De Achttiende Eeuw - Volume 53, Issue 1, 2021

The fear that a republic will inevitably decline occupied a central place in late eighteenth-century Dutch thought, but concrete examples are rarely analyzed in depth. This article takes a closer look at a largely ignored thinker from this era, Jan Hendrik van Dongen (1766-1789), focusing on the theme of republican decline in the collection of his most important writings: Mijn Tijd Winst (1789-1791). Special attention is paid to his treatment of the remarkable example of San Marino. This small, isolated, and agrarian republic had enjoyed a stable existence for more than a millennium and thus appeared to be an exception to the historical rule of inevitable decline. The question arises if the example of San Marino holds lessons for the larger, internationally oriented and commercial Dutch Republic, which was widely considered to be in rapid decline at the end of the eighteenth century.

This biographical sketch of the little-known French pastellist Susanne Caron focuses on September 1769, when, some eighteen months after her arrival in Holland, her name suddenly appeared in newspapers throughout Europe. In Amsterdam, she portrayed Pascal Paoli (1725-1807), the elected leader of the Corsican republic. After suffering a crushing defeat by the French invaders, Paoli was on his way to London to get military support. Newspapers claimed Caron’s portrait was Paoli’s first true likeness and carried publicity for its engraving by Jacob Houbraken. A fascinating glimpse of Caron’s personal feelings about Paoli is provided by an autograph letter (one of several newly discovered biographical documents) to professor Pieter Burman. Burman was one of the ideologists of the ‘patriot’ faction and looked upon Paoli as an incarnation of ‘true liberty’, as opposed to the hereditary stadholder. Caron never managed to cash in on her fame. In 1771, she married a compatriot and left for the West-Indies.

In 1679, Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) published a study on the sexual lust of women, titled De Stolatae Virginitatis Iure. Scholars who have looked at this rebellious humanist and his sexual studies have unanimously concluded that the publication of De Peccato Originali, his infamous work on sexual lust and original sin, led to Beverland’s arrest and eventually his banishment from Holland and Zeeland. Looking at the connection of De Stolatae Virginitatis Iure to his other studies and comparing his perspective on women and their behaviour to the outlook of his contemporaries, this article argues that Beverland’s study of female desire was just as radical, if not more seditious, than his work on original sin. Taking Beverland’s exceptional solutions to pre- and extramarital sexual relations into account, De Stolatae Virginitatis Iure proves to be truly provocative, offering a unique perspective on the sexual activities of young men and women in early modern Europe.

The Antwerp manuscript ‘Het Mengelmoes’ from 1696 contains several ‘taboo texts’, in which views and opinions were expressed that were inconsistent with those of the Catholic Church. In manuscript, these texts escaped ecclesiastical censorship. This article will present and discuss a selection of these ‘taboo texts’, since some of them bear witness to libertine ideas in the late seventeenth-century Southern Low Countries. These ideas seem to have come over from France, but there are indications of influences from the Dutch Republic as well. They relate in particular to sexual morality, presenting marriage as an unnatural institution and advocating sexual freedom instead. Since the most prominent cultural language in the Southern Low Countries at the time was French, it is highly interesting that some of the libertine ‘taboo texts’ were written in Dutch. ‘Het Mengelmoes’ provides evidence of the existence of Dutch-language, seventeenth-century libertine literature from the Southern Low Countries.

The tragic story of Sophia van Noortwijck (1673-1710) and her mother Sophia van der Maa (1636?-1710) is a well-documented and suitable case to investigate prevailing ideas about morality in the county of Holland around 1700. Because of their promiscuous and fraudulent behaviour, these wealthy ladies were involved in a scandalous trial before the high court in The Hague. Mother and daughter had flouted the norms and values of their various social circles to such an extent that they ended up excluded from those communities altogether. This article focuses on one particular type of source, namely mock-songs and pasquils that circulated about them and denounced their immoral behaviour. I argue that these songs give us access to the subjective experiences and value judgments of contemporaries. In doing so, I connect to the current debate in heritage studies around diversity and inclusion. The concepts of a ‘multi-voiced society’ and exclusion are also useful for studying the past and the memories of the past, particularly in a case like this one where the wealth of sources (letters, court documents, testimonies, personal notes, etc.) enables us to interpret these voices.

The philosophical-pornographic novel Dom B… portier des chartreux, écrite par lui-même (1740) is a fictitious autobiography by a charterhouse’s porter about the years preceding his joining of the order. The author criticizes the hypocrisy of the regular priests, who do not at all abstain from sex while at the same time disputing the opinion that sexuality was not wanted by God. In the opinion of the charterhouse’s porter, it is rather chastity that corrupts nature as He created it. The book became widely known among refined, libertine readers in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. In the same period, Jacob Campo Weyerman published a number of fierce diatribes on the same theme, i.e. against the hypocrite dealing of monks with their own pretended ideals on chastity. This article analyzes Dom B…’s storyline in conjunction with Weyerman’s statements on the carthusians in order to formulate assertions on the ways in which the order was perceived in the years around 1740. The contemporary debates on jansenism constitute a formative contextual theme.

When organized homosexual emancipation took root in the late nineteenth century, it was based to a large extent on the then prevailing biomedical and psychiatric conceptualizations. These presented homosexuality as an innate inclination of a minority, while science-based knowledge was seen as the road towards societal acceptance of such leaning. In this article it is argued that, as early as in the eighteenth century, distinct efforts were made towards ‘homosexual emancipation’, if preliminary and less coherent perhaps, yet also quite radical in tone and contents. While the modern gay movement largely steered a defensive course way into the twentieth century – based on a clearly demarcated minority group’s sense of ‘being different’ and ‘having no other option’ – in the eighteenth century, voices could be heard that appealed to self-determination and choice, and that used racy language and let itself be inspired by libertinism, cultural history, and literature. The examples provided in this article are derived from (mainly English and French) court archives, pamphlets, political-philosophical treatises, personal documents, and (semi-pornographic) literary texts.

For the modern reader, the sentimental novel has become virtually unreadable. Yet, for the eighteenth-century reader it meant a ‘revolution of feeling’ that can be regarded simultaneously as a consequence of, and a counterbalance to, early modern individualism. Passion and emotion were increasingly valorized because they provided an escape from the isolation produced by the Enlightenment emancipations into an intimate bond between a few self-chosen individuals. The increasing freedom in personal relations, however, implied that an emotional connection could be cancelled at any time. The genre’s swollen rhetoric thus aimed at countering an underlying fear. A careful reading of sentimentalist texts reveals various lapses and slips that hint at this fear. In Rhijnvis Feith’s Ferdinand and Constantia, it even defines the plot as both characters, at a crucial moment in the story, believe that the other has become unfaithful.

The social, gendered, and racial relations in the Dutch colony of Suriname have been predominantly studied in the context of the plantation system and the hierarchized divide between masters and those who were enslaved. More recently, however, scholars have demanded attention for the ambiguous position of free people of color within these colonial dynamics. This article aligns with this recent research trend, as it traces some of the complexities of the sexual relations in daily realities of eighteenth-century Suriname. By unearthing and analyzing hitherto unstudied archival sources such as testaments and records of criminal cases, it demonstrates that, while the colonial judicial system forbade sex between people with a different complexion, the reality of sexual relations in the Dutch colony was more complicated than it was long assumed and that women of color were at times able to circumvent the overarching white patriarchal system. Indeed, this article illustrates that sexual ties – prohibited or legitimate, tolerated or scandalous, coerced or loving – in some cases challenged the lines of color, gender, and class that shaped the demographic circumstances in colonial Suriname.