De Achttiende Eeuw - Current Issue

Family life in early modern Amsterdam was often precarious, with children frequently requiring institutional or communal care due to the inability of their parents to provide for them. The city had a well-developed system of charitable institutions that supported these children, including those with a migration background. This article examines the educational and career opportunities available to children with a migration background in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. By using the bestedelingen (foster children) registers of the Lutheran Church as a historical source, this study offers detailed insights into their upbringing and prospects. By tracing their trajectories over time, it explores the extent to which the descendants of immigrants in early modern Amsterdam were able to achieve social mobility, particularly within urban trades and maritime occupations. This contributes to a broader understanding of children of lower social standing in early modern European cities.

This article focuses on cheap reprints of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715) to shed new light on the development of a market for children’s books and of children as a target for literary socialisation. It combines a macro and micro perspective on the publishing history of Watts’s collection of children’s poems to illustrate the emergence of a diversified and democratised market for children’s literature. Moreover, the case study demonstrates how children’s literature intersected with eighteenth-century canonisation processes. It argues that the textual and visual characteristics of widely affordable reprints of Watts’s work not only democratised access to literary culture, but also contributed to Watts’s literary status and even shaped the canonisation of a specific selection of his poems. The case study thus challenges the notion of canon formation as an exclusively top-down phenomenon, as well as demonstrating how children of various social classes were included in these processes.

This article explores youth, female agency, and the colonial marriage market in seventeenth-century Virginia through the case of Lucy Burwell. Even before her fifteenth birthday Lucy was the object of Governor Francis Nicholson’s courtship efforts, which she famously refused. Drawing on Nicholson’s surviving correspondence with Lucy and her parents, the article reveals the growing disparity between early modern English and Virginian perspectives on youth, authority and agency on the marriage market. Whereas Lucy and her parents believed in her right to choose her own partner, Nicholson invoked her youth as proof of immaturity when addressing her parents, while emphasizing his faith in Lucy’s decision making when addressing her. Lucy actively navigated female information networks to assess suitors, using advice, gossip, and reputation as tools of social control. This case study calls for a reassessment of early American marriage conventions, recognizing how settler societies provided young women with unexpected forms of autonomy distinct from English norms.

This article argues that Willem de Perponcher’s Education for Children (1782) adopts an anthropocentric perspective that, paradoxically, creates room for recognizing the animal in its own right. By reading the text through an animal-centered lens, it reveals how the child’s journey of empirical learning produces an ambivalent image of the animal. This ambiguity sheds a new light on the work’s strong emphasis on the intellectual development of the aristocratic child. As the child learns—by observing, thinking, debating, and reflecting—a space emerges in which animality is valued, drawing child and animal closer together. However, this same cognitive process ultimately re-establishes distance: the child, by exercising his reasoning skills, reaffirms his divinely ordained superiority over the animal. The text therefore both questions and reinforces the human-animal hierarchy.

This article examines the orphanage in Batavia during the eighteenth century as an instrument of colonial and social control. Using archival sources from the diaconate and VOC, it argues that the orphanage systematically separated children of European Christian men and non-Christian local women from their mothers and raised them within a strict Dutch Reformed regime. The institution served to ensure the preservation of a European Protestant community by preventing religious apostasy and by providing Dutch Reformed marriage partners for European men to combat widespread concubinage. A key finding is the gradual shift during the eighteenth century from concerns about European heritage and religion to increasingly racialized concerns for ‘European blood’. The orphanage thus became a key site where racial and religious hierarchies were reproduced through child separation, discipline and marriage policy. Colonial rule was based on the concept of European and Dutch Reformed superiority, by which these children had to be separated from the rest of the population.