Throughout this work we quote extensively from Dutch newspaper advertisements, which have all been paraphrased from the original Dutch, French or Latin, rather than translated directly. These paraphrased advertisements can be found also in our reference survey, published concurrently by Brill (also in The Library of the Written Word series) as News, Business and Public Information. Advertisements and Announcements in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers, 1620–1675.
In paraphrasing, we have tried to maintain a sense of the unique style of the advertisements, which is often formulaic. This calls for a careful balance between interpretability and faithfulness to the source. We have tried to maintain as much as possible every detail of importance to the content of the notification, whilst presenting this in an accessible and standardised form for the modern reader. Our paraphrasing is more interpretative when advertisements or announcements are longer or more complex. While the advertisements found before 1650 tend to be relatively short, often no more than a couple of sentences, the announcements of the 1660s and 1670s are more verbose, and can take up a couple of paragraphs in the original Dutch. In these instances, we have sometimes shortened the text, or intervened more severely in the structure of the content.
Names of individuals are kept as given except when obvious misspellings or inconsistencies have slipped into the advertisements. There are many individuals who appear only once in the newspapers: victims, criminals, sellers and contacts for information, people who have otherwise disappeared from the historical record save for a single notice in a seventeenth-century newspaper. These individuals we have left as they are presented to us. On the other hand, we have standardised the names of prominent individuals, especially authors and political figures, for the convenience of the reader and the indices. In general, if a modern version of an individual’s name is more common and acceptable, then we have adopted it. Place names are also standardised and modernised. Names of streets are kept in Dutch, but shop signs are translated into English.
The most common currency found in this volume is the Dutch gulden, provided here in its original Dutch rather than the English guilder. The gulden was the standard currency of the Dutch Republic, and it divided into twenty stuivers. Each stuiver divided into sixteen penningen, but one will not find many penningen in this volume, given their limited value. Most printed works, like newspapers, almanacs or short pamphlets, cost at least a stuiver, the same
For many citizens in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, books and prints were affordable, but still considered purchases. The average household income around the middle of the century was 500 gulden, and the average daily wage of an artisan was around 20 stuivers, or a gulden. Browsing through the advertisements and announcements of the 1660s and 1670s, it becomes clear that the advertising public can generally be considered to have earned more than the average household income. Missing financial bonds are regularly worth more than 1,000 gulden, and rewards for the retrieval of lost goods run generally to between 25 and 200 gulden. Then again, some advertisers spoke only of a drinkpenning, a ‘drinking-penny’, possibly equivalent to the four stuivers which would have bought a pint of Bordeaux red in an Amsterdam tavern. Many other advertisers prefer to speak only of ‘a good reward’, which would allow for a relatively minimal sum to be paid out to the assiduous member of the public who returned a lost watch, child or pet.
Aside from gulden and stuivers, advertisements and announcements often speak of rijksdaalders, worth 2.5 gulden. Others mention ducats, which can be silver ducats, of similar value to the rijksdaalder, or gold ducats, worth five gulden. To make matters more complex, many citizens also used Flemish pounds, common in the Southern Netherlands and also in the Dutch province of Zeeland: this was worth six gulden. For scholars familiar with the currency of early modern England, they will find that in general, one English shilling was the equivalent of 10 stuivers, or half a gulden, so that there were two shillings to the gulden, and 10 gulden to the English pound.
During the seventeenth century, the provinces of the Dutch Republic adhered to two calendars: the Georgian (New Style) Calendar, and the Julian (Old Style) Calendar. Holland and Zeeland adopted the New Style in the 1580s, along with most Catholic countries in Europe, while the other five provinces (Gelderland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel and Groningen) maintained the Old Style until 1700. Throughout the seventeenth century the discrepancy between the two calendars was some ten days. Dutch citizens of the seventeenth century avoided the obvious complications of this dual dating system by using both dates: in the advertisements, especially those from the eastern provinces, dates are often provided as: ‘16/26 July’. We have maintained New Style dating throughout this work, unless otherwise stated as ‘(OS)’.
Dutch newspapers are cited throughout the footnotes of this work according to the abbreviations found below. Citations always start with the newspaper title, in abbreviated form, followed by the issue number (if available), and the date of publication.