Consuming Splendor
Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

A fascinating study of the emergence of consumer society in seventeenth-century England.

Linda Levy Peck (Author)

9780521842327, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 September 2005

448 pages, 48 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 2.5 cm, 1.12 kg

'There is no doubt that Linda Levy Peck has produced a major new work on the society and the economy of late sixteenth century England. She has offered new thoughts on the constitutions of luxury and its uses. peck has pushed the accepted advent of the division of retail shopping from wholesale and manufacturers forward by about one hundred years. At the same time she has caused a rethink on the effect of the English Civil wars and the Interregnum on trade and consumption of luxury. Consuming Splendor is well footnoted and has an extensive bibliography to and index. It would make a worthy addition to any interested party's bookshelf and at 320 (hardback) its a steal.' Open History

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 a novel framework for the history of seventeenth-century England.

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: 1640–60
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.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]