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 neighbouring but distinct concepts including avarice, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in the conceptual development of extravagance in seventeenth-century England. Scott traces how ‘luxury’ developed encompassing meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust.

Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.

Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.

Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.

Matt Erlin considers books and the culture around books during this period, focusing specifically on Germany where literature, and the fine arts in general, were the subject of soul-searching debates over the legitimacy of luxury.

Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.