Strategic Affection?

Front matter

Strategic Affection?

Gift Exchange in Seventeenth- Century Holland

AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

Part I: Practices of Gift Exchange Daily Hospitality

Hospitality at Calendar Feasts Hospitality and Rites of Passage Other Gifts

Networks of Exchange Conclusion

Part II: Gifts and Meanings A. Rites of Passage Marriage and Cooking Pots Birth and Christening Gifts

Death and Support through Poetic Letters

B. Hospitality

The Organisation of Hospitality Discourses on Hospitality

Hospitality towards Professional Contacts: Tailors and

Wet Nurses

Stadholders and Forced Hospitality

Hospitality and Reciprocity Conclusion

Part III: Terms and Conditions of Exchange Brotherly Exchange Friendly Exchange Professional Exchange

Literary Exchange 184

Conclusion 194 Part IV: Comparison in Time 197 Practices of Exchange 199 Discourses on Exchange in the Letters to the Future 212 Cultural Conventions 218 Conclusion 222 Conclusion 223 Notes 231 Sources 269 Literature 271 Index of Subjects 283

Acknowledgements

Naturally a work like this can not be completed without the help of family, friends and professional contacts. Some of these people have helped me through their academic knowledge and critical remarks on my work, some of them have inspired me through the discussions we had, and others were there to support and positively distract me. Although it is impossible to mention all these people by name, there are a few that I wish to thank explicitly.

First of all I want to extend my gratitude to my supervisor, Peter Becker. Although his field of expertise does not include seventeenth-century Holland nor gift exchange, he has proved himself willing and able to supervise this book. Secondly, I wish to thank my co-supervisor, Willem Frijhoff. Not only is his knowledge of early-modern Dutch history — and many other things — unsurpassed, the swiftness with which he reads and corrects texts is unequalled.

Other academic contacts that have helped me throughout the years are Ingrid van der Vlis, who helped me with my database project, and Alexander Geppert, who taught me the advantages of a good bibliographical program. I am also indebted to Professor Arjo Klamer and the participants of his ‘Value of Culture’ seminar as well as to the participants of Frijhoff’s ‘Cultural History’ seminar.

Alexandra van Dongen, curator at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, and Cora Laan are responsible for introducing me to the field of material culture. The Meertens Institute in Amsterdam has welcomed me to do my research on the ‘Letters to the Future’. With Rudolf Dekker I discussed ego-documents in seventeenth-century Holland, and with Jeroen Blaak I discussed the same and many other research issues. I also want to thank Jeroen for his hospitality; he was kind enough to share his office with me whenever I was in Holland for one of my ‘missions’.

Naturally I also want to thank my parents. They have always been very supportive of me, in every way they possibly could. Still the most important gift they have offered me throughout my life is their faith that I can do whatever I set my mind to. I hope this book is proof that they were right about me all along.

Last but conventionally not least, I want to thank Serge for all his practical and mental support. I could have probably written this book without you, but with you it has been so much more fun and so much more interesting.

Irma Thoen September 2006

Introduction

When in 1624 Constantijn Huygens was staying in London with an official delegation, he received a number of letters from Dorothea van Dorp.’ Dorothea lived next to the Huygens family in The Hague and had once been his childhood sweetheart. In these letters she not only kept him informed on the latest gossip of high society in The Hague, but she also urged Huygens on several occasions to have Lady Killigrew, a mutual acquaintance, send her a present.* On 24 March Dorothea wrote:

“I wish lady Killigrew would send me a little golden ring.”

