Devotional and Demonic Narratives in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Dutch Penny Prints

Dutch penny prints are cheap broadsides, printed on one side (30 to 42 cm) and illustrated with 8 to 24 woodcuts. They could be seen, with some reservations, as the precursor of the modern comic strip. Images were often produced from old or second-hand woodblocks. The rhyming captions used either narrated the story or explained the pictures. At the end of the eighteenth century, a regular penny print production averaged 250,000 prints per year in the Dutch Republic. In the penny prints’ boom period, the Dutch Republic had about two million inhabitants, which equates to at least one print per year per every two inhabitants. These penny prints were sold for one penny and were widely disseminated, not only via bookshops, but also by pedlars and street sellers at markets and fairs. In this chapter I will focus on fictional narratives and more specifically on the famous stories of Doctor Faustus and Robert the Devil. Both these stories had a long European history of adaptations and reached a wide Dutch audience via eighteenth-century penny prints.