The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England

To write about usury is to become acutely conscious of one's debts. My major professional obligation is to my home institution, Arizona State University, which has unfailingly provided every practical assistance for which I either asked or hoped. I was able to finish my research and writing thanks to a Senior Leave granted by the Department of English, and my colleagues there could not have been more supportive. The department chair, Neal Lester, went out of his way to provide me with the opportunities I needed to complete my work, which I could never have done without his help. I've also benefited from the support of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the tireless work of Bob Bjork, Bill Gentrup, and many others there is much appreciated. The pragmatic aid of Maureen Goggin, Phillip Karagas, Risha Sharma, and Karen Silva has been utterly indispensable. I'll always be grateful for the intellectual and social camaraderie of Usury is entrenched in the twenty-first century world. Recently, however, public opinion has been shifting back to the strongly hostile view of usury held by humanity for millennia before the rise of capitalism. This book examines the ways in which usury was perceived and portrayed at the very beginning of its rise to power. David Hawkes examines early modern English depictions of usury in a wide variety of literary media: plays, pamphlets, poems, political economy, and parliamentary debates. It suggests that knowledge of such portrayals may help us settle accounts with the vastly expanded form taken by usury in our own time Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction Debt and Deconstruction....Pages 1-12 “Howe is the Worlde Chaunged”: The Emergence of Usury....Pages 13-45 The Aristotelian and Biblical Critiques....Pages 47-66 The Theological Critique....Pages 67-93 “Strange Metamorphosis”: The Death of Hospitality....Pages 95-114 Magic, Labor, and Allegory: Imagining the Usurer....Pages 115-137 “Tramplers of Time”: Alchemists, Goldsmiths, and Sodomites....Pages 139-165 Afterword....Pages 167-168 Back Matter....Pages 169-200 This book examines the ways in which usury was perceived and portrayed as it rose to popularity in Renaissance England, taking into account the works of key literary figures of this period, including Milton and Shakespeare.