The last twenty years have seen the emergence of an innovative critical approach to early modern literature. With a nod to the marketing techniques that have migrated from advertising to intellectual discourse, it styles itself the “new materialism,” and its practitioners tend to define themselves against their unfashionable Marxist forebears. The new materialism focuses on the representation of physical objects, while eschewing the outmoded notion of an economic base that determines an ideological superstructure. In this exciting study, Stephen Deng combines the new materialist method with the “new economic criticism” practiced by such critics as Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux to produce some remarkable insights into an array of literary texts.

As Deng points out, this book provides a salutary reinstatement of politics into the new materialism, which too often neglects the wider social context of the objects it examines. His fundamental claim is that “in addition to bearing financial value, coins emanated state authority and so were sometimes perceived as representative or even agents of the state” (2). He notes that the concept of “legal tender,” which forces the subjects of a state to accept its currency as valid payment of debt, inserts an implicit acknowledgment of state authority into every financial transaction. He shows how coins stamped with a monarch's image involve their possessors in a physical relationship with their ruler, and he illustrates the possibilities for both subversion and containment inherent in that connection.

Through skillful readings of works like Utopia, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and The Shoemaker's Holiday, Deng establishes that coinage played a political as well as an economic role, and he criticizes Marxists for having neglected that dimension of money's effects: “Money is an instrument of both state and economy, and critics should not occlude the former category in the pursuit of understanding the latter” (6). The political function of coins was inseparable from their physical material. When Shakespeare's Timon of Athens describes money as a “visible god,” claims Deng, he stresses the adjective above the noun. The important thing about money was its matter. In Deng's view, the Marxist insistence that financial value is abstract rather than material has prevented a due consideration of money's physical properties. This position clearly emerges out of the new materialist fascination with objects, and Deng's is a particularly perspicacious application of this method.

Yet it unavoidably suffers from the same drawbacks as the method in general. Marxists do not neglect the physical bodies of coins because of some squeamish revulsion from matter, nor because of a puritanical suspicion of the body, as some new materialists have suggested. They do so because financial value actually is invisible. Money is a symbol representing alienated labor power. To attribute value to the material properties of coinage is fetishism of precisely the same nature as religious idolatry or magic. We can certainly study the physical nature of coins, just as many literary critics today choose to focus their attention on furniture, clothes, or cutlery. But we will not be studying financial value. If we want to study value, we must begin by distinguishing it from coinage. We must look for the source of value in the abstract labor power that it represents.

This Deng does not do. He claims that “paper money only has value because the state says it does” (14), thus ignoring the true origin of value in human activity. One could finish this book without any awareness that money is congealed labor power. There is precious little acknowledgment or discussion of any labor theory of value. This is a serious deficiency, for money's status as alienated human activity was the ethical basis for the early modern critique of its fetishistic effects. Deng's claim that the significances attached to money are political as much as economic is true of material coins, inscribed as they are with the image of state authority, and he brilliantly extrapolates this theoretical insight into incisive readings of literary texts. But it is not true of financial value. As the fiat money of the postmodern era amply demonstrates, financial value is a purely ideal phenomenon. In the terminology of the early modern era, financial value is a spirit, and this is what Timon means when he calls it a “visible god.” Pace Deng, this phrase acquires its full explanatory power only if we emphasize the noun.

This decision to limit his analysis to money's material form also influences Deng's account of James I's magical cure for scrofula, “the King's evil.” Building on Shakespeare's allusion in Macbeth, Deng adduces James's use of gold coins in this ritual as evidence for the capacity of “objects to move in and out of the commodity phase across their life cycles” (7). If we identify coins with money, this interpretation works well. James was using an originally financial object in a nonfinancial manner, thus illustrating the new materialist contention that the meaning of objects varies with cultural context. But if we distinguish between financial value and the coins that symbolize it, we can see that James's fetishistic deployment of money is in perfect accordance with its economic function. Money is quite literally magic, and this is as true of its financial as its medicinal properties.

This book is worlds apart from the frequently dull fixation on objects that plagues the new materialism's less lively practitioners. Deng describes the debate between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” theories of value with precision and acuity. He shows how the “clipping” of coins to extract some of their specie, along with the great sixteenth-century inflations and debasements of the currency, gradually established the idea that value was independent of the coins that represent it. The relation between state and subject is a vital element of early modern economic practice, and this book breaks new ground through its treatment of money's political implications. Its only significant drawback is that the analysis remains at the level of what money appears to be, rather than penetrating to what it actually is.

That is a problem for the new materialism in general, however, and the many, various strengths of Deng's book comfortably outweigh such theoretical snags. Coinage and State Formation is an indispensible text for anyone seeking to understand the relations among money, subjectivity, and political authority in early modern England. Given the continued pertinence of these issues in our own time, it will undoubtedly attract numerous enthusiastic readers. Anyone feeling slightly weary of the new materialism's infatuation with objects will be grateful for Deng's bracing, long-overdue return to political engagement.