The Face of Mammon

The Face of Mammon studies the gold and silver coins of sixteenth-century England as they are articulated in literary writing. Landreth argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know-- not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics. The writers central to this study--among them Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne--use the coin to demonstrate the interdependence of these competing discourses as they converge upon a single, ubiquitous object. For these authors, an understanding of the world that humans make for themselves relies upon understanding how the material world is made. The small circumference of the coin brings these contending worlds into contact. a fascinating historicist account of early modern English coins and their place in the literature of this period ... penetreting and lively ... much more than a study of the sixteenth-century English economy, ambitious that alone would be. Landreth shows how something as ubiquitous in the culture as money is pervasive in the literature, too. Sarah Dewar-Watson, Times Literary Supplement [a] striking, consistently intelligent study ... this is a book that Elizabethanists in general, and Shakespeareans in particular, will not want to miss ... Highly recommended. E.D. Hill, ChoiceACKNOWLEDGMENTS ; INTRODUCTION: MAMMON IN THE TUDOR COMMON WEALTH ; CHAPTER ONE: AT HOME WITH MAMMON: MATTER, MONEY, AND MEMORY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE AND THE JEW OF MALTA ; CHAPTER TWO: MONETARY POLICY IN KING JOHN AND MEASURE FOR MEASURE ; CHAPTER THREE: DISMEMBERING THE DUCAT IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE ; CHAPTER FOUR: WIT WITHOUT MONEY IN DONNE AND NASHE ; AFTERWORD: BEFORE ECONOMY ; APPENDIX: TUDOR MONETARY UNITS ; WORKS CITED ; INDEX