Linda Levy Peck's much-anticipated study of the place of luxury, especially luxury goods, in seventeenth-century England is itself a beautifully produced publication from Cambridge University Press, in a slightly oversized format, yet with a very reasonable price tag for a book of this quality, especially from this press. With forty-eight well-chosen illustrations, it was easy for this book to do double duty as the catalog for an exhibition of the same name curated by Peck in the fall of 2005 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. It should come as no surprise that many of the illustrations and other sources used in this book come from the Folger's collections.

In this study, supported as it is by deep and wide research in both manuscript collections and secondary sources, Peck tells the story of the “demoralization” of luxury and conspicuous consumption over the course of the first seventy years of the seventeenth century. She masterfully traces the evolution and interaction of trade, taste, and technology that transformed Stuart England into a sophisticated and cosmopolitan hub of importation and dissemination, and perhaps most important, Peck locates this transformation (and rightly so) at a point in time much earlier than “the long eighteenth century,” where it has usually been located by a large body of scholarship. She also highlights the importance of continuity in this transformation and illustrates quite convincingly that instead of being a sharp disruption, the English Civil Wars and Interregnum rather facilitated the broad-based growth of new markets and introduction of new products. The early Stuart monarchs are rescued here from designation as dissolute and frivolous personalities, being credited with exhibiting the aesthetic (and even financial) sense that underpinned an expanding national and international economy, which ultimately contributed to the formation of a British global empire.

Peck's chapters treat a variety of themes and case studies to illustrate her thesis. Notable among these is her positioning of gender and shopping in a more positive light (conspicuous consumption was neither effeminate nor inconsequential); the treatment of the international, cosmopolitan influence on the desires of consumers from multiple, layered perspectives (travelers, diplomats, and connoisseurs played roles as important as those of merchants); and the importance of collecting (allowing trends to be emulated and even objects found in nature to be commodified). From my own research perspective, Peck's use of contemporary printed materials is striking, as is her foray into luxury printing in the later seventeenth century. She effectively demonstrates the importance of printing in reproducing multiple identical images and in diffusing ideas about material cultural to distant parts of the nation and empire, while also exploring the material culture of print items that were marketed and consumed. Her use of printed illustrations is particularly rewarding.

This book is an important study of the material world in seventeenth-century England and will be required reading for anyone contemplating the topics that Peck addresses here. Moreover, her work has properly placed yet another crucial development in the course of early modern England's rise to global power in the appropriate context—the early seventeenth century, prior to and during the Civil War and Interregnum.