The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (14 page)

one has ever yet heard of such things!’
6
Conversely, foreigners ogled Amsterdam prostitutes and often judged them harshly, even though prostitution was rife in their own major cities.All over Europe, syphilis, the ‘foul disease’, was blamed on foreigners.The Dutch used the term ‘Spanish pox’ to refer to a sickness known in England and Italy, for example, as ‘the French disease’, while Spaniards chose to identify the heathen American Indians as the source of the devastating infection.
7

The problem, of course, was that whoring was not a sin committed exclusively elsewhere or by outsiders. In
Den Amsteldamsen Diogenes
(
1684
) (The Amsterdam Diogenes) Axilius
R
oos asks himself, ‘How many times has it not happened that an honest and virtuous woman was infected by her husband—who regularly converses with whores in brothels, on Dam Square, or in the street—with the Spanish, French,

German, yes, let’s simply call it Dutch pox?’
8
‘Public Whoring’, Bernard Mandeville argues in his
A Modest Defence of Publick Stews
(
1724
), ‘is neither so criminal in itself, nor so detrimental to the Society, as private Whoring’.
9
The enticements of some penniless German girl, clearly a prostitute, standing at a brothel doorway in a back-street in the harbour district making eyes at drunken Norwegian seamen posed no real threat.Sinfulness within the community was felt to be far more dangerous: the ‘silent’ whore, not recognizable as a strumpet; the adulterous hus- band who infected his wife with venereal disease; the corruption of burghers’ children; and the secret, forbidden, perverse sexual practices

that undermined the fabric of society and, worst of all, provoked God’s wrath.

The term ‘whoring’ referred to more than simply prostitution, or even fornication. It was a metaphor for everything regarded as rotten, godless, and depraved. The big city, for instance, was a metaphorical whore in contrast to the virtuous woman represented by unspoiled countryside.
10
Amsterdam was ‘the whore on the IJ’, a city open to all comers, in which everything revolved around money.The seventeenth- century clergyman Bartens writes:
‌

The whore on the IJ will take any coin to hand She sails for papist, heathen, moor, or Turk

She cares for neither God nor our dear fatherland But demands only profit, profit, profit!
11

The whore was the female personification of all evil.
Het karakter van een hoer
(
1730
) (The Character of a Whore) warns:‘Truly a whore is the highway to the devil, and he who stops to talk with her embarks on a voyage to hell; he who kisses her desirously quickens his pace; and he who enjoys her has reached his journey’s end.’
12

Prostitution has long been associated with sewage and waste dis- posal. Nicolaas Heinsius, in a book about the pox called
De kwynende Venus
(
1700
) (The Languishing Venus), attributes the disease to the ‘foul sin’ of sex with women ‘who, just like the common city privies and rubbish ditches, publicly and shamelessly hire out their bodies to the rabble and passing lechers’.
13
Mandeville likens the function of a brothel to that of an earth closet or ‘boghouse’.
14
In imagery of this kind, not only the brothel but often the prostitute herself was likened to a sewer; a whore was a ‘pisspot’ and a ‘shithouse’.
15
It is striking that the filth attaching to a prostitute did not adhere to the man in whom it, after all, it originated.

Abhorrence of ‘silent’ whores

The obsession with whores and the fear of them, both of which emerge in contemporary writing, relate more to private whores who posed as honourable women than to public whores who made no secret of their harlotry. Jacob Cats, for example, in his
Hoeren, ende ongemacken van deselve herkomende
(
1632
) (Whores and the Troubles That Arise

From Them), stresses that hypocrisy is a whore’s most dangerous at- tribute. Like many writers, he points to the contrast between her beau- tiful appearance and the moral and physical depravity lurking behind the facade. He compares the damage done by ‘a whore in the house’ to the ravages of the ‘caterpillar in a cabbage’ or ‘canker in the leg’, both of which are invisible to the external observer. In
Het karakter van een hoer
we read:‘Her body is a painted cask, filled with the dregs of pleas- ure, covered with a little stale wine to turn it the right colour; taste her—she is death on the tongue.’
16
‌
‌

