the seasons was also linked tothe folly of marriage: the dominated or cuckolded husband,\"\"assumefdl the role of uncrowned old age, of the old year, andthe receding winter. He [was] stripped of his robes, mocked and29beaten.\"\" The Saint John's Day themes of the folly of marriageand festive beatings are especially evident in some of theearliest Jan de Wasser prints (figs. 1, 3 & 4).A popular fifteenth-century song and dance of this festivalwas called the paterken, or 'little monk'. In the first verseof the song, the players form a circle and a boy is chosen to gointo the middle and act the role of the little monk. He goesaround the circle once and then chooses a girl to play the roleof the little nun and leads her into the middle of the circlewhile the other players sing the first verse of the song:\"A little monk wandered by the side [of the road];He took a little nun by the hand.Chorus: It was in the middle of the day,It was in May.\"In the second verse, he kneels before the girl while the playerssing:\"So, little monk, you have to kneel;And little nun, you have to stay standing.\"Chorus...In the third verse, he embraces the nun while everyone sings:\"So, little monk, give your little nun a son.You can do that three more times.\"Chorus...Then, the boy takes his place in the circle again and the girlstays in the middle while the players sing the final verse:\"So, little monk, you have to depart;And little nun, you have to stay standing.\"Chorus...\"Bakhtin argues that this type of mocking of religious authoritywas typical festive behaviour.'30A theatrical farce of the sixteenth century which isprobably derived from the paterken dance features the amorousmisadventures of a nun and monk couple who are named SisterMargriet and Brother Jan.\" Possibly, these are the ancestorsof the Jan and Griet of the Jan de Wasser prints who aretransformed over time into a domestic burgher couple. Thecharacters Jan and Griet became stock comic figures in theseventeenth century and there were a number of farces at thistime that featured the marital troubles of a couple named Janand Griet.Theatrical farces dating back to the thirteenth centuryfrequently dealt with the theme of domestic quarrels, anddomineering wives and hen-pecked husbands were common inseventeenth-century comedies as well. In Amsterdam,rederijker's kamers, or chambers of rhetoric, made up ofcraftsmen, artisans and small shopkeepers, performed at publicand private celebrations such as weddings, civil and religiousprocessions and carnival revelries. The theatre was prevalentin Dutch urban life. Almost every town had a dramatic club andtowns competed to compose and perform the best play.\" Therederijkers often reacted to current events and the topics dealtwith in their performances were closely linked to themes thatappeared in print culture at this time.'Both the popular theatre and the prints were directed atthe same broad middle-class audience.\" However, the twomediums invoked different experiences of similar themes and31stories. Theatrical farces and festivals were communalactivities that encouraged the participation of the audience.Practices related to printed material differed from thetheatrical process, for many traits of oral culture wereretained in prints and intermingle in complex ways withattributes that are characteristic of written culture.The availability of printed material in Amsterdam and theincreased literacy of the city's inhabitants contributed to ashift from oral to silent reading practices. Private readingand writing are acts which set a person apart and cause theindividual to retreat into the self, while oral readingfunctions as a sociable, communal practice. However, whileprinted material redrew boundaries between the self and thecommunity, it did not obliterate oral practices. Complextrajectories between oral and written culture operate in thevery forms of the Jan de Wasser prints. Thus, a close analysisof the forms is necessary to understand some of the ways inwhich the Jan de Wasser prints constructed a private reader, andthe ways in which that reader was able to resist thisconstruction by reasserting oral practices.For example, while the Jan de Wasser narrative has linearand objective traits of the written form, many of its attributeslink it to oral forms. The linear narrative tells the story ofthe burgher couple as they move through space and time, pausingto describe landmarks such as their wedding day, the arrival oftheir first child and their discussions of the child's future.32However, the story also has many repetitions, a trait of oralculture, as Jan performs chore after chore, punctuated by theroutine of beatings and disputes (see especially figs. 1 & 3).The earliest Jan de Wasser prints (figs. 1 & 3) are morerepetitive, while the later prints (figs. 5 & 6) tend to assertthe linear narrative. However, all of the prints have elementsof both oral and written culture. For example, while fig. 1 isextremely repetitive and disjointed, it does have a conclusionin which order is reestablished in the chaotic household, as Janends his day happily by climbing into bed with his wife.The mnemonic devices contained in the prints also revealthe vacillation between written and oral processes of story-telling and between internal and communal experiences ofnarrative. The simple rhyming couplets of the text aredescriptive of the gestural images above them. This would serveas an aid to those learning to read, allowing the privatesubject to interiorize exterior information in a practice whichconstructs an individual that is increasingly separate from theworld. Yet, this didactic literary function can be underminedby the reader. As Roger Chartier points out, while mnemonicdevices serve as aids for those learning to read, they also makenarrative easily memorizable, which destines the text to returnto oral form.' In this way, the same forms engendercontradictory practices and the Jan de Wasser prints elicit arange of responses which fluctuated between oral and writtenreading practices. Thus, printed broadsheets such as these lie33somewhere in between the two traditions of oral and silentreading practices. Indeed, these two forms of sociabilitycannot be treated as totally separate customs. There is a widerange of attitudes towards and uses of print culture thatfunction between private individual reading and passivelistening to the spoken word. In this way, the Jan de Wasserprints act as site where different reading practicesoverlap.\"A series of late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuryplays that were performed in Amsterdam have themes andcharacters that bear a resemblance to those of the Jan de Wasserprints. Maurits de Meyer points out the similarity between thestory of Jan de Wasser and a klucht, or farce, by Cornelis deBie entitled Jan Goethals en Griet syn wyf (Jan, the GoodSimpleton and Griet, his Wife) of 1670 which deals with themarital problems of a couple named Jan and Griet.\" Een KwaGriet Getemd of 1649 (A Difficult Griet is Tamed) is about themarriage of a woman named Griet and a lawyer. Griet's parentsare Jan Goedbloedt (Goodblood) and Griet. The farce begins withJan Goedbloedt telling of his unhappy marriage to Griet. Thenthe lawyer takes over and decides to tame his wife Griet. Hedoes this by tying her up in a cradle and treating her like ababy until she agrees to behave.\" This play is referred to inanother farce called Rombout and his Wife in which the husbandindicates that if his wife acts like a 'kwa Griet' he will takehis cue from Jan and tame her.' This offhand reference to Jan34and Griet seems to indicate an expectation that the audiencewould have been familiar with these characters and their maritalstruggles.In Broekdragende Griet Genezen (Griet who Wears theTrousers is Cured) of 1683, Griet pretends to be dead andlistens for her husband's reaction to the news. Needless tosay, the husband, who has been hen-pecked by Griet throughouttheir married life, is quite glad to hear of her demise.\" InDe Feeks (The Shrew) a couple named Jan and Griet have a fight.Jan goes to his mother and Griet's father to get them to talkwith her. She convinces them that it is Jan's fault. At theend, the sheriff comes to collect a fine from Griet (who wasfound guilty of breaking Jan's nose) and the family quicklyhushes things up.\" This is an interesting indication of howmarital quarrels became the jurisdiction of the state ratherthan of the community.Aspects of the Jan de Wasser prints were probably derivedfrom these types of popular farces.'\" Visually, the prints bearthe imprint of the theatre. In the late seventeenth-centuryprint published by Hendrina Blaeu (fig. 3), Klaas and Griet arewearing different costumes in every scene. In all of theseventeenth and eighteenth-century prints, the scenes arecontained in shallow box-like spaces, which resemble stage sets.The action is directed outward for the audience through thevivid rhetorical gestures and expressions of the characters,which seem to recall a comic dialogue.35These rhetorical gestures create a second unwrittenperformative narrative. The texts below the images are simpledescriptions: Jan de Wasser scrubs the street / Jan teaches thechild to walk / Jan and Griet argue, etc. However, the bodilygestures of the figures function as signs for missing words.'This indicates the link between the prints and contemporarytheatre, where well-known gestures recall a dialogue betweencharacters. For example, the pointing finger of the ministercalls up for a seventeenth-century public the familiar words ofthe wedding ceremony as Jan and Griet join hands in thedextrarum iunctio, a gesture which indicates the solemnizationof marriage (fig. 5: 1). Dialogue is also indicated as Grietpoints as she gives instruction on how to do the housework (fig.5: 4), Jan and Griet argue over the future of their child (fig.D: 24), Jan gossips with the women (fig. 1: 20), Jan makes funof the neighbours (fig. 1: 21), and so on. These performativegestures act as pictorial representations of narrative.' Thisallows for the story to be reenacted by the reader. Inaddition, the reader can invent her or his own narrative basedon the gestural images. Possibly, the simple descriptive textsthat accompany the images also serve as an attempt to deny thedialogue between characters and thus censor the abusive languagethat accompanies festive forms. In this way, the text acts asa subtle form of closure on the meaning of the prints.As a result of the disparate traditions that are combinedin the Jan de Wasser prints, attributes of oral and written36culture intermingle in the forms of the prints. Because traitsof the written form tend to assert themselves in the laterprints, we can conclude that the numerous editing of the printsparticipated in the shift from oral to written culture.However, the oral characteristics of the prints are nevercompletely disavowed. They continuously reassert themselves andallow for a multiplicity of reading practices. As we shall see,the overlapping of written and oral traits also points to thediverse constituency which the prints reached.37III. Audience: The Contested Boundaries of the Burgher Class The complex trajectories of oral and written practicesinscribed in the Jan de Wasser prints indicate the range ofreaders who engaged with the prints in various ways. The formatof combining images with texts would have appealed to theliterate and semi-literate alike, for all those who took up theprints did not read them in the same manner. As a result, themarket extended beyond those who knew how to read, for the semi-literate could have used the images as an aid to deciphering thetext. As we have seen, the mnemonic devices used in the printswould have helped readers to transform the text back into oralform. The story could have been read aloud or acted out bygroups of readers. A single reader could also bringcontradictory or successive attitudes to the text and engage inthe same plurality of readings. Multiple connections operatedbetween the prints and human actions. In the seventeenthcentury, the relation to the printed word was inextricablylinked to social and communal relations.\"In light of this, a broad definition of the 'reading'audience is needed.^Reading was not just the intimate,intellectual act of private comprehension of the text.^Asargued above, Amsterdam was a city whose residents could notavoid some contact with the printed word, and the deciphering ofprinted matter encountered in the city was also a form ofreading. Ephemeral prints, which formed the bulk of printingproduction, were aimed at the urban bourgeoisie. Inventories of38the possessions of merchants, artisans and shopkeepers revealthat this group did not own many books. However, this does notsignify that reading was not an important means for this classto establish its cultural identity, for they were involved inother types of reading, and ephemera were more present and moreinfluential in their lives than were books.\"While the Jan de Wasser prints were directed at this urbanclass of merchants and artisans, this was not the exclusiveaudience for them. As Roger Chartier points out, because thesesorts of prints were so widely distributed, they crossed socialboundaries and drew readers from different social and economiclevels. As a result, various social groups could approach thesame printed material in diverse practices that ranged from thebasic deciphering of signs to fluent reading.\" However, justas cultural objects cannot be assigned to specific classes,certain ways of reading were not exclusive to distinctive socialgroups either. Rather, there was some fluidity in thecirculation of shared cultural practices and objects.\"Therefore, it is difficult, if not impossible to separate'popular' from 'elite' culture, for there is no absoluteboundary between these two concepts. This is especially true ofthe Netherlands in the seventeenth century. After fighting andemerging victorious from the Eighty Years War with Spain of 1568to 1648, the Netherlands were transformed from a small feudalterritory governed by the Catholic Spanish into an independentProtestant republic. The breakdown of feudalism meant that the39place of the individual in society was relatively undefined anda person's social status was not fixed.' The social andreligious shifts brought about by the war also resulted in aweakening of traditional elites, the aristocracy and clergy ofthe Netherlands.The Netherlands emerged from the Eighty Years War as aworld empire which dominated the seas and excelled in trade andcommerce. Due to the rise of merchant capitalism, the middleclass became the most wealthy, powerful and dominant group inthe Republic. In Dutch, this class was called the bredemiddenstand: a broad stratum which ranged from small shopkeepersand artisans to wealthy trading merchants and civic leaders.Because of the weakened aristocracy, the new elites of Dutchsociety came out of this middle class group.The new leaders of the Republic were faced with the task ofmaking sense of the social realignments and the sudden rise topower and prosperity of the nation which were the results of theEighty Years War. Moralists of the day constructed Dutchsociety as a mutable world. In this way, the Dutch definedthemselves as a people who had struggled and worked hard forsurvival and were rewarded by God with material success.However, they also understood the transience of wealth and therewas an underlying fear that if the nation or individuals becamecomplacent or dishonest, the Lord could punish them by takingaway personal or collective fortune and might.' For there wasmuch fluidity within the boundaries of the middle class, and as40social positions and occupations were not fixed, individuals hadopportunities to climb, and descend, the social ladder.