1st Edition
Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace
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.
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
Scott Oldenburg
2. The Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using Confessio Amatis Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London
Alison Harper
Part 2: Material Marketplaces
3. "Many tokenes passed betwixt them": Negotiating Meaning in the Matrimonial Market of Early Modern England
Jennifer McNabb
4. Catholics and the Underground Devotional Market in Post-Reformation England
Aislinn Muller
5. Marketing English Catholicism Through Gifted Relics (c.1559–1640)
Sarah Johanesen
Part 3: Textual Marketplaces
6. Keeping the Romish Wolves at Bay: A Breviary for Britain and the Welsh Book Trade of the Sixteenth Century
Sarah J. Sprouse
7. Markets, Machinations, & Martin Mar-Prelate: The Marketplace of Publication and Espionage Surrounding the Marprelate Controversy
Kristin M.S. Bezio
8. "Not sparing Kings in what they did not right": Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the King James Bible
Emily Griffiths Jones
Part 4: Literary Marketplaces
9. The Economics of Salvation in Early Modern Devotional Poetry
Chelsea R. McKelvey
10. Exchange Economies and Free Enterprise in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
Vanessa L. Rapatz
11. The Invisible Economies of Marketplace and Church in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist
Ritchie D. Kendall
Epilogue
Scott Oldenburg
Biography
Kristin M. S. Bezio is Associate Professor at the University of Richmond.
Scott Oldenburg specializes in early modern literature and culture at Tulane University.