Covert whores were a threat to their environment, including their loved ones; in popular literature, kept women routinely cuckold those who maintain them by receiving other men, whether for payment or not.The special abhorrence reserved for this type of woman is reflected in judicial records.The interrogation of Johanna
R
obberts, for instance, arrested for brothel-keeping in
1733
, focused on her past as a chambered whore. She was asked ‘whether during the time when she was main-

tained by that gentleman, she did not service others to the utter ruin of some of them?’
17
This echoes the reproach of Melchior Fokkens in
Klucht van dronken Hansje
(
1657
) (Farce of Drunken Hans) to a procuress of kept women:‘How many have been sent for pepper by you!’
18
Pepper came from the East Indies, where dissolute young men were likely to end up.Whores were often blamed for a man’s youthful profligacy.

From caring mother to punishing father

Feelings of fear and guilt surrounding illicit sexual acts were nourished by the Church. Sexual norms were rooted in Christian thought, ac- cording to which the body was the source of all evil.The apostle Paul had emphasized that sexual abstinence was the highest state in which a person could live. Those incapable of it, however, had better marry: ‘To avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband’ (
1
Cor.
7
:
2
). Sex had no place outside marriage, and even for married couples it was first and foremost a means of procreation and a safeguard against fornication, in the sense that one partner must yield to the other’s desires in order to help him or her resist the temptations of extramarital sex.
19
The ban on adultery was one of the Ten Commandments received by Moses direct from God and was therefore an extremely powerful prohibition.

All Christian societies maintained that prostitution was an evil and a sin, but the precise definition and approved ways of dealing with it varied over time.The Bible offers no definitive answers.The medieval Catholic Church regarded prostitution as a necessary evil, made sadly unavoidable by the sinful state of humanity and the imperfections of earthly existence. Saint Augustine (
354
–
430
) said that if prostitutes were banished, society would be undermined by sexual lusts. Every palace needed a dung heap, otherwise the whole building would stink. Saint Thomas Aquinas (
c
.
1225
–
74
) wrote that it was sensible to tolerate a lesser evil if a greater evil could thus be avoided.
20
On the basis of these and similar statements, late medieval municipal authorities all over Europe opted for a policy of regulated tolerance.

In Catholic teaching, man is a sinner in possession of free will; he can choose to mend his ways and his sins may be forgiven. Prostitutes were sinners who might repent, so it was right to work for their con- version, and marriage with a prostitute received the Church’s blessing as a charitable act, since it saved the woman from a sinful life. One of the most venerated of all the saints, Mary Magdalene, was by tradition a former prostitute and there were several other reformed whores among the female saints.
21

In
1227
the Catholic Church founded the Order of the Holy Mary Magdalene, to help repentant prostitutes who wanted to live honour- able,God-fearing lives in future.Special places of refuge called Magdalene Hospitals were founded all across Europe; in the Low Countries they were also known as Bethany Houses after the saint’s home village. In Amsterdam in about
1450
, a convent called Saint Mary Magdalene in Bethany was instituted to house ‘repentant sisters’.
22
A
1484
entry in the register kept by another Bethany House, in the Flemish city of Bruges, gives a clear indication of the thinking that lay behind it:

God, who does not desire that anyone be lost, but who wishes that all people should be saved and blessed, has inspired many good hearts to establish this nunnery for repentant sisters . . . to snatch poor lost sheep from the claws of the wolves, which is to say from the enemy; for as St Paul says, where sin has abounded, grace will much more abound, and this, praise be to God, we dis- cover daily with all our poor sisters, many of whom, after a sinful life, have lived piously in this poor convent.
23

