Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace

This book explores the intersection between geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. It presents religion as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the socioeconomic markets of England, Scotland, and Wales.

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets. Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets. Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the "modern" conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.

Autorentext

Kristin M. S. Bezio is Associate Professor at the University of Richmond.

Scott Oldenburg specializes in early modern literature and culture at Tulane University.

Inhalt

Introduction: Church, Coin, and Custom: Religious Conflict and the Marketplace Kristin M.S. Bezio Part 1: Spiritual Marketplaces 1. A Puritan's Ethics and the Spirit of Communism in Elizabethan Newcastle 2. The Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using Confessio Amatis Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London Part 2: Material Marketplaces 3. "Many tokenes passed betwixt them": Negotiating Meaning in the Matrimonial Market of Early Modern England 4. Catholics and the Underground Devotional Market in Post-Reformation England 5. Marketing English Catholicism Through Gifted Relics (c.15591640) Part 3: Textual Marketplaces 6. Keeping the Romish Wolves at Bay: A Breviary for Britain and the Welsh Book Trade of the Sixteenth Century 7. Markets, Machinations, and Martin Mar-Prelate: The Marketplace of Publication and Espionage Surrounding the Marprelate Controversy 8. "Not sparing Kings in what they did not right": Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the King James Bible Part 4: Literary Marketplaces 9. The Economics of Salvation in Early Modern Devotional Poetry 10. Exchange Economies and Free Enterprise in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure 11. The Invisible Economies of Marketplace and Church in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. Epilogue