This captivating volume paints a broad portrait of daily life in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Taking the reader into the heart of the Dutch Golden Age, Derek Phillips uses a wide variety of sources in order to provide a wealth of domestic detail: from how people washed their clothes and cooked their meals to how they lived, married, and raised their children. Well-Being in Amsterdam's Golden Age covers the terrain of merchants' offices, regents' drawing rooms, and servants' quarters through a range of multidisciplinary perspectives, revealing the processes linking equality and well-being in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and beyond.

Taking as their premiss the subjective experience of art, the authors look at how paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer & other masters were displayed & comprehended in the 17th century.

During the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was transformed into a leading political power in Europe, with global trading interests. It nurtured some of the period's greatest luminaries, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Descartes and Spinoza. Long celebrated for its religious tolerance, artistic innovation and economic modernity, the United Provinces of the Netherlands also became known for their involvement with slavery and military repression in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This Companion provides a compelling overview of the best scholarship on this much debated era, written by a wide range of experts in the field. Unique in its balanced treatment of global, political, socio-economic, literary, artistic, religious, and intellectual history, its nineteen chapters offer an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the world of the Dutch Golden Age.

In a brilliantly inventive work, bestselling author Simon Schama explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES throbs with life on every page. 314 photos & illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Using the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage as a window through which readers can see the start of profound social and economic changes in early modern Amsterdam, Civic Charity in a Golden Age explores the connections between the developing capitalist economy, the functioning of the government, and the provision of charitable services to orphans in Amsterdam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of the city's greatest prosperity and subsequent decline. Anne McCants skillfully interprets details of the orphanage's expenditures, especially for food; its population; the work records of those who were reared there; and the careers of the regents who oversaw it. The establishment of the orphanage itself was called for by the changing economic needs of rapidly expanding commercial centers and the potential instability of a government that depended on taxes from a large, politically powerless segment of the population.

A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank. In this fascinating examination of the city's soul, part history, part travel guide, Geert Mak imaginatively recreates the lives of the early Amsterdammers, and traces Amsterdam's progress from waterlogged settlement to a major financial centre and thriving modern metropolis