Correction. The Economic History Review 59: 2, 403-404. Note: This book review represents an amended version of a previously published review from issue 59.2, p. 403, of The Economic History Review. The original version duplicated some text within the body of the review—for which we apologize. Linda Levy Peck , Consuming splendour: society and culture in seventeenth-century England ( Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press , 2005 . Pp . xii + 431 . 48 ills. ISBN 0521842328 Hbk. £ 20/$35 ) A book about luxury goods strikes a resounding chord nowadays, for we are keenly aware of living in an age of almost frenzied consumerism. Peck depicts the seventeenth century as another such age, though it did not yet enrol all classes; the nobility, gentry, and some of the educated middle class were the first to be caught in the mesh. Her investigations carry her through a most impressive bibliography of references, brimming over with the most apposite quotations from contemporaries, and stiffened by multitudinous pieces of recent research. Surprisingly, she did not find my Alternative agriculture: a history (1997), pp. 118–30, offering twelve pages on the silk project, including an illustration of the shelves on which the silkworms nestled! But her emphasis on the wonders and the variety of the luxuries that burgeoned in the seventeenth century produce a thoroughly convincing argument, and leaves this reviewer musing yet again upon the resistance of the Oxford University Press in 1975 to publishing her Ford Lectures, which pioneered the subject of the consumer revolution in its first stages! The subject, the Press claimed, would not set the academic world on fire, yet it did! Peck finds a veritable torrent of luxuries pouring onto the market in the seventeenth century, fed from many different small streams. The first trickled in from countries abroad whence travellers came, bringing novelties, followed by the artisans in the 1560s who made them, fleeing persecution in the Netherlands and France, and dispersing their skills in England. Politicians turned a sense of guilt at the expenditure on luxuries into pride, when new industries improved trade and provided work for the poor. Well-to-do women propelled another stream of influences by asserting their freedom to shop for the goods they liked, ignoring the satires of poets like Ben Jonson, captivated rather by the displays in London in the shops of the Old Exchange. James I was complicit in all this, himself opening the two storeys of shops in the New Exchange in 1609 and urging, by proclamation, more effort in building a magnificent London. New trading companies fed the zest for exotic goods with their imports from Africa and the Far East, patents and monopolies stirred projectors’ ambitions to make more such goods at home, and the list of luxuries that became necessities grew ever longer: silk stockings dyed in fancy colours, perfumed gloves, tapestries, leather panels to cover walls and floors, Chinese porcelain, silver fruit dishes, sugar boxes, tea and coffee pots; these are just a select few. The book’s 48 illustrations depict such wares, alongside paintings and books gathered from American collections. A chronological sequence of fashions emerges from this story, showing a heady period of zest for luxuries in the 1620s and 1630s, a short lull between 1642 and 1646, and a resurgence of interest in the 1650s. Hartlib’s drive to improve agriculture does not feature here since farming does not count as one of life’s luxuries, but curiosity abounded everywhere, resulting in a serious quest to perfect scientific instruments after 1660. The work of the Royal Society receives careful attention, along with the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. For the 1670s Peck chooses a case study showing one gentleman’s diligent efforts to acquire a telescope, and a luxurious marble monument sculpted in Italy for a church in Chelsea, to commemorate his wife. On an early page in her book (p. 18) Peck mentions a recent suggestion that one stream of luxury tastes emanated from an independent-minded middle class; not everything trickled down from the aristocracy. She favours the notion of mixed influences, though her evidence does weigh most heavily in favour of the nobility and gentry persuading the middle class to copy them, that is until the Royal Society weighed in. All told, Peck’s book is a magnificent survey of a luxury-ridden seventeenth century. It does, moreover, tangentially herald the next phase, in a reference at the end to John Houghton who ran a news-sheet from 1681 to 1703 conveying news and novelties to the middle class. It fastened on middle-class tastes most emphatically, concentrating admittedly much on foodstuffs. It awaits an historian as thorough as Peck to find the next, cheaper range of consumer goods, lace, buttons, painted cloths, curtains, what else? We must wait to see.