Amsterdam was, after London and Paris, the third largest city in early modern Europe, and just like these was renowned throughout Europe for its widespread and visible prostitution. This study explores how the vice trade was embedded in Amsterdam's society, economy, and judicial system and how legislation and policing were shaped by misogynist attitudes towards women and fear of God's wrath and venereal diseases towards sex. The rich judicial archives made it possible to construct a collective biography of the 6,000 arrested prostitutes, while they also gave insight into their individual life ... More

Amsterdam was, after London and Paris, the third largest city in early modern Europe, and just like these was renowned throughout Europe for its widespread and visible prostitution. This study explores how the vice trade was embedded in Amsterdam's society, economy, and judicial system and how legislation and policing were shaped by misogynist attitudes towards women and fear of God's wrath and venereal diseases towards sex. The rich judicial archives made it possible to construct a collective biography of the 6,000 arrested prostitutes, while they also gave insight into their individual life stories. The organisation of the prostitution trade is analysed as pre-industrial business, but also as a trade which changed forms in interaction with the vicissitudes of its persecution and policing. The story told here of the sex trade in early modern Amsterdam, concentrates on the people living at the margins of a rich metropolis, in which there was a large surplus of women, many of them poor immigrants with little prospect of marriage. At all levels, honour, citizenship and credit were of utmost importance, criteria that pushed prostitutes to the margins of society. The shared these and other characteristics with their main clients, the sailors for the VOC, the Dutch East India Company. In the 150 years under scrutiny, many changes are visible, including the view of prostitution from immorality to trade, and of prostitutes from criminal whores and criminals to paupers. In the same period, thinking about prostitution secularized, and active prosecution became regulated tolerance.