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• W2107322012 abstract "Reviewed by: The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature by David Landreth Heather Hirschfeld (bio) Keywords early modern economy, early modern literature, Shakespeare, Spenser, Nashe, Donne David Landreth. The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xii + 348 pages. Cloth. $49.95. Money talks, as the saying goes, but it can still use a spokesperson. It has found an exemplary one in David Landreth, whose The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature, blends fastidious historical detail, bracing theoretical acumen, and interpretive ingenuity into a truly impressive achievement of literary scholarship. In this text, Landreth provides a commanding review of mid-sixteenth-century currency debasement and the ontological status of the coin. From its discrete readings of canonical works of drama, poetry, and prose to its final commentary on the epistemological divide between bullionist and mercantilist political economies, the book rewards its reader—even as it continually calls attention to the contingency of such rewards—on every page. The Introduction covers a wide swath of territory, including a sharp analysis of commonwealth rhetoric and its eventual failure to account for late-Elizabethan inflation, but the heart of the long chapter is a lucid discussion of the nature of coinage and currency that is essential to the readings that follow. The coin, Landreth reminds us, is a medium of exchange as well as a repository of value; it is also an exemplary instance of the relation of matter and form, as its ability to store or arbitrate worth derives from the conjunction of precious metal and the authorizing stamp of the prince. For Landreth, this conjunction poses hermeneutic challenges that extend beyond the borders of the strictly financial and are explicitly addressed in the period’s literature: ”The interaction of material qualities and socially determined values in gold and silver coins propels these objects beyond the circuits of exchange they are minted to serve into literary texts that seek to define the contested relations among poetics, human institutions, and material substance” (6). On this foundation, with its Aristotelian roots, Landreth builds an interpretive strategy distinct from—although in contact with—more familiar patterns of new economic and object-oriented criticism; he takes the simultaneously material ”thingness” and metaphysical status of the coin as a starting point to consider the role of money in human networks or activities that are not necessarily about money: consumption, reproduction, disavowal, and evacuation. It seems appropriate that the first chapter should begin with the personification of riches in Spenser’s Mammon in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene. As [End Page 110] Landreth points out, Mammon’s hoarded, fingered, counted coins have lost their purchasing power as well as their symbolic, commemorative potential to a ”dismally ahistorical sameness,” and in Guyon’s encounter with this excess of stuff and absence of value Spenser fashions a ”means for analyzing the ethical relation of human bodies to the material world” (53). That analysis, as Landreth presents it, is best understood via a detour through Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Barabas’s instrumental relation to money. The chapter makes a compelling case for the way in which Guyon’s ability to withstand the lures of Mammon’s cave—his ”attention to the right kind of consumption”—disables his ability to interact effectively or ethically in the world above ground, a failure or evasion of the ”question of ‘right usance’ ” (54) that develops from his disdain for matter. As Landreth explains, this kind of evasion returns in a more violent, frightening way in Book 5 in the form of Talus, whose politically expedient solution to the problem of corruption involves chopping off Munera’s hands and feet before killing her. This solution, as it is gendered and sexualized in Munera, ”suggests that the privileging of instrumentality is a vice of politics just as the privileging of consumption is the vice of ethics” (101). This is a capacious reading at the macro-level of epic trajectory; the chapter also offers fascinating interpretations at a micro-level, including the comparison of Guyon to Pontius Pilate and the important recognition..." @default.
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• W2107322012 title "The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature by David Landreth" @default.
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