The Wandering Whore

On 15 March 1678, the bookseller, bookbinder, and publisher Timotheus ten Hoorn was summoned to Amsterdam's town hall on a charge of ‘having distributed and sold several dirty pictures’. Even in the Dutch Republic, renowned for its religious toleration, freedom of the press was not unlimited. Writing, printing, selling, and indeed merely owning any book deemed seditious or scandalous was a criminal offence. In 1669, the States General, the Hof van Holland, and several cities had issued a wide-ranging edict banning a number of specific titles, including several ‘dirty and obscene booklets’ that corrupted the youth. Censorship legislation had primarily targeted publications undermining the safety of the state, public order, and true religion, but they now also aimed at conserving public decency by forbidding what was regarded as pornography. Yet enforcement of the censorship edicts was slack, due to the loose federal structure of the United Netherlands. A book banned in one city might pop up in the next one a few days later. The urban regents, always keen to protect the economic interests of their hometown, displayed a distinct lack of enthusiasm about interfering with the book trade. Although the law required that each publication display the name of its author and printer or publisher, booksellers routinely sold all kinds of anonymous publications under the counter.

One week after interrogating Timotheus ten Hoorn, the Amsterdam magistrates’ bench (schepenbank) duly sentenced him to pay a fine of one guilder. Their verdict was extraordinarily mild, amounting to less than the value of the daily wage of a skilled labourer. When asked who had provided him with the offensive pictures, Timotheus had named a certain Stijntje Koops, widow of Bartholomeus Schouwers and presently married to Pieter van Dijck. The sheriff promptly had Stijntje arrested and interrogated. Naming three men who were safely dead and buried, Stijntje confessed that her late husband and a certain Dr Latenhouwer had bought the prints from the printmaker Crispijn de Passe, but she did not know when or for how much. While vigorously denying she had sold the prints to Timotheus, she admitted the possibility that her present husband or perhaps her eldest daughter might have done so.