While strolling along Leiden's seventeenth-century Rapenburg canal today and standing in front of the unversity's academic building, it feels as if time has stood still for the last 400 years. The differences between students from 1620 and now are also slight: in 2010 the average age of a male student enrolling at the university was 18 to 19 years old. The student today is likely to choose a major in the humanities, and the most common first name for a male student is Kevin, followed by Thomas and Jeroen. The young man is likely to come from a middle-class background. In 1620 some 297 students enrolled at the University of Leiden. The average age of a new student was 21.7 years old, he was likely to study law, and the most common name was Johannes, followed by Jacobus, and he would have come from an affluent family. Besides students of the early modern period having different names and being slightly older than students today, the manner in which young men expressed their youth culture and masculinity 400 years ago was also quite remote from contemporary student life.

Let us first examine the social, economic, and cultural setting of the Dutch Republic during the 1620s and 1630s. We will zoom in on the province of Holland, which was the most urbanized area in Europe in 1622. Half of the province's 672,000 inhabitants resided in cities. More than 100,000 lived in Amsterdam alone. Dutch cities and towns were swarming with young people, mainly men in their late teens and early twenties. From all over Northern and Central Europe, job-searching and adventure-seeking young men converged on Amsterdam and other cities in Holland and the Dutch Republic for the prospect of employment, religious freedom, education, apprenticeship or perhaps even adventure. The largest group of men sought employment in the Republic's maritime industry, namely on board one of the many ships of the Dutch West and East India Companies, or in the marines. There is no exact data on foreigners recruited in the 1620s and 1630s, but for the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were approximately 475,000 foreigners employed by the Dutch East India Company, and an additional 35,000 foreign-born men that worked for the marine.