ABSTRACT
As the diary of David Beck has shown, hospitality was quantitatively the most important gift in seventeenth-century Holland. This gift was commonly used to maintain social relations, both in the sense that it was offered most often and in the sense that it was offered on a daily basis. However, other gifts carried greater significance in qualitative terms. This is especially true of the gifts that were – next to a host’s hospitality – presented on those occasions that celebrated or mourned life’s significant events. 1 These were events like birth, marriage and death, but also academic promotions and other events that symbolised passages in one’s life.
