The Face of Mammon

Relying on works by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne, The Face of Mammon argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know today--not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, David Landreth reveals that a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics.