The enthusiastic (even excessive) consumerism of contemporary western society has its roots, according to some, in the expansion of the consumption of goods in Renaissance Europe. Early modern men and women were ardent, even “passionate” consumers. Such self-indulgence was regarded as decadent and socially perilous; religious and other moral authorities of the era sought to eradicate or at least control these sins of excess. My study examines criticism of “crimes of consumption” in both serious and satirical French literature of the early modern era, including such pamphlets as Frenaizie fantastique Françoise Sur la Nouvelle Mode des Nouveaux Courtisans bottez de ce temps and Pasquil de la Cour pour apprendre à discourir et s’habiller à la mode. Scrutiny of these texts suggest that women’s “crimes of consumption” tended to reveal who they “really were”—bad women, sinful women, dangerous women who led men into sin. Men’s crimes of passionate consumption sometimes also revealed their sinful selves—some were seen as gluttons, for example. But men’s consumption was also, at times, condemned as an attempt to appear to be what they were not; their display of acquired objects revealed an effort to claim membership in a social class to which they did not belong. Le consumérisme enthousiaste (et même démesuré) de la société occidentale contemporaine a ses racines, d’après certains, dans l’expansion de la consommation de biens en Europe pendant la Renaissance. Dès les débuts de la modernité, hommes et femmes furent des consommateurs ardents, voire « passionnés ». S’adonner au plaisir d’acquérir était sévèrement condamné par les théologiens et les moralistes. Cet article examine la critique de ces passions excessives dans la littérature morale et satirique de l’époque, incluant les pamphlets tels que Frenaizie fantastique Françoise Sur la Nouvelle Mode des Nouveaux Courtisans bottez de ce temps et Pasquil de la Cour pour apprendre à discourir et s’habiller à la mode. Une analyse approfondie de ces textes montre combien la question du gender influe sur l’interprétation de ces passions : la femme coupable de tels excès y est vue mauvaise, pécheresse, dangereuse pour l’homme ; l’homme, quant à lui, est condamné pour dissimuler et vouloir paraître autre que ce qu’il est, entendre d’une autre classe que celle à laquelle il appartient.

1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Llewellyn, Kathleen M. "A Fantastic Frenzy of Consumption in Early Modern France." Renaissance and Reformation 38 (3): 2015. 119-140. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v38i3.26151. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.