A month later she received a number of gemstones from this Lady Killigrew, for which Dorothea thanked her through the mediation of Huygens. In May, Dorothea sent Lady Killigrew a present; a bracelet made of amber. This gift was presumably also offered upon request, for it was accompanied by a letter to Huygens which stated:

“I am glad there is something she wishes to have from me. This and everything I possess in this world is at her disposal. She will do me great honour by wearing it, with which she will greatly oblige me to her. Tell her that it comes from someone who is more her servant than anyone has ever been, notwithstanding all the people that love her.”*

These phrases about Lady Killigrew went on for a while, after which Dorothea directed her attentions once more to Huygens himself:

“I beg you: do not forget the little ring she has promised me.” This begging for gifts seems to suggest that Dorothea was a rather bad-mannered young girl; it is definitely not a way in which one would expect “a humble servant” to behave. Yet Dorothea van

Dorp came from an old, noble family. Her father had played an important role in the liberation of the Dutch from the Spanish, and had made an impressive career for himself in the military. He died as the governor of Tholen, Zeeland, in 1612 and was buried at The Hague. His second wife, Sara van Trello, moved to The Hague after his demise, and brought Dorothea, who was born from his first marriage to Anna Schets, along to live with her.” In The Hague they lived at the Voorhout, which was then — and still is — a very classy lane in the centre of town.” In 1614, the Huygens family had moved into the house next to the Van Dorp residence, which is when the friendship between Dorothea and Constantijn Huygens started.

The Huygens family was part of the regent class of the Dutch Republic. Constantijn’s father, Christian Huygens, was one of the secretaries of the Council of State and therewith one of the highest state officials in the Dutch Republic. Constantijn himself was also trained to become a high-ranking government official in due course. His trip to London in 1624 was only one of the starting points of his career. He was a minor delegate of these official state missions to England, but later he followed in his father’s footsteps as the secretary to the stadholders, besides which he was also to become one of the more famous poets of that period.”

Considering that both Dorothea and Constantijn were members of elite families and their upbringing will have reflected this social position, it is unlikely that their conniving over Lady Killigrew’s gifts was just a matter of bad behaviour. Moreover, Dorothea had by this time passed the age of thirty. Her bold insistence on receiving these gifts from Lady Killigrew will therefore also not have derived from childish greed. Besides which, the remark about the amber bracelet suggests that Lady Killigrew herself did not find it inappropriate to indicate what gift she wished to receive from Dorothea. It seems that this behaviour was acceptable between these two upper class individuals and Constantijn Huygens obviously did not object to playing his role in the whole mediation of the exchange of these gifts either.

However, the picture painted here does leave the modern beholder with a somewhat peculiar feeling. There is a sense of inappropriateness to this behaviour, which is caused by Dorothea’s explicitness in asking for gifts and her explicitness as to what gifts she wished to receive. Even though this explicitness does exist in contemporary society as such — it is not considered inappropriate,

Io for instance, for children to make a wish list for Christmas — it is generally considered “not done” to ask for a gift. If this does occur at all, it is more likely associated with childish behaviour, begging or corruption than with a friendly exchange of gifts."° This implies that the cultural conventions, or rules of behaviour, that surrounded gift exchange in the seventeenth-century may have been rather different from the conventions that apply to contemporary — in the sense of turn of the twentieth century — gift exchange.”

Defining the Gift

An analytical reconstruction of gift-exchange practices needs to start with at least a tentative definition of the gift. Interestingly enough, despite all the literature on gift exchange in the social sciences most social scientists do not define their topic of research in full detail. This might seem like a disadvantage, but, on the other hand, it might not be such a brilliant idea to define gift and gift exchange in advance. Since hardly anything is known about gift exchange in seventeenth-century Holland and the assumption is that gift exchange then might have been rather different from gift exchange now, it seems sensible to start off with a rather open frame of mind. Any definition thought up beforehand might impose a contemporary view on the seventeenth-century sources, while the idea behind this research is to study gift exchange as it was perceived by individuals in the cultural context of seventeenth-century Dutch society.

