Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (review)

Reviews 239 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Following the manuscript material are extensive Explanatory Notes that contain a wealth of information on tangential as well as directly relevant topics. After the Notes there is a wide-ranging Glossary which, as it features words specific to hunting and hawking, is particularly valuable for the uniqueness of many of its entries. Where else, for example, might one learn that reyryde is not only a past participle meaning ‘reared’ (from ME reren) but that, when applied to a goose, it means ‘carved by having its limbs lifted and severed’? The Appendices, too, are an invaluable source. Appendix I is a ‘complete collation of phrases containing collective nouns, or terms of association, found in all J.B. sources’ (p. 224). It is a methodical index, with headwords arranged alphabetically and listed by their sigla, also in alphabetical order. The contents, however, are full of surprises. To our modern sensibilities the lists are almost ‘Pythonesque’, featuring such gems as ‘a tabernacle of bakers’, ‘a raskall of boyes’, ‘a sentence of iuges’, ‘an eloquence of lawers’, ‘a superfluite of nonnes’, ‘a discrecion of prestis’ and ‘an impacience of wyves’. Scott-Macnab acknowledges the comedic tone of the collective phrases, observing that they ‘grew as they might in a 19th -century parlour game’ (p. 263). The list is followed by its own Index and then by extensive Notes on the nouns themselves. Subsequent Appendices follow a similar treatment with Appendix II dealing with Carving terms and Appendix III with Resting terms. This is a highly readable work which, in its systematic presentation and thorough argument, is an important addition to any scholarly library, particularly the library of medievalists who enjoy the definite ‘otherness’ of the Middle Ages as well as its familiarity. Carmel Bendon Davis Department of English Macquarie University Vanhaelen, Angela, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; cloth; pp. xii, 219; 42 b/w illustrations; RRP US$79.95; ISBN 0754608441. This ambitious book begins with the simple question of why a new kind of cheap, printed broadsheet emerged for children in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam in the form of farcical cartoons featuring scenes of violence, lust, and deceit, often with gender roles reversed and women ‘on top’. The answer, however, is far from simple as Vanlaelen reveals how much these prints tell us 240 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) about contemporary religious disputes, gender relationships, class conflict, and attitudes towards children, the theatre, and the city. While the author sees these prints as pedagogical tools used by Protestants to shape the behaviour of children, she contends that they were not intended solely for children but reflected adult preoccupations with contemporary cultural and political transformations. She emphatically rejects the assumption that catchpenny prints represent an earlier form of folklore catering to the lower classes. They were, she claims, produced by and for middle-class mercantile burghers in an attempt to re-establish their position in the face of an increasingly powerful class of finance capitalists. The catchpenny prints utilize themes popular in the farces that drew large audiences from all classes into Amsterdam’s new public theatre, the Shouwberg. Like the catchpenny prints, these farces were not an old-fashioned form of entertainment appealing to the lower classes. They were new: instead of featuring lower-class figures, they catered to the middle class by depicting the adultery, fraud, and deception of immoral middle-class householders. These new farces were selected by the theatre’s Board of Regents, six prominent businessmen. Vanhaelen points out that the building of a public theatre in Amsterdam was significant given the hostility of Calvinist Churchmen, who believed that theatrical performances went against the laws of God because they encouraged the blurring of gender and social categories. However, while Calvinists failed to ban the theatre, in 1677 a new Board of Regents succeeded in banning farces, not for theological reasons but on the grounds that they were inappropriately suggestive for their children. Vanhaelen claims that behind this conflict over what kind of plays should be performed lie deeper controversies about the redefinition of the home...