\" Thiswas unprecedented in Western Europe at this time.As discussed above, the Jan de Wasser prints drew on andreformulated the festive and theatrical traditions of theirpredecessors, which contributed to the redefinition of thestatus of the middle class Dutch subject. In this way, printedmaterial played a significant role in constructing a new socialstructure and in reeducating Dutch citizens to functionefficiently in a merchant capital system. What Stuart Hall hassaid of the twentieth century is equally applicable to theseventeenth century: \"Capital had a stake in the culture of thepopular classes because the constitution of a whole new socialorder around capital required a more or less continuous, ifintermittent, process of reeducation, in the broadest sense.'\"However, while the middle class sought cultural domination, itwould be simplistic to believe that they were a homogeneousgroup who understood exactly how to line up culture andsociety.\" Their own confusion as to how to restructure societyemerges in the Jan de Wasser prints and the contradictory waysin which they could be read.While print culture attempted to formulate a homogeneoussociety, by its very nature it also revealed and precipitatedmany social cleavages. The Dutch middle class did not have auniform identity. As we shall see, it was fractured by multipledifferences such as wealth and social status, residence, gender41and age. In various ways, the Jan de Wasser prints dramatizethese schisms in Dutch society.In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, abattle over social and cultural status split the middle class.Because the Dutch elites came from the brede middenstand, theyneeded to find ways to establish their elevated status and setthemselves apart from the rest of this group. One of thestrategies by which the wealthiest and most powerful burghersredefined their social position was by distancing themselvesfrom the national language and culture of the burgher class andembracing French culture.\" In the late seventeenth century,the French were the republic's greatest political enemy.However, while the Dutch struggled against the military power ofthe French nation, the upper classes did not resist Frenchculture and the French language became the favoured means ofcommunication among this group. After Louis XIV's revocation ofthe Edict of Nantes in 1685, many Huguenots fled to thereligiously tolerant Netherlands. These Protestant refugeeswere often well-educated members of the upper classes and camebearing French culture. It became fashionable for wealthy Dutchfamilies to engage Huguenots as tutors and governesses for theirchildren.\"In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, thenew upper class also began to invest in homes, estates andsecurities rather than in ships, merchandise and manufacturing.Thus, money made from trade was not returned to trade and the42ruling class lost touch with issues concerning trade andindustry which were vital to the economy of the city. Publicoffices became private property as the regent families forgedagreements to reserve civic appointments for themselves andtheir relations.\"The middle class had a number of grievances with thisgroup, which they often published in political pamphlets. Theycomplained that the regents profited while poverty increased.By the late seventeenth century, food and housing costs werequite high, while wages lagged behind prices. The gap betweenrich and poor widened as unemployment, poverty and theexploitation of labour increased. The regents responded withgrowing intolerance to numerous riots protesting food shortagesand tax burdens which occurred during the first half of theeighteenth century.\"This resulted in a burgher movement against the elites ofDutch society, which was inspired by the French Revolution andits ideals of democracy, political rights, and freedom of thepeople. Thus, in 1793, when the French National Conventiondeclared war on the Netherlands, the Dutch middle class'Patriots' aided the French. The Patriots were encouraged bythe French revolution and in response to a political situationwhich they found intolerable, they waged a revolution againsttheir ruling classes in 1795. The regents were deposed andrevolutionary committees were set up with the aim of abolishingclass differences.\"43This class struggle which continued through the lateseventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century was linked toa battle over Dutch culture. In 1668, a society called Nil Volentibus Arduum had been formed in Amsterdam. This groupsought to cleanse the Dutch language of all perceived vulgarimpurities and colloquialisms. The society 'purified' a numberof traditional farces and helped to enforce decency regulationswhich were imposed by the Amsterdam government on the theatre.Nil Volentibus Arduum looked to French culture as an ideal andtheir notions of classicism and decorum included allowing anumber of French words to enter the language, and introducingmore French plays into the theatre, while reducing the number ofDutch farces being performed.'The ideology of Nil Volentibus Arduum is obviously linkedto the cultural aspirations of the elites. Many middle classburghers resisted French culture and saw themselves as theprotectors of Dutch culture. A number of writers from thisgroup worked to popularize the vernacular by producing playsabout daily life written in the language heard on the streets ofAmsterdam. The writers of these types of plays saw themselvesas the defenders of the virtues of the Dutch language.'Popular language was also maintained in print culture of theday. The Jan de Wasser prints would have played a role in thisstruggle to assert Dutch language and culture. The Nil Volentibus Arduum society sought to standardize the Dutchlanguage and suppress dialects, thus endowing the language with44national status in order to unify the state. Because the Jan deWasser prints were written in the vernacular, they assert thelanguage of the streets. In this way, the prints reveal aschism, and their ideological message is imbedded in theirlanguage, grammar and syntax.The materials and the content of the Jan de Wasser printsreveal printers' itineries of circulation for differentclientele. In this way, publishing strategies culturallydefined printed products, fragmented the market and drew newcultural boundaries.\" For example, the use of the vernacularalso defined class boundaries. Dutch elites could haveestablished their cultural identity by distancing themselvesfrom the Jan de Wasser prints. Because of the use of thevernacular in the prints and their links to Dutch theatrical andfestive traditions, their content would have been deemedunworthy reading by these members of the middle class.The material qualities of the prints reveal the same classdistinctions. One of the ways in which the wealthy middle classdistinguished themselves was through the ownership of materialpossessions. With the rise of capitalism, personal wealth tookon new importance in determining an individual's place insociety and that person's capability to negotiate the way up thesocial ladder within the boundaries of the broad middle class.Outward signs of wealth and taste, such as clothing, the decorof the home and cuisine functioned as means of indicatingindividual social status as appearance in the eyes of the45community became increasingly important.\" Therefore, theelites would have favoured expensively bound French or Latinbooks, which carried much more prestige than cheaply printedbroadsheets. However, because the elites of Dutch society werealso burghers, they would have had contradictory and conflictingcultural impulses. The elites were not completely segregatedfrom the rest of the middle class, and their very struggle toseparate themselves from burgher culture indicates theirfamiliarity with these cultural practices.The Dutch middle class also attempted to distinguishthemselves from their perceived inferiors. This distinction wascentred around the issue of residence. The burghers ofAmsterdam defined themselves as an urban, house-proud andfamily-centred group. To become a burgher, one had to purchasecitizenship, or poorterschap. Poort literally means doorway,threshold or gate. Poorterschap allowed membership to religiouscongregations, guilds, the civic militia, and gave one the rightto give and receive charity. Basically, one had to purchasepoorterschap to be able to play an active role in the urbancommunity. However, proof of residence was required in order toprocure this citizenship. As a result, the burghers definedoutsiders as those who were without residence or occupation--literally, as those outside of the home.\"In this way, the burgher class demarcated its boundaries.A 'foreigner' was defined, not just as someone who was not anative-born Netherlander, but also as anyone born outside of the46city of Amsterdam or the province of Holland. Thus, there wasa hierarchy of types of foreigners. While newcomers who movedto Amsterdam were somewhat discriminated against, they had theright to purchase poorterschap, and therefore they could beabsorbed into society. One in four Amsterdammers originatedfrom outside the Netherlands, consequently there must have beena great deal of toleration and assimilation of this group.\"For example, while there were guild regulations whichdiscriminated against foreigners in favour of native-bornAmsterdammers, these regulations were not strictly enforced andoutsiders with useful skills were welcomed into trade and craftguilds.\"Rural groups who lived in the countryside surroundingAmsterdam were especially marked out as being culturally andpolitically different from urban dwellers. Throughout theseventeenth century, there was a great deal of competitionbetween Amsterdam and neighbouring agrarian villages. AsAmsterdam wielded political power, it continually attempted torestrict the dangerous competition of rural industries.Numerous regulations were drafted against rural trades whichkept village industries local, restricted in growth andsubordinated to the interests of the urban centre.\"The content of the Jan de Wasser prints played a role inhelping the residents of Amsterdam to fabricate their culturalidentity as being distinct from rural culture. In this way, theprints' focus on residence and family would have enabled readers47to set themselves apart from groups with different culturaltraditions. The familiarity of the residents of Amsterdam withprinted materials would have served as another way todistinguish urban culture from the rural way of life. In theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, printed material waslargely restricted to urban centres, and cities became islandsof a different culture. Printed matter was scarce in ruralareas, where reading and writing were the domain of clerics andnotaries, and culture was based on gesture and oral traditions.This resulted in urban scorn for rural traditions and ruralhostility towards urban life.\"Indeed, rural groups were mocked and constructed as the'others' of the urban middle class in numerous prints, paintingsand plays in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuryAmsterdam. The burghers defined as their absolute oppositesthose who were without residence or occupation. Groups such asbeggars, vagrants, criminals and gypsies were associated withthe countryside and rural ways of life.\"' Because they werewithout residence, they were refused poorterschap and henceexcluded from the urban community. Representations of theserural groups could call up the binary opposite of the idealburgher for a seventeenth-century public. In a world upsidedown, they committed the sins of the fool: gluttony, lust,drunkenness, dirt, greed, self-indulgence, inconsistency anduninhibited behaviour. In some instances they also wereportrayed as happy and free. For example, a catchpenny print48entitled The Theatre of the Crazy People of Amsterdam (fig. 12),depicts homeless people playing instruments and dancing in thestreets. In this representation, the bodies of the other areportrayed as open and unobstructed, which opposed the closed andenclosed bodies of the burghers. The 'animal impulses'attributed to rural groups were increasingly spurned by themiddle class, although they may have secretly envied thisfreedom from constraint.The Dutch Republic was known for its numerous charitableorganizations which looked after the poor. However, 'the poor'did not include the group outlined above. In order to receivecharity, one had to be an honest citizen who had purchasedpoorterschap and remained within the bounds of burgherlijkbehaviour.\"' Charitable institutions defined the official pooras pious, grateful, obedient individuals who were working to getahead. Thus the poor who were deemed to be deserving of charitycomprised individuals who were understood to be burghers fallenon hard times, such as widows, orphans, the maimed, the blind,the wounded and prisoners. Those who were perceived as able-bodied individuals who refused to work and had no fixedresidence were not granted charity . 102While beggars and vagrants were perceived as the mostthreatening rural group, the urban middle classes alsodifferentiated themselves from other groups associated with thecountryside. For example, in the late seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries, numerous theatrical farces which mocked49farmers, or boeren, were performed in Amsterdam, and in thiscontext boeren were fabricated as stock symbols of foolishnessand immorality .103 Rural women were also constructed indenigrating ways. Maids and prostitutes were often unmarriedcountry women who came to the city to find work.\"' In farces,prints and genre paintings of the day, these women wereportrayed as unrestrained by the responsibilities of marriageand family, and as dangerous homewreckers--a threat to urbanresidential culture. The boundary between maid and prostitutecould be obscured as both were represented as dangerouslyseductive. According to Simon Schama, prostitutes were neededin Dutch society to absorb dangerous masculine lust and keep therest of the community pure. While in reality, corruption andinnocence mingle ambiguously, brothels were tolerated becausethey functioned as a means of marking off boundaries betweenvirtue and vice and made it easier to distinguish betweenburghers and their others.