Nevertheless, some reference point is obviously needed, as to what can actually be considered gifts. Gifts in this research include both material gifts, such as objects, food and drink, money and artistic or intellectual gifts, and immaterial gifts, such as hospitality and support.’* Objects can be any type of gifts in objectified form, be it kitchen utensils or pottery that is used for decoration. Food and drink, in contrast to hospitality, is offered outside of one’s own home, whereas hospitality is considered to be all offerings of food, drink and lodging within the confines of the home of the giver. Artistic and intellectual gifts are those gifts that spring from the artistic and intellectual efforts of the giver, be it poems, paintings and prints or treatises and books. Support can be offered in several forms, such as practical, financial and emotional support. Some of these types of gifts may be perishable, like food and drink, while others are more likely to have survived the tests of time, such as silver objects.

The character of these different types of gifts will be further explored in the chapters that follow. The advantage of working with such a broad range of gifts is that it leaves an opportunity to trace the full extent of reciprocal exchange in seventeenth-century Holland. Therewith, it can hopefully offer full insight into how individuals in seventeenth-century Holland used gifts as a means to establish and maintain social ties, and how gift exchange as a system was organised.

If so many different things can be gifts, when does an object or an activity enter the sphere of gift exchange, when the same exact object or activity could also be part of an economic transaction? Undoubtedly the line between gift exchanges and economic transactions is sometimes difficult to draw. The contemporary idea of an economic transaction would be that a certain object, activity or service is exchanged for money, yet in the early modern period an economic exchange may well have involved payment in kind. On the other hand, even today money itself can function as a gift and in those cases it is definitely not seen as a form of payment. Sums of money that grandparents offer their grandchildren on occasions such as birthdays are seen as gifts and not as payment.

So what makes a gift? Where does one draw the line between gift exchange and economic transaction? This all depends on the parties involved. It is a necessity that at least one of the parties involved in the exchange of the gift — either the giver or the recipient — thinks of the gift as such. For it is only by either explicitly or implicitly acknowledging an object or activity as a gift that it becomes one. For that reason, all cases that are considered or referred to as gifts by the seventeenth-century subjects involved will be considered gifts, even when the exchange for the contemporary onlooker seems to have more to do with economic exchange or barter than with gift giving. It is the subjects involved that distinguish gift exchange behaviour from economic behaviour.”

One way of doing this is through their discourse on this behaviour. Through the use of words that refer to the exchange of gifts, the actual offering turns into a gift. Words that belong to the rhetoric of the gift in seventeenth-century Holland are gift, geschenk, schenkagie and gave, which can all be translated as gifts, and vereering, which means honouring by giving.

I2

It is not just the terminology that makes the gift, it is also the context in which something is offered that makes the subjects interpret the offering as a gift. Certain occasions, for instance, are strongly connected to gift exchange rituals and on these occasions it is clear to all parties involved that the things offered on these occasions are gifts. Gifts that guests bring to wedding, for example, are generally acknowledged as such. Nobody will wonder whether these gifts were in fact part of an economic transaction. Over all, one might say that this research deals with all those objects and activities that are offered within a (possible) pattern of reciprocity not as an economic transaction but as a means to establish or maintain social ties.

However, there are also situations that are not obviously connected to gift exchange rituals and that do not include a discourse of gift exchange. Dorothea, for instance, does not use the terminology of gift exchange when she refers to the ring and bracelet she exchanged with Lady Killigrew in her letters to Huygens. Still both Lady Killigrew and Dorothea will have thought of their mutual offerings as a friendly exchange of gifts rather than anything else. As Dorothea mentioned, she thought it an honour that Lady Killigrew would wear a bracelet that she had offered her. So, even though this is not considered gift exchange behaviour in the eye of the contemporary beholder, to Dorothea and Lady Killigrew it was, which poses the question of how this behaviour can be explained within the cultural context of seventeenth-century Holland.

Gifts in Theory

Social relations and instrumentality in the early modern period

Dorothea’s behaviour may be explained by the supposed instrumental character of social relations in the early modern period. Several historians have reflected upon the idea that the existence of affection and intimacy within social relations is a modern phenomenon that only began developing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and was not necessarily a feature of relations in the early modern period. This lack of affection supposedly applied to relationships within marriage — between husband and wife; within the family; between parents and children; and between friends. '*

It has been argued, for instance, that marriages in the early modern period consisted of alliances between families, rather than affectionate relationships between husband and wife. Parents looked for partners for their children that would best suit their family interests in terms of financial gain, career perspectives, status and healthy progeny. In that sense, marriage in the early modern period was about strategy and allegiance instead of affection or even love. The ideal of romantic love between spouses would only develop during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.”

The relationship between parents and children in the early modern period has also been claimed by several authors to be devoid of affection. The high infant mortality rate caused parents and especially mothers to refrain from developing any feelings for their children in order not to be hurt when the child died. Not only was there a lack of general affection for children, they were largely neglected during their upbringing as such. The idea of the child as a specific category in need of special care and attention only developed in the course of time, while the concept of motherly love did not surface until the eighteenth century."®

Outside the family, this lack of affection has also been described by historians. Friendship, for instance, was, like any other type of relationship, just a means to an end. Friendship was mostly instrumental in character and would just be maintained for the mutual benefit of the involved.” The idea of friendship in the modern sense of the word of people sharing certain interests, enjoying each others company and developing feelings of affection for each other is considered to be the result of the Romantic era in the eighteenth century."

One might say that friendship as a system was a type of carpooling. When necessary, people used the social capital of their friends to obtain whatever it was they needed — be it a favour, a job or a spouse — and there was a mutual understanding that whenever their friends in turn were in need of their social capital they would be reciprocated for the help earlier received. This means that the offering of support was expected to be reciprocated and while the reciprocation had not yet taken place, the recipient of the initial support was “obliged to” his benefactor. If the recipient in time failed to live up to this expectation of reciprocation, it was likely to bring disgrace"?

Naturally, these claims by some historians have been strongly opposed by others who have pointed out that both marital and parental love, and friendly affection did indeed exist before the eighteenth century.*° Yet, even though there is an ongoing discussion on parental love, emotions and friendship in the early modern period, there seems to be a general agreement that instrumentality can be considered a prominent feature of Dutch society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Frijhoff and Spies stated in their 1650 Bevochten Eendracht: “Friendship in the early modern period was a notion that not so much expressed an affective tie as an instrumental one, even though affection was decidedly part of proper friendly intercourse.”* Friendship — in the broadest sense of the word including both family relations and friendship proper — consisted of a form of solidarity between individuals and groups with coinciding interests, who depended on each other for practical help and moral support.

However well argued and convincing some of these views are, the generalisation that social relations in the early modern period are predominantly instrumental is in some respects rather problematic. First of all, this generalisation — by describing general patterns of human relations — seems to deny the fact that there are real human beings involved in these relationships who might offer different meanings to their behaviour than historians do. Or, in other words, the patterns that can be described with the benefit of hindsight were not necessarily intentional patterns for the individuals that constitute these patterns. Two individuals who get married, just get married and do not therewith intentionally establish a particular marriage pattern, even though later on the marriages of a great number of individuals might add up to a pattern. The bride and groom might, consciously or unconsciously, be adjusting to social conventions, but the objective analysis that can be made of this behaviour does not necessarily coincide with the subjective experience of the couple involved. This probes the question of whether these individual human beings then interpreted their social contacts in the same instrumental manner as historians do now. Did early modern individuals ascribe the same instrumental meanings to their behaviour within social relationships as contemporary historians do?

The second problem with these instrumental views of social relations in the early modern period is that by defining these relations as instrumental it is suggested that this instrumentality is typical for the described period and for that period only. Whereas some historians have just analysed the early modern period and have come to the conclusion that this — in social terms — was an instrumental period, others have actually explicitly argued that there has been a development from instrumental to affectionate ties. Whether implicitly or explicitly, in both cases the stress is on change rather than continuity, on historical development rather than anthropological perpetuity and the standard by which this change is measured is usually — but never explicitly — the society of which the author himself is part.

