Lauro Martines

The Renaissance and the Birth of Consumer Society

ical writing may bend too readily to the ideals and stresses of its 1 1 1 11 the two agree on a thesis: own world. For all their dssmlartes, they want to make consumer goods, from pepper and glazed pottery to pictures and furnishings, the motor of Renaissance society and culture. Thus, current campaigns for market economies and private enterprise, as mounted during the Reagan-Thatcher years, are here obliquely accommodated, and we begin to see late-medieval and early-modern Europe under a fine rain of new commodities. In this view, whatever was distinctive or creative about Renaissance Europe is hitched to a growing, thirsting quest for possessable goods, as these reputedly proliferated in diversity and numbers. Characteristic pictures by Van Eyck, Carlo Crivelli, and others are scrutinized as if they were windows to a world awash with luxury goods mirrors, Turkish carpets, hangings, pictures, books, portrait medals, cloth of silk and gold, fancy bottles, earthenware, scientific and musical instruments, gems, gold coins, and so on. Impinging rural economies, basic social structures, the appalling system of tax-farming, and poverty are all banished from the scene, to leave only the crystalline world glimpsed in the pictures of collectors. Because Professor Jardines Worldly Goods is issued with lots of pictures and not a single footnote, it is evidently a consumer good and therefore a serious production. The author is known to readers of Renaissance Quarterly primarily as a scholar in the field of English