\"'However, while the burghers raised barriers betweenthemselves and those whom they perceived as their others, theseboundaries were never absolute. This is revealed in theintricate cultural mixtures of the Jan de Wasser prints. Whilethe prints focus on urban middle class issues such as residence,marriage and family, they also borrow from the oral and gesturaltraditions related to rural culture. And, as we have seen, therange of readings which they elicited link them to the writtenculture of an urban milieu, as well as to oral and gestural50traditions which were increasingly associated with rural ways oflife. In fact, many Amsterdam burghers had recently raisedthemselves out of the rural classes.\"' As a result, while theydesired to erect barriers between the 'civilized' urban culturewhich they embraced and the 'uncivilized' rural culture whichthey were leaving behind, the burghers themselves werecontradictory combinations of both ways of life. Therefore, notonly is the notion of a homogeneous and distinct middle classnot feasible, but each Dutch subject did not have a single,unified identity.51IV. The Gendered Subject: Women, the Domestic and Marriage While the Jan de Wasser prints dramatize differences whichfractured the community such as wealth, social status andresidence, they also expose gender differences which were beingredefined in the late seventeenth century. The prints werefirst produced at a time when women's roles and concepts ofmarriage were being reworked and they operate as a locus for theproduction of gender roles. However, the content of the Jan deWasser prints also reveals and contributes to conflictssurrounding the shifting concept of gender.Because the prints drew upon and reformulated themes thatwere popular in didactic literature of the time, they targeteda female readership. In the late seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries, literacy spread to new sections of thepopulation, and Dutch printers increasingly perceived middleclass women as an important market. As these printers werealways on the lookout for new markets, they realized that bydirecting reading material specifically at women, they couldperhaps double their output.'\" Emblem and advice books whichdealt with domestic matters and gave detailed instructionsregarding a housewife's duties were the type of literature thatwas most often aimed at female readers. While domestic advicebooks date back to antiquity, the inexpensive ephemeral formatthat was made possible by the printing press gave this sort ofmaterial unprecedented popularity. The new format contributedto shifts in the character of domestic life as women52internalized precise codes of behaviour that were known byrelatives and neighbours as well as the self. The collectivemorality taught in domestic advice books was not limited towomen, however, nor was this didactic literature exclusively fora female readership. Husbands, fathers and teachers would alsohave been familiar with the contents of these popular works.\"'In this way, this type of literature constructed genderedsubjects.In the Netherlands, the most prolific writer of marriageand household guides was Jacob Cats. Cats was a wealthyCalvinist from a regent family who rose to the position of theGrand Pensionary of Holland, one of the highest politicalpositions open to a Dutch subject.\"' Apparently, Cats wasrecommended for this appointment because of his readiness tofollow the wishes of the Stadholder, who was the quasi-monarchof the Netherlands. His high position did not preclude Catsfrom intervening in the domestic lives of Dutch citizens,however. This points to the significance which private life hadin the political sphere. Cats wrote over 120 000 hexameters ondomestic matters and always addressed his middle class audiencein the vernacular. In works such as Maagdeplicht (The Duties a Maiden), Houwelyck (Marriage), and Verstandige Kok ofZoryuldige Huishouder (The Wise Cook or the Careful Householder)Cats offered homely, proverbial, religious and moral advice towomen regarding their duties in the home, and theirrelationships with their husbands, children and the community.of53Cats' publications must have been quite popular, for, next tothe Bible, they are the most numerous books found inseventeenth-century Dutch household inventories.\"'With their detailed lists of household chores, and theirdelineation of marital roles and childrearing techniques, theJan de Wasser prints drew on the subject matter of these adviceand emblem books. Thus, the reader's preknowledge of thesedomestic works would have determined some of the ways in whichthe prints were read. Because they were infused with thesubject matter of advice books, the prints were given didacticcontent. In this way, for a female audience, the prints couldhave been read as an admonition against improper behaviourwithin the home. The prints constructed a gendered reader, forthrough the example of the unruly Griet, they taught prescribedfemale roles by demonstrating how a woman must not act. For amale reader, they may have served as a warning against choosingan unsuitable mate. However, because the prints bear theimprint not only of domestic advice books, but also of publicfestivals, contradictory readings would have been possible.While they warned readers against abnormal marital situations,they also mocked the official culture of domesticity.The domestic content of the prints would have appealed toa middle class audience because of the critical role whichissues of family and home played in the fashioning of Dutchidentity.\" As recent studies of Dutch culture have shown, thedomestic played a very important role in defining, not only the54Dutch citizen, but also the Dutch state. To quote Simon Schama:\"When properly established and run, the family household was thesaving grace of Dutch culture that otherwise would have beenindelibly soiled by materialism.\"' In this way, the broadDutch middle class defined itself as being different andseparate from outside groups such as the Dutch elites, ruralclasses and peoples from foreign nations. In the moral haven ofthe home, the Dutch merchant or trader could retreat from thecorrupting world with all of its sensuous and lucrativetemptations. Thus, housework came to symbolize theexclusiveness of Dutch middle class citizens. The propensity ofthe Dutch to go into the world to acquire, prosper, explore andunderstand was contradicted by Calvinist morality which remindedthe Dutch citizen that, just as God raised up the Republic, Godcould also lay it low. The partitioning of the domestic spaceas a secluded and purified haven in which the middle classescould withdraw from the world and its polluters was of paramountimportance to the Dutch understanding of themselves and theirnation. In the Republic, the social and the political wereperceived to be inseparable. Moralists continually remindedcitizens that the ideal family was a small state and a moralhome was the most fitting microcosm of an inviolate Republic.\" 3The protectress of the pure household was the Dutchhousewife. It was understood in seventeenth-century Dutchsociety that keeping women in the home was in fact a statussymbol, for only the well-off could afford to keep wives and55daughters out of the work force, as housewifery was an unpaidposition and therefore a luxury .114 However, given the largerimplications of domestic cleanliness, housewifery was also aheavy burden. Perhaps the behaviour of the unruly Griet of theJan de Wasser prints, who is not a huisvrouw (housewife), but an'anti-housewife' or, uithuisigevrouw, which literally means'woman outside of the home', picks up on the apprehension ofleaving such a great responsibility in the hands of women.\"'As women were commonly thought of as being naturally unruly, itwas feared that their authority over the domestic also bestowedthem with the power to upset the home. This anxiety revealssome of the ambiguities surrounding issues of gender at thistime.Traditionally, it was believed that women were naturallyprone to unburgherlijk behaviour and therefore had to be policedby fathers and husbands. This surveillance applied mostly tothree areas: the mouth, chastity and the threshold of the home.Within this construct, the ideal woman had a closed mouth, aclosed body and was enclosed in the home. Accordingly, agossiping woman who frequented public spaces was connected toideas of wantonness, while a quiet woman who stayed in the homewas a symbol of chastity. Thus, in cultural traditions, anunruly woman could be recognized by her gaping mouth, a bodythat transgressed limits, and her proximity to an open window ordoor.\"'56Given these beliefs, one function of domestic advice bookswas to confine the perceived 'natural' unruliness of womenwithin a system of moral regulation. This was extremelyimportant, for the character of the state was defined, not justby the morality of the home, but also by the virtue of Dutchwomen. The ideal woman defined by male moralists was a perfectand impermeable container. As such, she was a map of theintegrity of the nation. Male moralists consistently statedthat the Republic stood or fell by the untarnished purity of itswomen.\"' In this way, the behaviour of Dutch women was centralto the definition of the Dutch state as separate and cleansedfrom the dirt of the world. There was much anxiety about womenat this time, which was manifested in the numerous depictions ofthe unruly household in prints and genre paintings, as well asin the many misogynist anecdotes, poems and farces which becameespecially popular in the second half of the centuryThe Jan de Wasser prints can be included in this genre aswell. In this context, the portrayal of Griet in the Jan deWasser prints exemplified the notion of the unruly woman for aseventeenth-century public. For example, the gestures of thefigures in the prints could be read as codes which definedgender inversion and thus indicated to the reader or viewer thatGriet was anything but an ideal woman. According to DavidSmith,\"' in Dutch marriage portraiture of this time, thehusband conventionally was depicted on the left of the pictureplane so that the eye sees him first. In the Jan de Wasser57prints, Griet, in her unruly masculine role, is often on theleft and her gestures lead the eye to Jan. (See fig. 5: 4, 6,14, 17, 23) While portrait conventions dictated that women wereto be represented in passive positions, Griet stands with armsakimbo, or with one hand on her hip (for example, fig. 5: 4;fig. 3: 3), which was used to denote a defiant masculine pose.When she is not moving, Griet often sits with her hands in herlap (See fig. 5: 6, 19, 24), a gesture which would indicate heridleness to the reader/viewer. This type of inactivity was thecardinal sin of the Dutch housewife.' Also, Jan is confinedin the domestic feminine space and is juxtaposed to hearth,cradle and bed (for example, fig. 1: 18, 27, 31, 43; fig. 3: 7,8; fig. 5: 4, 5, 14, 15, 16, 18, 22), while it is Griet whomoves at will from open to closed spaces and back out again.These juxtapositions of 'female' and 'male' gestures reduceJan and Griet to gendered opposites. If complementary tasks inthe home were crucial to the survival of the family group, andthe domestic sphere epitomized the nation for the public whichthe prints addressed, how did Dutch citizens understand thereversals of the Jan de Wasser prints, which turn the householdon its head? Once again, it seems that a number of responseswere possible and this question will be dealt with more fully inthe last section of this thesis. For the twentieth-centuryreader, the gender inversions of the prints expose more of theunderlying tensions and fears which inhabited Dutch society. AsChartier points out, the imagery of gender inversion reveals58what it thought to conceal.\"' The reversals of traditionalgestures, attributes, spaces and tasks reduced male and femaleto binary opposites and served to cover up the fact that maleand female were blurred categories with vacillating dividinglines. The Dutch lived in an uncompartmentalized world and asmuch as they wanted their homes to be separate spheres guardedby the ideal housewife, this notion was always threatened. Ofcourse, actual women were neither sealed containers nor unsoundvessels. Rather, they occupied spaces in between these twopoles of virtue and vice. 122 The Jan de Wasser prints deny theheterogeneous qualities of both categories of female and male byorganizing them as fixed and opposed social categories. In thisway, the prints are a site where gender is produced. Thiscompulsion to define boundaries reveals the very uncertainty ofthese distinctions, for Dutch women of the seventeenth centurydid not conform to prescribed gender roles, but lived out theirmultiple differences in diverse ways.Dutch women had a number of unusual legal rights andfreedoms which gave them more space to assert themselves thanwomen in other Western European countries at that time.\"'Because of the growing importance of the domestic in theseventeenth century, women's roles both advanced and regressed.While a married woman was formally subjected to the authority ofher husband, in certain cases she could contest this authorityand advance her own rights, especially if this was done in theinterest of her family. Although women were increasingly59excluded from guilds in the seventeenth century, they were givena higher status and greater respect within the structure of thefamily, as domestic labour was elevated to a special vocation.For example, wife beating was forbidden in the Netherlands andif a woman was a member of the Reformed church, she could takemarital problems to the church consistory which had the power toadminister church discipline on the husband if he was found tobe in the wrong. Women could also take marital grievances tothe civic authorities. In cases of adultery, desertion orextreme physical abuse on the part of the husband, the wife hadthe right to have her marriage annulled.\"' If a husband wasfoolish or irresponsible in business affairs, his wife was atliberty to step in and take over the business if the welfare ofthe family was at stake.\"' In fact, wives often handled thebusiness and money affairs of their husbands. Property broughtinto a marriage was mutually owned by wives and husbands. Thuswomen maintained some control over their own riches, even aftermarriage.