Acknowledgments
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
David Landreth is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
"The Face of Mammon is a refreshing addition to the steadily
growing body of scholarship on money in the literature of the early
modern period.... Landreth's richly evocative book is at its best
when he discusses the ethical, religious, and political
implications of the materiality of actual coins and the images
stamped on them, a subject to which he returns throughout the
book." --Modern Philology
"[A] striking, consistently intelligent study...The critic writes
sharply and wittily throughout.... [T]his is a book that
Elizabethanists in general, and Shakespeareans in particular, will
not want to miss. Highly recommended." --CHOICE
"I don't know what to admire more: David Landreth's nuanced account
of price inflation in the sixteenth century, his detailed
descriptions of the debasement and clipping of coinage, his
philosophical grasp of the ontology of the money form, or his
striking and original readings of early modern authors. This is an
indispensable contribution to our understanding of economy and
literature." --Richard Halpern, author of Shakespeare's Perfume:
Sodomy and
Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan
"If, as the saying goes, 'money talks,' its most loquacious avatar
is the Mammon of early modern writing. And Mammon's most astute
listener is David Landreth, who hears in the prosopopeia that lends
voice to early modern money the prehistory of capitalist
conceptions of matter, value and social relations." --Jonathan Gil
Harris, author of Shakespeare and Literary Theory
"Landreth offers a fascinating account of the ways in which the
matter of money mattered in Tudor England by revealing the many
faces Mammon assumed in a wide array of literary and cultural
texts. We have always known that money talks; Landreth teaches us
how to listen." --Natasha Korda, author of Labors Lost: Women's
Work and the Early Modern English Stage
"[A] splendid book." --Renaissance Quarterly
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