Manon Van der Heijden

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• Professor
• Professor at Leiden University

This study examines the experiences of migrants in early modern Dutch cities, focusing on violence and indications of social tensions in criminal cases from 1680 to 1810. Despite the prevailing notion of harmonious coexistence, migrants, comprising a significant portion of urban residents, faced stigmatization and bias. The research focuses on Amst...

Volume I documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400–1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of pre-industrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studie...

Die Konfliktbeilegung in der Frühen Neuzeit war von einer großen Vielfalt an Systemen gekennzeichnet: In Europa bildeten zahlreiche Formen von lokalen, regionalen und nationalen Gerichtshöfen ein dichtes Netzwerk von Konfliktlösungsverfahren, die sich mit Disputen zwischen gewöhnlichen Leuten beschäftigen (Vermeesch 2015, S. 210; van der Heijden 20...

This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents – particularly women – negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. Throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers. In l...

The lives of Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly may well have passed unnoticed into the faceless history of Victorian London were it not for how they died in the autumn of 1888. Now known as the ‘canonical five’, Polly, Annie, Liz, Catherine, and Mary Jane are the infamous victims of th...

Based on prosecution data for the period 1600–1900, this chapter re-assesses existing literature to stress the importance of discontinuity and variations in female crime rates in Europe. Women’s share among criminal offenders was not static and even reached significant levels throughout the early modern period. This chapter identifies five contextu...

This introduction deals with the historiography on women’s participation in crime in various regions in Europe in the early modern and modern period. It introduces the chapters in this volume and places them in the framework of three topics around which the debates about crime and gender have centered over the past decades: violence, prosecution an...

Between 1600 and 1900 the towns in Western Europe, the Kingdoms in Eastern Europe, the Empires in Asia and the Colonial States in Asia and the Americas were all characterised by a plurality of legal orders resulting from interactions and negotiations between states, institutions, and people with different backgrounds. Through exploring how justice...

This essay introduces the special section "Crime and Gender." The first part explains the disregard for women in crime history. The second part summarizes the state of research. The final part describes the aim and introduces the contributions to this special section. "Why gender and crime?" asked Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne in the intro...

This article examines the violence committed by men and women that appeared before the eighteenth century criminal courts in two cities in Europe: one in the North (Rotterdam, Holland) and one in the South (Bologna, Italy). The results provide further evidence for the existence of a broader pattern of nonlethal violence in early modern Europe that...

Crime is men's business, isn't it? Women are responsible for 10 percent of crime in Europe. Yet, if we look at the Dutch Republic in the early modern period, we find that in the towns of Holland women played a much larger role in crime. In a number of early modern towns about half of the criminals convicted in court were women. These women were in...

Historical criminology: a discipline Throughout history people have committed theft, fraud and murder. However, the frequency and severity of crimes are not static, but varies across time and space. The ways in which people respond to crime also change over time: penalties such as banishment, corporal punishment and capital punishment were frequent...

The depiction of the situation of single women in early modern urban society is rather pessimistic. Women without men were portrayed as pitiful, with migrant never-married women as the most vulnerable of all. They were said to have lacked the support of parents and of charitable institutions, and to be legally subordinated, and their opportunities...

This article questions the relevance of the theory of the criminalization of men in nineteenth-century Holland compared to the situation in England. Works on English criminality show a clear gender bias in relation to the prosecution and punishment of violence in the nineteenth century but we argue that this ‘criminalization of men’ did not occur i...

This article looked at the various options available to the urban population in early modern Holland to tackle problems regarding abusive and drunken family members. In the course of the early modern period the options available to victims of domestic violence and alcohol abuse expand. In addition to support from Protestant consistories and neighbo...

This article about women, violence and urban justice in Holland 1600-1838 argues that the nature of justice available strongly affects the evidence available about patterns of early modern violence. Women’s violence becomes more apparent in the records of the lower courts which particularly handled fights and aggression within neighbourhoods. In Ho...

