This is an account of the ordinary working people of Holland in the seventeenth-century, the so-called ‘golden age’. Professor van Deursen is the most outstanding and gifted scholar at present working on this period of Dutch history. His history ‘from below’ is based on a mass of contemporary documentary evidence and the text is enlivened by contemporary illustrations. Ranging over a broad spectrum of everyday conditions, sex, marriage, leisure, religion and popular culture, this is the most comprehensive study yet published of the plain lives of a ‘golden age’.