This chapter describes the daily functioning of the Desolate Boedelskamer. It examines the Amsterdam insolvency procedure through the eyes of the actors involved. How did the court evolve over time, and where is it possible to discern the influence of its staff on such changes? Social and cultural attitudes towards overindebtedness and the insolvents themselves softened during the seventeenth century. While one might expect that such developments were detrimental to the position of creditors, they actually went hand in hand with important changes to Amsterdam’s legal institutions that also sought to protect the creditors’ interests. This chapter discusses to what extent the introduction of the Desolate Boedelskamer had an impact on the management of the insolvent estates that were placed in its care. Through a careful combination of formal work instructions and archival evidence from the daily practice, it analyzes the functioning of the court as part of its broader legal and institutional context.

This chapter discusses the background and characteristics of the Desolate Boedelskamer’s staff, in order to analyze how they contributed to the professionalization of insolvency procedures in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Through a closer examination of the ways in which the institution dealt with fraud or mistakes, it will become clear how it helped to create a more professional and trustworthy insolvency procedure. Ultimately, it was the daily labor of commissioners and subordinate officials that constituted the foundation of the systemic trust generated by the Desolate Boedelskamer as a crucial means to repair broken relations between insolvents and their creditors.

We introduce elementary concepts of sets, probability, and events. We then study and illustrate the basic properties of probability. We use probability to characterize independent events and mutually exclusive events. We study conditioning and Bayes' law. We also introduce essential functions required to calculate probabilities, including the factorial, gamma, and beta functions. We then apply them to calculating combinations and permutations.