WOWOProject
Oro, plata, economía y textos en los siglos XVI y XVII
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Estudios interdisciplinarios sobre el valor, los mercados y las ideas económicas en Inglaterra y en el mundo hispánico a través de los textos de la época.
[Verbo y valor: Economías de mercado y el discurso infinito del oro en la literatura inglesa del periodo premoderno]
In the past three decades the approach loosely known as “New Economic Criticism” has established the economic interpretation of literary texts not only as a distinctive area of criticism but also as one of the most innovative and productive. However, despite having received so much critical attention, the question of how literature allows us to understand economic phenomena and vice versa remains strangely absent from discussions of early modern poetry and drama in Spanish academia, and not so widespread as one could think in international contexts. A few significant examples may suffice: the programme of the most recent international conference of the Renaissance Society of America (the leading forum for early modern scholarship) shows that in 2024 only seven out of more than three hundred seminars (three papers each) deal with economics in some form (some of them only tangentially), and not a single paper (out of more than one thousand individual presentations, seminars, panels, workshops and roundtables) examines such concepts as ‘usury,’ ‘debasement’ or ‘currency’ issues as central topics. An even more barren scenario we can encounter in Europe (ESRA) or Spain (SEDERI or AEDEAN), where the only approaches to these topics proceed from members of this project. Thus, whereas the research carried out in departments of English at Spanish universities has made a distinct and very valuable contribution to, for example, gender and post-colonial studies, psychoanalytical and Marxist theory, theology and literature, editing and performance studies, and new historicism, in the case of the interdisciplinary study of literature and economics, no similar output can be said to exist. It is our purpose to try to remedy this deficiency by initiating a reflection on a key episode of the evolving relationship between literature and economy—the impact of New World gold—that remains underrepresented in criticism.
The emergence of modernity has been traditionally presented as a clean cut dividing an economy of gift- giving that kept communities largely cohesive and the new market economics that tended to atomise them (Mauss 2011). However, the most interesting recent work on the period has shown that such a neat transition never occurred (e.g. Davis 2000, Muldrew 2001). Economic criticism explores literary texts that negotiate ambivalent and often contradictory notions of value, profit and creditworthiness at a time when the modern notion of the “economy” and the concomitant discourse of “economic theory” were still in the making (Woodbridge 2003, Woodmansee 1999). In the sixteenth century, as the circulation of capital accelerated and market transactions rapidly increased, ordinary men and women came to feel that commercial exchange, which is to say money itself, was becoming increasingly free from time- honoured social rituals and reciprocal obligations. Hence the striking pervasiveness of financial and commercial terminology in lyrical, tragic and comic texts. A number of pioneering critics have established the full extent to which the language of early modern literature can be said to be economically inflected. These include, to name but a few, Douglas Bruster and the theatre as marketplace (1993); Patricia Parker and arithmetic and other forms of numeracy (1996); Wendy Wall and Natasha Korda and gender, husbandry and other domestic economies (2002); Barbara Correll and waste, excess and unrestricted economy (2008); Linda Woodbridge and payback in revenge tragedy (2014); David Landreth and Mammon (2012); David Hawkes and use and exchange value, as well as Shakespeare and derivatives (2015, 2018); Julia Reinhard Lupton and hospitality (2019); Laura Kolb and fictions of credit (2021).
All these studies show how early modern literary authors became acutely aware of the new conflicted meanings that the emergent marketplace conferred on traditional economic tropes and analogies and re- imagined the most intense subjectivities of love, erotic desire, and religious fervour in light of the deep ambiguities that all processes of valorisation acquired in this context. In doing so, they did not simply register the impact of spreading commercialism on all spheres of “invaluable” experience but sought to produce something even more fundamental than that: a radical re-examination of the nature and origins of value, relative and absolute. Thus, the texts explored are shown to lay bare the mechanisms of appraisal that underpin material, symbolic, and literary-aesthetic transactions in order to reveal their strikingly analogous operations.
