In the summer of 1982 I was a sixteen-year-old American teenager who backpacked across Europe on a Eurail Pass together with my eldest brother. Bright-eyed and curious, I was on a quest to discover – and witness – everything ‘civilized’ that European culture had to offer, as opposed to the ‘uncouthness’ we Americans felt about our own culture. One of our first stops from Amsterdam was to the picturesque, medieval university town of Heidelberg, which included a climb to the Gothic alte Schoss perched up high above the Neckar River, an afternoon at the University of Heidelberg, Germany's oldest university that was founded in 1386 and later bastion of Humanist and Reformation thought in the sixteenth century, and a visit to the university's studentenkarzer or student prison, where pupils that misbehaved were incarcerated for short periods of time. To my surprise, the prison walls were clad with graffiti and lewd texts. They reminded me of the drawings of oversized genitals and ‘reefers’, the marijuana cigarettes, and coarse inscriptions about sex, masturbation, and drugs that I enjoyed reading on the walls of my high school restroom back in the US. My initial thoughts were: ‘Could it be that young men three hundred years ago were just as obsessed with the same profanities as me? And this was the “civilized culture” Americans aspired to model themselves after?’ There went my first presupposition about how ‘civilized’ European culture was. Since then, that notion about the continuity and discontinuity of the human experience, fueled by an almost innate curiosity about the dynamics of culture has intrigued me. It has been a main theme in my historical research endeavors, including my dissertation about child-rearing practices in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Holland. For this study, that fascination is the leitmotif in examining how one generation of young men experienced the phase of life between sexual maturation and the age of marriage during one of Holland's most dynamic economic and cultural eras.

This work would not have been realized without the help and encouragement of many. Firstly I would like to thank Professor Willem Frijhoff, who, through our many delightful conversations, has given me countless advice, direction, and motivation from the very start of this project.