Yet, one might wonder whether social relations then were actually so different from social relations now. If one takes contemporary marriage patterns, for instance, it becomes clear that most individuals, even though they have the freedom of choice, still marry within their own peer group, which consists of people with the same level of education and same social status. This would imply on an analytical level that they, like seventeenth-century individuals, are mostly concerned with maintaining their social capital, while, in fact, the contemporary discourse on marriage is one of love and affection. This probes the question of whether the instrumentality of social relations is really typical of the early modern period.

These two questions — the one on the individuals interpretation of his social behaviour and the other on instrumentality as a typical trait of early modern social relations — direct the attention to yet another question: the question of how one can answer these questions. How can the meanings that individuals ascribed to their social behaviour and their social relations be researched? And how can one know that instrumentality is typical for the early modern period? These two questions require two different approaches in answering them. The first approach needs to offer an opportunity to deal with individual social behaviour in the early modern period and the ways in which relationships in that period were maintained and interpreted, while the second question implies a need for comparison. It is only by comparing levels of instrumentality in the early modern period with those of another period that the supposed instrumental character of the former can be established. But first and foremost, a vehicle is needed through which social relations — in any period, but the early modern period in particular — can be studied.

In this research, the exchange of gifts is taken as the vehicle through which the character of social relations in seventeenth-century Holland is analysed. This choice for gift exchange is manifold. First of all, gift exchange is a phenomenon that until recently has largely been ignored by cultural historians of the early modern period. Works have been published on related themes such as marriage exchange, charity and credit.** Still there is only one cultural/social historical research document that deals with the phenomenon of gift exchange in the early modern period: Natalie Davis’s The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. *

This lack of historical interest in gift exchange is rather surprising, since there has been considerable interest in historical anthropology (or anthropological history) over the last decade and traditionally, the gift has always been a very prominent topic in the field of anthropology.** Therefore, it would have seemed unavoidable that the gift as a historical research topic would have gained momentum sooner than it eventually did. However, this means that, especially within the historiography of the Dutch Republic, the field of gift exchange is a largely unexplored territory and therewith an exciting voyage to embark upon.

The Dutch Republic experienced its Golden Age during the seventeenth-century. It had freed itself from the Spanish domination, overseas exploration brought relative wealth, and the arts and sciences blossomed in the Dutch climate of relative tolerance. The Dutch were known as a bourgeois and Calvinistic people who enjoyed making money more than spending it, which makes their gift exchange behaviour especially interesting. Even though the Dutch Golden Age has always been an epoch of great interest to historians and art historians alike, relatively little has been written on and is known about the exchange of gifts in seventeenth-century Holland.

This is surprising in the sense that, in general, every possible topic of Dutch society in that period has been covered; monographs have been published on subjects ranging from Dutch humour to civil servants and from widows to friendship associations.”

There are, however, a number of Dutch studies that deal with the exchange of gifts in a more indirect manner. These either use theoretical notions from gift exchange theory to study more or less institutional forms of exchange, like charity, and the ways in which poverty was dealt with by seventeenth-century individuals.?° Or they discuss the exchange of gifts as a part of a larger concept such as friendship in the early modern period.” Furthermore, there are a number of older works, from the turn of the century, that deal with daily life among “our Dutch ancestors” that refer to events and occasions in this period that involved the exchange of gifts, such as birth and calendar feasts.” However, before sailing off to the rather unexplored island of gift exchange in seventeenth-century Holland, the rather over-explored concept of the gift and gift-exchange in the social sciences deserves some attention.

Gift exchange and the social sciences

Ever since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le Don, gift exchange has been a topic of great interest in the social sciences.*? It is a popular research theme in fields ranging from cultural anthropology to sociology and from social psychology to consumer research and within all of these fields of study, Mauss is referred to as the initiator of gift-exchange research.