The main purpose of our research project is to understand how notions of unlimited, infinite, and instant wealth shaped the discourse of the emergent capitalist market as represented in the literature of the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. Commercial transactions are assumed to be governed by a quantifying logic that implies a restricted economy of finite means. Yet early modern literary texts often depict trade in terms of a superfluity and overabundance that is literally incalculable. Building on the findings of New Economic Criticism, the project seeks to explore the significance of this fact. The perspective we will adopt incorporates and redefines current debates about the tension between traditional gift economies and emergent markets in the period. We will concentrate on forms of commercial transactions, old and new, including the recent development of bonds, promissory notes and bills of exchange that gave rise to modern conceptions of negotiability and, above all, on the momentous discovery and importation of New World gold and the unprecedented accumulation of wealth it brought about. British poets, dramatists and prose writers crafted their texts at a time when an unprecedented thirst for gold was reshaping all economies, real and imaginary. We intend to carry out what will in effect be the first in-depth and systematic analysis of the representation of New World gold in early modern English literature. In order to do so, we will explore the transformative impact that the prodigious inflow of American bullion into Europe had on the conception of value that undergirds Elizabethan and Jacobean literary texts. We thus hope to establish a) the complex role that notions of endless wealth play in the literary representation of capitalist economic culture, b) the distinctiveness of an early modern gold discourse that interlinks economic thought and literary form, and c) the impact that the engagement with this culture had on poems and plays that articulate a new poetics of modernity.
Our project takes as its point of departure the recognition that critical readings of early modern literary texts tend to relegate gold and gold-related assets to metaphoric status in presenting them as emblems of pure, non-economic value in amatory and religious contexts, or, alternatively, as signs of the corrupting effects of the profit-seeking and unbridled commercialism associated with the new monetary economy. We aim to transcend this reductive dichotomy by premising our argument on the existence of a specific sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discourse of New World gold as infinite gift that is firmly rooted in early modern history and that, as such, gave rise to a dialectic between the spirit of gift-giving and the calculating logic of scarcity and competition of the market—a dialectic that, as poets and dramatists of the time fully recognized, reshaped notions of absolute value for capitalist times. Central to our analysis is the early modern literary engagement with i) inflationary policies such as the debasement of coinage; ii) the expansion of financial markets and new forms of credit; iii) the emergence of the global ocean. In this view, literature emerges as a privileged site that tests and reconfigures the epistemology of value by fusing aesthetic, economic, and religious constructions of reality. We hope that this perspective will broaden our understanding of the historical transitions and cultural processes that interlinked the languages of literature and economy at a time when the monetarization of all spheres of life characteristic of modernity began to take shape.
Literary Genres, Thematic Areas and Chronological Periods
The history of gold is the history of the economic imagination of humankind (Bernstein 2012:1). Gold constitutes a unique point of intersection between the real and the imaginary. This project is articulated on the troubled relationship between the allure of gold as mythical possession and the financial strictures of gold as money. We will examine gold-inspired literatures in connection with pre- and early modern imaginings of endless wealth but also with proto-economic writing as defined by Crosthwaite (2022), that is, with those texts that paved the way for what would come to be considered “economic theory” later in the eighteenth century. This writing reflects what contemporaries considered to be the most pressing economic issues of the time. The economic component of our project is structured around the three main areas of the monetary debate to which these issues gave rise:
Taken together, these areas span the entire early modern period in England (Henrician, Elizabethan and Jacobean). Accordingly, our project concentrates on the three areas of rapid economic change in order to show how the representation of gold reorganizes literary discourse and reinvents poetic traditions in which gold used to be a metaphor for the unquantifiable, and hence absolute rather than relative, values of art and artistic creativity. While gold constituted “a deep metaphor for poetry itself” (Allen 2016: 145) in the texts of their medieval predecessors, Chaucer for example, poets and dramatists of the sixteenth century turn gold discourse into a metalanguage that lays bare the mechanisms whereby modern texts confer meaning and assign value.
The literary component of our project is structured in terms of three main genres: drama, lyrical poetry and epic romance. In each case, we will approach the texts from the perspective of a gold-related literary tradition that, we will show, poets and playwrights appropriate and re-invent for their modern times. Thus, each genre correlates with a specific gold-inspired literary tradition it deeply transforms:
The organization of the project around literary genres brings out the full range of fundamental questions that our inquiry addresses, although not in an exclusive way: drama explores the sociopolitical dimension of gold economy, and lyrical poetry is preoccupied with the paradoxical nature of aesthetic value in modern culture and the formulation of a new poetics that takes account of it, while epic romance concerns itself primarily with epistemological problems.