\"'While marriage certainly strengthened and secured a woman'sposition in Dutch society, unmarried women and especially widowshad rights as well. Legally, single women and widows could runtheir own businesses with the understanding that this wouldcease upon marriage. Widows, rather than male kin, controlledfamily property which also gave them authority over theirchildren. Unmarried women had the right to sue for paternity.If the woman won her case, the father of the child might be60obliged to marry her, or provide a dowry, birth costs andmaintenance costs for the child's upbringing .127Thus, while Dutch women had no official political power,they did manage to gain an unusual number of rights andfreedoms. There is much evidence to prove that Dutch women didnot quietly and obediently stay at home, as much as this wasadvised by male moralists. For example, women played asignificant role in public life. They acted on the boards ofmanagement of institutions such as orphanages, old people'shomes and houses of correction, and they served as deaconessesin the church. Dutch women were quite literate and read anddiscussed political pamphlets. There were some well-known womenintellectuals in the seventeenth century, and much discussion onthe issue of learned women ensued, with some going as far as tosay that women could equal if not surpass men as scholars.'The rights of Dutch women seem to be linked to the importantrole which home and family played in the new social system basedon merchant capitalism. As men went out to earn a living, womenwere left in charge of the domestic sphere and they were giventhe powers they needed to protect the home and, when necessary,the family business, against threat. In this way, the role ofthe wife complemented and was crucial to the career of herhusband.The Jan de Wasser prints first appeared in the lateseventeenth century and coincided with a shift in theunderstanding of marriage. The growing importance of the61domestic was linked to changes in the understanding of themarital relationship. Because seventeenth-century Dutch societywas not centred around the court or the aristocracy, lineageceased to be important and arranged marriages were no longer thenorm among members of the middle class. Medieval and sixteenth-century marriages were usually a collective decision of familyand kin and were understood to be a political, social oreconomic contract between family groups. Thus expectations ofmarriage were different. While marrying for love was notunheard of, it was not the norm, and in some cases, could leadto being disinherited.'Because of changes in the social and economic structure ofthe Netherlands, by the second half of the seventeenth century,marriage transactions shifted. Marriages were established bypersonal choice and 'companionate marriages' based on affection,mutual comfort and the reciprocal duties of wife and husbandbecame common.' In theory, the structure of this new type ofmarriage was clearly defined. Calvinist teaching in theNetherlands did not subordinate love to marital obedience.While it was understood that the husband was the head of thehousehold, his position was conditional on his accountability tofamily members. He was to give his wife the freedom to governthe home and it was expected that he behave responsibly towardshis family. The wife in turn was supposed to efficiently andcapably manage the household, care for the children, and tolovingly advise and even correct her husband.'62Issues surrounding marriage also shifted from being acommunal concern to being open to the intervention of the stateand the church. Previously, breaches of marital norms such aswife and husband beating, adultery and marriages betweenpartners who were unequal in age or wealth were the jurisdictionof the community. Rituals such as the charivari mocked domesticarrangements and punished sexual offenses that threatened thesocial order of the community .132 In this ritual, offenderssuch as hen-pecked husbands were ridiculed by being paradedbackwards on a donkey through the neighbourhood. Couples whotransgressed marital norms were serenaded with ketelmusik, the'rough music' of clashing pots and pans. In this type ofcommunity discipline, the punishment usually fit the crime anddomestic disputes were made into public spectacles. Slowlypopular initiative was usurped by state punishment which wasmore formal and removed. In this way, marriage shifted from acommunal concern to a private institution, dictated by thestate.'The Jan de Wasser prints sharpen the public/private splitand reveal the tensions of this distinction. The titles of theprints offer the reader/viewer a glimpse into the life andcareer of Jan de Wasser and his wife, which must have been quitetantalizing as marriage and domestic life were increasinglyhidden from view. And the curtain is lifted from their privatelives to reveal socially unconventional behaviour hidden in thehome. The prints expose the ambiguity of the private sphere,63which could be used to cloak secret sins. Jan, the hen-peckedhusband, is not disciplined by the community through the ritualof charivari, for the abnormalities of this marriage wereprivate matters which were continuing unpunished. Thus, publicand private could also be understood as openness and secrecy oroutward morality and inner evil. In this way, the Jan de Wasserprints unveil the hidden truths of private life and the fearthat as the jurisdiction over marriage was taken over by thestate, relationships that breached conventional norms could beconcealed in the private spaces of the domestic realm.Increasingly, Dutch sociability centred on the new idealsof companionate marriages and family life. However, this shiftwas not without anxiety, and it was accompanied by changes inthe representation of marital relationships. In the lateseventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a prolific genreshared the Jan de Wasser theme of unhappy marriage, revealingsome of the tensions surrounding the shift in marriagetransactions. For example, a question often dealt with inliterature and the theatre was how to make a suitable choice ofpartner. Several plays that treat the issue of parents forcingtheir children to marry actually ridicule the excessivestrictness of the parents. Apparently, plays with this themewere extremely popular. Many farces also dealt with the themeof unsuccessful marriages. While wives were most often blamedfor an unhappy marriage, there are instances where drunken oradulterous husbands are at fault.' The range of treatment of64the popular themes of choosing a mate and living with theconsequences of that choice no doubt have to do with theuncertainties of a changing definition of marriage.The Jan de Wasser prints participated in the conflictssurrounding the reworking of the social definition of genderdifference. The growing importance of private domestic life andthe shift to companionate marriages precipitated a fear ofunclear boundaries between the sexes and a loss of conventionalmale authority. While merchant capitalism required that womenbe given the freedom to protect the home, this shift was fraughtwith tensions and uncertainty. Although the subjugation ofwomen was still the norm, in actual marriages, this was alwaysmoderated, which resulted in a tension between prescribed rolesand actual lived experience. The world-upside-down construct ofthe Jan de Wasser prints defines male and female as separate andopposite. In defining male and female as fixed dominant andsubordinate social positions, the Jan de Wasser prints concealthe instabilities and malleability of the categories 'woman' and'man'. In a reaction to the ambiguities and uncertainties ofshifting gender roles, they attempt to reinforce norms of sexualauthority by defining male and female as fixed oppositions.65V. The Comic and the Didactic: Children, Education, Games and the Ambiguous Body Although the imprint of the subject matter of domesticadvice and emblem books indicates a female readership for theJan de Wasser prints, they also were aimed at children. Thetitles of most versions of the prints address 'the youth' andinventories listed Jan de Wasser blocks with those dedicated toyoung people. As the education of middle class children grew inimportance in the Republic, printers targeted this increasinglyliterate group as a new audience for printed material.Children's prints originated in the Netherlands in the lateseventeenth-century and were linked to the importance of thefamily and education in the Republic. However, while theseprints were directed at youth, this was not the exclusiveaudience for them. The Jan de Wasser theme was one of the best-selling children's prints of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies and undoubtedly was enjoyed by adults as well aschildren of the middle class.'Children's prints were cheaply produced and inexpensive topurchase. Often called centsprenten or 'catchpenny prints',these sheets sold for a few cents and if that was still tooexpensive for the buyer, the sheets could be divided and soldfor one cent,' making them very accessible. For example, asnoted above, fig. 2, which has sixteen scenes, is a smallerfragment of fig. 1, which is made up of forty-eight scenes, andwas probably printed and sold as a cheaper version of the print.The prints were usually 31 x 40 cm in size, though the earliest66examples were somewhat smaller at 28 x 36.5 cm. Catchpennyprints could be purchased at toy stalls at fairs and markets,and were also sold door-to-door by hawkers and pedlars.By targeting children as a separate audience for printedmaterial, the Jan de Wasser prints reveal another cleavage inseventeenth-century Dutch society. As the domestic sphere tookon new meanings in the seventeenth century, generational gapswidened as attitudes towards middle class children shifted.\"'Because social and political positions in the republic were nolonger determined by a person's birth but were based on newunderstandings of moral superiority and personal aptitude, theeducation of children became crucial to the future of thefamily. Philippe Aries points out that the education ofchildren played an important role in the turn away from thecollective, as the private family began to take the place oftraditional social relationships.'\" At this time, middle classchildren were increasingly separated from the rest of societyand were constructed as a special status group. Children weregiven their own costumes, toys and literature, and portraits ofindividual children became more common. The mean household sizein the Netherlands in the seventeenth century was extremely lowand averaged two offspring.\"' This allowed families toconcentrate on the upbringing of children.Elementary schools were another context in which the Jan deWasser prints functioned. The prints were given out by teachersas rewards for diligence at school or in learning the67catechism,\" a practice which underlined the popular teachingthat citizens were rewarded according to their obedience andpersonal ability. Van Veen points out that children's printswere often folded in four in order to fit them in school boxes.These were wooden boxes with sliding lids which were kept on thewall of the classroom and only taken home on holidays.\"'Sending children to school at an early age served to separatethem from the adult community. By the mid-seventeenth century,there was advanced education in almost every town of theRepublic, although education also took place in homes and wascentred around family devotions such as Bible reading, hymnsinging and learning prayers.\"' The schools were institutionsfor the children of the broad middle class to develop skillswhich were perceived as being useful to society. Thiseducational system was another way for the middle class todefine its boundaries as poor and rural children usually had towork rather than attend school, and the children of the eliteswere often taught at home by private tutors.\"'The elementary schools were not centrally administered, butcame under the jurisdiction of the local Reformed Church.However, as recent historical studies have shown, religiouspluralism, rather than strict Calvinism was the norm in theRepublic during the seventeenth century. 144 The government ofAmsterdam took several measures to ensure that Calvinism neverhad much political power. For example, new predicants had to beapproved by the burgomaster of the city and a minister could be68banished for preaching on political matters. Religiousobservance was typified by the gap between the strict theory andthe actual practice of Calvinism. A clear boundary between thechurch and popular belief could not be drawn, for old traditionsheld on and many were assimilated by the Reformed church. As aresult, social ethics were regulated by an extensive array ofclassical, scriptural and folk influences which were usuallygiven a dusting of Calvinism.\"'Therefore, while the schools were officially controlled bythe church, strict Calvinist doctrine was probably not alwaystaught. This was partly because the schoolmaster's salary camefrom tuition money. Presumably, the instruction of Calvinismwas watered down somewhat in order not to alienate parents fromother Protestant sects, or even those with Roman Catholic orAnabaptist beliefs who wished to send their children to theseschools. A seventeenth-century schoolmaster's report describeswhat must have been a common problem: \"Parents remove theirchildren from the schools and send them elsewhere, unless popishbooks are used in instruction.\"\"' Thus, while Calvinismcertainly played a role in the education of Dutch children, itsinfluence was probably indirect.'Under the guidance of the church, children learned theskills which would equip them to function productively incapitalist society. Moral training was an especially importantaspect of elementary education, as pious and virtuous adults69were most likely to advance in society .148 Thus, schoolsemerged as the:state apparatus by and within which the social body wasregimented and trained into a social discipline based onindividuating the subject within the social collective.Individual self-discipline was seen as a prerequisite togreater social cohesion and discipline.\"'This individual self-discipline operated differently forgirls than it did for boys as schools also socialized childrento internalize prescribed gender roles. Junior schools, forchildren aged seven to eleven, taught the alphabet, handwriting,basic math, and religious fundamentals such as the Lord'sPrayer, hymn tunes and in some cases, the Heidelberg catechism.Both boys and girls were sent to school, though they were taughtseparately and less was expected of girls, whose formaleducation was normally stopped at the age of twelve, when boyswent on to the Latin schools. The daughters of the aspiringmiddle class were educated in such a way as to make themdesirable marriage partners. For example, as Petty Bange pointsout, while subjects like math were emphasised for boys becauseof its importance in commerce, girls were taught rudimentarydressmaking, knitting and needlework in preparation for theirfutures as housewives. However, girls were also given sometraining in commerce, as a good wife often helped her husband inbusiness affairs.' It was important that girls learned theseskills, for with the shift from arranged to companionatemarriages, they would be competing in an 'open marriagemarket' Foreign visitors to the Netherlands often remarked70that the Dutch youth of both sexes were better trained inlanguage, speech, geometry and arithmetic than other Europeanchildren, and were especially impressed with the education andbusiness skills of women.'Reading was taught during the first three years of achild's education. After this time parents had to pay more inorder for their children to be taught to write. As a result,many citizens of the Republic who could not write often hadrudimentary reading skills. This was especially true for women,as girls were usually sent to school for a shorter time thanboys.' This affects the literacy statistics of this timeperiod which are usually based on signatures in registers.Literacy rates for the Netherlands were consistently higher thanthose of other European countries during the seventeenthcentury. Amsterdam marriage registers of 1630 show that 64% ofwomen and 85% of men were able to sign their names.'