In the sixteenth century the policy of tolerance and regulation, and the belief that prostitution was a necessary evil, came under attack. One

important reason for this was the
morbus Gallicus
, or syphilis, a previ- ously unknown disease that broke out in a virulent, epidemic form in
1494
.When it became clear that the new infection was sexually trans- mitted, clients took fright and brothels fell into decline. More signifi- cant, however, was the battle raging within the church. Toleration of prostitution was seen by many critics of the Catholic hierarchy as a serious abuse and where Protestants came to power, prostitution was immediately and categorically forbidden, and indeed punished.
24

The transition from Catholic regulation to Protestant prohibition represents more than a change in government policy. It marks a para- digm shift in the way the relationship between God and man was conceived, such that the forgiving God of the New Testament appears to have given way to the vengeful God of the Old Testament. Protes- tants were convinced good works and atonement could not help them achieve eternal salvation, since mercy was granted by God alone. Cal- vinist ideas about the sinfulness of man left even less room for repent- ance and forgiveness than existed in other forms of Protestantism. According to strict Calvinist teaching on predestination, salvation and eternal damnation were preordained. God did not forgive sins, He punished them. Never absent from Christian teaching, this vengeful God became an obsession all over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
25
Initially this held true mainly for Protestants, the Calvinist Church in particular, but eventually it became the underlying tenor of all Christian thought, irrespective of denomination. After the Coun-

ter-
R
eformation, governments in Catholic countries ceased to tolerate prostitution.The fear of divine retribution was especially strong in the

Low Countries. Ministers proclaimed from the pulpit that the Dutch were God’s chosen people, as demonstrated by their miraculous vic- tory over Spain and the prosperity of the Dutch
R
epublic. God would therefore punish them particularly harshly for their sins, as He had punished Israel in ancient times.
26

An Amsterdam municipal statute of
1509
regulating prostitution be- gins with the words:

Since the Holy
R
oman Christian Church, governed by the Holy Spirit and caring for her children like a good mother, prescribes some things and pro- scribes others, both on pain of eternal damnation, in order to ward off a greater evil than public women [we tolerate prostitution on the following conditions].
27

In
1578
, when Amsterdam joined the revolt against the King of Spain, the Calvinists drove the Catholics out of municipal government and the city’s official brothels were closed forthwith.The reversal in policy was a radical one. A new ordinance was passed, condemning the ‘ugli- ness that has been seen in this matter under Papism’. It forbids fornica- tion of all kinds and lays down punishments for public whoring ‘so as not to expose the government and its subjects to the wrath and venge- ance of God, about which biblical and earthly history have so many stories to tell’.
28
Prostitutes were no longer sinners who could be saved, they were malefactors who must be punished. The writing and im- agery of the period suggest a pronounced shift from a belief in the church as a caring mother to a direct confrontation with God as a punishing father. For the poor sinner this was a painful transition.

Fear of God’s wrath was incorporated into laws and statutes,preached from the pulpit, and taken to heart by pious churchgoers. Whether it was shared by the entire population is harder to say, but there are indi- cations that such fear was widespread. ‘Amsterdam, Amsterdam,’ the first-person narrator of
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
reflects at the end of his nocturnal journey, ‘what godless things occur within your walls? And what a sign of God’s universal goodness towards you it is, that you have not been punished for all these abominations with the most ter- rible plagues’.
29
Het karakter van een hoer
(
1730
) expresses similar senti- ments:‘A whore lives like Cain, branded for ever by the glowing stamp of her conscience; she knows no hiding place from her fear; and she flees at the sight of her Judge, just as the devil retracts his horns at the coming of dawn.’
30

These are literary references, but they are supported by other sources, including letters written by ordinary citizens.‘Furthermore know, my beloved child,’ a woman wrote to her son in
1664
during an outbreak of plague,‘that the hand of God is raised over this entire land, chastis- ing us for our sins, for many are dying here and in other cities’.
31
Her son was serving in the battle fleet on the eve of the Second Anglo- Dutch War, and this letter is among the thousands now preserved, along with other papers found on ships captured in the five naval wars between the two countries, in the National Archives at Kew.
32
The fear of divine punishment is a common sentiment in these missives, many of them written or dictated by common folk.