Consuming Splendor

Linda Levy Peck is Columbian Professor of History at the George Washington University. She has published extensively on politics, society, and culture in seventeenth-century England. She is the author of Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (1990) and the editor of The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (1991).

• 1. 'I must have a pair of Damasked spurs': shopping in seventeenth-century London; 2. 'We may as well be silk-masters as sheep-masters': transferring technology in seventeenth-century England; 3. 'What do you lack? What isn't you buy?': creating new wants; 4. 'Anything that is strange': from rarities to luxury goods; 5. 'Examine but my humors in buildings, gardening, and private expenses': cultural exchange and the new built environment; 6. 'The pictures I desire to have … must be exquisitely done and by the best masters': luxury and war: 1640–60; 7. 'Rome's artists in this nature can do no more': a Bernini in Chelsea; 8. 'The largest, best built, and richest city in the world': The Royal Society, luxury manufactures, and aristocratic identity; 9. New wants, new wares: luxury consumption, cultural change, and economic transformation.

'… an encyclopaedic survey of the origins of the shopping mall and consumer revolution in 17th-century London.' Sunday Herald