\" Thesefigures would be even higher if it were taken into account thatreading skills are probably underestimated by these findings.The rise of pedagogy was accompanied by a large body ofdidactic printed material that created a discourse onchildhood.' In some ways, the Jan de Wasser prints can belocated within this discourse. While these prints are part ofa festive tradition, they were edited in explicit and implicitways to give them practical didactic value. For example, therubrics and images of the Jan de Wasser prints warned childrenagainst making an over-hasty marriage which might result in what71would be taken to be the 'unhappy' situation of Jan and Griet.This was especially important as nuptial traditions shifted fromarranged to companionate marriages. One of the Jan de Wasserrubrics warns, \"Here you see the life and career / of Jan deWasser and his wife / and you learn that an unequal marriage /will long be regretted.\"' These warnings undoubtedly servedto form a citizen who would respect the tremendous politicalimportance of a well-run moral household. However, childrenmight also mimic the improper behaviour of adults. A theme dearto moralists of the time was that infant virtue is alwaysjeopardized by the decayed manners of adulthood. In this way,the prints can also be read as a warning against the inevitable--a satirical view that looks back from adulthood withpessimistic acceptance and reminds the viewer that, just as theinfant republic cannot remain uncorrupted by the world, it isinevitable that children will repeat the mistakes of theirparents.\"'\"Struggles of competition\"' also occur between comic anddidactic understandings of representations of the body.Editions of the Jan de Wasser prints reveal how bodily functionswere increasingly denied. An early version of one of the firstJan de Wasser prints (fig. 3) shows an image of Jan (whose nameis Klaas in this account) feeling Griet's breasts. This imageis accompanied with the verse, \"Klaas loves Griet and feels herbare breasts\". In later printings (fig. 4), this verse isedited to read something like \"Jan loves Griet and will love her72until death\".\"' In this way the text, in attempting to closeoff the body, actually denies the image. As communal andprivate life became increasingly separate, the body disappearedfrom public view.\"' The changes in the prints suggest thatlater versions were adjusted to address a different public. Inthis way, the prints were made compatible for a constituencywith a different set of expectations. However, while the printswere reworked to appeal to an audience that had a higher\"threshold of shame and repugnance\",\"' they also transformedtheir readers and instilled in them new notions of bodilydecorum.In the earlier Jan de Wasser prints (fig. 1 & 3), while Jandoes all the housework, he also still beats his wife. In laterones (fig. 5 & 6), she beats him and he does not retaliate.According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque blows have a broad, symbolicand ambivalent meaning. They both kill and regenerate; end theold life and start the new. As such, these blows have sexualconnotations. Brides traditionally received erotic, or \"bridalcreative\" blows. While these blows kill the old, they alsogenerate new life and the punishment is transformed into festivelaughter.\"' This meaning is lost in the later Jan de Wasserprints. Griet no longer receives bridal creative blows and sheno longer gives birth. In a complete denial of the reproductivebody, Jan and Griet travel to Volewyk (fig. 5: 13; fig. 6: 4),a mythical island where the inhabitants of Amsterdam went to73find babies. Then it is Jan who lies in the childbed, whileGriet can take it easy (fig 5: 14; fig 6: 5).This censoring of representations of the body was notsimply an editing of printed forms. Rather, through forms suchas the Jan de Wasser prints, interior censorship became implicitin the newly privatized citizen. According to Francis Barker,this new subject was profoundly self-conscious, with a deepsense of corporeal guilt and a need to repudiate the body.However, the body could never be completely denied, as merchantcapitalism required a productive and reproductive body.'Barker describes the uneasy equilibrium of the seventeenth-century body, which always threatened insurrection:Neither wholly present, nor wholly absent, the body isconfined, ignored, exscribed from discourse, and yetremains at the edge of visibility, troubling the space fromwhich it has been banished.'Consequently, the seventeenth-century body is always ambiguousand contradictory, and can never be entirely obscured by text.The construction of a private middle class citizen in theseventeenth century required that the subject learn to dominatethe disruptive \"mess of the body\" According to Bakhtin, thetraditional grotesque body of sixteenth-century festivals was anunfinished, open body, that emphasized the parts through whichthe world entered or emerged: the mouth, genitals, breasts,phallus, potbelly and nose. Within this construct, the body wasof the earth, and represented all members of the community. Itwas a body which focused on the lower stratum with all of itsdegrading and regenerating aspects. The grotesque body74defecated, copulated, conceived and gave birth in an endlesscosmic cycle. As demonstrated by the editing of the Jan deWasser prints, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, the grotesque body was increasingly denied. Itsunfinished parts were disavowed; its protuberances and apertureswere closed off. The new body was constituted as complete,isolated, alone and fenced off from other bodies.\"'In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, the process ofconstructing a private body was linked to the education ofchildren. A number of pedagogical treatises which codifiedsocial behaviour circulated at this time. Most of these werebased on De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, a book of etiquette forchildren written by Erasmus in 1530. Erasmus' work advisedchildren on how to behave in everyday situations encountered attable, church, school, while going to bed, etcetera. The bookadvocated an even-tempered disposition accompanied by outwardbodily decorum.\"' Erasmus believed that bodily gestures andpostures expressed a person's inner state in an intelligiblefashion, revealing the disposition of the soul. According to DeCivilitate Morum Puerilium, gestures should vary according togender so that there would be no confusion of the sexes. Asdescribed above, the Jan de Wasser prints played on this notionas they signified gender inversion by reversing the genderedgestures of Jan and Griet. Thus, gestures were understood assigns which could be organized into language, interpreted andread. According to Erasmus, these signs should be readable to75all, forming a common code of manners. As the seventeenthcentury was a period of social and cultural realignment in theNetherlands, Erasmus' book was extremely popular as it taught acommon social language and provided familiar points ofreference. Naturally, this book was altered and editedthroughout the century as needs changed.\"'In 1625, the teaching of rules governing social conduct, orcivility, was made compulsory as part of the basic curriculum ofDutch schools.\"' Elementary instruction was combined with theteaching of outward bodily decorum. For example, the physicaldiscipline of mastering skills such as writing was linked withlearning civility. Thus, a child's training in control of heror his physical gestures was obtained in school, where it wasassociated with arithmetic, writing and prayer as part of ahierarchical program of education.\"' Some of this trainingalso took place in the home as children learned to imitate thegestures of their parents.The teaching of civility participated in the seventeenth-century shift to private life as relationships between peopleand their bodies and the bodies of others became more discreetand understated. Increasingly, a protected zone surrounded thebody as prohibitions against touching and looking at otherbodies increased. For example, bodily contact was censored inchildren's play and a taboo was placed on certain actions andwords. Specific body parts and bodily functions wereincreasingly hidden from view.\"' Gestures of intimacy became76concentrated on a few people, usually family members, and wereunderstood as private behaviour. Public displays of anger andcontempt were no longer acceptable.\"' As noted above, thecharacter of Jan de Wasser underwent these same social changes.In early Jan de Wasser prints, Jan insults the neighbours andbeats the neighbourhood boys (see fig. 1: 17, 20). This type ofabusive behaviour ceases in later prints. Bodily functions alsowere hidden. In later versions of the scene 'Jan teaches thechild to shit', (fig. 5: 21) Jan and the child are no longer outin the open but hide behind a tree (fig. 7: 21). The languagedescribing this scene is refined to something like \"Jan holdsthe little girl until she has done her business.\" Thus, theprints participate in the process of denying the body as theyinscribe censorship in private citizens by editing comic andfestive representations of bodily functions. In this way,external distinctions between types of acceptable private andpublic behaviour were interiorized by individuals. However,there was a constant tension between instinct and socialcontrol, emotions and repressive forces.An analysis of the forms of the prints also reveals astruggle between comic and didactic uses and meanings. Implicitin the form of the prints (the heavy dark lines around eachscene) is an invitation to cut out the different episodes andthus completely fragment the narrative. In fact, children didjust this and these types of prints were commonly referred to asblaassanctjes, stiksanctjes, stekesanctjes or steeksanctjes.77Sanctje means 'saint', as early prints often depicted religioussubjects. This name or the term heilig, which also means'saint', or 'holy' continued to be applied to popular printseven after their subject matter changed. The term blaassanctje,(blaas meaning 'blow') is a reference to a game played withthese prints in which the cut up episodes are blown into theair, while the players guess which side will fall face up.Steek, steke and stik are all terms for 'stab', and refer toanother game in which one player hides the fragments at randombetween the leaves of a book. The other players take turnspricking at hazard between the pages with a knife, pin or doorkey. Whoever finds a fragment gets to keep it as a prize.\"'As a response to this practice, printers began to includerhymes with instructions on how to play with the prints.Interestingly, these often direct the reader to cut up theprints but then to glue them down again. For example, Mauritsde Meyer quotes directions such as \"Cut them out neatly andpaste them onto to stiff paper\", \"for the scrapbook\", or \"Youcan decorate your book with these / and thus spend your timewisely\" .174 This is a good example of a very overt way in whichcertain oral practices were discouraged. The pasting down ofthe cut up fragments of the prints reasserts their linearnarrative which could be read in isolation by a private citizenand completely disallows the group practice of playing gameswith fragments of the prints.78Games of chance had a long carnivalesque history and wereclosely related to the popular-festive atmosphere, as we haveseen in the case of the St. John's Day festivities. Games ofchance, such as those played with catchpenny prints, were usedto divine the future, and to predict personal or collectivedestinies. To quote Bakhtin,The images of games were seen as a condensed formula oflife and of the historic process: fortune, misfortune,gain and loss, crowning and uncrowning...games drew theplayers out of the bounds of everyday life, liberated themfrom usual laws and regulations, and replaced establishedconventions by other lighter conventionalities.\"'Thus, they had great subversive potential and one can understandthe attempts to suppress this function of catchpenny prints.Bakhtin points out that in the sixteenth century, games ofchance were not thought of as part of ordinary life and thusretained their philosophical meaning. However, beginning in theseventeenth century, games became increasingly absorbed by thesphere of private life, and started to lose this significance.Many games ceased to be considered adult activities and wererelegated to children.\"'^In the Netherlands at this time,games were assigned a host of moral meanings.^For example,tops, which needed to be whipped, came to signify the toil andpain required to get anywhere in life; toy windmills representedundesirable restlessness; balloons or bubbles illustrated theinflated emptiness of earthly affairs, or the ephemerality oflife; kites soared to the heavens, but always fell back toearth; the hoop signified the futility of life, or itspredictability.\"' Writers of didactic literature and emblem79books also increasingly justified children's games by stressingtheir role in a child's physical, moral and mental development.Playing for the sake of recreation was severely criticized(especially by Calvinists) as mere idleness that would lead tomore serious vices. Theoretically, recreation time in schoolwas limited to thirty minutes per week, and play was offeredonly to make instruction more palatable.\"'Increasingly, the enjoyment of play was used to socializechildren. Girl's toys tended to focus on home life, while boy'sgames allowed them fantasies of power and superiority.\"' Workssuch as Jacob Cats' Houwelyck sought to instill these values.A print entitled Kinderspel, or Children's Games, by Adriaen vande Venne illustrates Cats' teachings regarding children's play(fig. 13). In the centre of the print, a large and noisy crowdof boys play at marching off to war, equipped with makeshiftweapons, fifes and drums. In the bottom corner of the print,juxtaposed to this central group, a few little girls playquietly with dishes and dolls.Toys were also linked to the rise of capitalism in a numberof ways. Social and economic developments of the time createda large market of middle class parents with money to buyluxuries for their children.\"' Like homes, clothing andhousehold goods, children's toys and prints were consumer goodswhich made a statement about the social status of the owner. Astoys were private possessions with exchange value, they alsotaught children the values of capitalism. For example, Van Veen80provides this translation of a message written on the back of aneighteenth-century children's print: \"This is Abe Roord's print/ who finds it will return it / for an apple or a pear / and whofails to do so / will get blows on his hat / and will sit on thewheel / with a hundred nails in his bum.\"\"'The struggle between the comic and didactic aspects of playis implicit in the very forms of the Jan de Wasser prints.While they were used in children's games, this was increasinglycensored as rubrics and instructions were added to the prints inattempts to curtail some of their subversive uses. This was away of coming to terms with traditional forms which constructeda communal subject and of establishing new distinctions tocreate a private individual. However, the reader could alwayssubvert the imposed uses of the prints and continue to use themin communal activities. The numerous adjustments, arrangementsand resistances went two ways between the institution and thecommunity.