Prologue

Summary

On a December night in 1629, Otto Copes and two friends were completely drunk. The 18-year-old law student at the University of Groningen was 120 miles away from the watchful eye of his uncle, a magistrate in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a city in the generality lands of the Dutch Republic. Earlier in the day, he and two friends had been seen drinking in a tavern. However, by nightfall, their student merrymaking had turned into an orgy of binge drinking and violent aggression. Their noisiness attracted the attention of the city's municipal guard who tried to temper their high-spiritedness. After mustering up enough courage and bravado from drinking, the three young men, armed with pistols, opened fire on the guard.

Today, a drunken armed young man roaming the streets late at night would be a recipe for disaster. Contemporary authorities would impose curfews, prohibit the sale of alcohol to minors, and there would be fingerpointing at parents and schools for raising maladjusted youngsters. Politicians and moralists would use the opportunity to unleash a wave of moral panic and predict the collision course ‘the youth of today’ are headed for. Moreover, tax money would be spent on expensive programs to reform young people.

In the seventeenth century, the authorities in Groningen were not alarmed by the aggressive behavior of Otto Copes and his friends, nor was there much cause for moral panic in similar cases throughout the Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century, which raises the question: Were excessive drinking and aggressive behavior typical for young men in the early modern period? Was it common for young men in the seventeenth century, or was this behavior specific to young men of Otto Copes's generation who grew up during the 1620s and 1630s?

That brings us to the first dilemma in the history of youth. Historians in general have a tendency to address history in broad sweeping strokes such as ‘childhood and youth in the Middle Ages and early modern period’ or ‘youths in the seventeenth century’. However, we also often forget that a century in the past consisted of the same hundred years as our present era.