Gifts are always with us: we use them positively to display affection and show gratitude for favours; we suspect that others give and accept them as douceurs and bribes. The gift also performed these roles in early modern English culture: and assumed a more significant role because networks of informal support and patronage were central to social and political behaviour. Favours, and their proper acknowledgement, were preoccupations of the age of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Hobbes. As in modern society, giving and receiving was complex and full of the potential for social damage. 'Almost nothing', men of the Renaissance learned from that great classical guide to morality, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 'is more disgraceful than the fact that we do not know how either to give or receive benefits'. The Power of Gifts is about those gifts and benefits - what they were, and how they were offered and received in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows that the mode of giving, as well
as what was given, was crucial to social bonding and political success.

The volume moves from a general consideration of the nature of the gift to an exploration of the politics of giving. In the latter chapters some of the well-known rituals of English court life - the New Year ceremony, royal progresses, diplomatic missions - are viewed through the prism of gift-exchange. Gifts to monarchs or their ministers could focus attention on the donor, those from the crown could offer some assurance of favour. These fundamentals remained the same throughout the century and a half before the Civil War, but the attitude of individual monarchs altered specific behaviour. Elizabeth expected to be wooed with gifts and dispensed benefits largely for service rendered, James I modelled giving as the largesse of the Renaissance prince, Charles I's gift-exchanges focused on the art collecting of his coterie. And always in both politics and the law courts there was the danger that gifts would be corroded, morphing from acceptable behaviour into bribes and corruption. The
Power of Gifts explores prescriptive literature, pamphlets, correspondence, legal cases and financial records, to illuminate social attitudes and behaviour through a rich series of examples and case-studies.

About the Author:
Felicity Heal is Emeritus Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. She was also a lecturer in History at the University of Oxford from 1980 to 2011. She is the author of numerous books and articles on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, including Reformation in Britain and Ireland (2003), The Gentry in England and Wales 1500-1700 (with Clive Holmes, 1994), and Hospitality in Early Modern England (1990). In recent years her research interests have focused on gifts and social exchange, and also on Tudor chronicles and the history of the early Church in England.