The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (4 page)

become a favourite of historians of seventeenth-century English lit- erature, who are clearly unaware that it is an adaptation of a Dutch work. Melissa Mowry, for instance, in her
The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England,
1660
–
1714
: Political Pornography and Prostitution
(
2004
), uses it extensively to support her argument about changes to English political culture. In the first reissue of
The London Jilt
since
1683
, editor Charles Hinnant places the text firmly within an English literary tradition. Searching for the identity of the author, he suggests it may have been written by the same anonymous author as
The London Bully, or the Prodigal Son
, also published in London in
1683
.
27
The London Bully
, however, is another unacknowledged translation and adaptation of a Dutch original, namely
De Haagsche lichtmis
(
1679
) (The Libertine of The Hague).
28
Drawing upon recent research, I have done my best to unravel the history of the works used in the writing of this book.

Literature tells us a great deal about ideas and attitudes, reflecting stories and clichés current at the time, but books like
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
must have owed their success in part to the fact that what they described was recognizably true to life. Used with caution, liter- ary texts can illustrate, clarify, confirm, and supplement archival sources. The same applies to the visual arts, although here even greater caution is required. Scenes depicting exchanges of money for sex were popular among seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Artists including Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer, and Gerard van Honthorst between them painted many hundreds of ‘brothel scenes’,‘procuresses’,‘indecent pro- posals’, and ‘robberies in brothels’, as did less famous painters like Jacob Backer and Hendrick Pot.
29
Book illustrations, such as the frontis- pieces to the works mentioned above, reflect some of the realities of prostitution, although they often tell us rather more about attitudes to women and to sexuality in general.

A final type of source, and one that has proven extraordinarily valuable, consists of descriptions by hundreds of foreign travellers from all nations who visited the Amsterdam music houses and the Spin House and wrote about them, in travelogues, travel guides, dia- ries, memoirs, and letters in various languages. They reflect Amster- dam’s reputation as a city of prostitution, indeed it was a reputation they helped to create. As well as concrete information about what these houses and their inmates looked like, the prices, furnishings, opening hours, and other details of the trade, they tell us about the

myths surrounding Amsterdam prostitution. I have used them exten- sively, and Appendix I contains several extracts from travelogues.

The archival sources too are plentiful, varied, and rich, but they need to be treated with almost as much caution as fictional works. The Confession Books essentially describe what the judicial system de- fined, prosecuted, and then documented as whoredom. In studying even the most detailed interrogations we are dependent on the specific questions asked in court, and the stories told are not necessarily repre- sentative, since many perpetrators were never arrested and the Confes- sion Books focus disproportionately on poor and public whores.

Unless they were innocent and could prove it, suspects had a vested interest in presenting their cases in as favourable a light as possible, distorting the facts if need be, even lying outright.They undoubtedly perjured themselves. Many things they said in their own defence were falsehoods or threadbare excuses and some of their accounts are pure invention.This does not make their testimony worthless. In court the accused did not simply lie or tell the truth, they told stories. Even without consciously fibbing, they turned the events in question into narratives intended to make a good impression on judges, at the same time convincing themselves they were telling the truth. Their stories had to be plausible, so they were tailored to the culture and outlook of their era. They arise from reality, but also from the shared myths and fantasies of the time.The statement by Anna Isabe Buncke with which this introduction begins is one rather extreme example.
30

Travel stories often tell us at least as much about the travellers them- selves as about the Dutch. The French find the food unpalatable and the women badly dressed, the Germans comment that the Dutch care little about their honour, and the English complain of being fleeced. The English and Dutch had a great deal in common and there was much contact between them, but they wholeheartedly detested one another; English visitors tended to examine everything through the eyes of a competitor and enemy. To reasonably erudite French travel- lers, eighteenth-century Holland was the exemplary state Enlighten- ment philosophers looked to as they contemplated designs for a better society. The Germans, who in the seventeenth century were still en- amoured of everything Dutch, managed to throw off their sense of inferiority in the eighteenth century, passing stern judgement on the moral shortcomings they discerned in a country where they were still

reviled on the streets as
moffen
(a word still in use today that is usually translated as ‘Krauts’).

Foreign visitors rarely understood the language,spoke to few Dutch peo- ple, and relied on compatriots to show them around. Many had read travel narratives beforehand and almost all carried guidebooks, which influenced their own accounts and were in turn largely copied from each other. As a result, travellers not only tended to visit the same places, they had similar reactions and often used the same imagery.The harbour of ‘populous’Am- sterdam, a city ‘rich in ships’, is invariably described as a ‘forest of masts’.
‌

There is no sharp distinction between ‘factual’ archival sources and ‘fictional’ art and literature. Neither is without its prejudices and stere- otypes. Judicial archives, popular literature, travel writing, paintings, drawings—they all deserve to be taken seriously as sources. It is crucial to see each in the context of the rest; more than just different genres, they differ in approach. Every description has a perspective of its own and some contradict others.

Finally, the sources themselves are part of the story.Travel accounts did not merely reflect the city’s reputation, they made prostitution a major feature of Amsterdam’s image. Literary texts and works of art are aspects of material reality and they too play a part in the history of prostitution. The trade rendered up rich subject matter which, dis- torted and exaggerated or not, was the stuff of books that stood a good chance of profitable sales.

Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
had an especially powerful influence on the real world. It tempted many members of the elite to visit the music houses, and with publication of the French edition the same year the attraction became international. Foreign visitors wrote letters and travel accounts that in turn set a fashion; no trip to Amsterdam was complete without a visit to a music house. Books drew people to the music houses, helping to keep them in business, and they created expectations the proprietors pro- ceeded to fulfil.To some extent, reality was created by fiction.

About this edition

This book is based on a dissertation submitted to the Erasmus Univer- sity of
R
otterdam in
1996
and published by Wereldbibliotheek in Amsterdam as
Het Amsterdams hoerdom. Prostitutie in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw
(AmsterdamWhoredom: Prostitution in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries).A shorter version for the general reader was issued in
2003
by the same publisher, under the title
De burger en de hoer. Prostitutie in Amsterdam
(The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Amsterdam). That edition has been translated into Spanish, German, Chinese, and now English.

R
educing the book to half its original length meant that choices had to be made. Some sections, even whole chapters, were omitted, including

an account of how the data from the Confession Books was collected and arranged into searchable electronic files.The results and conclusions re- main, but I refer to the statistics only to a limited extent.When I began my research in the
1980
s, much of the source material was still unex- plored and references to early modern prostitution were few. This is no longer the case. In the Netherlands much has been published about women, crime, citizenship, poverty, and migration, and on travelogues and popular literature.These studies have supplemented and enriched my own findings, as well as placing them in a broader context, but I have not been persuaded to alter my arguments or descriptions.This edition does include some additional research of my own into prostitution. My study is based on primary sources that are unique in their extent, comprehen- siveness, and variety, and they relate to a large and rich pre-industrial city in a period little covered in histories of prostitution thus far. The notes reflect this.They give all the primary sources and their locations but are more selective in specifying secondary sources.

In this book I tell the story of the sex trade in early modern Amster- dam and the people who lived from it. I concentrate in particular on a number of themes: women living at the margins of society in a rich metropolis, the concept of honour that was so crucial to the culture of the time, seafaring and the sailors who were such an important part of Amsterdam society, prostitution as a pre-industrial enterprise, the in- terplay between government, police, and crime, and the complex rela- tionship between image and reality, in short the mental and material worlds in which prostitution existed and continues to exist. The title,
The Burgher and the Whore
, refers to the multifaceted relationship be- tween the honourable and the dishonourable, the established and out- siders, the centre and the margins.

William Temple, English ambassador to The Hague, wrote in the intro- duction to his
Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands
(
1673
) that ‘the United Provinces, after a prodigious Growth in
R
iches, Beauty, Extent of Commerce, and Number of Inhabitants, arrived at length to

such a height...as made them the Envy of some, the Fear of others and the Wonder of all their neighbours’. Books about the Dutch
R
epublic are plentiful, and their titles usually refer to a Golden Age,
R
iches, Miracles or Glory.
3
1
This is not a book about riches and glory but about poverty and
‌

crime, yet without the wealth that produced the promise of jobs, the allure of poor relief, and opportunities for criminal gain, Amsterdam would not have attracted hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants.Without pau- pers, the merchant and war fleets could not have been manned, without the wages paid out by the East India Company, prostitution would not have flourished, and without whores on whom they could squander their wages, sailors might not have been so eager to re-enlist.The centre, to a degree, ultimately depended on those who lived at the margins.

This edition has been adapted slightly for an English readership. Many of the Amsterdam addresses and Dutch birthplaces have been omitted, for example,and I have added quotations from English travelogues and guides, to illustrate the impression Amsterdam prostitution made on foreign visi- tors. Despite the naval wars fought between them, the English and Dutch had many points of contact,including diplomats,painters and scientists—as described in
Going Dutch: How England plundered Holland’s Glory
(
2008
) by Lisa Jardine—and their ruling families intermarried. Prostitution might not seem to belong on this list, but there is more here than meets the eye.

The Glorious
R
evolution of
1688
saw a Dutch prince brought to the English throne with the support of Dutch troops and Dutch money. The

new monarchs rejected the lax moral standards of their predecessors; court preacher Gilbert Burnett helped to found the Society for the
R
eformation of Manners, which brought the force of the law to bear against London’s prostitutes.The Society’s greatest opponent, the influential writer on pros- titution Bernard Mandeville, was born and educated in Holland, and al- though no one at the time seems to have noticed, the popular book
The London Jilt, or the Politick Whore
, a fictional autobiography of a prostitute, was translated and adapted from a Dutch original.

My research was made possible partly by grants from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Netherlands Organi- zation for Scientific
R
esearch), the Faculteit Historische en Kunst- wetenschappen (Faculty of History and Arts) of the Erasmus University

in
R
otterdam, and the Stimuleringsfonds Emancipatie Onderzoek (Foundation for the Stimulation of Emancipation
R
esearch) at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. I am grateful to all of

them. The Onderzoeksinstituut voor Geschiedenis en Cultuur

(
R
esearch Institute for History and Culture) of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Utrecht has offered me an academic home since
2001
, for which I would like to express my profound thanks.

Much of the material covered in this book was first presented and discussed in workshops and seminars on women’s history in the Neth- erlands and elsewhere. Of particular importance was the Werkgroep Strafrechtsgeschiedenis (Study Group for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice,
1973
–
98
). I am grateful to the many people who have helped me by providing information from their own research or dis- cussing the subject with me as fellow scholars. I would like to name first of all Willem Frijhoff and Hans Blom, under whose academic leader-