(¡) The Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Mercantilism, Oceanic Expansion and New World Gold
The principal, though not exclusive, dimension of our project is gold discourse as shaped by narratives of geographical exploration and the literature of New World wonders. Tudor explorers were fascinated with the prospect of an endless supply of gold. Their reports often blend fable, myth and romance on the one hand and precise, business-like accounts of commercial activity on the other hand. Recent cultural historians have established the full extent to which the East Indies rhetoric of Columbus and other sixteenth-century trailblazers fuses apparently contradictory economies. Of particular importance for our project is the landmark study of Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (2010), which demonstrates that Columbus formulated the quest for the wealth of the East as a search for “a holy gift of free gold” (2010: 74). Vilches maintains that the Genoese explorer systematically represented the Indies as “a site of symbolic value, where everything could be turned into gold” (2010: 63). Building on her insights, we intend to show how systematically the rhetorical production of wonder in the reports of Elizabethan expeditions such as those led by Sir Humphrey Gilbert (early period) and Sir Walter Ralegh (late period) incorporated the idea of unimaginable quantities of the precious metal.
Despite manifest failure on the part of several pioneers, the myth of El Dorado persisted well into the seventeenth century, becoming an important factor in the imperial rivalry between England and Spain. So far the question of gold and overseas expansion has been studied by scholars interested primarily in the colonial experience and the construction of nationhood (e.g. Hulme 1992 and Linton 1998; and Helgerson 1992, respectively). Critics such as Mark Netzloff (2003) and Valerie Forman (2008) have recently taken a more specifically economic approach by connecting the mercantilists’ debate on the export of bullion to literature. The work of Thomas Mun, Gerard de Malynes and Edward Misselden has received increasing attention by critics who have sought to re-examine the commercialism of late Elizabethan and Jacobean tragicomedy. Netzloff and Forman argue that Renaissance drama reinvents forms of romance in a way that reflects the controversial dynamics of global maritime commerce as formulated by these founders of modern economic theory. Finally, the past decade has produced ground-breaking analyses of early modern geographies, in particular a) scientific and poetic constructions of maps that are intended to be topographically accurate but also richly symbolical, and b) the “oceanic turn” of early modern criticism as exemplified by Dan Brayton (2012) and Steven Mentz (2009), who vindicate the need for a cultural history of the sea. In our analysis, these perspectives become complementary in that they shed light on the truly oceanic scale of Elizabethan-Jacobean literary texts and permit an examination of the way in which they incorporate evolving images of an economically unifying globe. But we intend to take them forward by integrating updated research on historical processes of wealth accumulation such as (Alfani 2023). The three critical approaches just outlined—post-colonial, mercantilist, and ecocritical—tend to concentrate on the drama of the period. We therefore propose a re-examination of this drama—specifically the plays of Marlowe, the comedies of Jonson, and the four late tragicomedies of Shakespeare—that broadens the scope of current readings by incorporating the vision of endless Indian gold as fundamental to the analysis of early modern dramaturgy.
(¡¡) Lyrical and Religious Poetry: Debasement, Coin Stamping and the Materiality of Gold
Since Egyptian times, the use of gold has been primarily ceremonial, i.e. “a medium for advertising power, wealth, eminence, and proximity to the gods.” (Bernstein 2012: 10). It was the way in which pharaohs, priests, and kings sought to visualize the divine origin of their status. By contrast, coinage put gold into the hands of common people, bringing about its widespread circulation. The most updated scholarship on the cultural history of money (Deng 2021) has shown that the resulting tension between gold as sacred substance and gold as money was exacerbated in the sixteenth century when Henry VIII started the process of debasing coinage by separating the market value of coins from their content of precious metal. Money had become a commodity. Leading Elizabethan financiers such as Thomas Gresham immediately understood the instabilities that this fundamental change would introduce. But so did, in their way, creative writers, who fully recognized that coins are unique in encoding the paradoxes inherent in the symbolic representation of value. New Economic critics have demonstrated that William Shakespeare and John Donne, but also lesser-known authors, including women poets such as Isabella Whitney, Lady Mary Wroth or Mary Herbert, were amongst the first writers in England to recognize the profound effects of the coinage revolution on all spheres of life. Hence their fascination with the process whereby the stamping of the king’s image renders the coin valuable as legal tender, or with the baffling effect of an overabundance of gold on its purchasing power. Recent critics highlight how Donne’s lyrical poems link the royal stamping of coins to the impressing of a woman’s image on the lover’s heart. He probes the meaning of counterfeit money or “coining” in a context of illicit sexual relations, revealing forgery to be a technique common to chrematistic but also, unexpectedly, to artistic pursuits. Despite these developments in criticism, we argue that what remains unexplored is the specificity of gold as an ambit of the incalculable that is essentially connected to a) the imagining of the Americas and, hence, to Spanish economic culture, and b) the reinvention of traditional poetics. Petrarch relies on the rich metaphorics of gold as invaluable gift when affirming the nature of his poetic undertaking. For example, he explicitly refuses to sexualise his poetic experience as a Jovian shower of gold in his allusion to the myth of Danae in Canzoniere 23. Our purpose is to show that Donne, and then others, assimilate the Petrarchan motifs in a way that proclaims both their debt to and departure from Petrarchan poetics. We will investigate the complex homologies that the poems establish—between financial and emotional investments, and between fiduciary and amorous obligations or other forms of ambivalent endearment— by concentrating on the material culture of gold that informs the poems, mostly tokens of love and other prominent signifiers of affective bonding such as medals, bracelets or carcanets. In our interpretation, gift-of-gold discourse allows poets to sharpen their sense of the fetishizing impulse of erotic desire, which proves to be disturbingly akin to both poetic creation and the accumulation of endless capital. We will also take into account the politics of gold in court culture as embodied in the practice of displaying, which includes the unabashed use of exquisite jewelry, regalia and rare artifacts as symbols of political power (Schroder 2020). At the hands of poets, gold discourse becomes a metalanguage that allows them to reshape the very conception of poetry in a way that lays the foundations of artistic modernity and questions the relationship between art and power.
(iii) Allegory and Epic Romance: Usury, Alchemy and the Magic of Gold
A third major area of inquiry will be the discourse of usury and other forms of credit expansion that mark the literature of the period. Today interest rates and the return on loans may appear to be rather abstruse technical matters but in Tudor England usury, which had been long forbidden on legal and religious grounds, became emblematic of the spectacular life-changing power of money. David Hawkes vindicates the existence of “the culture of usury in Renaissance England” (2010), where “usury” is to be understood as “the way of looking at the world that money generates”, that is, as a psychological phenomenon in itself (2010: 25). We will examine the period’s Catholic and Protestant anti-usury tracts that vilify the unnatural birth of money from money and the stereotypical figure of the Jewish alien that is associated with it. Our working assumption will be that gold is pulled into the orbit of the free-floating sign epitomized by usury even in those texts that claim to reinstate absolute aesthetic value. We will concentrate on performative signs and the “hyper-real realm of images” (Hawkes 2010:118) in order to trace the connections that the texts make between magic, liturgy and money, all of which involve modes of autonomous representation (Hawkes 2022). Given the association of “use” with sodomy, prostitution and other forms of transgressive sexuality, this component of the project will also concern itself with figurations of the female body and its defilement, in particular as transmitted through the retelling of gold-related classical myths (Ovid in particular).We will also consider female experiences of the economy and women’s views of financial matters in order to challenge traditional gendered distinctions between usury (finance) and oikonomia (household management). Essentially, the third unit of the project explores the epistemological dimension of gold discourse. The starting point here will be traditional moralizing conceptions of gold as a symbol of the vanity of the world, that is, the well-known topos of vanitas. We argue that, on its basis, poets develop a hermeneutics of supreme value that, as in the case of lovers, correlates internal possessions with true value and external ones with unworthiness. By focusing on the poetry of Edmund Spenser—and to a lesser extent on that of Sir Philip Sidney—we will examine the tension that exists in their poems between glittery surfaces and hidden reality. The key idea here is the fruitless attempts of both lovers and poets to grasp, beyond appearance, the true essence of things. Finally, this perspective also integrates religious anxieties about the nature of idols and idolatry as provoked by the Reformation. Often considered to be typically medieval, allegorical writing has been recently re-discovered to be key to modern texts that explore the meaning of scepticism and false belief (Crawford 2017). Gold images are also crucial in this kind of writing because poets build them to indicate at strategic points that their texts can be interpreted allegorically. This practice often relies on the visual art of the emblem, transmitted at the time in the form of book-length collections. We will thus examine the way in which early modern texts engage with Neoplatonic and Christian Humanist discourses of outward appearance and inner worth and the technique they use to represent the conflicted relationship between false allurement and the true essence of things and, more generally, the semiotic relation of words to images (Hackett 2022).
We will re-examine basically two different bodies of literature: a) well-known texts whose financial and monetary language has received scrupulous attention from New Economic Criticism but whose engagement with gold has been diluted by critics as one more generalized instance of the monetary economy; in addition, we will explore the work of b) lesser-known texts that have never been approached from the perspective of the economy of New World gold. Needless to say, as our research progresses, authors who are not listed below may be eventually included.
![Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586) [Emblem 203, Auxilio divino] [Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library]](https://www.wowoproject.es/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images-1.jpg "Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586) [Emblem 203, Auxilio divino] [Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library]")
Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586) [Emblem 203, Auxilio divino] [Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library]
1.1. Drama: The focus of attention will be primarily on the plays of William Shakespeare. We will re- examine his “economic” plays (The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens) but will also engage with those which are not usually thought of as particularly concerned with monetary matters, such as his tragedies and, above all, his late plays or romances. We will also explore aspects of some of the plays of his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, playing particular attention to the city-comedies. In addition, the usury plays of Robert Wilson, William Haughton, or Robert Tailor will serve to contextualize our analysis.
1.2. Lyrical and Devotional Poetry: The poetry of Petrarch and lyric Petrarchism of the sixteenth century, in particular the love lyric, seduction poems and the poetry of consummated desire. Authors include Elizabethan sonneteers such as William Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney and, in particular, the work of John Donne (Love Elegies, Epithalamia, Verse Letters and Satires, but also his divine poems, mostly his Holy Sonnets). Attention will also be paid to the contribution of women poets such as Isabella Whitney, Lady Mary Wroth or Mary Herbert.
1.3. Epic Romance and Allegory: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen (in particular Books I-III) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (in particular Part I) and, less centrally, Stephen Hawes, The Passetyme of Pleasure (1509).
1.4. Books of Emblems: We will analyse three major representative works of the English emblematic tradition: Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1583), George Whiter’s A collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), and Henry Peacham’s Minnverva Britanna, or Garden of Heroical Deuises (1611), concentrating on a number of key emblems such as Wither’s “All is not Gold, which makes a Show”, Whitney’s “Auri sacra fames” and “Aurae compedes”, and Peacham’s “Crimina gravissima”. We will also show that those Shakespearean plays that most directly engage with emblems are also those that are most essentially concerned with the representation of money: The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Pericles, A Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.
Contemporary thinking about the economy will be represented in our analysis by three different kinds of prose writing:
2.1. Narratives of Voyages of Exploration and Discovery: Spanish voyages: the writings of Columbus, Hernán Cortés (Segunda carta), Bernal Díaz del Castillo (Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España), Francisco López de Gómara (Historia general de las Indias). English expeditions and maritime expansion: Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (including contemporary narratives of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Martin Frobisher), and Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana. We may also consider continental tracts translated in Elizabethan times (e.g. Jacques Cartier, A Short and Brief Narration of the Two Navigations and Discoveries, in John Florio’s translation).
2.2 The Mercantilists’ Debate:
Mostly represented by its three principal exponents: Gerard de Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of Englands Common Wealth (1601), Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664 but written decades earlier and usually considered to be the manifesto of mercantilism), Edward Misselden’s Free Trade or the Meanes to Make Trade Florish (1622) and Circle or Commerce or the Balance of Trade in Defence of Free Trade (1623).
2.3. Anti-Usury Tracts: Philip Caesar, A General Discourse against the Damnable Sect of Usurers (1578), Richard Barnfield’s The Combat between Conscience and Covetousness and The Ecomion of Lady Pecunia (1598), Robert Wilson, A Discourse on Usury (1972), and Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usury (1611). We will examine images of monstrosity and deviant miscegenation that Protestant anti-usury rhetoric—as popularized by Martin Luther’s On Usury (1520) and his notorious On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)—conjures in vilifying the unnatural birth of money from money and the stereotypical Jewish alien who is associated with it.