ABSTRACT
It seems fruitful to start off this research by offering a broad outline of general patterns of gift exchange in seventeenth-century Holland. The sketch that follows here serves as a means of pointing out possible patterns of gift exchange by a seventeenth-century individual. It does not draw on the pretext that this person’s gift behaviour is representative for the whole Dutch population of that period. It rather offers an initial opportunity to map what the possible occasions for and networks of exchange were in this period, and what types of gifts were exchanged in these instances. Or to put it differently, it answers the question of “who was giving what to whom and on what occasion”, at least for the case of David Beck in 1624.
