Jacob Campo Weyerman’s Comments on the Customs and Manners of his Time

Weyerman was the author and editor of a satirical weekly periodical of which two volumes are analysed here. They are a primary source on the customs and manners of urbanised Western Europe, especially Holland, in the early eighteenth century.

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The nucleus of Weyerman’s (1677-1747) literary oeuvre is the weekly periodical he published under varying titles from 1720 to the end of his life. He was its only contributor and editor. This book consists of key excerpts supplemented by a scholarly apparatus that contextualizes Weyerman's witty and satirical comments on the customs and manners of his cocitizens.

His moralizing observations constitute a mirror of Dutch society in the second quarter of the eighteenth century in the decades before new socio-cultural paradigms associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism took hold.