Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

Consuming Splendor tells of new ways to shop, above all in London; of royal patronage, notably by James I, of luxury trades such as the import of porcelain and of manufactures such as silk and tapestries; and of new aspirations shaped by print, often imported, and travel to the European continent, which often resulted in new expenditures on buying, building, furnishing and collecting paintings and sculpture. For historians of the seventeenth century, probably her most challenging chapter contains a new reading of the tumultuous decades of the Civil War and Interregnum, where she emphasises continuities, rather than wholesale disruption.