Other Gifts

What David Beck’s diary shows is that the most important gift in terms of quantity was hospitality. Hospitality was exchanged on a daily basis and every type of occasion from christenings to funerals and from carnival to the kermis had its shows of hospitality. Still, this was not the only type of gift that Beck and his friends, relatives and professional contacts were exchanging. Occasionally they offered other types of gifts as well. Unlike hospitality, these offerings were more likely to be connected to a specific occasion or a specific network. Rites of passage, for instance, were the only occasion at which David Beck and his family would offer material gifts. Even though gift exchange in contemporary society is largely associated with material objects as gifts, the offering of objects was quite uncommon in the seventeenth century. These objects were usually related to very specific occasions, of which there were only a few in the course of a lifetime. As a matter of fact, in the entire diary there is only one instance in which Beck mentions that an object was offered as a gift. This is when an uncle passed by Beck’s house to drop off a present on behalf of his daughter Geertruyt for Beck’s daughter Roeltje. ¹⁹⁰ Geertruyt van Overschie was the cousin of his late wife and was Roeltje’s godmother. This gift consisted of a silver cup and was offered to Roeltje as a belated christening gift. As shall be discussed later, this offering of a (silver) christening gift, or pillegift, was a common practice in seventeenth-century Holland. It was considered a proper gift from a godmother to her godchildren among all the social classes.