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Formulating Dutch Identity . Amanda Pipkin . Leiden: Brill, 2013 Book Reviews 211 Rape in the Republic, 1609–1725: Formulating Dutch Identity . Amanda Pipkin . Leiden: Brill, 2013 . 271 pp . $112 00. ISBN 978-90-04-25665-1 . The rise of the Dutch Republic as an independent state in the late six- teenth century was the unexpected outcome of Dutch discontent with Spanish rule. The Revolt, which lasted about eighty years, officially ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia and international recogni- tion of Dutch independence. Historians today are still fascinated by the forces that enabled the Republic during these struggles to shape a society distinctive for its religious tolerance, urbanization, educated citizenry, flourishing commerce, and bourgeois culture. Understanding how the Dutch developed a common cultural identity, considering the diversity of the Republic’s population, remains a question of significant importance to historians of the Republic and early modern Europe more generally. Amanda Pipkin has contributed to the debate on Dutch identity by tak- ing a somewhat unusual but interesting approach. She shows that rape as a metaphor helped construct a Dutch national identity in the first half of the seventeenth century, while it generated opposition to that same identity in the century’s latter half. This identity turned on the image of the ideal Dutch citizen as the honorable male who protected family and nation by seeking to propagate a strict social order. Indeed, an educated Dutch urban elite constructed specific roles for men and women within the context of sexual violence that in turn reinforced the status of the patriarchal family and the social order. Thus Pipkin shows that rape in this context was not solely a women’s issue but a gendered one. The multifold meanings of rape in the seventeenth-century Republic and the difficulties women faced in proving rape mean that only a handful of court cases exist for the whole period. Faced with this lacuna, Pipkin redirected her inquiries. In Formulating Dutch Identity, she applies the methods of literary criticism to a wide range of literature to understand how polemical pamphlets, plays, histories, and devotional books dealt with rape. To be sure, Pipkin is not necessarily interested in showing how these works reflect prevalent discourses on sexual violence although such vio- lence makes up a significant portion of her narrative. Rather, she remains true to gender theory in seeking to highlight the interdependence of poli- 212 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Book Reviews tics and historical agents. She therefore assigns agency and intent to the authors she examines by explaining the ways they adopted and manipu- lated contemporary views and experiences of rape to serve their purposes. To explain the formation of identity through gendered images, Pipkin devotes the first half of the book to two of the most popular writers in the seventeenth-century Republic: Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) and Jacob Cats (1577–1660). Vondel’s Gijsbrecht van Amstel, a play about the siege of Amsterdam in the Middle Ages, provides a striking example of the evocative power of rape. It premiered in Amsterdam in 1638 and was staged each Christmas from 1641 until 1969. Act Five offers Pipkin mate- rial for her argument: a Spanish soldier rapes and murders a noblewoman and nun over the corpse of her uncle, the bishop, and in the midst of a pile of slain nuns. Pipkin interprets this drama as a call to arms against Spain. The victim, Claris van Velzen, who is also the niece of Gijsbrecht van Amstel, embodies the virtuous Dutch state, violated with brute force by Spanish tyrants in the form of a soldier. Gijsbrecht, a symbol of the noble Dutch patriot, has no choice other than to seek revenge. The continuities of established gendered relations manifest themselves in the resemblance of Claris’s rape to other mytho-historical stories, such as the rape of Lucretia in ancient Rome, and in Vondel’s deployment of earlier polemi- cal writings to portray the Spanish tyrant (the king and, by extension, his soldiers) as the violator of the freedoms and rights of his subjects. Vondel’s work blends these earlier representations of political and sexual violations. Whereas Vondel used rape to formulate a common identity in order to wage war against Spain, Jacob Cats examined sexual violence in the domestic sphere. Cats embraced the teachings of the Puritan and Pietist movements that sought to purify and sanctify daily life for the well-being of church and state. The Touchstone of the Wedding Band (1637), a world history told by two men through the prism of marriage with examples drawn from biblical, classical, and contemporary times, exemplifies the search for harmony and order through marriage and the state. Cats offered advice on sexual violation that represented established social mores but also, according to Pipkin, presented rape as a