Synopses & Reviews
A fascinating study of the ways in which the consumption of luxury goods transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. Linda Levy Peck charts the development of new ways of shopping; new aspirations and identities shaped by print, continental travel, and trade to Asia, Africa, the East and West Indies; new building, furnishing, and collecting; and the new relationship of technology, luxury and science. As contemporaries eagerly appropriated and copied foreign material culture, the expansion of luxury consumption continued across the usual divide of the Civil War and the Interregnum and helped to propel England from the margins to the center of European growth and innovation. Her findings show for the first time the seventeenth-century origins of consumer society and she offers the reader an entirely new framework for the history of seventeenth-century England.
Review
"Consuming Splendor is an appropriately luxurious volume."
-The Times, T2 Supplement"[Peck's] investigations carry her through a most impressive bibliography of references, brimming over with the most apposite quotations from contemporaries, and stiffened by multitudinous pieces of recent research...her emphasis on the wonders and the variety of the luxuries that burgeoned in the seventeenth century produce a thoroughly convincing argument....Peck's book is a magnificent survey of a luxury-ridden seventeenth century."
-The Economic History ReviewPeck is a distinguished scholar of early modern English political culture whose previous works concerning patronage, corruption and court politics... have been well received by scholars. This work, however, promises to outdo them all. It not only has a catchy title, it also makes powerful arguments that will refashion understanding of the early modern period and the rise of the modern state.
-Choice
Synopsis
A fascinating study of the ways in which the consumption of luxury goods transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. Linda Levy Peck charts the development of new ways of shopping; new aspirations and identities shaped by print, continental travel, and trade to the East and West Indies; new building, furnishing, and collecting. Her findings show for the first time the seventeenth-century origins of consumer society and she offers the reader a new framework for the history of seventeenth-century England.
Synopsis
A fascinating study of the ways in which consumption transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. It reveals for the first time the emergence of consumer society in seventeenth-century England.
About the Author
Linda Levy Peck is Columbian Professor of History at the George Washington University. She has published extensively on politics, society, and culture in seventeenth-century England. She is the author of Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (1990) and the editor of The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (1991).
Table of Contents
1. 'I must have a pair of Damasked spurs': shopping in seventeenth-century London; 2. 'We may as well be silk-masters as sheep-masters': transferring technology in seventeenth-century England; 3. 'What do you lack? What isn't you buy?': creating new wants; 4. 'Anything that is strange': from rarities to luxury goods; 5. 'Examine but my humors in buildings, gardening, and private expenses': cultural exchange and the new built environment; 6. 'The pictures I desire to have ... must be exquisitely done and by the best masters': luxury and war: 1640-1660; 7. 'Rome's artists in this nature can do no more': a Bernini in Chelsea; 8. 'The largest, best built, and richest city in the world': The Royal Society, luxury manufactures, and aristocratic identity; 9. New wants, new wares: luxury consumption, cultural change, and economic transformation.