Well-being in Amsterdam's Golden Age

This book presents a fascinating and far-ranging account of daily life across all the social strata of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

This captivating study takes into the merchants' offices, regents' drawing rooms and servants' quarters of Amsterdam during its Golden Age heyday.

Derek Phillips charts the both the daily lives of the different classes and the men, women and children who composed them, and the laws and expectations that governed them, to create a unique recreation of their daily lives.

Illustrated with a wealth of domestic detail and supported by archival evidence from letters, diaries, parish records and paintings, this is an incisive biography of the city in the seventeenth century which explains its hierarchies and the social mechanisms that bound them together.How people washed their clothes, cooked their meals, earned a living, married, raised children, passed on their wealth, got on with their servants, their families and their city authorities, has changed over the centuries, but, as at any other time in history, there was a collective notion of well-being appropriate to the various combinations of gender, age and social standing. Phillips' study reminds us both of the historical differences in these perceptions, and of the human universals of good health, material sustenance, self-esteem and love, the goals of the servant, the merchant and the regent alike.