Alison V. Scott - Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England

LITERATURE AND THE IDEA OF LUXURY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

ALISON V. SCOTT
University of Queensland, Australia

ASHGATE

Alison Scott 2015

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Alison Scott has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Scott, Alison V., 1974 author.

Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England / by Alison V. Scott.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7546-6403-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-4724-4162-1 (ebook)ISBN 978-1-4724-4163-8 (epub)

1. English literatureEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism. 2. Literature and societyEnglandHistory17th century. 3. Luxury in literature. 4. Excess (Philosophy) I. Title.

PR421.S356 2015

820.9355dc23

2014026194

ISBN: 978-0-7546-6403-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-4724-4162-1 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-4724-4163-8 (ebk-ePUB)

I gratefully acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding this project, which I began some years ago as a postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. I also owe thanks to several other institutions for funding support along the way, including the Huntington Library, San Marino, where I enjoyed a short-term visiting fellowship which enabled me to carry out research for the first section of this book; the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland for various grants for travel and research during the life of the project; and the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland for a fellowship that provided crucial relief from full-time teaching during the books completion.

Naturally, I have also accrued substantial professional and personal debts in the course of writing this book. I have enjoyed the support of great colleagues, first at Macquarie University and then at the University of Queensland where I have taught since 2008. In addition, I am grateful for advice and mentoring of differing kinds from Jean Howard, Peter Holbrook, Gillian Whitlock, Graeme Turner, Tom ORegan and Liam Semler, and for the patience and professionalism of Erika Gaffney at Ashgate. Finally, thanks to Brandon Chua, Andrea Bubenik, Prue Ahrens, and especially Lisa OConnell, each of whom, though likely without realizing it, have made completing this book possible; to my family for their ongoing support; and, most importantly, to my husband Simon, who has put up with a lot and never stopped smiling though it can never be enough, this is for you.

I also gratefully acknowledge the following journals: Explorations in Renaissance Culture for permission to reproduce material from Toward a Reevaluation of the Bower of Bliss: The Taxonomy of Luxury in The Faerie Queene, Book Two, 33.2 (Winter 2007) in

In modernity, luxury is defined chiefly in terms of the use of or indulgence in what is choice or costly (OED). The word is most often used to label categories of commercial goods which increase pleasure or comfort, but which are understood to be dispensable that is, unnecessary to life. Though it is sometimes applied to describe culpable behavior in times of crisis, and while the titles of books on the subject of luxury (luxe lit) imply its continued moral resonance through metaphoric association with disease Robert Franks Luxury Fever and Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennisss Affluenza are notable examples the contemporary west understands luxury as a largely morally neutral concept.

Pecks work reorders thus the cultural-material history of luxury, but the assumption that luxury was comparatively conceptually static in this period still shapes critical responses to literary and cultural engagements with the idea in seventeenth-century England. Critical editions of major literary works, for example, continue to gloss luxury simply as lust or licentiousness without concern for the ways in which the rise of material luxury culture might have disrupted those medieval categories, potentially altering the meaning of luxury. This book explores the fuller and more complex conceptual possibilities of luxury in early modern England. Drawing together approaches from cultural and intellectual history, it seeks to build on Berrys work by providing an account of the idea in a period previously overlooked, and to build on Pecks work by exploring the shifting and expanding meanings of luxury at a time of rapid economic and commercial development. By examining the representation of luxury and analyzing the uses to which its conceptual vocabulary is put, it argues for the fundamental fluidity and discontinuity of the concept at this time and for its importance to the proper contextualization of eighteenth-century luxury debates.

The standard historical understanding of luxury as a vice upwardly transformed and demoralized by economic liberalism in the eighteenth century has not gone altogether unchallenged. Historian Alan Hunt (Moralising Luxury) and sociologist James B. Twitchell have each suggested, though from very different disciplinary perspectives, that the idea of luxury is never absolutely detached from moral frameworks of understanding in the modern west and that its conceptual development over time has been less continuous and progressive than is often assumed. Ultimately, this analysis shows that in early modernity, as luxury was gradually Englished, the idea was disrupted and reformulated in substantive ways a century or so before its apparent conceptual sea-change (Berry 98) amidst eighteenth-century debates. Moreover, while luxury remained an intensely moralized idea in seventeenth-century England, it developed interactively and dynamically with moral, political and aesthetic discourses, and in ways that ultimately gave way to its conceptual transformation in the eighteenth century even as they opposed that so-called demoralizing thrust.

In a landmark study of the concept of luxury and the eighteenth-century novel to which the present one is variously indebted, John Sekora warned that since the changes in the meanings of the concept of luxury represent nothing less than the movement from the classical world to the modern, (1) writing a history of luxury effectively becomes writing a history of an attempt to enforce a single meaning over all others which is necessarily frustrated by the ideas inevitably evolving meanings over time (6).trying to claim that intellectual historians have ignored literary texts in tracing the moral and political uses to which luxury as idea has been put, or to evaluate shifts in the meanings of luxury over time far from it. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that existing intellectual histories of luxury in western civilization frequently overlook early modern literary engagements with the idea, or else they homogenize them, and in doing so they obscure, reduce or simplify the conceptual possibilities of luxury in early modern culture.