Literature and the idea of luxury in early modifern England

Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture. Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ‘luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. 0Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ‘luxury’ could and often did denote merely ‘lust’ or ‘licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ‘luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture Cover 1 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 10 1 Problems of Definition: The Meaning of Spenser’s “Wastfull Luxuree” 34 2 Cleopatra’s Spoils: Proto-Liberal Dimensions of Early Modern Luxury 62 3 Sin City: Satirizing Luxury in Early Modern London 92 4 Riotous Luxury: Comical Satire and the Staging of a New Order of Things 120 5 Bad Markets: Remoralized Luxury in Mercantile Literature 150 6 Particularizing Abundance: Un-Economic Luxury in Roman Political Tragedy 184 Bibliography 216 Index 240 1. Problems of definition : the meaning of Spenser's "wastfull luxuree"--2. Cleopatra's spoils : proto-liberal dimensions of early modifern luxury -- 3. Sin city : satirizing luxury in early modifern London -- 4. Riotous luxury : comical satire and the staging of a new ordifer of things -- 5. Bad markets : remoralized luxury in mercantile literature -- 6. Particularizing abundance : un-economic luxury in Roman political tragedy