Insects at the Intersection of Gender and Class in the Early Modern Period1

For millennia, the lives of humans and insects have been intimately connected. Living on bodies, in homes, and in people’s imagination, insects were (and are) an integral part of everyday life. In the historiography of human–animal history, the role of arthropods has recently gained more attention, with historians designating the Early Modern period as a time in which insects were increasingly studied and appreciated. In the domestic sphere, however, insects were seen as unwanted intruders. This essay considers the ways in which Dutch men and women encountered and were expected to deal with insects in the premodern period. It argues that ideas about (dealing with) insects intersected with ideas about gender and class, and aims to show how these ideas co-evolved over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.