Follow the Money: Economic Concerns in Early Modern English Texts
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries markets expanded globally, transactions increased, and the circulation of capital accelerated. This new situation, that created an unprecedented concern with the nature of money (in different forms: bullion, coins, bills of payment, and promissory notes) and with economic concepts (inflation, interest, usury), made its way into all sorts of literary texts and cultural artefacts: plays, poems, pamphlets, or emblems, among others. People started to suspect that money, commercial exchanges, and economic transactions at large were becoming mysteriously free from bedrock referents (fixed value, fair prices) in order to be subjected to uncertain and fluctuating social rituals and conventions.