Benjamin Roberts

Drinking like a man: the paradox of excessive drinking for seventeenth-century dutch youths.

In the early modern period, drinking alcohol was an integral part of Dutch social and cultural life. Toasts were made to the health of unborn babies, for job nominations, and at funerals. Young people started to consume alcohol at an early age. However, within this culture they had to learn how to drink in moderation. Excessive drinking was not only a cardinal sin, it was also a paradox in the realm of gender. For males, the act of getting drunk and losing control was a flaw on their masculinity. They in fact became like women who were believed to be incapable of controlling their mind and body. On the other hand, the ability to drink great quantities of alcohol symbolized an age-old form of masculinity. Imbibing in “wine, women, and song” were liminal rites in becoming men and how young men demarcated themselves from being boys.

The “Marlboro Men” of the Early Seventeenth Century Masculine Role Models for Dutch Youths in the Golden Age?

In the course of the early seventeenth century, smoking tobacco changed from being a vice of social outcasts to a common pastime enjoyed in all echelons of Dutch society. Among the first to experiment with tobacco were male youths. This article questions why young men started using tobacco and explores possible “smoking” role models that might have influenced them to take up smoking. The most likely candidates were soldiers and civic guards, who, in general, were considered macho men. Besides being heroes on the battlefield and protectors of cities, these models of manhood were renowned to youngsters for their drinking, womanizing, and smoking. In the eyes of male youths, these activities were important liminal rites that demarcated boyhood from manhood.

Moral Panic and Holland’s Libertine Youth of the 1650s and 1660s

During the 1650s and 1660s, the Dutch Republic witnessed a wave of moral panic created by moralists. Every natural disaster, economic setback, and war that the Republic was involved in was considered to be a sign of God’s wrath on Holland’s newly acquired freedom, wealth, and secular society. Much of the finger-pointing was directed toward Holland’s young people, who were accused of being vain, defying the Sabbath, visiting the theater, gambling, drinking, and fornicating. These accusations were, however, misplaced. This article examines the moral crusade of the 1650s and 1660s, and discovers that moralists were more upset that the Dutch Republic became a secular society and did not evolve into a theocratic state or “Dutch Israel,” as they had hoped. Holland’s youth were used as a scapegoat to create moral panic among political leaders, so they would reform Holland’s secular society.

Het schoolschrift van Pieter Teding van Berkhout. Vergezicht op het gymnasiaal onderwijs in de zeventiende‐eeuwse Nederlanden

If someone knew that their homework would be corrected 350 years later and rated ‘mediocre’, the chances of wanting to save it for posterity drop to nil. The poor pupil, Pieter Teding van Berkhout (1643–1713), saved his notebook. However, it became a fortunate discovery for later generations. For the eminent historian of education Anna Frank-van Westrienen, his homework compiled in a notebook was a welcome source of information about Dutch secondary education in the seventeenth century.

Edifying Youths. The Chambers of Rhetoric in Seventeenth-Century Holland

For the early modern period, historians have primarily looked at institutional forms of education when investigating the intellectual molding of youths. With the exception of the wealthy, their conclusions have often been one-sided. However, youths of the middling sort in the Dutch Republic were more resourceful. Youths that could not afford a formal education at a Latin school or a university resorted to alternative resources such as chambers of rhetoric. For historians of education, chambers of rhetoric are not an obvious terrain to excavate. Traditionally, the chambers have been studied for their public literary and theatrical activities. However, those incidental public performances were only a fraction of what took place in private. In this essay we will probe into the literary activities of the chambers private weekly meetings and illustrate how the Dutch chambers of rhetoric in the seventeenth century played an important role in edifying youths from the middling sort into a cultural elite.

Fatherhood in eighteenth-century Holland : The Van der Muelen brothers

Until recently, fatherhood in the Early Modern period has been largely unknown terrain. Books of advice on the physical upbringing of children were addressed to mothers, implying that fathers were not involved in the process. However, iconog raphic evidence presented by Simon Schama suggests that fathers did indeed partici pate in bringing up their children. This research note uses personal documents-the correspondence of two brothers, Jan André (1703-60) and JosephElias (1707-81) Van der Muelen-to address the apparent discrepancy. Two themes, the births and sickness of their children, dominated the brothers letters to each other, and they also wrote about breast feeding, weaning, and the problems of finding godparents for their children. As such, the correspondence provides an insight into fatherhood in the Early Modern period.

The Renaissance Man and his children [Review of: (1998) The Renaissance Man and his children]

If the history of childhood was a painting then it would probably belong to the impressionistic school. Many historians have painted its landscape in broad strokes of time including every social strata, drawing upon every topic under the sun, and not silhouetting geographical borders. This image leaves much to desire. In The Renaissance Man and his Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600, Louis Haas of Duquesne University adds more definition to this sketchy past by confining the contours of his portrait to the merchant and ruling elite of Renaissance Florence in the period 1300-1600 and restricting his subject matter to childbirth and infancy. By drawing from ricordi and ricordanze, remembrances and memories, as a source, Haas’s picture illustrates more realistic practices and attitudes of Florence’s Renaissance fathers. In these personal documents, fathers are prominent writers; women plainly wrote fewer letters than men did. Another asset to studying Florence that was influenced by the humanistic movement was it wealth of moralists, clergymen, educators, and physicians who theorized about childbirth and infancy. The reasons for examining the event of birth is because it is a biological event. It is a point of tension in a human’s life in which the religious, political, ritual, and dynastic attitudes of a culture suddenly become translucent. Haas not only examines how Florentines were born but also how Florentines thought about children and birth rituals, how they cared for their young, how they were educated, how they rewarded and punished, how children played, and in some cases, how they mourned the death of a young child. Historians of Renaissance childhood, such as David Herlihy, Christiane KlapischZuber, and Charles de la Roncière, have presented an ugly image of childhood for this period. Their conclusions, based on infant mortality rates, wet-nursing practices, and foundling hospital records, support Ariès’s gloomy interpretation of childhood. This genre of negative sources will provide historians with a negative image, just as newspapers today might provide future family historians studying the late twentieth century. Love and affection will not be the conclusions but rather child abuse, sexual misuse, and discarded dead infants found in trash bins. The personal documents that Haas studied for Renaissance Florence nuanced this dismal portrait. By studying ricordi and ricordanze, Haas is able to retrieve the underlying motive for these child-rearing practices, which makes the past a less foreign place for us. Haas not only observes childhood from a parental perspective but allows us to see Florentine society from a religious and cultural viewpoint. Baptism was one of those rituals that symbolized the acceptance of children into Florentine society, and it exemplified parental love. For the baptism, an infant was paraded in procession, surrounded by his or her entire family, to Florence’s baptistery, San Giovani. Baptism gave children a soul; hence, it was important that children be baptized as soon as possible because if an infant were to die without being baptized, parents feared that the baby was doomed to “Limbo of Children, a place separate from Heaven with no future.” To save children from this destiny, parents had their infants baptized quickly (usually within three days of their birth). This often meant that the infant’s mother was not present at the baptismal ceremony because she was recovering from childbirth. Florentines often gave their children a name of a living relative or of an ancestor. This practice did not show a lack of originality and did not symbolize the absence of individuality in premodern times. It was a way of binding generations together, connecting the past to the present, amplifying continuity in the family.