Cet article démontre que dans la longue durée, la part des femmes dans les poursuites et les condamnations en Hollande, entre 1750 et 1838 est restée stable. Entre 1750 et 1811, les femmes représentaient en général 30 à 40% des poursuites. C’est le fort taux d’urbanisation qui fournit l’explication la plus évidente des taux de criminalité féminine...

This article analyzes the influence of professionalization and the broader process of bureaucratization on female labor participation in the public service sector in early modern towns in the Dutch province of Holland. Contrary to suggestions in other literature, women were found in a broad range of public offices, and developments in this sector d...

This article introduces a special issue that explores public services in early modern Europe It advocates a broad definition of early modern public services, all public facilities provided by (semi-) governments, churches, religious organizations, civic institutions, and individual citizens. Such a definition is more appropriate because most late m...

A return to patriarchy? Independent women in the Dutch Republic In this article, we aim to show that – in contrast to what some recent historical studies suppose – there was no ‘return to patriarchy’ in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Instead, the freedom and possibilities of Dutch women increased remarkably in the sixteenth through eigtheen...

In this article, we aim to show that - in contrast to what some recent historical studies suppose - there was no 'return to patriarchy' in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Instead, the freedom and possibilities of Dutch women increased remarkably in the sixteenth through eigtheenth century, with regard to their position in marriage and marita...

Women’s work in public services in early modern towns in Holland, 1500-1800This article analyses the influence of professionalization and the broader pro-cess of bureaucratization on female labour participation in the public service sector in early modern towns in Holland. Contrary to what is suggested in lit-erature, women could be found in a broa...

This article points to a largely neglected theme in the maritime history: the important role of sailors' families in urban seafaring communities during the Early Modern Period. At the end of the seventeenth century and during the first decades of the eighteenth century, about 20% of the crewmembers of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were married...

This article analyses the influence of professionalization and the broader process of bureaucratization on female labour participation in the public service sector in early modern towns in Holland. Contrary to what is suggested in literature, women could be found in a broad range of public offices and developments in the sector did not lead to the...

The governments of the Habsburg Empire (1477-1579) anti the Dutch Republic (1579) depended largely on taxes imposed on Holland's wealthy cities. The wealth of Holland's cities was used for the needs of the state but only by the consent of the urban governments. Such negotiations benefited both town and ruler. Successful efforts of the province to i...

The authors point to three trends in the recent historiography on urban finances in the Low Countries. The first trend discusses the institutional arrangements and the financial policy of the urban authorities, including the relationship between town and central state. The second focuses on economic topics, such as wages, prices, economic developme...

To remedy their chronic shortage of funds, early modern urban communities frequently lend money from capital owners. Loans were an effective method of raising capital, providing the city with large amounts of money in a short time and offering rich citizens the opportunity to invest their money. Historians often suppose that the urban elite had mor...

Corruption in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period is a challenging theme for scientific researchers. The main difficulty concerns the fact that definitions of corruption are strongly context-related. The concept of corruption differs not only per period and per community, but within a particular period the perceptions on corruption were dif...

The consistory notes of the Dutch Reformed Church (1573–1700) reveal conflicts over work between parents and children during the early modern period. Two issues that caused particular tension were the labor experience of future sons-in-law and the division of household tasks. Parents' concerns about the financial position of their future son-in-law...

This article started with questions about the position of women in criminal cases of rape, incest, and maltreatment in seventeenth-century Holland. Did contemporaries consider women who suffered from rape, incest, and maltreatment as victims of sexual and physical abuse? Furthermore, did honour play any role in these court cases? The purpose of thi...

At the time of the Reformation in the 1560s Scotland and the Netherlands already had long-established commercial links. Scots soldiers fought in the wars that ravaged the Low Countries and much of northern Europe in the two centuries after Calvinism gained a foothold. Goods, people, and ideas were readily exchanged in the North Sea basin. With the...