\"'81VI. Carnivalesque Inversions: Social Protest or Social Control? Because they were linked to education, the Jan de Wasserprints were invested with a number of didactic meanings.However, many comic aspects, derived from carnival and popularfarces, were also maintained in the forms and content of theprints. Themes of the 'World Upside Down', with theircarnivalesque inversions, have been theorized by a number ofscholars as forms of social protest. Both Mikhail Bakhtin andNatalie Zemon Davis claim that in the sixteenth century, thehierarchical husband/wife relationship stood for allsuperior/subordinate structures. According to Davis, themes of'Women on Top' and the 'World Upside Down' could be explicitcriticisms of the social order which inverted the structure inorder to criticize, correct and renew it.\"' Bakhtin arguesthat the laughter of festive role reversals mocked, derided,denied and buried, but it also asserted and revived and washopeful and triumphant.\"' Within this construct, conflictsbetween opposites were understood as having the power toregenerate time, nature and society. However, these ritualsalso functioned as a means of social control. As Roger Chartierpoints out, \"Clearly the function of the world turned upside-down was to conserve social order, since the reversal ofhierarchies is presented as just as impossible and absurd as tosee sky and earth or air and sea change places.\"\"'The reversals of the^'World Upside Down'^havecontradictory meanings.^While these forms were allowed by82elites to release social and political tensions and to reinforcethe boundaries of social order, at times the subversivequalities of these inversions were asserted in attempts to bringabout social transformations. Thus, the same codes that wereused in rituals and prints also played a role in riots andrebellions. Identical symbols were also used by differentgroups for dissimilar or even opposing ideological aims.'\"Although authorities allowed this type of ritual play as a formof social control, it always had the potential to turn toviolence against the established order. This is the ambivalentpotential of the 'World Upside Down': while it could be used asresistance against the social order, it often also played a partin reestablishing order. Most scholars agree that these formsalways mocked authority. However, the question remains, whenwas this protest 'play' and when was it a real instrument oftransformation?'\"It has been argued that in times of crisis, themes of the'World Upside Down' were commonly perceived as inversions of theruling structure. For example, in 1797, during the revolutionin which the Patriots deposed the regents, a children's print ofthe 'World Upside Down' theme of the 'Battle Between the Ratsand the Cat' was printed from a sixteenth-century block. Thepublisher of this print was arrested, jailed and all of hisstock was confiscated; the print was condemned as a\"revolutionary and seditious print, which is made to bear upon83the Patriots.\"' Therefore, in certain situations, these formsdid threaten the hierarchies of power.If the critical quality of these forms emerges in times ofsocial crisis and revolutionary change,\"' then it can be arguedthat the late seventeenth century, when the Jan de Wasser printsfirst appeared, was just such a time. 1672 is remembered as therampjaar, or 'year of disaster' of the 'Golden Age'. During thecourse of this year, the Republic was attacked by Britain,France, Cologne and MUnster. This lead to internal disorder andthe Dutch rose up against their rulers. The grand pensionaryJohann de Witt and his brother Cornelis came to a violent end atthe hands of a mob. William III was brought to power as thetraditional Stadholder, the quasi-monarch and military leader ofthe Netherlands. This position had been vacant from the time ofthe death of William's father, William II in 1650. Thisuncrowning of the old regime and crowning of the new did littleto improve the system, however. According to Pieter Geyl, whilethe regent oligarchy, lead by de Witt, wanted obedient subjects,William III desired useful tools.\"'In retrospect, the late seventeenth century has come to beregarded as the beginning of the decline of the 'Golden Age'.After 1672, the ruling regent class became increasingly closedand inflexible. Dutch industry dwindled and the Netherlandswere overtaken by France and England in trade and navalpower.\"' Middle class dissatisfaction with the cliquish regentoligarchies grew at this time:84Decent people now don't mind indulging in reflections likethe following: 'I must help my children into offices whileI live. Here I haven't much opportunity for advancing mychildren. There are few vacancies...Just as if it had beenwritten that none but these or those families shouldgovern!...As a rule they get too much, but think it toolittle.' This must in course of time create an impatientcitizenry.\"'In this quote, political power is thought of in terms of thefamily. Indeed, throughout the seventeenth century, the Dutchlinked the structure of the family to that of the state, and thefamily was commonly understood to be a 'small state'. Thus, theJan de Wasser prints, with their representation of chaoticfamily life, indirectly criticize the disorder of the nation.However, it is difficult to link the prints to any specifichistorical event, or to judge what effect they might have had onthe political life of the Dutch republic.I cannot completely rule out the possibility that the Jande Wasser prints use the age-old carnivalesque formula of theunruly woman who devours and regenerates to criticizeineffective governing bodies. Just as Bruegel's Dulle Griet appears as a symbol of violence and chaos during the Spanishoccupation of the Netherlands\"', the Griet of the Jan de Wasserprints could have served as an emblem of the internal disorderof the late seventeenth century. However, the regenerativepower of festive laughter is reduced in the seventeenth centuryas the communal qualities of festive forms are blended with theprivate and their comic aspects are censored and transformedinto the didactic. The Jan de Wasser prints are different fromthe print of the 'Battle Between the Rats and the Cat', which85was understood as a political threat in the late eighteenthcentury. The 'Rats against the Cat' is a pure theme of the'World Upside Down' (see, for example, fig. 10: 25) and theprint in question was printed from sixteenth-century blocks. Assuch, it retained the revolutionary possibilities of the 'WorldUpside Down'. The Jan de Wasser prints, on the other hand,borrow a theme from the 'World Upside Down' but transform thistheme through the numerous editing and appropriations from othersources, which are traced throughout this thesis. Because ofthese changes, the Jan de Wasser prints lose their subversivepotential. To quote Bakhtin, If ...the^ever-growing,inexhaustible, ever-laughing principle which uncrowns and renewsis combined with its opposite: the petty inert 'materialprinciple' of class society\", resulting in a form which is\"half-dead\" . 1\" When combined with didactic warnings, festivelaughter loses its power to liberate. The shift to linearnarrative eradicates the meaning of cyclical time whichcontinuously destroys and renews. Just as Griet's body losesits reproductive powers, the Jan de Wasser prints forfeit theirpower to regenerate society. While these forms are reduced,however, they cannot be destroyed. The vitality and dynamism ofthe prints give them great capacity for further development,'\"allowing them to survive for centuries. Their transformativepower works on the reader, as the prints attempt to construct acertain type of subject.86Thus, I would argue that the social protest/social controldebate is not the most productive framework for investigatingforms of representation linked to popular culture. It isimpossible to gauge the capacity of the Jan de Wasser prints tobring about social renewal. However, it is possible toinvestigate the prints' potential to fashion subjectivity byanalysing the forms and themes of the prints and the uses,readings and meanings which they produce. The prints functionin terms of the double movement between containment andresistance. They are the site of the revision of the individualinto a private citizen as well as the site where the individualstruggles against this reform and reasserts traditional communalfestive forms. In various ways, the reader finds her or himself inscribed in the text, and in turn, the text is itselfinscribed variously in its different readers.'\" Thus, theprints do not function as pure forms of either social protest orsocial control. The Jan de Wasser prints lend themselves to amultiplicity of uses and meanings, which constantly shift,indicating the range of subject positions which were possible inbetween the extremes of social protest and social control. Thecontradictory readings and uses of the Jan de Wasser printsindicate that they are a locus where Dutch subjects could resistand struggle against, or accept and adapt their social structurein the complex process of fashioning identity.87Endnotes1. The rise of the middle class at the end of the Eighty YearsWar is described in K.D.H. Haley, The Dutch in the SeventeenthCentury (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972); and J.H. Huizinga,Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: FredUnger Publishing Co., 1968).2. Paul Smith defines a socially constructed subject in hisbook, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988) xxx, 22.3. Paul Smith 25.4. Stuart Hall, \"Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular',\"People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. R. Samuel (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 227.5. Roger Chartier, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and theUses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia Cochrane(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 169.6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. HelenIswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968).7. Hall 325.8. I have been influenced by Roger Chartier's understanding ofprint culture, which he theorizes in the following works:Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans.Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) 47; Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) 183; and TheCulture of Print 1-2.9. For this argument, see Bakhtin 11-12, and also NatalieZemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 131.10. See Chartier Cultural History 122.11. Craig Harline, Pamphlets, Printing and Political Culture inthe Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987) 73.12. Harline 81. For issues surrounding the foreign book trade,see Le Magasin de l'Univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre ofthe European Book Trade, ed. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al.(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992).8813. Maurits de Meyer, De Volks- en Kinderprent in de Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e Eeuw (Antwerpen: UitgeversStandard-Boekhandel, 1962) 148.14. Harline 94.15. The woodcut process is described in Roger Chartier,\"Culture as Appropriation: Popular Culture Uses in Early ModernFrance.\" Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the MiddleAges to the Nineteenth Century ed. Steven Kaplan (Berlin: MoutonPublishers, 1984) 245; and Lucien Febvre and H. J. Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, ed. G.Novell-Smith et al. Trans. David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976) 92.16. Harline 96.17. Febvre and Martin 138; E.M. van Heurck and G.J.Boekenoogen, L'Imagerie Populaire des Pays-Bas: Belgique-Holland(Paris: Editions Duchartre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1930) 24.18. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 145, 346.19. Quoted in Harline 91-92.20. Another print, which was published by Gysbert de Groot-Keurin 1733, is described, though not reproduced in the Sotheby'scatalogue, The Van Veen Collection of Children's Books andJuvenilia (London: Sotheby's, 1984).^It is printed from thesame forty-eight blocks and entitled, Here the Bold Youth havethe Life and Career of Jan de Wasser and Bot'heid his Wife.21. The dates given for various printing firms are based onJ.A. Gruys and C. de Wolf's Thesaurus 1473-1800 NederlandseBoekdrukkers en Boekverkopers.^Met Plaatsen en Jaren vanWerkzaamheid. (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf Publishers, 1989). While deMeyer, Van Veen, and Van Heurck and Boekenoogen give some datesfor various publishers, these are not consistent. The Thesaurus is the most recent source and seems to be based on more thoroughresearch. Unfortunately, however, the Thesaurus does not givedates after 1800.22. Meyer 215.23. Meyer 34.24. Van Veen Dutch Catchpenny Prints: Three Centuries ofPictorial Broadsides for Children (The Hague: W. Van Hoeve,1971) ii.25. See Van Veen Dutch i. Common formulas used to introduceoral tales are described in Peter Burke, Popular Culture inEarly Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978) 127.8926. In the Van der Putte print, the babies of Volewyck hangfrom a well, while in the Wendel version, they grow on trees.27. B. Landheer, ed., The Netherlands (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1946) 228.28. A \"New Jan de Wasser\" was published by H. Van Munster andSon of Amsterdam, who, together with David le Jolle, joined withthe firm of Ratelband and Bouwer in 1809. I have not located areproduction of this version, but Maurits de Meyer gives adescription of it.^This sixteen block print is entitled,Housework is for the Wife, Manual Work is for the Husband. Thepurpose of the print was to instill Christian and moral virtuesin the reader by showing how things should not be done. Thefirst four scenes depict boys who act like girls and play withdolls, while the next four scenes portray girls who act likeboys and climb trees. The final eight scenes are about Jan andGriet. Jan is a shoemaker who marries Griet and she then forceshim to do all the 'woman's work'. For a full description, seeMeyer 499.Another version published by Brepols combines the old Jande Wasser with the New Jan of Van Munster and Son. Meyer statesthat this version is a copy of one by T.C. Hoffers of Rotterdam(n.d.). This print begins with the childhoods of Jan and Griet.Young Jan plays with girls, while young Griet, of course, playswith boys. When they grow up, they marry, battle for thetrousers, and Griet forces Jan to do all of the housework.Then, as in the eighteenth-century versions of Jan de Wasser,they travel to Volewyck to get a baby, Jan lies in the childbedand then has to care for the children. This print was copied bythe Belgian firm of Wellens and Delhuvenne and the stock ofBrepols later became the property of Glenisson and van Genechtenof Turnout.Meyer briefly describes one more nineteenth-century variantof Jan de Wasser published by Brepols, but does not reproducethe print. In this version, the 'traditional' story of Jan deWasser is acted out by apes. Most Belgian printers had a copyof this print which was very popular at the beginning of thetwentieth century. For more information on these last twoversions, see Meyer 500.29. In a twenty block bilingual version (fig. 8), Jan has beenrenamed Lamme Goedzak. Le Bon Guillaume, which translatesroughly to \"The Worthless Good-guy or Honest William\". In thisrendition, Lammen/Guillaume does all the housework while hiswife Griet sleeps in, dresses up and promenades around town,reads novels and drinks wine with her maid.