Niet zo beschaafd als we dachten: Koffiehuizen, sociabilisering en literaire socialisatie in Amsterdam, c. 1685 – c. 1785

Abstract

According to existing historiography the coffee house played an important role in the sociabilization of the late seventeenth-and the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie. The assumption in existing historiography is that the bourgeois went to the Dutch coffee houses to socialize, converse about political and ethical issues, and thus achieve personal growth. Sociabilization in the coffeehouses is assumed to have been encouraged by ‘literary socialization’: the conversations were spurred by the bourgeois’ reading of texts and introduced them to literary reading of these texts. In this article, we question this historiography for the case of Amsterdam between 1685 and 1785 by a closer investigation of both literary representations of coffee houses and judicial (notary) sources. Coffee houses often appear as scenes of gambling and violent encounters in the notary archives. Literary representations (plays, diaries) confirm a more dissolute and less civilizing character of the Amsterdam coffee house. Moreover, the number of coffee houses in Amsterdam diminished in the eighteenth century, and literary representations are almost completely absent after 1730. They do not appear in a typical bourgeois novel such as Sara Burgerhart. We conclude that coffee houses did not play the key role in literary socialization and sociabilization previously assumed. The remaining question; which places did?.