The giving of gifts is a rich topic for the social and cultural historian. Gifts create, sustain and display relationships between people, and the process of gift-giving lends objects a social life. For models or parallels, those studying gifts can draw on a wide body of work spanning several disciplines. There are studies by anthropologists reaching back to Marcel Mauss; by historians of other societies, most notably among early modernists Natalie Zemon Davis on France; and by literary scholars interested in texts as the products of social relationships. Felicity Heal's study of gifts complements her earlier work on hospitality and, similarly to it, is concerned primarily with the activities of the social elite, reflected in their writings and accounts. Where Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos's The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008) focuses more on kinship, communities and charitable giving, Heal has more to say about political and social power, about towns, great households, the legal system and the court.

Heal frames her study with a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary attitudes to gifts and gifting. It was clearly a fraught business. As the ninth earl of Northumberland told his son, ‘to give well and advantageously will aske a great deal of art’ (p. 22). In discussion it resonated with other issues of central importance, from divine grace and human philanthropy through property transmission and hospitality to credit and payment for services. Such reflection was refreshed by engagement with the literature of a Roman world equally exercised about giving, above all in the work of Seneca, who is depicted in the early seventeenth-century Bodleian Library painted frieze with a copy of his De beneficiis.

Extensive engagement with household accounts and correspondence pays dividends in a fascinating analysis of what was appropriate as a gift. While food was very frequently given, it had to be in some way special. Seasonal fruit and fowl were fine; grain and most vegetables were not. Wine, cheese, cakes and prize fish like pike or sturgeon were very acceptable; staples like beer, ale, beef and stockfish not as acceptable. Venison carried special weight: sourced from parks, sometimes slain with the giver's own hand, baked in pasties, and served at feasts. The mind could be fed as well as the body, with literary dedications, letters, poems, books, advice; even news and gossip. At the highest levels horses, dogs, plate and jewels were common. After 1600, they were joined by works of renaissance and baroque art, for those with the continental contacts to access what would appeal to the connoisseur. The seasonality of giving was also important, as gifts were given at births, christenings, weddings and funerals, on occasions of hospitality, and above all at New Year.

Gifts open interesting vistas on the relations of people to the objects around them. The biography of an object could make it a good gift. In 1564, Bishop Edwin Sandys gave Sir William Cecil a clock that had been given by King Edward VI to Sir John Cheke, tutor to both Cecil and the king. Modification could fit an object to be a gift: lavishly binding a book for example; or presentation could make a gift more acceptable, as when putting money – preferably uniform gold coins rather than loose change in silver – into a glove or purse. A gift could be worn or displayed on significant occasions to show how much it and its giver meant to the recipient.

At court the New Year gift exchange between ruler and governing elite was carefully calculated and was commented upon by those eager to spot the rise and fall of those around the monarch. On progress gifts were given to rulers and their entourages, the act of presentation sometimes built elaborately into mythologising pageantry. Political centralisation made gifts to those in power at court ever more necessary, and yet ever more controversial. It would seem that financial retrenchment under Charles I made the king less generous and more demanding, while his courtiers and officials, grasping after gratuities, became ever more exasperating to his subjects. In diplomatic relations, meanwhile, calibration of gifts to ambassadors, pensions to royal minsters and above all rich and rare presents for fellow monarchs, was equally politically important.

Gifts could go wrong in many ways. Excessive gift-giving was profligate; insufficient gift-giving miserly. Small keepsakes might be misconstrued as love-tokens. In many gift-giving relationships there were clear expectations of reciprocity, yet archives rarely let us reconstruct both sides of an exchange; when they do, as with the earl of Leicester's New Year gifts in 1564, the calculus of obligation and agency can be teased out and the difficulty of getting things right understood. Gifts designed too obviously to achieve certain outcomes might constitute bribes, but the word bribe came into use only slowly. Early Stuart sources show how hard it was to draw lines. The East India Company found no shame in minuting that it gave gifts to those ‘of whose countenance and favour the Company stand in need’ (p. 134), yet the earl of Suffolk, on trial for corruption as Lord Treasurer, answered charges that he and his wife valued ‘no friends but money’ with vain protestations that, while he did accept gifts of money from suitors, it was done ‘with no contract’ (p. 201).

Gifts are illuminating at almost any level of historical analysis. They register globalisation, as parakeets, tigers, and a ‘little carved Indian idol’ enter the repertoire of English gifts; they register social critique, as Bishop Latimer fulminates against those who call bribes ‘gentle rewards’; they register personality, as Queen Mary gives Cardinal Pole a mitre and crozier made from silver plundered from churches by her father and brother. So rich is the variety of avenues for the study of gifts that many – gardening, for example, or the exchange of scholarly and scientific curios – can only be touched on in this book, but it will guide those who wish to reflect on its topic for many years to come.