As scholarly interest in consumption developed, especially in regards to the growing production and consumption of luxury items, scholars focused upon the eighteenth century. Within the context of England, this interest developed because of the economic, social, political, intellectual, and cultural changes that clearly marked a transition from traditional to modern society. More recently, scholars have found that the changes of the eighteenth century built upon earlier changes concerning the place of luxury within English society. Alison Scott's new work, Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England, not only builds upon this scholarly tradition but expands it by exploring the complexity of luxury, especially its multiple and dynamic meanings, in early modern literature.

Utilizing both the methods of intellectual and cultural history, Scott explores the idea of luxury in early modern England and “argues for the fundamental fluidity and discontinuity of the concept at this time and for its importance to the proper contextualization of eighteenth-century luxury debates” (2). Scott successfully argues that in the seventeenth century the idea of luxury “was gradually Englished” (3) as it moved beyond its traditional, and rather one-dimensional, connotation to meaning many different things at once. To prove this, Scott relies on the literature of early modern England to demonstrate the changing and multidimensional meanings of luxury. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English language saw a particularly rich period of its normal expansion and adaptation through incorporation of foreign words and changes in meaning of existing words. One of these words, luxury, was traditionally associated with lust, but in the sixteenth century the idea of luxury started to change as it came to be associated with excess. This occurred as the traditional religious idea of luxury encountered the political idea of luxury within a society undergoing a consumer culture transition.

To illustrate the changing idea of luxury, Scott uses six thematic chapters that clearly show the growing complexity and acceptance of luxury. She begins by examining Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596) and argues that it was clear that within the text Spenser sought to understand the myriad meanings of luxury. Especially important here was the movement of the meaning away from its religious and classical denotations and connotations, beyond lust, and towards something more kin to its modern meaning. Scott then examines Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (performed in 1607 and published in 1623) and shows that while Cleopatra represents a traditional idea of luxury, especially the lustful type, she also represents the complexities of luxury, especially within a political context. Here, Cleopatra came to represent the luxury of personal liberty.

Larger changes within English society both reinforced traditional views of luxury while simultaneously challenging them. One such change was urbanization, evident in the literature that developed around the opportunities and depravities of luxury within London. As the city grew, and the economy developed, new opportunities for liberties developed that were both good and bad. The challenge within London and other urban areas involved the fine line that existed between vice, and thus a moral idea of luxury, and an emerging modern idea of luxury that related to consumption. Scott suggests that this is most clearly seen in Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass (performed in 1616 and published in 1631) that marked a new phase of the changing idea of luxury as the power of consumption reinforced the larger changes taking place. Luxury, through consumption, now related to social position, which quickly caused all levels of society to aspire to consumption. Important here, according to Scott, was the radical redefining of necessity. Within a traditional understanding of luxury, necessity defined excess, whereas within the seventeenth century, necessity came to represent need.

Scott's insightful and well-written work clearly demonstrates that the foundations of the eighteenth century's success in regards to consumption lay in the radical reimagining of the idea of luxury that occurred in the seventeenth century. She skillfully illustrates through literature the ways in which individuals grappled with the changing idea of luxury in regards to larger changes taking place within English society. As with many intellectual and cultural histories, there is an assumption that these works represent the processes that society is undergoing, but one wonders the extent to which they represent the debates of the time: Were these texts leading change or were they reacting to change? How much did individuals care about traditional ideas of luxury and whether consumption was good or bad? Ideas are important, and what Scott makes clear is that within both a popular and highbrow culture, people were working to understand the larger changes taking place within an intellectual system that did not always accept these changes. As Scott shows, the luxury of the eighteenth century was very different from that of the sixteenth century thanks to the process that occurred in the seventeenth century.