Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam

Abstract

The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam, by Lotte van de Pol, translated by Liz Waters, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, ix + 269 pp., £30.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-921140-1In 1693, Jacoba van de Heyden, a prostitute imprisoned in Amsterdam, was heard boasting to her inmates about a time when she had taken advantage of a prosperous burgher. Getting him exceedingly drunk, Jacoba stole his cash and clothes, before dragging him to the Oude Kerk where she left him sprawled on the church steps. While the specific characters and landmarks depicted in her account were particular to Amsterdam, the activities mentioned were ones with which historians across early modern Europe are perhaps familiar. For Lotte van de Pol in her new monograph however, this incident and many others came to symbolise a particular relationship between the two extremes of early modern Amsterdam's society: the established and respectable city burgher, versus the disreputable whore living on the margins.Ministers and magistrates alike condemned prostitution as the veritable cancer of their age. Vergers complained of the 'great commotion of thumping and slamming' from whore- houses that disrupted Sunday service, as well as the crapulous liberty practised in back- streets and private chambers that silently devoured the moral fabric of the city like, as one Dutch author termed it, the ravages of 'the caterpillar in a cabbage'. How easy was it to hold such a hostile position, though, when the sex trade met the needs of sailors returning to Amsterdam in between voyages, and attracted the interests and currency of travellers across Europe to the city?It is this constant balancing between rhetoric and reality, opposition and tolerance that the author explores through a particularly rich source base. Legal records come from the Confession Books of Prisoners between 1650 and 1750, totalling an astonishing 8099 separate trials, 4633 individual prostitutes, 898 bawds and 253 whoremasters. Each prisoner appearing before the bench was ordered to state their name, age, place of birth, and profession, which - added with the detail of the interrogations - allows the author to offer a degree of thick description on the lives of individual prostitutes. Complementary to her analysis is the usage of travel diaries of visitors to the city and hundreds of pieces of popular literature, though two in particular: Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom (Amsterdam Whoredom), published in Amsterdam in 1681 and reprinted at least nine times, and D'Openhertige Juffrouw, of d'ontdekte gevinsdheid (The Outspoken Damsel, or Hypocrisy Unmasked), which was adapted so well into the English version (The London Jilt) that it is still taken to be an original English work, a forerunner to eighteenth-century works on Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill.In a series of seven chapters, the author aims to tell 'the story of the sex trade and the people who lived from it'. Chapters one and two explore the institutional and cultural contours of Amsterdam's prostitution industry, looking at the various types of prostitutes, the organisations for which they usually worked, and the levels of professionalisation attached to the sex trade. The women governing whorehouses, for example, strictly super- vised staff and clients, enforced standards of cleanliness, and took care of complicated financial matters. Equally, prostitutes placed great emphasis on upholding verbal agree- ments with their customers, and sought to distance themselves from other lesser miscreants. Whores commonly identified themselves as 'a whore, but no thief ', or a whore but not 'everyman's whore', for example. As van de Pol convincingly argues, Amsterdam's sex trade appeared to work within broadly accepted norms of the moral economy.The two subsequent chapters then address the attitudes and prosecution of prostitution and their relative changes over time. While the seventeenth-century mindset viewed whores as lewd and idle women who wanted the luxuries of life without the graft to afford them, the eighteenth century introduced feelings of compassion, seeing prostitutes as victims of a poor childhood and defective upbringing. …