No place or publisher, 1730. 31 x 20 cm. Two volumes in one binding. Contemporary half roan. 84; 78 p. (last blank missing). 1st edition. Cut rather short. Binding worn. Some pages loose, edges browned. 'Spectacle of both the executed and the accused for the abominable Crime of sodomy, opened in the principal Cities of Holland and Over-yssel, etc., as a warning to the good and a deterrent to the evil.' Summonses, verdicts, long lists of culprits, followed by 42 thundering poems, this large-format book was designed to spread dread and terror with its headlines set in large capital letters. Most of the sodomites ended horribly tortured and killed as if their soul had to be excised from earth and from memory: burnt to ashes, or 'after being hung taken to the coast by cart, and there thrown into the sea with 50 pounds of weight on the body and 50 pounds on the legs'. Some managed to flee before they could be apprehended; then all their possessions and money were to be confiscated, and they were banished forever on pain of execution. That is probably often a sentence to beggary in a foreign country, language unknown. In general, no details about the person in question or their crime were given, only their name and occupation - with a few exceptions. The last cases mentioned in the Schouwtooneel were the 24 victims of De Mepsche's rage in Groningen and Emanuel Valk, the vicar of Vianen who hanged himself in prison. In impotent anger because Valk had managed to escape his punishment, the court ordered that his corpse was to be dragged 'on a wickerwork through the city, with his head on the stones along the street, dragged to a barge, to be thrown further into the sea above Brielle.' The poems, though uniform in tendency, are interesting to study. The first one, four full pages written by one 'J.V.H.', explain how the sudden persecution of sodomites fits into the 1720s and 1730s. How many calamities has our free country suffered by God's severe hand! How often has the country been seen devastated by raging storms and floods? How many a person has not been plunged into the grave, during the past ten years, by an unusual punishment? The death of the cattle declared to us for years that an unknown abomination was in vogue. Mad thunders, lightnings and hot fevers, that was God's punishment for some people's sanctimoniousness, coupled with unnatural sexuality: sodomy. At least, that was what man in the early 18th century believed, in the times witches were still hunted.