class-related issue. Although rape by wealthy men could be forgiven, that by socially inferior men could not. Likewise, single and poor women especially could exhibit dangerous Book Reviews 213 and seductive behavior that would naturally lead to rape. Along with the idea that women were already morally corrupt simply by leaving their houses, Cats added insult to injury. Not only did women suffer from actual rape, they also were held responsible for it. The appropriate solution was to encourage marriage with the rapist as a form of rehabilitation of both par- ties. In offering advice about how to deal with sexual violation, Cats estab- lished a set of hierarchical identities for all social groups in Dutch society. In the second half of the book, Pipkin turns to an examination of the subversive voices of repressed Catholics and women, those who resisted Cats’s (and other Pietists’) dominant models of the patriarchal family, female guilt in rape, and the existing social order. In her third chapter, Pipkin reinterprets the life of Agnes van Heilsbach of Roermond (1597– 1640), a Spiritual Virgin, as represented in a spiritual biography of 1691. Spiritual Virgins were not cloistered nuns. Rather, they gathered in small communities, devoted themselves to religious pursuits, and led chaste lives. At the forefront of the Counter-Reformation, these women resembled virgin martyrs from ancient times in that they fiercely protected them- selves from any sexual violation. Although Catholic teachings, in a manner similar to Cats, regarded them as equally responsible for their rape, there remained a difference. In their resistance to sex, spiritual virgins served as inspiring examples for the Catholic cause. Finally, Pipkin’s discussion of the comedy The Dissatisfied Fulvius and the Faithful Octavia (1665) by the woman playwright Catharina Questiers (1631–69) recycles Cats’s idea that marriage can repair sexual miscon- duct. Questiers, however, broadens the definition of sexual misconduct to include “broken promises and seduction” (Fulvius’s crime). More impor- tantly, Questiers makes Octavia morally superior to Fulvius and holds men responsible for their deeds. Pipkin argues that Questiers’s women fight moral corruption and prove themselves worthy citizens of the Republic in a way similar to Vondel’s earlier ideal of male, honorable citizens. By focusing exclusively on literary figures, Pipkin restricts her exami- nation of the formulation of identity to narratives about elites, despite the undeniable popularity of the works of Vondel and Cats. One might ques- tion whether belonging to a particular group — such as the elites — fully determines identity. Moreover, one might also criticize Pipkin’s book for 214 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Book Reviews failing to explain changes in law or politics. However, these subjects were never part of Pipkin’s scholarly agenda. Rather, by astutely combining gender theory and literary criticism, she helps us understand how elite society perceived and employed sexual violence in literary ways, thereby contributing to the formation of Dutch identity. In seeking continuities and discontinuities in the discourse of rape, Pipkin offers an innova- tive approach to the study of gender, sexual violence, and identity in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. At the same time Formulating Dutch Indentity proffers a commentary on the continued misunderstanding of rape in current society. Erica Heinsen- Roach University of South Florida, St . Petersburg An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in 17th- Century Japan . G . G . Rowley . New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 . 280 pp . $40.00 . ISBN: 978-0-231-15854-1 . The title of G.G. Rowley’s work suggests an exciting account and it does not disappoint. It reconstructs the life of Nakanoin Nakako (1591?– 1671), who spent her youth during the volatile and violent conclusion of Japan’s age of civil war. The final throes that resulted in the unification of the country under the Pax Tokugawa can be dated 1573–1615. Nakanoin Nakako began her life in the countryside living with her nobleman father, who endured nineteen years of exile for a youthful sexual transgression with an imperial concubine. When her father was finally welcomed back into court society in 1599, he worked quickly to install his daughter Nakako, in 1601 aged ten or so, into a position of service to the then reign- ing Emperor. A mere eight years later, Nakako herself became embroiled in a sexual scandal that brought social disorder to the entire country due to the emperor’s excessive reaction to it. Nakako was not alone in this indis- cretion, however; it involved a number of imperial concubines and court- iers who participated in an alleged orgy that included a popular troupe of female kabuki dancers. For her part, Nakako was sentenced to exile on a small island off the Pacific coast of Japan but was prevented from reach-.
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