The study of gift exchange has in recent years engaged scholars and historians in different disciplines and historical eras, yet few accounts focused on gift-giving in the political arena and in an early modern political context. Felicity Heal's The Power of Gifts, on gift exchange under the Tudors and early Stuarts is hence apt as well as it is rewarding.

Heal organizes her study into two parts. Following a survey of modern (and by now substantial) literature on gift giving, she first explores varied dimensions of gift-exchange in an early modern social context. She examines contemporary definitions of gifts and the types of gifts in circulation, as well as the “occasions and seasons” of gift exchange, pointing to the centrality of New Year's practices as a key moment in the annual cycle of giving. In the second part of the book, Heal provides a chronological account that documents gift-exchange in the royal courts of successive monarchs, analyzing forms of ceremonies and royal progresses, evolving feasts, and the rise of art works as gifts (“Caroline Connoisseurship”) as well as the use of gifts in international engagements and diplomatic exchange. A final chapter focuses on the perils and abuse of gifts, documenting an increased awareness of the lines that demarcated gifts from bribes.

The greatest strength of the book lies in the merging of the theoretical considerations that underpin the literature on gifts with a rich and detailed investigation based on a wide range of sources, including accounts and correspondence, reports, moral tracts, drama, and literature. The book probes multiple acts of giving and their reciprocation, charting not only the varied acts of offering but also the cycles and dynamics of gift offering and reciprocation, in a manner not quite often encountered in the literature on gifts. Resisting a single theoretical model, Heal offers an intricate account of multiple modes of gift giving in specific settings and across time. The sheer diversity is illustrated with compelling detail, gift giving encompassing compulsive and voluntary gifts as well as material, symbolic, and spiritual gifts—small tokens and food gifts alongside books and dedications, luxurious foods as well as precious metals, jewels, and art works. Gifts were both presented in face-to-face encounters and offered at a distance or through representatives of monarchs and ambassadors. They entailed the spectacularly lavish offering of rare animals, exotic gifts, and the newly emerging form of portraiture, as well as gifts that were considered suspicious, “polluted,” and corrupt. Gifts could be shaped by the style of rule of individual monarchs and their relationship with their inner circle of favorites, as in the case, for example, of Charles I's novel use of paintings and sculpture for advancement and maintenance of his relations with his courtiers. No less important, the meaning and role of gifts were diverse. Gift giving bound the participants in ties of loyalty and dependence; it could reaffirm and consolidate authority and status, or facilitate the advancement of dynastic aims and of broader political interests and ambitions. Gift offering could also deepen family ties, create intimate bonds, and signal amity, as well as express the occasional spirit of resentment and critique.

Heal's insistence that the gifts derived their meanings from specific contexts and the understanding of those engaged in the exchange is amply demonstrated, and her urging of multiple approaches to the articulation of gift giving instead of a single conception of its structure is cogently argued. Yet for all the diversity in gift giving that the book shows, the distinctive role of gifts in forging and animating relations of power in this era does stand out. A key component in the process of elite consolidation and in state formation, gift giving played a crucial and an increased role in the vastly expanding courtly and patronage system through which a wide array of favors (and disfavors), services, and loyalties were offered and exchanged. Over time, these gift offerings that sustained royal authority and rule became increasingly and acutely competitive, the sheer extravagance often entailed in lavish displays of largesse becoming ever more evident. Under the early Stuarts, the increased financial burden of gifts, their magnification and commodification created growing pressures and tensions, which ultimately contributed to the destabilization of politics, anticipating, as Heal put it, the conflict and strife of the mid-century Civil War era. Concomitantly, the period witnessed a growing critique and the emergence of a language of condemnation of bribes, particularly evident with reference to judicial corruption. Yet, Heal argues, while contemporaries became increasingly alert to the differentiation between gifts, rewards, fees, and bribes—as long as fierce and competitive struggles for patronage and office holding remained rife—the boundaries between gifts and bribes remained in practice blurred and highly fluid. And as the concluding chapter also points out, the flow of gifts into and out of the court continued during the Restoration and beyond. Despite the decline of some forms of gift offering (especially practices of open hospitality) in the late seventeenth century, there were also “countervailing responses,” evident particularly in the rise of gift exchange in the evolving world of electioneering. The vigor of gifts in animating politics and relations of power took long to wither and erode.

In demonstrating the indispensability of gift giving to courtly rule and elite interactions, and by charting its subtle evolvement across the period, Heal's rendering of “the power of gifts” places the entire political culture of the era in a new and fresh perspective. Scholars and students of early modern culture and politics, as well as historians who continue to be fascinated with the gift and its multiple facets in creating binding commitments and intricate ties of dependence and exchange, will find much to learn and probe in it.