^Then, to makematters worse, she has twins, and he must care for them. In theend, poor Lammen/Guillaume dies of grief and his frivolous wifefeels repentant.^The costumes, settings and themes of this90version have been updated to appeal to a nineteenth-centuryaudience.30. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 344.31. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 7, 9, 145.32. Febvre and Martin 122, 136.33. Harline 87-88.34. Harline 87-88.35. Quoted in Harline 88. Harline only cites an approximatedate for this quote.36. Roger Chartier's argument that printed matter was prolificand visible in seventeenth-century urban settings certainlyapplies to Amsterdam. See Chartier \"Culture as Appropriation\"251; The Culture of Print 1; Cultural Uses of Print 166.37. Harline 83.38. Harline 89.39. Febvre and Martin 226; and Harline 82-84.40. David Kunzle, \"The World Upside Down: The Iconography of aEuropean Broadsheet Type,\" The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babcock (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1978) 48-49.41. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 280.42. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision andModernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)5.43. Roger Chartier, ed. Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989) 9-15, vol. 3 ofA History of Private Life, gen. ed. Philippe Aries and GeorgesDuby. Trans. A. Goldhammer.44. Chartier discusses how drawing on familiar themes calls upthe readers' preknowledge in a theoretical analysis of the waysin which popular prints are read. I think that this conclusionapplies to the Jan de Wasser prints. See The Culture of Print 167-168.45. Chartier Cultural History 117.9146. Chartier Cultural History 116-119.47. Natalie Zemon Davis uses the term 'Women on Top', with itsobvious sexual connotations, to classify prints depicting womenwho dominate men in an essay entitled, \"Women on Top\", inSociety and Culture 124-315.48. Bakhtin 212.49. Van Heurck and Boekenoogen 35.50. Bakhtin 276.51. Seventeenth-century readers would have understood thephallic implications of a spindle, as this was an associationcommonly made in prints of women spinning. See Linda Stone-Ferrier, \"Spun Virtue, the Lacework of Folly and the World WoundUpside-Down: Seventeenth-century Depictions of Female Handwork,\"Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette Weiner and JaneSchneider (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1989) 222.52. Petty Bange et al., \"Who can find a Virtuous Woman? Marriedand Unmarried Women at the Beginning of the Modern Time,\" Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the Fifteenth and SixteenthCenturies, ed. Lene Dresen-Coenders (London: Rubicon Press,1987) 28.^Because of fifteenth and sixteenth-century guildrestrictions, women were limited to working in the textileindustry.53. Stone-Ferrier 218-233.54. Margaret Sullivan, \"Madness and Folly: Pieter Bruegel theElder's Dulle Griet,\" Art Bulletin LIX, 1 (March 1977): 63.55. Bakhtin 240-241.56. St. John's Day and Eve was also a festival dedicated topublishers, printers and booksellers. See Otto van Reinsberg-Duringsfeld, Calendrier Belge (Brussels: F.Claassen, 1861) 427.For more on the festival of St. John the Baptist, see MariaLeach, ed., Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend 2 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnall's Co.,1950, II) 723; and Burke 181, 195.57. Sandra Hindman, \"Pieter Bruegel's Children's Games, Folly,and Chance,\" The Art Bulletin LXIII, 3 (September 1981) 453-455.^Hindman quotes Jacob Cats' poem Houwelijk of 1625 tounderscore the folly of marriage: \"The game it has but one bigcatch / One keeps forever what one gets!\"58. Bakhtin 198.9259. The presence of a large cat in many of the Jan de Wasserprints may signify marital infidelity, as the cat was a commonseventeenth-century symbol of female sensuality. See MaryFrances Durantini The Child in Seventeenth-Century DutchPainting (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983) 34. Housekeepingmanuals of the time also stated that cats were disgusting anddid not belong in a decent household. See Simon Schama, TheEmbarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture inthe Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987) 377.60. Bakhtin 241.61. This dance is described by van Reinsberg-Duringsfeld inCalendrier Belges 418, along with the following version of thesong which I have translated:Daer wandeld' a patertje langst de kant;Hy greep a nonnetje by der hand.Het was in den midderen dey,Net was in den mei.Sa, patertje, gy moet knielen gaen;En nonnetje, gy moet blyven staen.Net was, enz.Sa, patertje, geef uw nonnetje een zoen.Dat meugt gy wel driemael doers.Net was, enz.Sa, patertje, gy moet scheyden gaen;En nonnetje, gy moet blyven staen.Net was, enz.62. Bakhtin 212.63. J. Van Vloten, Het Nederlandse Kluchtspel van de 14e tot de 18e Eeuw Vol. 1 (Haarlem: De Graaff, 1881) 130-149.64. Burke 103.65. For more on the chambers of rhetoric, see Walter Gibson,\"Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel,\" The ArtBulletin LXIII, 3 (September 1982): 227; and Bob Haak, TheGolden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, trans.Elizabeth Willems-Treeman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984) 190.66. Gibson 434.67. Chartier The Culture of Print 160.68. Chartier Passions 4-5, 111; and \"Culture as Appropriation\"236.9369. Meyer 498.^Meyer points out that in the farce, JanGoethals is a shoemaker, and there is no evidence of Jan'sprofession in the Jan de Wasser prints.70. Van Vloten, vol 1, 252-255.71. Van Vloten, Vol 3, 63-64.72. Van Vloten, Vol. 3, 129-131.73. P. H. van Moerkerken, Het Nederlandsch Kluchtspel in de 17eEeuw Vol. 1 (Sneek: J.F. van Druten, 1899) 248-257.74. Titles of other farces which played in Amsterdam in thelate seventeenth century, such as Sceele Griet of de GestrafteWellust (Cross-eyed Griet or the Severe Lust) and DeBroekdr,igende Vrouwe (The Woman who Wears the Pants) alsooverlap with the themes and characters of the Jan de Wasserprints. The Jan Klaassen puppet play, which was performed atthe annual Amsterdam kermis, or 'carnival' plays on the themesof the Jan de Wasser prints as well. This Punch and Judy typeof puppet show incorporated conjugal troubles and also launchedpolitical attacks on authority.^See Deric Regin, Traders, Artists and Burghers. A Cultural History of Amsterdam in theSeventeenth Century (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976) 124.75. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in theSeventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)211.76. Alpers 218.77. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 180, 345-346.78. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 183, 197, 345.79. Chartier The Culture of Print 2; and \"Culture asAppropriation\" 231.80. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 3.81. A.T. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: PopularCulture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland(Cambridge, 1991) 319-320.82. Schama 7-11.83. Deursen 320.84. Hall 227.9485. Steven Kaplan, ed. Understanding Popular Culture: Europefrom the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin: MoutonPublishers, 1984) 15-16.86. Pieter Geyl, The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century. Part II, 1648-1715 (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1974) 198.87. Geyl 190-197.88. John Murray, Amsterdam in the Age of Rembrandt (NormanOklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967) 46-47.89. Bertha Mook, The Dutch Family in the Seventeenth andEighteenth Centuries (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1977)38.90. Mook 38; Max Schuchart, The Netherlands (London: Thames andHudson, 1972) 23.91. Nil Volentibus Arduum translates roughly as \"Nothing ishard for those who will\". For more on this society see PieterGeyl 247-249; E. de Jongh, \"Erotica in Vogelsperspectief\"Simiolus 3 (1968-9): 73; and Schama 285.92. Murray 123.93. Chartier \"Culture as Appropriation\" 251-252.94. Chartier Passions 3.95. Schama 386, 570-573.96. Alice Carter, The English Reformed Church in Amsterdam inthe Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam: Scheltema and Holkema, 1964)17.97. For more on foreigners see Deursen 11, 33; and Murray 52.98. Deursen 18.99. Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 180-1; and \"Culture asAppropriation\" 251.100. Deursen 45; Schama 580-581.101. Schama 579.102. Carter The English Reformed Church 151; Schama 579.95103. Volume II of Van Vloten's collection of Dutch farcesincludes plays entitled Die Dronken Boer, Die Door Droomennuchteren sober, The Drunk Farmer, Who Became Sober in His Dreams; and Die Boer Die 't Gelag Betaalt, The Farmer Who Tells the Story of His Drinking Bout.104. Schama 649.105. Schama 649.106. David Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century DutchMarriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982) 34.107. S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London:Faber and Faber, 1959) 119.108. For more on advice books that were marketed for women, seeElizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early ModernEurope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 134, 429;and Steinberg 118-119, 129, 166.109. The Grand Pensionary was the legal counsellor of the Statesof Holland, whose duty it was to protect the interests andprivileges of the Republic.110. For more on the works of Cats, see Alice Carter, \"MarriageCounselling in the Early Seventeenth Century: England and theNetherlands Compared,\" Ten Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations, ed.Jan Van Dorsten (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1974) 98; andHuizinga 65.111. The shift from societies that were centred on the street tothose which focused on private domestic life resulted in a newemphasis on housing and decorating the home. Homes were builtwith more private spaces and features such as stairs and hallways were added in order to make it possible to enter one roomwithout walking through another. Seventeenth-century Dutchinteriors represented a new ideal: a concept of how the burgherclass should live. In this way, taste and sophistication indecorating the home became a means of exteriorizing the newinner life and the private values of the individual. SeeChartier Passions 6-7.112. Schama 388.113. Schama 4, 380-388.114. Deursen 8.115. Schama points out this distinction between huisvrouw anduithuisigevrouw (445).96116. Peter Stallybrass, \"Patriarchal Territories: The BodyEnclosed,\" Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. M.W. Ferguson et al.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 126-128.117. Schama 403; Stallybrass 128.118. Simon Schama, \"Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood inSeventeenth-Century Dutch Art,\" The Oxford Art Journal 3 (April1980): 5.119. For more on the gestural nature of marriage portraiture,see David Smith's Masks of Wedlock 43-49.120. Susan Koslow, \"Frans Hals' Fisherboys: Exemplars ofIdleness,\" Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 419 & 429.121. Chartier Cultural History 125.122. Schama, \"Wives\" 12-13.123. From the Middle Ages on, women could inherit familylineage, titles, property and goods. Dutch women also gainedgreater independence because of the roles they played during theEighty Years War and the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands.Two essays which deal with the history of the legal rights ofDutch women are Alice Carter's \"Marriage Counselling in theEarly Seventeenth Century\", and Sherrin Marshall Wyntjes'\"Survivors and Status: Widowhood and Family in the Early ModernNetherlands,\" Journal of Family History 7 (Winter 1982): 396-405.124. Schama 406.125. Carter \"Marriage\" 110.126. For example, Saskia left her portion of her marriageproperty to her own family in the event of Rembrandt's death orremarriage. Carter \"Marriage\" 125.127. For more on the rights of unmarried women and widows, seeCarter \"Marriage\" 109; Schama 405-406 and Wyntjes 401.128. Carter \"Marriage\" 96-99.^This was stated by Dr. vanBeverwijck, although his was certainly an unorthodox view. Formore on Beverwijck, see Schama 418-420.129. David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychologyof Family Life in Early Modern France (New York: Basic Books,1970) 57-61.130. Schama 421.97131. See Smith 10-36; and Schama 424-429.132. Burke 198.133. Chartier Passions 480.134. Mook 27.^The farce collections of Van Vloten andMoerkerken contain numerous plays that deal with the theme ofmarriage.135. Van Heurck and Boekenoogen 21; Meyer 12.136. Van Heurck and Boekenoogen 3.137. Schama 555.138. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History ofFamily Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred Knopf,1962) 411. This book is considered the pioneering study in thehistory of the family. While Aries' research methods have beencriticized, his premise that childhood was given special statusin the early modern period has been widely accepted and hasinspired hundreds of works on this subject.^While Ariesgeneralizes that a shift in attitudes towards children tookplace in Western Europe as a whole, historians such as BerthaMook, Simon Schama and Mary Frances Durantini have applied histheories to the specifics of Dutch society.139. A.M. van der Woude, \"Variations on the Size and Structureof the Household in the United Provinces of the Netherlands inthe 17th and 18th Centuries,\" Household and Family in Past Timeed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1972) 311.140. The role of the prints in the schools is discussed in C.F.Van Veen Catchpenny Prints: Dutch Popular and Childrenprints (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976) 15-20.141. See Van Veen Catchpenny 15-20.142. Christopher Brown, Images of a Golden Past: Dutch GenrePainting of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Abbeville Press,1984) 55-56.While Roman Catholics and Anabaptists were included in theschool system (see Deursen 117), non-Christian groups, such asthe members of Amsterdam's Jewish community, would have hadtheir own educational institutions. For more on Amsterdam'sJewish community, see Schama 587-596.143. E.P. de Booy, \"Naar School: Schoolgande Kinderen in deNoordelijke Nederlanden in de Zeventiende en Achtiende Eeuw\"Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 94 (1981): 427-428.98144. Gary Schwartz, \"Art in History,\" Art in History, History inArt ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Barbara,California: Getty Centre for the History of Art and Humanities,1991) 10.145. See Deursen 234; Schama 124-125; and Haley 88-91.146. Harline 62.147. Deursen 117.148. Durantini 112-113.149. Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: TheDiscourse on Childhood (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 1989) 141. This is Luke's description of the ways inwhich schools functioned in early modern Germany. I think italso applies to Dutch schools at this time.150. See Bange 25; and Paul Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt'sHolland (New York: MacMillan and Company, 1963) 103-111.151. Laurence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England1500-1800 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1979)284.152. Murray 92.153. Deursen 122.154. Chartier Passions 113.155. These include educational texts, moralizing and didacticliterature, medical information, works on social conduct andemblem books. For more on these types of works, see CarmenLuke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism 2.156. This rubric is quoted in Meyer 215: \"Zie hier het leven enbedrijf / Van Jan de Wasser en sijn wijf / Die leere U, dat rasgetrouwd / lets is dat Lang daarna nog rouwt\". Meyer statesthat this version was put out by the firm of de Lange ofDeventer and dates from around 1750, but gives no otherinformation about this print.157. Schama 494.^Schama also links these ideas to thepredestination/free will debate that went on throughout theseventeenth century.158. This expression is used by Chartier to describe the ways inwhich these types of prints function. See The Culture of Print174.99159. This is my translation. I can't make out all of the wordsdue to the poor quality of the text, but the last few words are\"tot in den dood\", or, \"until death\".160. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays onSubjection (London: Methuen, 1984) 12-14.161. This is Norbert Elias' term, which he uses to describe theshift to private life. See Power and Civility, trans. E.Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), vol. III of TheCivilizing Process 292.162. Bakhtin 198-206.163. Barker 52, 67.164. Barker 63.165. Barker 7.166. Bakhtin 19-21, 26-29.167. H. de la Fontaine Verwey, \"The first book of etiquette forchildren: Erasmus' De Civilitate Morum Puerilium\" 21.168. Chartier Passions 171-174.169. Chartier Passions 174.170. Verwey 22-23; Chartier Passions 170.171. Chartier Passions 163.172. Chartier Passions 58.173. Van Heurck and Boekenoogen 4-6.174. See Meyer 18: \"voor het plakboek\", and \"Wilt hier mee uwboek bekleeden / En uw tijd ook wet besteden\"; and 44: \"snyt zeuit fraei na de zwier, en plakt ze dan op stijf papier\".175. Bakhtin 235. This meaning would have been understood inthe Netherlands at this time, as the Dutch version of Rabelais'Gargantua, with its list of games, was first published in 1682.176. Bakhtin 236.177. Schama 502-503.100178. Durantini 186-189. Durantini goes on to say that citiesrepeatedly passed regulations prohibiting potentially damagingor disruptive games in various places. Traveller's accountsalso frequently complain of the rambunctious playful nature ofDutch children.179. Martin Hoyles, ed, Changing Childhood (London: Writers andReaders Publishing Coop., 1979) 53.180. Stone 284.181. Van Veen Dutch iii.182. Chartier The Culture of Print 173-174; Hall 229.183. Davis 131.184. Bakhtin 11-12.185. Chartier, Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988)122.186. For specific cases see Burke 203; and Chartier Cultural Uses of Print 29.187. Kaplan 11.188. Quoted in Kunzle 87.189. Hall 236; Bakhtin 9.190. For more on the rampjaar, see Geyl 205; and Regin 184.191. J.L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the Seventeenth Century (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd.,1974) 211-224.192. This is the observation of the diplomat and author, Lieuwevan Aitzema. Quoted in Geyl 202.193. Natalie Zemon Davis cites Bruegel's Dulle Griet as anexample of the unruly woman who signifies the political chaos ofher time in her essay \"Women on Top\" in Society and Culture 129.194. Bakhtin 24.195. Hall 236.196. 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Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press,1977.Moran, Gerard. \"Conceptions of Time in Early Modern France: AnApproach to the History of Collective Mentalities.\" TheSixteenth Century Journal 12 (Winter 1981): 3-20.Mukerji, Chandra.^From Graven Images: Patterns of ModernMaterialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.Murray, John J. Amsterdam in the Aqe of Rembrandt. NormanOklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967.107Pollock, Linda. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Realtions from1500-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.Price, J.L. Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic Duringthe Seventeenth Century. London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd.,1974.Regin, Deric. Traders, Artists, Burghers: A Cultural History ofAmsterdam in the Seventeenth Century. Assen: Van Gorcum,1976.Reinsberg-Duringsfeld, Otto van.^Calendrier Belge: Fetes Religieuses et Civiles, Usages, Croyances et PratiquesPopulaires des Beiges Anciens et Modernes. Brussels: F.Claassen, 1861.Rogers, Katherine.^The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. Seattle: University of WashingtonPress, 1966.Roodenburg, Herman W. \"The Autobiography of Isabella deMoerloose: Sex, Childrearing and Popular Belief in 17thCentury Holland.\" Journal of Social History. (Summer1985): 517-540.Rowen, Herbert. The Low Countries in Early Modern Times. NewYork: Walker and Co., 1972.Rowen, Herbert and Andrew Lossky.^Political Ideas andInstitutions in the Dutch Republic.^Los Angeles: Wm.Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985.Salamon, Ferdinando. The Hisory of Prints and Printmaking fromDirer to Picasso: A Guide to Collecting. New York: McGrawHill, 1971.Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretationof Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Knopf, 1987.---. \"Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art.\" The Oxford Art Journal 3 (April 1980):5-13.Schuchart, Max. The Netherlands. 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Lawrence: University of KansasPress, 1983.Images of Textiles.^The Weave of Seventeenth-CenturyDutch Art and Society.^Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,1985.109---. \"Spun Virtue, The Lacework of Folly and the World WoundUpside-Down: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Depictions of FemaleHandwork.\" Cloth and Human Experience. Ed. Annette Weinerand Jane Schneider. Washington D.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1989. 215-242.Sullivan, Margaret.^\"Madness and Folly: Pieter Bruegel theElder's Dulle Griet.\" Art Bulletin 59 (March 1977): 55-66.Suransky, Valerie Polakow. The Erosion of Childhood Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1982.Tot Lerin en Vermaak. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976.Trumbach, Randolph. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family. NewYork: Academic Press, 1978.Van^Duinen,^R.^Campagne's^Engelsch^Woordenboek.s'Hertogenbosch: L.C.G. Malmberg, 1927.Vann, Richard. \"Toward a New Lifestyle: Women in PreindustrialCapitalism.\" Becoming Visible: Women in European History.Eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1977. 192-216.Van Veen, C. F.^Catchpennyprints: Dutch Popular andChildrenprints. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976.The Van Veen Collection of Children's Books and Juvenilia. 3vols. London: Sotheby's Department of Printed Books andManuscripts, 1984.Van Veen, C.F.^Dutch Catchpenny Prints: Three Centuries of Pictorial Broadsides for Children The Hague: W. Van Hoeve,Ltd., 1971.Van Vloten, J. Het Nederlandse Kluchtspel van de 14e tot de 18eEeuw. 3 vols. Haarlem: De Graaff, 1881.Verwey, H. de la Fontaine. \"The First 'Book of Etiquette' forChildren: Erasmus' De Civilitate Morum Puerilium.\"Quaerendo 1 (January 1971): 19-30.Wilson, Charles. The Dutch Republic and the Civilisation of theSeventeenth Century. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1968.Woude, A.M. van der. \"Variations in the Size and Structure ofthe Household in the United Provinces of the Netherlands inthe Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.\" Household andFamily in Past Time. Ed. Peter Laslett et al. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1972. 299-318.110Wyntjes, Sherrin Marshall. \"Survivors and Status: Widowhood andFamily in the Early Modern Netherlands.\" Journal of FamilyHistory 7 (Winter 1982): 396-405.Zaretsky, Eli. Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life. NewYork: Harper and Row, 1986.Zumthor, Paul. Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland. New York:MacMillan Co., 1963.111Fig. 1.^Here Young People May View at Leisure the Career andLife of Jan de Wasser. Woodcut, printed from seventeenth-centuryblocks. Published by Ratelband and Bouwer of Amsterdam.Reproduced in E. M. van Heurck and G.J. Boekenoogen, L'Imacierie Populaire des Pays-Bas, Paris, 1930.1. Here comes Jan de Wasser.2. See him standing by the washtub.3. Jan de Wasser is being crowned.4. Because he rewarded Bottheid (?)5. Jan de Wasser scrubs the street.6. Teaches the child to walk.7. Jan washes the floors by himself.8. And he scrubs them.9. He knows how to wash pots.10. And clear the snow from the street.11. He bleaches like a man.12. And can wash as well.13. Jan de Wasser hits his wife.14. Because she wanted to smother him (?)15. How is the wind blowing?16. Jan starches the linen.17. Here he beats the boys.18. And cleans out the ashes like a woman .19. He hoops the barrel on the street.20. He gossips with the women.21. He mocks the neighbours.22. His rattle spins merrily.23. Here he birches his wife.24. Cries 'lamp-wick!' loud and clear.25. Jan wrings out the linen.26. And mangles like a woman.27. He doesn't mind rocking the cradle.28. Jan makes St. Nicholas' birches.29. Jan in his apron,30. Washing the windows.31. Jan wipes the child.32. Who pisses into his pocket.33. Jan plays the boss.34. What does St. Nicholas bring him? (birches).35. Jan gives the child a growl.36. And gets the pussy-cat.37. Jan gossips with his Sister.38. Teaches the child to walk.39. Jan exchanges his wages for bulbs.40. Here he comes with the child's wagon.41. Jan looks after his child.42. Which he swaddles and hugs.43. Jan gets the fire going.44. Sends the maid for flax.45. Jan then spins it,46. And winds it.47. Jan de Wasser is done his day.48. And goes to bed with his wife.112Fig. 1.^Here Young People may View at Leisure the Career andLife of Jan de Wasser113Fig. 2.^Section of fig. 1, Here Young People May View atLeisure the Career and Life of Jan de Wasser.^Woodcut,seventeenth century. Reproduced in C.F. Van Veen, CatchpennyPrints: Dutch Popular and Children's Prints, Amsterdam, 1976.lititrIt►eft At Jetted* tot ha►* frettii V/ Min DIP Ma rferd lati ton tn h► fif114Fig. 3. Children, Here You See Before You the Life of OurKlaas and Griet. Woodcut, seventeenth century. Published by theHeirs of the Widow G. de Groot and A. Van Dam of Amsterdam.Reproduced in Van Veen, Catchpenny Prints, 1976.1. Klaas loves Griet, and feels her bare breasts.See behind them Pete the musician plays a great love song.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 chairShe is sitting in, and makes a big fuss.4. Klaas tells Griet to shut up,and grabs the shovel and tongs....and she receives blows...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.115Fig. 3.^Children, Here You See Before You the Life of OurKlaas and Griettiinb'rt birr rttl boo; Uhl fitt / 't Ztbtri ban ongi ti lotaf3 to e;itt.t'AmRcrdam r Gy d Lrren^r',C-rt Cc U root a° on)^Bocl. • crl,oper, op dc^&Groot, B.L.d.116Fig. 4.^Children, Here You See the Life of Jan and Griet.Woodcut, late seventeenth century. Reproduced in Heurck, 1930.1. Jan loves Griet and will be faithful to her unto death.See the musicians behind playing a great love song.2. Griet cannot restrain her love,and has given her Yes to Jan.Here we see them getting happily married.3. Jan comes home late for dinner,and Griet jumps out of the chair,In which she was sitting and makes a big commotion.4. Jan tells her to shut up,and grabs the fire tongs and shovel,...gets beaten...5. (illegible)6. Jan is forced to surrender the pants,Griet stands with them in her hand,She is not to be joked with and he feels his shame (?).7. Jan has to sit and spin, and rock the cradle,because Griet has the upper hand.She threatens the simpleton with a stick.8. Griet pays Jan a visit in the kitchen and pulls his hair,Because the pancakes have not risen.4lea mMr eittie*Stromea ,^xidee Cri• A•ett h 5 xxxxne•eiret WS KO.. Vass_4, Met &•et, lex xoxtel a.. the Cast.111111.,^1:nee how^veer- littert.o. •nr•et hod N d. Ikupoa•Oa da. I, bra,'^t os.sa Al. Met .0. iwe.re Inearga.Kindercn , 'r gene gy bier z■er, Is ha Leven van Jan en Grier.WORN hU111111Jen k.er but Rieleet.eireit etee, Grit. die rex on, xe,l,see S,00,ev^ , en raxlit^xa ,root gexoel. -*4%1.,14 Cniet^1140.1.1.1. vorygen, en vrenxr de &lop tzi Tine in HUN.••••••'n rex,^ Xnd b , •1 tea &load.ix—xer\",M. r el , 7 1 .1. , me/ ,r^ilk^efr..17^ /C11.1'4,1041, L +cr pdedc p117• 4 •^Children, Here you See the Life of Jan and Griet118Fig. 5.^Here is the Career and Life of Jan de Wasser and his Wife.^Woodcut, seventeenth-eighteenth century. Published byRood & Zoon of Amsterdam. Reproduced in Heurck, 1930.1. Jan de Wasser is getting married,But I'm afraid he'll regret it.2. When the wedding ceremony is over,They go to the wedding feast.3. Jan and Griet boldly exchange / pants for skirt.4. Griet teaches Jan how to heat the potand stoke the fire.5. Meanwhile, dinner is getting coldand Jan has to make another fire.6. Jan brings the food / And Griet sits while he must stand.7. He scrapes out the ashes / After having cooked dinner.8. It seems that it doesn't suit him,But see how skilfully he washes the dishes.9. Jan hoses down the windows so hardthat the panes fall out.10. Jan de Wasser has to scruband keeps the water in the tub.11. Floor and tiles must be kept cleanOr he will receive beatings.12. After he has finished scrubbingHe has to stand by the washtub.13. Jan and Griet, the happy couple / Sail to Volewyck.14. Here Jan is in labour / While his wife can take it easy.15. Jan rocks the child / And loves it more than his wife.16. Jan gives the child its porridgeWhich it eagerly laps up.17. Jan gets whacked on the backsideBecause the child has cried.18. Jan is more careful / And plays with the doll.19. Jan teaches the child to walk / And goes to buy cakes.20. Jan takes his child / To crawl in the park.21. See Jan crouch / Helping the child to shit.22. The child becomes big and wilfulAnd Jan spanks her on the backside.23. For doing this / Jan gets whipped by Griet.24. Jan and Griet argueAbout what they should allow the child to be trained for.10\",...( 0,1 1 .14to Of VO411.444irtuin Oft