THE RHETORIC OF CREDIT. Merchants in Early Modern Writing.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original black cloth with silver titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. With six black and white illustrations. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, lightly rubbed to the tail of the spine and extremities, the cloth bright and fresh. With a couple instances of marginalia and underlining by the previous owner Dr Richard Rowland, in black ink to page 97 and in pencil to page 98, the contents are otherwise clean throughout. Complete with the better than very good, lightly rubbed dustwrapper, which has some small marks to the rear panel, a small stain to the underside of the mildly faded spine.

From the library of (and with marginalia of) Dr Richard Rowland, editor and author on the Renaissance and classical mythology, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. 'The first half of this book looks at the rhetorical handling of inherent value and the just price of goods and money, the role of demand and supply, differences between the miser and the usurer, risk and opportunity cost, bankruptcy and sovereign debt, the heroism of trade, and the business ethos in the formation of the merchant. The second half posits a socially mixed, economically zoned audience and asks which parts amused which sections of the playhouse, focusing on Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me Part 1, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, and Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston's Eastward Ho!' (publisher's blurb).