As with the discussion on the existence of affection in early modern relationships, when it comes to the development of gift exchange through time there seem to be two streams within gift-exchange theory. One of these favours the discontinuity and the other the continuity of the gift exchange system. In the first case, it is claimed that the gift exchange system over time has been overtaken by an economic system of market exchange. According to this view “gifts historically performed primarily economic functions”.*° It is acknowledged that gift exchange does still exist today but it is more or less considered only a remnant of days gone by. The idea is that, over time, the gift system was largely overtaken by the market system.

Others have adhered to a more continuous view in which the gift exchange system proceeds to exist next to a system of market exchange. According to this view gift exchange is still very much alive and has its own (social) function within the larger context in which these systems exist.” Authors like Macharel have argued that even “in industrial societies where most exchange is governed by the market, entire sectors of social life are ruled by the gift”.

This is also a statement to the effect that money and gifts are actually not only able to but actually exist side by side, and perform their own specific roles as well. This coincides with Natalie Davis’s remark that more recently a new generation of anthropologists and historians have emerged who claim that “rather than a gift system eventually being superseded by a market system, gift elements persist with new connections and consequences”.

As will be shown throughout this research, the latter view that gift exchange is a system with a continuous role within the history of human society, seems to be the most convincing. Here gift exchange is considered an anthropological given. As is stated in the Encyclopaedia of Human Emotions “giving and receiving is a practice common to all cultures in the world”.*+ It is a phenomenon that exists in any time and place, irrespective of the level of economic development of the society under scrutiny. The gift system exists parallel to the economic system and is not a replacement of it, nor a contradiction to it. The two systems may interfere and influence each other in certain instances, but, in general, the gift system is a system with its own specific function within human society.

This specific function within society is largely caused by one of the features of gift exchange that social scientists generally agree upon. Gift exchange is commonly accepted as a means to establish and maintain social ties, but not only that: Gifts are also viewed as a sign of the existence or coming into existence of a social tie.” As Schmied has put it in his work on giving as a form of social practice: “Geschenken dienen [...] dem Ausdruck, der Bestätigung oder Bekrüftigung sozialer Beziehungen”>° A slightly more down to earth statement that basically comes down to the same thing is Cheal’s remark that “gifts are the cement of social relationships” As such, gifts serve as a good means to study social relations in the early modern period: they were a tool in the maintenance of these relationships and at the same time an indication of the existence of a relationship.

The question is how gifts actually function as the cement which holds society together. According to Gouldner, it is the principle of reciprocity that makes the exchange of gifts possible.3® This norm prescribes that for each gift offered there must be a gift returned. It therewith helps individuals to initiate a relationship by offering the first gift, because due to this norm they can be certain that their initial efforts will be reciprocated, and through this norm existing relationships are further stabilised by the offering of more gifts. Therewith the norm of reciprocity makes it less risky for individuals to initiate and maintain a relationship: through the norm of reciprocity, the recipient is always socially bound to reciprocate received attentions.*? This doesn’t mean, however, that for every gift offered there has to be a gift of equal form and value in return, or that reciprocity has to be balanced under all circumstances. Instead, it is through the expectation of reciprocity by the donor and the feeling of obligation to reciprocate by the recipient that the relationship is maintained. People are bound together by the expectation of reciprocity.

It is exactly this feature of gift exchange that makes it such a suitable vehicle for studying social relations. Naturally, the assumptions that gift exchange is a means to establish and maintain social ties and that reciprocity is a basic principle of its functioning, stress the instrumental character of gift exchange as a social act. In that sense, one might assume that this research could be concluded right here and now: if one studies social relations through the exchange of gifts and one assumes that the exchange of gifts is instrumental by nature, then it seems obvious that social relations are likely to be instrumental as well. However, authors like Bourdieu and Komter have offered an opportunity to interpret gift exchange behaviour in a broader sense than just instrumental interpretations. As Komter argues, with reference to Bourdieu, a vital part of (contemporary) gift giving is that: