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Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.21
EAN: 9780393318661
ISBN: 0393318664
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 480
Publication Date: 1998-09
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
Drawing from her earlier and more academic studies, Lisa Jardine approaches the challenge of creating a new history of the Renaissance with remarkable bravura and all the boldness required to deliver a fresh and highly readable story of an age we think we know so well. In Worldly Goods, Jardine argues that while the Renaissance was indeed marked by a flourishing cultural identity, it was the material and commercial spirit of the 15th and 16th centuries that set the tone. Commerce and international trade provided the enormous fortunes that funded artistic production, and luxury goods, including great works of art, became important as means of displaying newly acquired wealth and status. It was an urge to own, a ceaseless quest for new horizons and exotic treasures, that fueled the cultural output of the Renaissance, according to Jardine, and that taste for conspicuous displays of opulence characterizes the Western experience of the arts and culture to this day.
That Worldly Goods succeeds in telling a captivating new story of the Renaissance is testimony to Jardine's literary and scholarly success at a difficult task. That her book, richly illustrated and well written, makes contemplation of its subject a thrill is testimony of a very good read.
In this provocative and wholly absorbing work, Lisa Jardine offers a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth-that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. As Jardine boldly states, "The seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance." While Europe's royalty and merchants competed with each other to acquire works of art, vicious commercial battles were being fought over who should control the centers for trade around the globe. Jardine encompasses Renaissance culture from its western borders in Christendom to its eastern reaches in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, bringing this opulent epoch to life in all its material splendor and competitive acquisitiveness.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Yesterday's Astrolabe is Today's iPhone
Lisa Jardine shows us that the Renaissance featured just as much competition, consumerism, exploration, innovation, nationalism, and bigotry as our modern world, and concludes that our modern world was therefore made in the Renaissance. She makes the point repeatedly throughout this exhaustively researched history by demonstrating the fundamental and underlying role that commerce played in the major political, intellectual, and artistic developments of that period. In doing so, she fills a major ... Read More
Rating: - Wealth and commerce stimulate art and luxury
Although a good book with a valid and interesting point, the subtitle "A New History of the Renaissance" is too pretentious. Jardine convincingly argues that the astounding rebirth in the arts and in knowledge in general during the Renaissance was in god measure a byproduct of renewed trade, a commercial revival, and the lust for wealth and social recognition. Also very interesting is the demonstration that the artist as a solitary, bohemian genius who faces the world by expressing in his ... Read More
Rating: - The birth of conspicuous consumption in the Renaissance
This is an impressive book about the economic underpinnings of Renaissance art, generously illustrated, and rich in examples to demonstrate the author's points.
The main theses of Lisa Jardine are that a "competitive urge to acquire was a precondition for the growth in production of lavishly expensive works of art" (12) and that "the seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance" (34).
Ms. Jardine argues convincingly that economics ... Read More
Rating:  - Revelatory Reexamination of the Renaissance
Were Britisher Lisa Jardine resident on this side of the Pond, she would be familiar in our mouths as household words, celebrated in print and film and certified a MacArthurian genius. As it is, she is simply the author of stimulating, beautifully conceived and compiled, engagingly written works of revisionist history with a uniquely, appealingly literary twist. Worldly Goods looks at the Renaissance through its material traces and transactions, focusing on the immortal works of art, yes, but using them forensically ... Read More
Rating: - Persuasive, but no footnotes
I really would not have expected a book with at least some academic intent to have no apparatus whatever whereby the reader may take under view the same sources. Are they all unpublished? Or are some published and others not? Where does Jardine's translation (where appropriate)begin and that of others leave off. I find this extremely disconcerting in a book of this nature.
Maybe I'm not entirely persuaded on all counts. Seems to me that Columbus' threat to go to France if the Spanish Crown didn't pony up in ... Read More
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