This edited volume offers an effective introduction to the contemporary study of early modern literature in relation to its markets, while also broadening and deepening the state of that field in compelling ways. It is the second volume in the series Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, which examines the dynamic contributions of literary writing to the emergence of disciplinary epistemologies in early modernity—the focus here being economics. It thus represents the consensus position staked out across the past two decades of new economic criticism: that, in the decades before the late seventeenth-century advent of political economy, imaginative writing attended with great acuity to the expansion of the market and its transformations of lived experience—not only anticipating the insights of political economy but also helping to shape its concepts and its discourse, often while (to our minds even more presciently) warning against the cultural and human costs that the capitalist economy would come to exact.

Critics have long recognized that the novel institution of mass entertainment in the English theater offers a particularly replete, multifarious, and self-consciously overdetermined archive for writing's engagement with the market. Bradley D. Ryner's essay in the volume is a good example of how what we might call the classic form of new economic criticism works: to analyze the problematic commodification of money emerging in paper bills of exchange, Ryner closely reads two plays by Richard Brome alongside key texts from the mercantilist controversy of the 1620s over international money markets (the cuckoo's egg from which, Adam Smith argued, political economy hatches); Marx's formulation of the commodity form in Capital; and a retrospective critique of the commodity in late capitalism by Giorgio Agamben.

Four other essays and the afterword likewise testify to the continuing centrality of English drama to early modern economic criticism. But the volume complements that focus with an impressive and enlightening range of attention to texts and textual marketplaces beyond London's theaters. Valérie Hayaert offers a comprehensive and fascinating analysis of the interactions between patronage, gift-giving, print circulation, and witty invention in the production of emblem books by Alciati and his followers. Vera Keller presents the give and take between the utopian satirist Boccalini and the imitators who took up his name as a carnivalesque market for fake news. Ayesha Mukherjee shows how the veil of alchemy's mystified jargon interacts with the markets for its (often revoltingly) material ingredients and products, as well as with its means of transmission, in which a model of mystical initiation competes with that of textual circulation. In the terms of the volume's subtitle, alchemical knowledge means to happen as an ineffable change in the student—from baffled aspirant to enlightened adept—even as that knowledge passes from hand to hand through the exchange of ideas and texts among scholars and booksellers.

Several other chapters likewise attend to the tension between seeing a purchase as a transaction (or exchange) between parties A and B, in which A gets commodity X from B and B gets commodity Y from A; and seeing it as a transformation (or change), in which, for A, Y has become X, and for B, X has become Y. In what, to me, is the collection's most powerful contribution, Torrance Kirby traces this tension down to the roots of the Reformation's theological strife. Kirby argues that both perspectives are implicated in the convenantal economy of salvation, as the early Fathers articulated it, and that even the firmest Protestant advocates for faith as an internal transformation—and against works as a good exchanged with God in return for grace—recognized grace as in some way transactional, a means through which God keeps his household accounts. Two essays that bookend the collection bring Kirby's insights back round to bear on Shakespeare's intertwining of economics and soteriology: Ceri Sullivan's study of the language of bargaining in characters’ private prayer, and Paul Yachnin's analysis of mutual indebtedness as public freedom.