As recent research into the history of early modern book production has shown, texts must be understood as more than physical records of thought. They are also commodities, and as Julianne Werlin observes in Writing at the Origin of Capitalism, texts are as such subject to the same conditions of exchange that make up the early modern economy. While the making and selling of printed books as well as their aesthetic and cultural significance as objects have been discussed thoroughly, less attention has been paid to their status as specifically economic objects.

Werlin's book seeks to address this by adopting a Marxist analytical method in order to examine the implications for literary history of the growth of the trade in printed books within an increasingly capitalist economy. Broad shifts in agricultural practice aimed at maximizing profit were mirrored in the book trade, which witnessed a movement from manuscript to print production, making books more readily saleable within an expanding domestic readership. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the English economy developed a more fully national (and, latterly, international) profile, and the production of printed texts followed suit, producing important consequences for the history of literature. Vernacular writing in English, then, developed within networks of commerce, and as such literary history must in part be economic history.

Fascinatingly, the book posits a link between the development of a less regional, more regularized idiom for written English and that of a transitional capitalist economy. Written English became the medium through which documentary systems defined economic networks that extended a national reach. Vernacular writing itself became then a species of commodity, and so implicated in the ways in which habits of consumption both reflected and defined shifting understandings of social degree.

In a chapter on ballads, the book suggests that the production and sale of printed broadsides helped to create a national market for literature, though at the expense of regional literary or folk traditions. The growing market for printed books was itself an engine for literary developments as well. In a remarkable chapter on Caroline court poetry, Werlin shows that writers who cultivated courtly audiences—used to writing primarily in manuscript—regarded the print market with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The career of John Milton illustrates the drift from the culture of manuscript to that of print—and the resulting effects on poetic reputation—effectively. Beginning as an aspiring court poet in the late 1620s and 1630s, the circulation of Milton's Latin political writing during the Interregnum for European audiences helped create for him an authorial reputation on the Continent. The introduction of Milton and his writing via networks of print production and distribution linking England to Europe helped to establish the foundation of a more wide-ranging global interest in English literature in the 1700s and following.

Werlin's particularly Marxist approach may be more familiarly intelligible as materialist, insofar as the book is not generally concerned in making normative claims, and it focuses less on class relations than other forms of Marxist history might. The materialist bent does enable the book to establish a clear political and economic framework for literary history and effectively to situate changes in the practices of textual production in relation to broader economic developments.

Some aspects of these economic changes, however, predate the late sixteenth century. For example, the movement in the terms of agricultural tenancy from tenurial service to cash rent is a product of the plague years of the mid-fourteenth century, as is the increasingly textual character of economic relations. The rural armies of the Peasants’ Revolt arrived partly hoping to destroy legal documents that established responsibilities for lordship and for tenancy. This is intended not as a criticism of the book's frame, rather simply as an observation that it would be helpful for the book to extend its discussion of economic context in order to show how developments in the late sixteenth century advanced significantly within extant currents of change. Scholars in the disciplines of social and economic history as well as that of literary studies would do well to consult this book; we are fortunate to have it.