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This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved, and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. This book draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. The author shows that during this period, demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth century, consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions, fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time; William Shakespeare satirized credit problems; Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade; and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.